As a premise, I would like to clarify that this article is only intended as a collection of thoughts on geopolitical strategies that have enfolded over a ten-year span. It is not meant to praise or criticise any specific administration. Most importantly, it is not meant to justify war crimes.
Although details are still to be settled down, the United States are pushing on a deal with Russia about Ukraine since the inauguration of the current administration. Trying to answer why Washington seems eagerly looking for the signature, I cannot exclude that two war scenarios have been pooled together to strike a balance for both. Indeed, it is my opinion that the potential ceasfire involving Ukraine cannot be read separately from that in the Middle East. Otherwise, it would be impossible to understand why the United States should consent to nearly all territorial claims coming from Russia, whose military adventure – or special operation – has been anything but a show of efficient warfare up to now. Instead, things become clearer if we consider the possibility that Russia won the apparent generosity of the United States about Ukraine by divesting from another confrontation field, namely the Middle East.
In the Middle Eastern scenario, Russia used to have two partners: Syria and Iran. Militian proxies of the latter, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, have been quickly eliminated by Israel in September 2024. Iran itself suffered an undeniable and swift defeat nine months later. When it comes to Syria, Assad’s regime collapsed in the mere 10 days from November 28th to December 8th 2024, even if it resisted for more than thirteen years with the sustain of Moscow. In this episode, one can possibly read a Russian commitment to withdraw from its position in the area. Despite the region’s vast economic interests, which pertain to the extraction of resources as well as to trade and global supply chains, such commitment might be rationally explained by Moscow’s willingness to be compensated on the Ukrainian battlefield. If they are read in these terms, the practical implications of the two ceasfire agreements show that the United States have not bowed to Russian terms. To the opposite, the position of Washington both in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe is stronger now than it was a decade ago.
In 2014, the Russian-Iranian alliance in the Middle East was at its highest, nearly creating an overland connection between the mountains of Iran and the Russian bases along the Mediterranean coast of Syria. Currently, nothing of that threat has remained. The most powerful player on the ground is undoubtedly the closest American ally, Israel. Indeed, even neighbouring Arab states such as Jordan cooperated to prevent Iranian drones from reaching Tel Aviv. Moreover, Israel’s ability to annihilate its regional rivals has been so clearly showcased that only one Muslim country is currently working to mitigate Tel Aviv’s hegemony in the region. This country is Turkey, which participates in the Gaza security force and exercises an influential role over the new government of Syria. Yet, Turkey is a NATO member and a close US ally itself. In other words, Ankara is proposing to be a counterbalance to Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East, but one that falls equally within the Western alliance – which, as opposed to ten years ago, is dominant in this scenario.
Even in Eastern Europe, the current situation looks better for the United States than it was in 2014. Until that year, four countrires were to be counted solidly under Russian influence: Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine. In slightly more than a decade, this is no longer the case for at least two of them. Armenia, after having lost the Karabakh war to the Azeri and Turkish forces in 2020, is undergoing an alliance shift by holding trade talks with Ankara to end the isolation that Yerevan is confronted with. Even if Ukraine were to lose four regions and recognise Crimea as Russian land, the country’s ties with Moscow are severely undermined. Nothing lets me conceive that Russian influence, in the style of that exercised from 1991 to 2014, has any probabilty to occur again in the future on the country as a whole. Finally, the pro-Russian government of Georgia, albeit standing, has gone through widespread popular protests led by the president of the republic during an unprecedented institutional crisis.
In sum, the United States have won the confrontation with a major power that has challenged its supremacy over the last ten years across two regional scenarios. Although this conclusion seems to me evident, a possible weakness should be pointed out. Europe, traditionally the other component of the Western alliance, has been left aside in all these strategic developments, despite having to bear most of their costs, such as that of economic disentanglement from Russia. Europe has not had clear gains, either in economic or in political terms, from the advancements of the United States in the last ten years. Threfore, it is to me unsurprising that England, France, and Germany are currently the greatest opponents to the US-backed deal with Russia. An outcome will likely be found in the middle between the following scenarios. The most favourable for the West would be that the combination of Europe’s bad-cop role and the US’s good-cop role led at least partially to Russian concessions. The least favorable scenario would be that European dissatisfaction with Washington exarcebated into a strategic disengagement from future American-led initiatives. While this conclusion might still be unrealisic because of the historical European lag on defence technology and equipment, the great push of current Commission on the matter speaks to its future likelihood.