Putin flexes his muscles and goes for the Gold… Black Gold

By now, it is no secret that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is making a major play to strengthen his country’s presence in the Middle East region. His stubborn diplomatic and devastating military defense of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad alone provides clear evidence of this strategy. Putin has proven himself willing to bear the brunt of worldwide censure for the slaughter taking place under the Syrian regime, and even to take an active role in perpetrating it, rather than hand over the head of the current leader of the 40-year-old Assad regime.

Obviously, this is not because of any particular personal love Putin might have for Assad (for the Russian leader, Assad is little more than a puppet, an instrument for execution of his strategy), but because Assad’s regime is the highest trump card Russia has in a game of ever-higher-stakes geopolitics. And, by this time, there can be little doubt in anyone’s mind that Putin’s goal is “to make Russia great again.”

The shining jewel in Putin’s Middle Eastern defense strategy is the naval base that Russia maintains in the Syrian port of Tartus on the Mediterranean Sea. And Moscow apparently believes that, as goes the fate of the Syrian regime, so too will go the fate of Russian defense in the region. The fall of Assad could probably either mean the initiation of a new age of Syrian democracy, with a foreseeable shift of that nation toward the West, or the rise of a fundamentalist Muslim theocracy, unlikely to be friendly toward any non-Islamic foreign power. In either case, the demise of the Assad regime—or of any similarly slavish pro-Kremlin surrogate—would be very bad news for Russian strategy and thus for President Putin.

But Putin is not just marking his territory by flexing the Russian Bear’s military muscles (much more boldly, even, than he did earlier in Ukraine and Crimea, where he at first pretended—less than convincingly—that there was no direct Russian involvement). Nor is he simply doing so by demonstrating the country’s diplomatic relevance in areas (i.e., policing the world) once completely dominated by the United States—which, in the case of Syria in particular, has not only taken a backseat to the Kremlin, but is indeed traveling in the trunk of the car: He is also doing so in the field of commercial relations, regional economics and business. Russian intervention in Syria, however, is not entirely about keeping a puppet regime in office. Not by a longshot. It is also, and very prominently, about showing the West that Russia is a resurgent major power in that part of the world, and, indeed, in the world at large. This is Putin reinventing, step by step, a Russia that the world has not witnessed since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Little by little his goal is becoming clear, after baffling an admittedly arrogant and naïve Western world back in 2014 and even before that (his 2008 Georgian invasion), when many still thought that it was the age of detente, glasnost and perestroika, that the days of a bipolar world were over and that Washington was the new Rome.

Touted by his admirers as a savvy and aggressive martial arts expert, Putin tends to relativize weaknesses and play to strengths, and the Russian economy, in terms of world trade, is all about energy, and particularly about oil and gas. It’s not at all surprising, then, that while issuing exemplified notice that Russia is once again a military force to be reckoned with—lest anyone thought otherwise—he has also been seeking rapprochement with old trading partners and making apparently successful overtures to new ones in the Middle East.

The most recent sample of this was Moscow’s leading role in brokering an unprecedented deal among OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) and non-OPEC countries to reduce their oil production. But it didn’t end there. Putin’s government has also talked the State of Qatar into investing 5 billion dollars in the Russian oil giant, Rosneft, with that Russian oil company then turning around and buying a 2.8 billion-dollar piece of a major Egyptian gas field.

The Bloomberg business news agency recently quoted the chairman of Russia’s Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Fyodor Lukyanov, as saying, “Russia is really keen to increase leverage in the Middle East by every means.” And it shows! Quoth Bloomberg: “It’s a reflection of how events in the region are combining in favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin as rarely before. A cooling of US alliances in the Gulf in recent years, the havoc cheaper oil has wreaked in energy-dependent economies and a recognition that Russia can no longer be ignored on regional security issues mean Putin is pushing at an increasingly open door.”Ever since its independence in 1972, after more than half a century of British rule following World War I, Qatar has been part of the US sphere of influence. Despite its being ruled by a single family (the al-Thani Dynasty) since the early 19^th century, and in spite of its adherence to Sharia law and abominable human rights record, the US considers itself to have “strong bilateral relations” with Qatar and indicates that it coordinates closely with the al-Thani regime “on a wide range of regional and global issues,” including security. Within that context, the Rosneft deal seems like a stunning Putin coup, at a time when the US is still pushing sanctions against Russia for various of Putin’s latest transgressions. And although Putin surrogates might argue that such moves by Moscow in the Middle East are “financial” in nature, those who actually believe that these deals aren’t also geopolitical are kidding themselves.

The US administration had originally underscored its 2013 snub by reneging on arms deals and cutting military aid to Egypt, but later eased these sanctions for the sake of regional security. Clearly, Putin has visualized this breach and set out to fill it to Moscow’s advantage in the Middle East—a factor that’s bound to make major US ally Israel nervous due to that country’s hardly more than tenuous relationship with the Putin regime.The Egyptian gas field deal, for instance, appears to have been an outgrowth of a newly kindled and fast-warming relationship between Putin and Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. After decades of strong ties—particularly military ones—between the US and Egypt, in which Washington has poured tens of billions of dollars worth of arms into the strategically crucial North African nation, relations between the two countries soured as of a 2013 military coup that deposed then-President Mohamed Morsi. But even before that, in late 2012, US President Barack Obama publicly stated that the United States no longer considered the Islamist government of Egypt “either an ally or an enemy.” This was the first time Egypt was publicly “unfriended” by a US administration following the historic 1978 peace treaty signed between that country and Israel at the US Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, under the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

In pursuing that common objective, Putin has been able to capitalize on much-improved  diplomatic relations with not only natural allies, like Iran, but also like traditionally unwavering US allies like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Add to that a newly warm and fuzzy relationship between Putin and Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Russian president has clearly been having a very good year at the expense of the West.It seems obvious, especially in light of the Russian-led OPEC accord, that Putin is working a two-pronged strategy in the Middle East region, by demonstrating withering, ruthless, military strength on the one hand and applying non-confrontational petroleum diplomacy on the other. At a time when the US has used a number of controversial methods to reduce its Middle East oil dependency, while backing away from direct military commitments like the ones that involved it in the disastrous Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, Russia, as a net energy power, finds itself on common ground with both its usual friends and usual foes in that part of the world, with all of them seeking one burning mutual goal: improved oil prices.

Again, Putin has moved to fill that rift: After a brief courtship, Putin and Erdogan put aside differences over the Russian warplane that the Turks shot down near the Syrian border last year and announced they were working to organize a new series of Syrian peace talks. It would be their show alone, they indicated, without any involvement of eiher the United States or the United Nations.Because of Turkey’s strategic location between East and West, it has long been the pampered pet of Western diplomacy and more recently, a fully recognized member of NATO. But relations with Washington have turned dicey in recent years on a number of fronts: the fact that Turkish borders are apparently permeable to Islamist terrorism; Erdogan’s early refusal to join the fight against ISIL with which he shares enmity for the Kurds, allies of the West in neighboring Syria and against Islamic State; Erdogan’s anger over Western disapproval of his government’s increasing autocracy and disrespect for human and civil rights in his own country, etc.

The UN was quick to announce that, indeed, it was time for everyone involved in Syria to sit down at the negotiating table once again, but that no peace talks would be legitimate without United Nations involvement. Putin, with typical veto-power disregard for the UN, conceded that the Moscow-Ankara sponsored talks, if indeed they occurred, would take place “in addition to UN-brokered negotiations in Geneva.”

Making the announcement while visiting another major US ally (Japan), the Russian President said, “The next step is to reach an agreement on a total ceasefire across the whole of Syria. We are conducting very active negotiations with representatives of the armed opposition, brokered by Turkey.”

There’s a threefold rhetorical question, then, that one might ask oneself: Between his highly active oil diplomacy and his readiness to rain massive military hellfire down on the opponents of his ad hoc protectorates, might Vladimir Putin, succeed in establishing a kind of Pax Russiana where, of late, Pax Americana has crashed and burned in the Middle East through lack of decisive commitment and lack of adherence to its own supposedly democratic ideals? If so, at what cost to the aspirations of the peoples of the region? And to what end?