Russia's Geostrategic Outlook and the Syrian Crisis by Hicham Tohme

Author:Hicham Tohme [Tohme, Hicham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Middle East, Political Science, History, General
ISBN: 9781680530643
Google: SGTgtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Academica Press
Published: 2020-03-15T13:37:21+00:00

CHAPTER III

Rearranging the Chessboard

Having examined the foundations of Russian geostrategic outlook in terms of readiness to militarily intervene in foreign conflicts, this chapter analyzes Russia’s geostrategy, assessing both how our understanding of Russian foreign outlook developed and how this outlook is shaping the geopolitical world map at present and will shape it in the near future. In line with the approach adopted in this book, I argue that understanding Russia’s behavior as a push for a multipolar world offers us but a fragment of the broader picture, since it informs us more about Russia’s general vision for the global order and the objectives it hopes to achieve, but less how it seeks to fulfill it. In order to answer this, I will rely on the Arabic concept of mumana‘a, which I translate as “obstructionism,” to describe Russia’s foreign policy.

How do the four pillars of Russian geostrategy help us understand Russian strategic readings of the global map? Our understanding of Russian foreign policy, especially as it pertains to Syria, has developed over the past eight years. One of the earliest arguments to emerge was the widespread notion that Russia was backing the Ba’ath regime because of the commercial ties, with special emphasis on weapons trade between Russia and Syria.1 Even on Wikipedia, a good source to gage popular and common knowledge on the issue, significant sections of the entry on “Russia’s Role in the Syrian Civil War” are devoted to the arms trade between the two countries. 2 This idea found traction in the news and among observers and analysts at the time, but some remained unconvinced. Talal Nizameddin argued that this trade was purely symbolic since the revenue it generated was negligible. 3 Indeed, a closer examination of Russia’s trade figures reveals how frail this popular argument really is. The export figures of Russia for 2008 amounted to more than 300 billion USD, fell to 202 billion USD in 2009 (the year the global financial crisis hit), and rose to 280 billion USD in 2010 before reaching almost 355 billion USD in 2012.4 Over these four years, Russia exported annually arms worth 10 billion USD on average, or the equivalent of roughly three percent of its total export value. In 2013, all of Syria’s weapons contracts with Russia were valued at a total of 3.7 billion USD, covering contracts signed over the previous seven-year period.5 The figures clearly show how small the arms trade argument was, even if it played a major role in the public’s eyes.

Another financially deterministic argument was advanced by Mark Katz, who claimed that Russia supports anti-Western regimes because they are more prone to international Western-backed economic sanctions, therefore giving more room for Russian companies to operate in these countries without having to compete with their European and American counterparts.6 According to him, Moscow is driven by “simply pursuing Russia’s commercial aims rather than in furthering any geopolitical ambitions it might have.” 7 Like arms trade, general trade between Syria and Russia is negligible. The total

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