Russia, Iran Need Each Other, Despite Disagreements
Trump would be hard-pressed to deliver a deal that could persuade Moscow to upend its deepening ties with Iran
BEIRUT—Iran and Russia aren’t often on the same page in the Middle East. But if President Donald Trump’s administration attempts to drive a wedge between the two, there is precious little incentive it can offer Moscow to abandon its crucial partner.
Confronting Iran while also improving relations with Russia and turning it into an ally against “radical Islam” have emerged as two early foreign-policy priorities for the new U.S. administration.
Those goals are difficult to reconcile for the simple reason that Russia and Iran increasingly need each other. Over the past year and a half, Moscow and Tehran have put their strategic differences aside as they took advantage of the shrinking American influence in the Middle East.
Their joint effort reversed the tide of the Syrian conflict, shoring up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, and gave Moscow new sway across the region, from Libya to Iraq.
U.S. officials have recently spoken of their desire to woo Russia away from Iran. Yet, viewed from the Middle East—or for that matter from Russia—it appears highly unlikely that such a “great bargain,” in which President Vladimir Putin cuts the Islamic Republic adrift, is achievable.
Unlike Iran, Russia considers itself as a global superpower, with the Middle East as only one part of its interests. For Moscow, the issue of Ukraine—in particular gaining international recognition for Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and ending Western sanctions imposed that year—is an overwhelming priority.
On this matter, however, any deal that would make it worthwhile for Mr. Putin to upend Moscow’s deepening ties with Iran would be exceedingly hard for President Trump to deliver. That has become particularly so amid the congressional investigations into Russia’s role in the U.S. presidential election and the fallout from former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador.
“This kind of trade-off is impossible,” said Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center and a former Russian military officer. “Russia has its own relationship with Iran—a neighbor, a partner, an occasional ally and adversary. Also, there is nothing that the U.S. can give to Russia in Ukraine: Russia has taken Crimea on its own, and the recognition of that will take decades.”
The events of the past year in Syria, meanwhile, have shown the value of collaboration between Iran and Russia.
Russia’s air power was indispensable for the success of Syrian regime advances, especially in recapturing the entire city of Aleppo after a four-year battle. So were the Iranian proxy ground forces participating in the conflict, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Shiite militias from Iraq and Afghanistan. They provided the manpower that the depleted Syrian army was unable to muster.
This common fight has by and large eclipsed the disagreements between Moscow and Tehran on the final political settlement in Syria.
“There are areas of great friction between Russia and Iran on the course of the war in Syria, but there is also a recognition on both sides that they need to work together,” said Ellie Geranmayeh, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
That isn’t to say that Russian and Iranian interests won’t diverge once the fighting subsides and the warring parties move toward a political deal. Russia doesn’t want to be drawn even further into the regional sectarian conflict between the Iranian-led Shiite forces and the Sunni powers such as Saudi Arabia.
In Syria, this means that the Russians are more interested in a political compromise that would satisfy at least a part of the country’s Sunni majority and its patrons, such as Turkey. Iran, meanwhile, is focused on empowering Mr. Assad’s Alawite community, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.
“There is a general understanding in the region that Russia’s policy in Syria is not about Syria itself but about increasing Russia’s role in the region,” said Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an Iran expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank in London. “The fear and concern in Iran is that Russia is very much ready to leave Iran out of the picture.”
Unlike Cold War-era Soviet Union, Russia has also developed an intense relationship with Israel—a relationship that appears to include allowing Israel to strike Hezbollah and Iranian targets in Syria.
“We all know that Russia has the security of Israel as a priority,” said Lebanese lawmaker Ali Bazzi, from the Shiite Amal bloc allied with Hezbollah.
This distance between Moscow’s and Iran’s positions, however, could also be an asset: It allowed Russia to draw Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization military alliance, into recent negotiations on Syria’s future that marginalized America’s role.
In any case, unless the Trump administration dramatically increases its commitment to the region both politically and militarily, it won’t be able to exploit these potential disagreements and drive Russia and Iran apart, cautioned Imad Salamey, a political scientist at the Lebanese American University.
“Now, Iran and Russia have a strong united front,” Mr. Salamey said. “It is Russia and Iran that have split the U.S. from its allies, brought about a rift between the U.S., Turkey and Saudi Arabia over Iraq and Syria, and managed to divide the West.”