Russia Rising? The Eventuality of an Imminent Collapse!
Putin’s ties to repressive regimes in the Middle East and North Africa reflect his own vulnerability—and reveal much about the conflict in Ukraine
Russia Rising: Putin’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa | Edited by Dimitar Bechev, Nicu Popescu, and Stanislav Secrieru | I.B. Tauris, 2021
A few days into the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, then Egyptian President Anwar Saadat woke up Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at night, begging for boots on the ground: “Save me,” Saadat cried over the phone. Brezhnev’s adamant rejection went down in history less as exasperation with an ally than with a disgruntled adolescent recklessly calling for World War III. Regardless of how Egyptians today make sense of that war, Brezhnev’s refusal to send Soviet soldiers to fight for Egyptians convinced Saadat to abnegate the Soviet camp and join the Americans instead.
The Saadat affair reflects the brittleness of Russia’s dealings in the greater Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s abdication amid massive demonstrations in February 2011—and the Obama administration’s active role in forcing that abdication—are still fresh in Arab leaders’ memory. Likewise, Muammar Qaddafi’s enemies could not have removed him from power in Libya without a no-fly zone and logistical support of the U.S. military. Recently, the removal from office of the Pakistani Prime Minister, following a no-confidence vote in parliament, highlighted the aggressive hand of a U.S. government piqued by his recent trip to Russia.
All this helps explain why Vladimir Putin invests warily in the Middle East and North Africa, which will, experience suggests, with the slightest pressure from Washington, immediately abandon him. Yet the symbiotic and cynical relationships he maintains with the region’s despotic leaders continue to energize the pipedream of an ascendant Russia—and demonstrate the violence on which that fantasy rests. Putin’s Russia has a principal role in preserving the retrogressive and reactionary status quos in the MENA. Contested at home, and chased by U.S. Democratic administrations to improve their poor human rights records, beleaguered Arab establishments reach for Russia as a ballast—and to find a patron that does not chastise them over democracy dues and human rights abuses.
Putin understands this Arab anxiety, and embraces the likes of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in turn. Rather than allowing MENA rulers to languish in isolation or irrelevance, Putin’s political support boosts their credentials and lengthens their hold on power. Yet in serving its own narrow class interests, the Russian leadership stands against the legitimate and, most importantly, historical aspirations of the peoples of the MENA, and drags the whole of Russia toward eventual collapse.
The contributors to the book Russia Rising: Putin’s Foreign Policy in the Middle East and North Africa use the Middle East and North African (MENA) space as a lens through which to study Russian foreign policy. But certain dynamics become clear if the question is reversed. By simply asking what the MENA countries want from Russia, or precisely what the Arab states want from their relations with Russia, we can learn much about Putin and his devotees in the region.
An analyst’s work cannot be limited to decrying what is already visible—it must trace subterranean forces long at work. In 1867, Karl Marx defined capital as a self-contradiction in movement. What he means is that, without perpetual growth through unlimited access to fresh natural resources and markets, capital simply asphyxiates and collapses. As the contributors to Russia Rising observe, Putin indulges MENA leaders in a world where the state structures that used to contain and regulate capital are steadily eroding. National capitalism has become a thing of the past, and amid the real movement of capital development, geared towards ever-increasing globalization, Putin and his MENA admirers are at best nostalgic and at worst neurotic. Once dependent on state structures, capital now claims a life independent of rules and norms set by the bourgeois state.
Still, Putin is not naïve. In contrast to that of the Soviet Union, Russian policy abroad tends to reflect extremely narrow business interests, not ideological convictions. Under Putin, the state has become a mere appendage of capitalists. Nearly all contributions in Russia Rising find that he fantasizes about little beyond securing a niche for Russian oligarchs to sell what they produce, aiding them on the unflinching hunt for ever-shrinking markets. Presently, capital cannot extort value except through wars and crisis; the war in Ukraine is about more than just the war in Ukraine. As Hegel observed, the real movement of history always registers reality in diametrical opposition to appearances. Russia’s foreign policy in MENA—and its presumed (even, chimerical) “rise” there—can help us better understand the ongoing conflict in Europe.
Putin does not take his MENA clients—not allies—seriously. In the chapter “Russia and Egypt: A Precarious Honeymoon,” Alexey Khlebnikov, a Russian policy analyst, finds that Moscow’s foreign policy often flattens diplomatic relations into variants of business transactions. Khlebnikov recounts how Putin warmly received Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi in Moscow in April 2013. Yet when Morsi was deposed by General el-Sisi in a military coup, Moscow had no qualms welcoming the new leadership. And the world still remembers when, at the Hmeimim air base in Syria in 2017, the Russian military prevented Bashar al-Assad from following Putin on the red carpet—a break from state visit protocol.
Yet many in MENA do take Russia seriously. Hypnotized by yellow media, large swaths of Arab populations, misunderstand Putin’s motivations and actions. The Cold War has a strong grip on the collective memory in the region, and Arabs fantasize about a second life of the Soviet Union in Putin’s Russia. Thus, amid his war in Ukraine, Putin’s popularity rises, as media outlets like Al-Quds, Al-Arabi, and Al Arabiya (variably) frame the campaign in terms of valor and virility: Putin, the last man standing up against American supremacy.
Such fantasies—which Arab ruling elites strive to maintain—helped shroud Russia’s intervention in Syria in mystery. The intervention, in September of 2015, came four and a half years after the uprising of Syrians against the regime of Bashar Al-Assad. By then, the Syrian uprising had evolved from peaceful demonstrations asking for limited reform, to an incendiary and militarized movement. Foreign meddling was not negligible, but the secular and liberal movement, spearheaded by the Free Syrian Army and its political umbrella, was steps away from tipping the balance of power, and ousting Assad and his cliques.
Russia saved Assad from Qaddafi’s fate. But to do just that, its leadership had to frame its intervention by making it compatible with the global war against terror. Did Russia invent Daesh? Certainly not. But the threat of Daesh—the Arabic acronym for ISIS—and other terrorist organizations was misleading described in Russian and Arab media as sweeping not only Syria, but the entire region. Even the Obama administration was complicit in this framing.
Major media outlets such as MBC, ElArabia, or the quasi liberal-minded Aljazeera rarely make clear that, while having saved Assad’s regime and neutralizing the very power that could propagate towards a democratic Syria—that is, forces belonging to liberal-secular opposition—Russia has so far never given Damascus any advantage to expand its rule over all Syrian territory. As Carol Saivetz, a senior researcher on Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard, reports in “Russia in Iran: It’s Complicated,” Iran’s successful deployment of non-state fighters in its war against Assad frustrated the Russians, who sought to control forces on the ground.
Meanwhile, Assad plays the Russian-Iranian rivalry to his advantage. Because the Iranians steadfastly reject any consensus that may or may not evolve toward a post-Assad Syria, all Russia’s plans to mediate a post-conflict situation in which Assad could be forced to share power with part of the opposition have thus far remained a mirage.
Indeed, Russia sells its 2015 intervention in Syria as a selfless endeavor to rid the world of the obscurantist Daesh. Yet as Florence Gaub, a security expert, makes clear in “The Nonwar on Daesh,” Russia has rarely bombed Daesh positions. And while Assad is still Damascus’ strongman, his jurisdiction is limited to a seventh of total Syrian territory.
A skewed narrative nevertheless persists: Since Assad’s head did not roll like Ghaddafi’s, then Russia must be a superpower, or at least qualify as a reliable patron. In “The ‘Comrades’ in the Maghreb,” the political scientist Dalia Ghanem underlines how well before quelling the non-violent protest movement otherwise known as le hirak (that erupted in February 2019), the Algerian establishment approached Russia not only as a superpower but as a potential guarantor for its perpetuation. Ultimately, lavish contracts for arms purchases from Russian firms have—among a vast array of contracts with other nations and firms—effectively quelled the le hirak protest movement, and rejuvenated the unpopular and aging Algerian regime.
The rush to see Russia as a superpower is staggering and underlines a political economy marred in miserable thinking wherein non-elites, the subaltern of the MENA, find themselves submerged. But for purposes of ensuring their hegemony and resisting democratization by all means possible, Arab establishments push for a second life of the Cold War—wishful thinking though it may be—and cast themselves an important role in the drama. Posing for cameras to feed the illusion they are making history, five Arab ministers of foreign affairs (Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, and Sudan) flew to Moscow and Warsaw last April, allegedly to mediate peace in Ukraine. And just as Arabs—ruling elites and populations both—maintain an inflated sense of Russian power, they also harbor the illusion that U.S. power is fatally endangered or is indeed in decline.
Yet, if there is a single lesson to take from Russia Rising, it’s that even Russia does not entertain the myth of American decline. The contrast between Putin’s realism and Arabs’ romanticism is clear in the Kremlin’s awareness that the bilateral relations Putin has built during his tenure are rooted in personal chemistry between him and his counterparts: Erdogan, Bin Salman, and Netanyahu. Yet since when does personal chemistry guarantee enduring state-to-state relations? What might happen if Putin or these counterparts leave or are replaced? Here Putin does match his Arab counterparts, who read the lack of institutionalization as a vindication of their personalist rule and Oriental despotism! Though conscious of American superiority, Putin does still enjoy cameras and spectacle. And like other sociopathic rulers of history, he’s a role model for the likes of el-Sisi and MBS.
The wishful thinking of MENA leadership is not just ridiculous but sinister. Beyond maintaining a simple narrative to feed infantilized populations, overblown perceptions of Russia’s grandeur enforce the status quo. Other than being anti-democratic, unpopular, and violent, the common denominators between the MENA establishment are their respective policies that thrive on the accumulation of value through shocks and disasters, a dynamic Naomi Klein describes in her 2007 classic, The Shock Doctrine. MENA leaders give Russian industrialists market shares that would have easily gone to truly skilled and competitive industrialists from China or the West, and award arms sales contracts as compensation for Russia’s diplomatic support. In 2006, “Moscow signed a $7.5 billion package of agreements with Algeria, which nowadays buys its weapons almost exclusively from Russia. By 2009-11 Algeria had procured more Russian weapons than China, and this includes 34 MiG 29 SMT/UMT light fighter aircraft, 28 Su-30 MKI (A) heavy multipurpose fighters, 16 Yak-130 advanced jet trainers…” The contracts tend to have outrageous price tags, a kind of corruption tax. The gadgets also serve little purpose, besides relieving Russian capitalists from eventual asphyxiation.
Russian arms sales remain a major challenge for democracy activists in the MENA. Selling Egyptians and Algerians each a license to assemble T-90 tanks is perhaps the shortest way of ensuring the perpetuation of ordinary Egyptians and Algerians’ domestication. If the present order stays unchallenged, the call for the rule of law and representative democracy as spearheaded by democracy activists in the MENA will soon look obsolete, darkened by repeated disappointments and subversions. The alternative for the subaltern populations will be militancy—and an incendiary crusade for a classless and moneyless order. For now, however, several MENA regimes see Russia’s veto power on U.N. Security Council as a guarantor for their perpetuity.
What are Russia’s interests in the region? The contributors of Russia Rising do not wade deeply here. Yes, Russia’s sales of arms, energy, and even grains in MENA are not negligible. But these are now just slim vestiges of the lucrative markets that the U.S. used to leave for the Soviet Union, and later Russia. No longer. Fierce competition with other producers leaves little margins for Putin’s oligarchs to expand. And, again, it is not news that without expansion, capital asphyxiates—in part a reflection of what Marx labels the tendential fall in the rate of profit. More mechanization and technology, he theorized, only deflect momentarily, never reverse definitively, losing profit margins. Right now, this dynamic (rather than the U.S. government or NATO) stifles Putin’s capitalists, as they lose market shares to more robust and technologically advanced Chinese or American firms.
The compounding impact of that crisis of ever-shrinking market shares will not be felt immediately. It may take decades, perhaps, even a century or two before capitalism completely breaks down. For the time being, what Arab ruling elites miss is that the triumphant American post-1945 world order still holds, in the sense that they will have to either democratize, lest else a radical (stateless and moneyless) order will emerge. The internal contradictions leading to the terminal crisis of capital are a dialectical, not a chronological, eventuality. Sensible historians trust in the Hegelian law of necessity whereby no power can stand against humans’ determination for freedom, especially the freedom from the ideology of the free market.
Lest I digress, Russia cavorts with the most conservative and reactionary elements in the MENA region at the expense of subaltern who, since 2011, has sought freedom—and paid dearly for it. Without Russia’s intervention in 2015, the butcher of Damascus simply would not still be around in contempt of that half a million people he has killed. Disenfranchised and stigmatized Arabs, those elements of MENA populations who breathe the spiritless degradation from seeing the butcher escaping punishment, still dare to claim back their place in history. And because they do, they can neither forget nor forgive Putin’s bombardments of Aleppo, his reducing major towns to rubble, and his instigating the exile of 12 million Syrians. To those Arabs, history is on their side in the sense that Russia is “rising” only to enjoy a free fall. Russia’s pathetic and agonizing campaign in Ukraine vindicates the cries and prayers of its victims in Syria and beyond. ▩