“We believe military interference from outside in the country without a U.N. Security Council sanction is inadmissible,”

Vladimir Putin’s Iranian gambit

by Leon Aron

Vladimir Putin is on a roll.

And now, fresh from brokering an 11th-hour deal to secure Syria’s chemical weapons and taking a victory lap in the New York Times, Russia’s bare-chested strongman is looking for his next diplomatic triumph: Iran.

How did we get here? Out of a geostrategic nowhere, Russia has rocketed to the position of global powerbroker, capable of preventing a U.S. military action. It is now the dominant diplomatic power in the Middle East, akin to the Soviet Union before Egypt’s Anwar Sadat switched from Moscow to Washington in 1973. Along the way, Moscow has met an overarching goal of its foreign policy: preventing regime change in a friendly authoritarian state close to Russia’s borders.

The Syrian formula is simple but powerfully attractive to both sides of the conflict. The recipe relieves the West of the nerve-wracking burden of responsibility for a military action in a strategically vital and volatile region, and replaces it with a long, drawn-out U.N. “process.” To the blood-soaked Syrian regime, the blueprint not only implies staying in power but almost certainly precludes any outside military action against it. With the threats to the regime’s survival thus effectively removed, the United States has only the words of Putin and Syrian leader Bashar Assad to rely on.
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