Trump to Russia’s Rescue
7 min read
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Dictatorships seem stable and almost invulnerable, until the day they fall. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime crumbled in days in the face of an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a group that the United States considers a terrorist organization. But the Syrian civil war is, for now, mostly over. Hundreds of thousands are dead.
I wrote more than a decade ago in favor of Western intervention in Syria, back when the butcher’s bill was still in the tens of thousands, and finally gave up when Assad repeatedly used chemical weapons and got away with it. I predicted at the time that President Barack Obama’s decision against military action would undermine America’s position in the Middle East, embolden Iran, and give Russia its first major outpost in the region. Some of my worst fears, sadly, came true, while bodies piled up in the Syrian rubble for the next decade. (Obama’s defenders point to congressional opposition, but he claimed that he had the authority to act alone, and I think he was right. His last-minute reversal, a case study I used to teach at the Naval War College, stunned his national-security team, and it’s not, in my view, a pretty story.)
I would not even begin to predict Syria’s future, but I can identify one of the biggest losers (besides Assad, of course) now that this nightmare is over: Vladimir Putin.
That is, unless Donald Trump rides to his rescue.
Syria was a symbol of Russia’s desire to return to superpower status, a perch in the Middle East that even Putin’s Soviet predecessors never achieved. It’s hard to overestimate the value of such a position—close to the West’s energy resources and important waterways—to any Russian government, past or present. In 1973, the Soviets tried to jump into the region when they invited the United States to join them in putting Soviet and American troops between Israel and Egypt during the Yom Kippur War. The White House rejected the proposal, and the Kremlin then said that it would go in with or without the United States. The Nixon administration’s response was to order U.S. forces to raise their global nuclear-alert status. The Soviets got the message.
Some 40 years later, Russian jets were streaking over Middle Eastern skies so regularly that U.S. and Russian military commanders had to keep a line open between them to deconflict their operations.
As Russia’s geopolitical position in Syria has collapsed, Putin’s prestige and credibility have taken a serious hit. Putin has long prided himself on being an ally who never cuts and runs. As my friend Nick Gvosdev, a veteran Russia-watcher who serves as the director of the national-security program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told me today: “In the Middle East, Putin has often contrasted the fecklessness of American presidents with his steadfast support to those he views as Russia’s loyal partners. He has marketed this consistency as a selling point as to why he is a better mediator for regional disputes.”
Putin, however, helped seal Assad’s fate when Russia invaded Ukraine, dividing Russian attention and capabilities so badly that when HTS and other rebels launched their offensives, Moscow was unable to offer much help. Now the world has seen Assad chased from his own palace while Putin did nothing, a spectacle that casts doubt both on Putin’s power and on the value of his word.
Putin is also in other jams of his own making. The Russian economy is suffering from sanctions and from the costs of his military adventure in Ukraine. On the ground in Ukraine, his troops are advancing slowly through a meat grinder in a war that was supposed to be over in a week. North Koreans are fighting alongside Russians, and a senior Russian military officer was blown up in the streets of Moscow. The sprawling Russian Federation now looks like a banana republic that needs assistance from Pyongyang’s hermit kingdom and can’t even keep one of its own generals safe in the national capital.
Putin’s very bad year could be a very good opportunity for the West and for the besieged Ukrainians, if the Americans and their allies continue to strain Russia’s military on the battlefield and Russia’s economy in the global marketplace—in other words, if someone other than Trump were about to become the leader of the free world.
Trump openly admires Putin, and has reportedly spoken with him multiple times since leaving the White House in 2021. He is unlikely to press the West’s advantage. Instead, at a press event yesterday, Trump called President Joe Biden’s decision to allow the Ukrainians to use U.S.-supplied long-range weapons to strike deeper inside Russia “stupid,” and complained that he hadn’t been consulted. “I don’t think that should have been allowed, not when there’s a possibility—and certainly not just weeks before I take over,” Trump said, adding that he might reverse Biden’s policy.
And what exactly would Trump do differently? During his campaign, Trump said he could end the war in a day. Now he says that the war is “a tough one; it’s a nasty one,” with people “being killed at levels that nobody’s ever seen.” (Fact check: People have been killed at such levels in many modern wars, but it’s to Trump’s credit if he’s concerned.) Trump claims to want a peace deal; the problem is that in practice, any “peace deal” means letting Putin keep his imperial acquisitions while he gears up for renewed fighting.
Trump has named retired General Keith Kellogg as his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia. Kellogg (who accepts the risible Russian line that the war was spurred in part by Moscow’s fears that Ukraine would join NATO) has argued for continuing to arm Ukraine if Russia won’t agree to a cease-fire. This might seem a hard line, but it’s pure theater: Putin knows this game, and he will simply repeat his Crimea playbook from 2014 and 2015, agreeing to peace negotiations while engaging in chicanery and cease-fire violations behind the scenes. The weapons to Ukraine will dry up, the West will look away in shame, and Putin’s tanks will roll again as soon as he’s caught his breath.
I hope I’m wrong and that wiser heads prevail on Trump to take advantage of Putin’s misfortunes. (I’m not sure who such people would be in a circle that includes adviser Elon Musk and possible Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.) More likely, Trump will go on with his campaign of retribution at home while the Russians do as they please.
Events in Syria have opened a historic opportunity, but sometimes the man and the moment do not meet.
Related:
- Why Syria matters to the Kremlin
- How Russia could maintain a foothold in Syria
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- A tech consultant was found guilty of second-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of the tech executive Bob Lee, who helped create Cash App.
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Evening Read
Bob Dylan’s Carnival Act
By James Parker
Everything, as Charles Péguy said, begins in mysticism and ends in politics. Except if you’re Bob Dylan. If you’re Bob Dylan, you start political and go mystical. You start as an apprentice hobo scuffing out songs of change; you become, under protest, the ordained and prophetic mouthpiece for a sense of mass disturbance otherwise known as the ’60s; and then, after some violent gestures and severances, you withdraw. You dematerialize; you drop it all, and you drift into the recesses of the Self. Where you remain, until they give you a Nobel Prize.
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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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