How Russia Became the Middle East’s New Power Broker

On the morning of January 11, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar climbed up the companionway of an aircraft carrier floating off the Mediterranean port of Tobruk. As a Marine band played and an honor guard presented arms, an admiral in a white full-dress uniform greeted the Libyan strongman, who was a senior commander in the U.S.-backed rebel forces that ousted the dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. After the welcoming ceremony, the 73-year-old Haftar, an American citizen who for many years lived in the United States, was escorted below decks for a secure video conference with the Middle East’s most energetic foreign power broker. The official topic was battling terrorists. But both sides knew the unofficial agenda was something else: how to boost Haftar’s power as he tries to defeat a weak, U.N.-backed government in Tripoli.

Haftar has close ties in Washington, but his hosts in January were not American. Rather, he was aboard the Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia’s only aircraft carrier, and his interlocutor was Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.

Like a growing number of leaders in the Middle East, Haftar has a new set of friends in Moscow. After three decades on the sidelines, Russia is once again a major player in the region. In the last six months alone, the country has altered the course of the Syrian civil war and taken control of the peace process, forged a close relationship with Turkey’s strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and has been courting traditional U.S. allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Israel. And over the past two years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has received the leaders of Middle Eastern states 25 times—five more than former U.S. President Barack Obama, according to a Newsweek analysis of presidential meetings.

For decades, Washington has tried to plant democracies in much of the world, including the Middle East. But that plan appears to have withered under Obama and current U.S. President Donald Trump. With the imperfect exception of Tunisia, the Arab Spring did not bring democracy to the Middle East. It instead allowed instability and extremism to flourish in countries including Egypt, Libya and Syria. Western intervention in Libya and Yemen—together with the involvement of Iran and a Saudi-led coalition in Yemen—helped produce failed states that are still mired in civil wars. Backing the Syrian rebels and insisting that autocratic President Bashar al-Assad shouldn’t stay allowed Syria’s civil war to drag on, or even intensify—fueling the rise of the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). And a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians—a longstanding goal of U.S. foreign policy—now seems further away than ever. After Obama’s two terms, only last year's historic Iran nuclear deal, which curbed Tehran's nuclear program in return for lifting sanctions, remains as the lone regional success story—and even that looks shaky under the new administration.

“Obama’s entire policy in the Middle East has failed,” says Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian Duma’s committee on foreign affairs. “The powerlessness and the lack of results are evident.”

Observing the U.S.’s setbacks, the Kremlin sensed an opportunity. For Moscow, the advantages of clawing back some of the Soviet Union’s old influence in the Middle East are manifold: Russia can continue empire-building and projecting its growing global influence and military heft; it can also gather diplomatic bargaining chips to exchange for softening of Western sanctions imposed after the 2014 annexation of Crimea—or for future use in negotiations with the West.

“First and foremost this is a question of regaining our strategic influence,” Senator Oleg Morozov, a member of Russia’s Federation Council international affairs committee, tells Newsweek. Or, as Dmitri Trenin, director of Moscow’s Carnegie Center, puts it: “The goal of [Putin’s] foreign policy is to restore Russia as a global major power. For him to be able to operate in the Middle East, in competition with the U.S., is a badge of [being] a major power. That is what Russia did in Syria.”

But perhaps more important than either of these goals—and a motivation little understood in the West—is Moscow’s desire to protect Russia from radical Islamist terrorism, the fear of which helped Putin ascend to power during the brutal wars in Russia’s North Caucasus in the 1990s. Russia’s homegrown insurgencies shaped its politics so that the Kremlin—and many Russians—favors order over personal rights and freedoms. After watching the U.S. a decade later try to import democracy to Iraq and Libya, only to see them crumble into civil strife, Putin saw a stark choice: Outside powers could side with strong regimes, however ruthless they might be, or the world will witness what he called “the destruction of state systems and the rise of terrorism.”

Read more: Putin declares Russia an 'ally' to Islamic World

As ISIS grew more influential in Syria, so did Putin’s mistrust of Western efforts to combat the militant group. In mid-September 2015, Russia’s security services announced that there were at least 2,500 Russian nationals fighting for ISIS. In Putin’s eyes this was enough to make the survival and success of Assad’s regime a matter of national security for Russia.

“Our main aim in Syria is to make sure that our citizens who went out there [to fight with ISIS] never come back,” says Vyacheslav Nikonov, a Duma member. “For Russia, intervention in the Middle East is a matter of defending our own security. All the rest is details.”