MEDIA pictures last week pretty much summed it up. Right there for the entire world to see were Russian troops heading into north-eastern Syria as US troops headed out.
Other pictures of Kurdish civilians pelting passing American vehicles with stones and rotting fruit only underlined the indignity of the US retreat.
Doubtless the Kurds will not forget such a US betrayal in a hurry, but for now they will have to come to terms with the new power broker on the block, Russia. For some time now American confusion, bungling and miscalculation have opened the door to Moscow’s Middle East revival, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has also played a canny game in exploiting such screw-ups in US foreign policy.
Looking back it’s hard to imagine that only a few years ago Moscow’s sole ally in the region, in the shape of President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, was crumbling before the world’s eyes. Russia’s influence in the Middle East looked likewise to be waning.
Indeed it was none other than then US president Barack Obama who predicted that, when Putin intervened militarily in Syria in 2015, Russian forces would become bogged down. Today nothing could be further from the truth, with the Kremlin dictating the pace of events militarily on the ground.
As I write, Russian troops now occupy positions in Syria held just days ago by US forces, a symbol if there ever was one of the collapse of America’s position in the region and Moscow’s ascendance as the key power broker in the Syrian civil war.
Quite simply and put in the bluntest of terms, last Tuesday during their six-hour meeting at the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin along with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan carved up north-eastern Syria between themselves. That the US was not even present at the meeting speaks volumes about Washington’s neutering in that process and across the region of late.
Again it was less than four years ago, that things could not have been more different between Moscow and Ankara. It was back then that Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near its border, prompting fears of a widening conflict between those neighbours as they faced off in Syria.
READ MORE: How the Kurds have once again been 'stabbed in the back'
Today instead the Kremlin, much to Washington’s chagrin, has been able to flog Turkey its advanced S-400 air-defence system, driving yet another wedge between Ankara and its Western Nato allies, something Putin never misses an opportunity to do.
Anyone who underestimates the significance of this and the geopolitical importance of Turkey to Nato need only consider the essential military infrastructure it has built up in the country. Incirlik airbase is the obvious example, one of the six airbases in Nato countries that hold US Air Force sub-strategic nuclear bombs.
In all October has not been a bad month for Putin in the Middle East. This success has come through Putin making Russia the only country that can talk to anyone in the region. Using deft international diplomacy Putin has been able to find common ground with leaders as diverse as al-Assad of Syria, Erdogan of Turkey, Hassan Rouhani of Iran and even Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
It doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s the Turks or Kurdish YPG, Syrian Army, Israel or Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, Putin seems able to get them into a room for a chat.
READ MORE: David Pratt: Donald Trump has stabbed the Kurds in the back
Moscow has even brought its influence to bear in the Libyan civil war, by supporting the rebel forces of General Khalifa Haftar, who happens to hold US citizenship.
Just these past weeks too, the King of Saudi Arabia hosted Putin. Likewise the royal rulers of the United Arab Emirates welcomed the Kremlin’s man, lining the streets with Russian flags for his arrival.
Here is a Russian leader who despite deep enmity between Riyadh and Tehran seems able to ensure Moscow has good relations with both, even if at times Putin does play one off against the other.
Putin’s success is in part enabled by his adherence to the dictum that countries have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. In all Moscow’s expanding Middle East influence is not a bad result for a country whose economy is smaller than Italy’s and barely 10th the size of the US.
Lately throughout all of Putin’s Middle East wheeling and dealing there were done deals and hints at more secretive arrangements pointing to Russia taking full advantage of the power vacuum created in the region by Trump’s renewed isolationist policy focus.
READ MORE: Kurdish situation is an absolute disgrace
The old Cold Warrior seems to have an uncanny ability to capitalise on American mistakes, and to cultivate a reputation for decisiveness just as many Arab regimes, from Egypt to the Gulf, have grown worried about America’s reliability as a friend and ally.
Maxim Suchkov, an expert at the Russian Council and lecturer at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, succinctly summed this strategy up this week in an interview with Newsweek magazine.
“Moscow doesn’t have an intention to ‘own’ the Middle East,” observed Suchkov.
“Russia’s strategic game plan is to construct a ‘polycentric world order’ where the US will not be a hegemon but more non-Western states have a role to play,” he added.
But falling under the influence of Moscow’s orbit does of course come at a price for many citizens within those countries.
Putin, after all, is not man to get bogged down with issues like human rights and transparency – which sadly is welcomed by some leaders in the areas Moscow seeks to influence. You will not for example hear the Kremlin chastise the Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman over the 2018 murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not that Washington was too vociferous itself in its criticism.
When viewed from a US domestic perspective, not least with a presidential election looming and deflecting troubles at home, Trump’s decision to pull American troops out of north-eastern Syria and abandoning the Kurds in the process might be perceived as a canny move of his own.
The problem with that thinking of course is that Trump simply went about it in the worst, most disastrously self-interested way. Whatever lay behind such a misconceived “strategy”, it has lost Washington the leverage of its Kurdish allies and squandered the island of political decency they were in the course of creating.
Above all else it has allowed Russia to possess the greatest influence it has had in the Middle East than at any time since the height of Soviet power in the 1960s. Vladimir Putin must be well pleased.
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