The Missing Piece of the Middle East Chessboard: Russia

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eijing was instrumental in the resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, hosting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. However, despite this intense activity and the cracks in the geopolitical fault lines, there is no initiative on the horizon that will embrace the Palestinian people as the Soviet Union did during the First Cold War—a move that also served as a nuclear deterrence.

“‘Why do you want to make war against the whole world, or at least against the United States?’ you asked. No one in our country, neither workers, nor peasants, nor writers, nor doctors, nor adults, nor children, nor members of the government, wants war, big or small.

We want peace. There are other things we are interested in: planting wheat, building our country, making new inventions, writing books and going into space. We want peace for ourselves and for everyone on the planet. For our children and for you, Samantha.”

This was Yuri Andropov’s response to 10-year-old Samantha Smith who wrote to him from the U.S. state of Maine after his appointment as general secretary of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee of the Communist Party in November 1982, having served before that as chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB) for 15 years.

Although the First Cold War poisoned the relations between the Arab nationalist regimes, supported by the USSR, and the Gulf dynasties, supported by the U.S. and Britain, in the Arab and Islamic geography, the bipolar world order and the existence of the USSR were crucial for the balances in the Middle East. Today, the unlimited support of the G7 countries is the main source of motivation for Israel’s ruthless genocide against Gaza, and the international community suffers from the fact that there is no deterrent and balancing force against this support. The fact that more than 5,000 Palestinian children who lost their lives in the first 45 days of the Israeli attack did not have a leader like Andropov to address a letter towards like Samantha has become one of the sources of the current geopolitical problems.

Moscow’s deterrence protected Palestine

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Moscow’s abandonment of its spheres of influence in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East upset an already precarious balance. On the principle that nature does not accept a vacuum, while the U.S. and Western European states were re-entering these areas with colonial practices dating back to the 18th century, the People’s Republic of China was also entering the game. Russia made belated attempts to return to its former spheres of influence in the following years with instruments such as the private military company Wagner Group and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The revelation of the inadequacy of Russia’s conventional military power set off a domino effect, and a new movement to abandon Russian hegemony in Central Asia and the Caucasus has begun. In the Middle East, the efforts of countries, especially Saudi Arabia, to balance U.S. hegemony and diversify their economic activities have come to the fore. The People’s Republic of China has moved into the space vacated by Russia in order to secure trade routes to European ports with energy resources in the Middle East.

The Beijing government, which was instrumental in the resumption of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, hosted Mahmoud Abbas in June and Bashar al-Assad in September. But despite this flurry of activity and the fracturing of geopolitical fault lines, there is no initiative on the horizon that will embrace the Palestinian people and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) like the Soviet Union did in the First Cold War.

The USSR’s leading role in every crisis in the Middle East

After the “Iranian crisis” of 1946, which sounded the first alarm bells of the First Cold War, the Soviet Union never shied away from taking part, and even playing a leading role, in every major development in the Middle East. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the French-British-Israeli attack on the Suez Canal which had been nationalized by Egyptian President Nasser, and Israel’s plan to seize the Sinai Peninsula and the Straits of Tiran were thwarted by the USSR’s nuclear deterrence. Although the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the 1970 Jordanian crisis, and the 1973 Arab-Israeli war resulted in the defeat of Moscow’s allies, the map of the Middle East would have been very different from what it is today without the USSR’s nuclear deterrence in its final phase. The parties involved in these wars against Israel could have been wiped off the map at a very early stage.

Moscow’s defense in the Eastern Mediterranean

In the immediate aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s, the Soviet Union realized that the Arab-Israeli conflict posed a direct threat to its security in the Eastern Mediterranean, as the U.S. Navy rushed to the region to intervene. Having withdrawn its Jupiter missiles from Turkey in 1963 following the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. was transferring its new weapon to the region. When submarine USS Sam Houston (SSBN-609) entered the port of Izmir on April 14, 1963, carrying a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, alarm bells went off in the Kremlin. The missiles on this submarine were capable of hitting all strategic targets in the west of the USSR, especially Moscow, from the Eastern Mediterranean at a range of 2,800 kilometers.

Thus, the Soviet Union established the “Fifth Operational Fleet” against the U.S.-NATO threat in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Soviet Navy was now ready to play hide-and-seek in the region with its U.S. counterpart, which it did in the 1967 and 1973 wars. The Soviets naturally positioned themselves against Israel on the Palestine issue in order to be able to use the Egyptian port of Alexandria and the Syrian ports. The departure of the Soviet Union in 1991 did not only change the military balance in Europe: the castles that had been built with the diplomatic and defense support of the Soviets began to collapse.

The end of the First Cold War and pro-Palestine leaders

First, we had the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, then Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s placement under Israeli siege and subsequent death, then the civil war in Libya. The Assad regime in Syria was on the verge of collapse in 2014, but managed to survive, at least for the time being, with the support of Russia, which has radically changed the balance in the Syrian civil war. But, Russia cannot remove its navy from the Black Sea because of its war with Ukraine, and it cannot move its Baltic, North Sea, and Pacific fleets to the Mediterranean because of developments in these regions, and is, therefore, far from protecting the Palestinian people to the extent that it did in the past. Nor does Russia have an effective state-level ally in the region.

While it is trying to hold on to eastern Libya through General Haftar, the Assad government it supports in Syria has no influence beyond Damascus and the Mediterranean coast. Under these circumstances, the best Russia could do was, on October 18, 2023, bring up the threat of hypersonic missiles—a field where it is somewhat ahead of the U.S.—against the U.S. Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean.

“This is not a threat. In accordance with my instructions, the Russian Aerospace Forces will begin permanent patrols in the international airspace of the Black Sea. And this mission will be carried out by MiG-31 fighter jets equipped with Kinzhal missiles. I must emphasize that this is not a threat. But we will also monitor what is happening in the Mediterranean with our weapons systems.”

Although the Russian president began his sentence by emphasizing that this was not a threat, the international community calculated the content of the message and the points it could reach. In the following days, on October 18, Russia added further steps to this deterrence discourse indicating that it would further increase its nuclear weapons capacity and deterrence. So, is it possible that this superpower, which has obviously stumbled, can offer the same level of protection to the Palestinian people now as it did in the past?