Putin's Master Plan. Douglas E. Schoen
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elections48 despite openly endorsing Putin’s illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea,49 and subsequently championed the Brexit vote to leave the EU. France, Britain, Spain, Italy, and Belgium all have populist political parties that are “committed” to Putin.50 The right-wing National Front party in France has been loaned tens of millions of euros by a Kremlin-connected bank, and Putin has hosted the National Front’s leader, Marine Le Pen, in Moscow.51 A January 2015 poll finds that between 29 and 31 percent of French voters would support Le Pen if she runs for president in 2017, putting her ahead of all other contenders.52 Radical pro-Putin parties are poised to grow in popularity in Europe as economic woes, dissatisfaction with immigration policy, and frustration with the status quo discredits mainstream political parties on both the left and right.
For a glimpse of the future of Western European politics, just look at Greece. The country’s far-left SYRIZA party and neofascist Golden Dawn party disagree on just about everything—but they both love Putin53 What Putin hopes to offer the voters of Western Europe is just that: a choice on everything except whether to stand up to Russia and defend their own own values. He figures that if core European states such as France and Britain elect governments that include Putin loyalists, NATO will be as good as dead. The thinking is that a Le Pen government that is pro-Putin would never send its troops to protect Estonia from a Russian invasion or endorse another round of sanctions on Russian-backed separatists. Pro-Putin Western European governments would also roll back efforts to reduce reliance on Russian energy and happily send their euros and pounds east to fill the Kremlin’s coffers. Putin, of course, will be generous enough not to turn off the gas during cold European winters, so long as his customers keep playing by his rules.
It follows that Western Europe’s pro-Putin politicians would also undermine their nations’ foundational relationship with America, closing military bases and ending long-standing cooperative defense arrangements. We may even see a repeat of France’s Cold War–era decision to decline participation in mutual defense arrangements with America. If that were the case, how could the United States trust pro-Putin politicians on basic matters of political decency and respect for human rights? It is one thing when politicians hold their noses for the sake of national commercial benefit, as many countries do with China. But when politicians throw in their lot with Putin, whose chief export has been war and bloodshed, they put at stake their very existence as liberal democracies, to say nothing of forfeiting any claim to a moral high ground. Simply put, Putin’s meddling in Western Europe poses a threat to the future of the Western alliance—and with it, the future of Western civilization.
THE MIDDLE EAST
Putin has many reasons to be interested in the Middle East, including global oil supplies and Russia’s lucrative arms sales in the region. But Putin’s overriding strategic priority in the Middle East concerns Iran, the world’s largest Shi’a Muslim nation. Not that Putin has any special love for Iran or its particular brand of Shi’a theocracy. What Iran represents is the gravest threat to American interests in the Middle East and the ability to shatter America’s regional alliance system. Moreover, Iran stands as a counterweight to Turkey, and has the power to destabilize the Caucasus region, where Shi’a Muslims in Azerbaijan and southern Russia look to Tehran for religious, cultural, and even political leadership. For these reasons, Putin supplies Iran with arms, nuclear technology, and diplomatic support that continue to be a decisive factor in the country’s emergence as a regional power.
Russia’s direct support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria has been conducted in clear collaboration with Iran, and Iranian military advisors on the ground direct Syrian troops armed by Putin. Today, Iran is in effective control of coastal Syria, Lebanon, the Shi’a regions of Iraq, and areas of Yemen ruled by Tehran-backed ethnic Houthi rebels. A member of Iran’s parliament has declared that the country now controls four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Sana’a.54
Understandably, America’s Arab allies are alarmed by Iran’s rise, which has deeply upset the balance of power in the Middle East. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, two powerful Arab nations and natural rivals with Iran, are determined to reassert their influence and roll back Iranian gains. But they aren’t turning to America for help. Instead, they’re running straight into Putin’s arms. The Saudi royal family, who have become “disillusioned with President Obama and his policies in the region,” recently dispatched Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman to Moscow to negotiate deals with Putin on “oil cooperation, space cooperation, peaceful nuclear energy cooperation, and nuclear technology sharing.55 In addition, Egypt recently signed a sweeping military cooperation agreement with Russia, and Cairo plans to buy billions of dollars of arms from the Kremlin.56 Egyptian and Russian officers will train together, and their navies will hold joint exercises in the Mediterranean.57 Putin is working all sides of the conflict in the Middle East, to the detriment of American security interests—and no one is batting an eye in Washington.
America’s Middle Eastern allies can no longer rely on Washington for material or diplomatic support. Instead, they’re flocking to Putin for arms and technology. Putin’s alliance with Iran demonstrated the value of the Kremlin’s friendship, and is upending a regional order that has persisted largely unchanged for decades. Iran is now on the verge of achieving effective regional hegemony with Russian help, and the rest of the Middle East is scrambling to be on the right side of history: Putin’s side.
In Iraq, meanwhile, any positive benefits that may have resulted from America’s decade-plus war there now belong to Tehran. There is plenty of blame to go around for allowing the Middle East to slip into such chaos, and surely America’s politicians of the last fifteen years must shoulder a considerable portion of it. But we cannot forget that Putin has worked tirelessly toward exactly what we are witnessing today: a rising Russia-backed Iran; a disintegrating American alliance system; and growing Russian influence in Arab countries. On all counts, Putin is getting what he wants.
CENTRAL ASIA
To many in the West, and especially in America, Central Asia is most familiar as the land of Borat and America’s grinding Afghan quagmire. For most Russians, however, Central Asia is the land of the Osterns, massively popular Soviet-era movies inspired by America’s Westerns but set on Central Asia’s endless steppes and bone-dry deserts, with Turkic nomads filling in for Native American braves and clever Russian frontiersmen replacing stiff-spined sheriffs.58 To Vladimir Putin, Central Asia is a land of opportunity, bursting with oil and natural gas begging for export and crisscrossed by well-worn Silk Road trade routes that cry out for high-speed freight trains and intercontinental superhighways. Russian control of Central Asia would hand over to Putin some of the world’s largest natural gas fields, and thereby consolidate Russian control of an energy market vital to both European and booming East Asian economies.
So far, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have signed on to Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union, with Tajikistan poised to follow suit. Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are likely to acquiesce eventually as well. These countries may be among the poorest in the world, but their vast reserves of natural resources make them strategically priceless. Beyond oil and gas, they have coal, uranium, gold, iron ore, and manganese. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, nestled up against the Tian Shan mountains just west of the Himalayas, have enormous stores of fresh water frozen in their glaciers. Soviet-era mismanagement means that the region remains underexplored, with major discoveries of resources worth billions of dollars having occurred within the last ten years. Putin is already working with the Chinese to build high-speed railways that will ship Central Asia’s riches to the hungry economies of Asia.59 Putin has built Russia into the power that it is today on the back of commodities extraction and energy exports. If Putin can consolidate control over Central Asia through political alliances and economic links, it will deepen his purse for military expenditures and secure the Kremlin’s position astride strategic trade routes from Europe to Asia.
EAST AND SOUTH ASIA
By now, it’s no secret that Putin has built a powerful alliance with China, as one of this book’s coauthors describes in detail in The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership (2014).