Tartus 2012: End of the American World

“Never let yourself be frozen in the north, lest you lose your status as a superpower.” – Catherine the Great, Russian Empress

We talk passionately about Russian support for Bashar al-Assad’s crimes, and the price it might pay, as if we were born yesterday. This is only politics; Russia does not care about the price. It has come back as a world leader. It will not budge and it will not change.

Russia began its comeback to warm waters by opening its old base in the Syrian port of Tartus. By docking warships there, Russia announced a new world and the end of the American century. America ruled over the world for two decades and halfway through this period, an enigmatic man arrived to the Kremlin. No one thought he would turn out to be a tsar who would rebuild the great power of the Soviet Union.

Russia was silent for years, holding a truce with the West as a friend whose only ambitions were money and economic interests. Countries that once constituted the Soviet Union were American allies for more than a decade, and they experienced America as an ally that hastily abandons its allies. Eduard Shevardnadze, then President of Georgia, a prominent American ally and the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the last days of the Soviet Union, was distraught after the revolt against him in 2003. He explained how he had served America for two decades, submitting to it in unimaginable ways, only to discover that the American ambassador was inciting rebels against him.

America first staggered in Iraq. In 2008, its economy went to pieces, and the same year, Vladimir Putin and his friend and subordinate, President Dmitry Medvedev, started a discourse, on various forums, about the emergence of a multipolar world, one not controlled by a single power.

The Russian Bear began to move outside its enclosure when it invaded Georgia in August 2008. Everyone was surprised that Russia had moved against America’s big ally, President Mikheil Saakashvili, tearing the Ossetia region from him and forcing him to sign a cease-fire agreement. Saakashvili said the West had let him down. After that, Putin and Medvedev started cementing Russia’s comeback as a major world player, using — especially in the Middle East — the old expert Yevgeny Primakov, former prime minister and current member of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

With the Russian Bear in the game, Iran’s role will shrink and fade.