Syria and the Changing Global Calculus
Iran and Russia have suffered serious setbacks over the past year, but grave dangers remain.
I.
It was not quite as quick as the Six Day War, nor is it likely to be as consequential as the “Ten Days that Shook the World,” when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. But it took only twelve days from the moment an Islamist band struck out from their redoubt in Idlib until they overran the presidential palace in Damascus, chasing President Bashar al-Assad into exile. And if it proves to be less momentous than the birth of communism in 1917, it has still shaken the Middle East, with reverberations that are likely to be felt around the globe.
Initially, Russia and Iran had acted to defend the regime of President Assad. A reported 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards were stationed in Syria, boosted by a contingent of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters. As the rebels advanced, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi flew to Baghdad, seeking to add forces from the Shi’ite-dominated government there. But when he was turned down, Iran ordered the IRGC to hasten home from Syria, and Hezbollah dispatched some officers from Lebanon to bring its fighters home. Russia, whose critical military support of Assad had always consisted primarily of airpower, flew a few sorties against the rebels in the first days of their campaign. These claimed some lives, but they didn’t slow the rebel advance, and the airstrikes soon petered out.
Humiliated by the sudden fall of their client, Moscow and Tehran issued almost identical explanations. One Russian analyst said of Assad’s forces: “It’s not possible to help an army that’s running.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said: “Voluntary forces from elsewhere can only fight alongside the army of that country. If the local army shows weakness, the [outsiders] cannot do anything.” But Russia and Iran had come to Syria in the first place because its army was hardly fighting.
That was during the previous decade. In 2011, the year of the “Arab Spring,” peaceful protests began in Syria as in many nearby countries. The regime sought to repress them violently, and soldiers began to defect. Some of the deserters reappeared as armed escorts defending the protest marches. As violence mounted, nonviolent protests gave way to full-scale civil war. A rebel force was formed largely from defectors, calling itself the Free Syrian Army. Sunni Arab states, Turkey, and Western countries provided the rebels with arms and training. On the other side, Russia, Iran, and Iran’s instrument, Hezbollah, rallied to support the regime. But Syrian soldiers continued to defect or perform desultorily and lost ground.
Assad sought to turn the tide by using chemical weapons. US president Barack Obama, who shunned involvement in Syria, warned in 2012 that those weapons constituted a personal “red line.” Then, in 2013, Assad’s forces dropped Sarin gas on the rebel-dominated Damascus suburb of Ghouta, taking 1,400 lives, many of them civilians. The US military prepared to execute attack plans. “It was all in motion,” said Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, “and at the last minute the president blinked.” Instead of striking, Obama worked out a deal in which Russia would be trusted to oversee the disposal of Syria’s banned weapons.
That episode emboldened Russia, and in 2015, it intervened massively, turning the tide of war. By that point, Assad’s control of the country had shrunk to an estimated twenty percent of its territory, but now he gradually reclaimed most of it. Russian air power, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and a critical supply of Lebanese foot soldiers provided by Hezbollah all combined to restore Assad’s dominance.
It is true, as the Iranian and Russian alibis had it, that this year the Syrian soldiers, even the elite units guarding the capital, mostly shed their uniforms, dropped their weapons, and fled. Indeed, it has been reported in several places that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the main rebel militia, initially set out only to consolidate control over Idlib province and then Aleppo to its north. When Aleppo fell to them in three days with little difficulty, they felt inspired to turn south toward Hama, Homs, and Damascus. But the difference between this year and a decade ago was not the fecklessness of Assad’s army. That had not changed. What was new was the behaviour of his foreign backers.
Russia, which recently imported soldiers from North Korea to help it wrest back a sliver of its own territory lost to Ukraine, had little to spare for Syria. “The special military operation is the absolute priority of our country,” explained Kremlin spokesman Dimitry Peskov, still using Putin’s euphemism for his attempted conquest of his neighbour. When the initial bombing runs by Moscow’s rump force in Syria made no difference, Russia settled for spiriting Assad out of the country and offering him asylum. “He is secured, and it shows that Russia acts as required in such an extraordinary situation,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, apparently trying to reassure other current or potential Russian clients.
The potential link between Syria and Ukraine was unforeseen by many but apparently not by Kyiv. According to David Ignatius, “Ukrainian intelligence sent about 20 experienced drone operators and about 150 first-person-view drones to the rebel headquarters in Idlib, Syria, four to five weeks ago to help Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.” This, he wrote, had even been revealed in the Ukrainian press and protested in the Russian press months before.
Even more devastating to Assad’s position than the sharp reduction of Russian air power in Syria was the loss of Iranian and Hezbollah forces on the ground thanks to actions by Israel. As Andrew Tabler, a former US official working on Syria, described it: “Over the past year, Israeli bombing of Iranian weapons depots in Syrian territory intensified, and then over the past two months intensified further, as Israel struck far and wide against Iranian targets in Syria.” And, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Iranian officials ... said they weren’t able to send military reinforcements because of Israel. ... An Iranian plane headed toward Syria had to make a U-turn because of the threat of Israeli airstrikes, [Syrian] officials said.”
Perhaps the most important point was that Israel had critically weakened Hezbollah, which had provided crucial manpower to the pro-Assad forces when they overcame the rebels during the previous decade. Remembering Hezbollah’s role in the conquest of their country, Syrians had taken to the streets and distributed sweets to celebrate the bombing that killed its chief, Hassan Nasrallah. Israeli strikes also wiped out the rest of Hezbollah’s leadership and had decimated its arsenal, leaving it in no condition to help anyone else. “What Israel did against Hezbollah in Lebanon helped us a great deal,” said a commander of the secular Free Syrian Army allied with HTS. “Now we are taking care of the rest.”
With Russian airpower drawn down by the demands of its effort to conquer Ukraine, and Hezbollah’s fighters out of action, the Syrian army simply dissolved. Referring to the main rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the military analyst Edward Luttwak wrote, “Al-Jawlani’s variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well trained soldiers.” But no such force was available to Assad.
II.
Placing the blame on the Syrian army, however, did little to diminish the damage to Iran’s and Russia’s strategic situations. Iran’s “axis of resistance” is now broken. Syria was Iran’s closest ally in the Arab world. But when Assad fled, Syrians sacked the Iranian embassy, tearing down the image of Qassem al-Suleimani, the architect of that “axis.” The new rulers, while stressing that they seek no quarrel with any foreign power, have betrayed resentment of Iran. In his victory speech, HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani (sometimes transliterated as Jawlani) said Assad had made Syria a “farm for Iran’s greed.” The Assads are of the Alawi sect, an offshoot of Shi’ism, but still close enough that Syria was considered part of the “Shi’ite crescent” stretching from Iran to Israel’s borders. Now, Syria will be ruled by its Sunnis, estimated to constitute seventy percent of the population, while Alawites, denuded of power, will be fortunate to avoid persecution. With the loss of Syria, Iran will have no easy way to resupply Hezbollah, its most important proxy.
Armed with an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles, and with ground forces hardened by fighting in Syria, Hezbollah had loomed in Israeli eyes as a dangerous foe. Israeli officials anticipated that their country would emerge victorious in a war with Hezbollah but would suffer grave damage. On the other side, Nasrallah, a charismatic orator, liked to taunt that Israel was as weak as a “spider web.” It turned out that this metaphor applied better to Hezbollah itself, although it is not clear how much of Israel’s crushing victory was due to its own breathtaking performance and how much to a widespread overestimation of Hezbollah. Neutered by Israel, Hezbollah was not only unable to rescue Assad in Syria, it may also lose the dominance over Lebanon that it has exerted since 2008 when it turned its guns on other Lebanese factions, securing coercive control over the country’s politics.
In addition to the loss of Syria and the crippling of Hezbollah, the “axis” can no longer count on Hamas as a military force, although it may still continue to engage in terrorism. Baghdad’s refusal to come to Assad’s aid also suggests that Iraq’s Shi’ites are not entirely under Iran’s sway. Apart from Iran itself, Yemen’s Houthis may be the last pillar standing in Iran’s axis, and it is an open question how long Israel will allow it to stand. The distance to Yemen from Israel is some 1,400 miles (2,250 km), but Israel has already shown that its bombers can manage that. Yemen’s Houthis have air-defence systems supplied by Iran, but they did not work very well for Iran.
Israel’s October airstrike—ordered in retaliation for Iran’s ballistic-missile barrage earlier that month—stripped away Tehran’s air defences. Then, Israeli attacks on Syrian weapons sites in the week following Assad’s fall “peeled away another layer of Iranian defenses in the region, leaving Tehran more exposed than it has been in decades,” reported the Washington Post.
As a result, Iran’s nuclear program, constructed over decades at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, is in grave jeopardy. Israel and the US have each said on many occasions that they will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Technologically, Iran has never been closer to “the bomb.” But politically, it has never been further from it. Donald Trump showed in his first term as president that he is unpredictable. Should he decide to use force to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, it is unlikely that he would stop at half-measures or be restrained by foreign opinion. The same might be said for Benjamin Netanyahu.
There are doubts about Israel’s technical ability to destroy the elements of Iran’s program that lie deeply buried under mountains. But Trump might supply Netanyahu with the weapons required to accomplish this goal. Or Israel, which has pulled off one surprising feat after another in this war—supplying Hezbollah’s cadre with pagers and walkie talkies that exploded on command, assassinating Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh in a Tehran guest house reserved for the regime’s most esteemed visitors, blowing Nasrallah and his leading comrades to pieces while they met in a deep Beirut basement—might have already devised a technological fix to the depth problem.
Probably, the best Tehran can do is offer negotiations to Trump who still fancies himself a supreme dealmaker. But there is no reason to suppose that he would settle for anything like the bargain Barack Obama bought in 2015, or anything short of a complete divestment of the nuclear program.
The clerical regime is putting a brave face on its predicament. IRGC commander-in-chief Hossein Salami assured a closed meeting of parliament, “Iran’s influence remains undiminished and its military strength intact.” In a more nuanced take, foreign minister Araghchi conceded that “the resistance has had a really hard year.” But then he pointed to the occasional missile still fired from Gaza, boasting, “Nobody could have predicted that the front could be so strong.” For his part, the Supreme Leader insists, “Those who think the Resistance Front has been weakened due to these events do not have a proper understanding of the Resistance and the Resistance Front.” What might that be? “Resistance is a faith,” he explained, an expression of sublime confidence into which others might read despair.
Beneath the bravado, divisions and recriminations within the Iranian establishment suggest a loss of confidence. Parliament member Ahmad Naderi lamented: “Syria is at the verge of collapse and we are watching calmly. ... I don’t understand the reason for this inaction but whatever it is, it’s not good for our country.” He added that if Iran lost Syria, it would lose Lebanon and Iraq, too. And the Telegraph reported that members of the [Revolutionary] Guard are pointing fingers angrily over the fall of Assad. “They are blaming each other, and no one is taking responsibility,” the paper quoted one Guard official as saying. A second IRGC official told the paper that some of his colleagues blame the chief of the Quds force, Esmail Qaani: “He has done nothing to prevent Iran’s interests from crumbling. Allies fell one after another, and he was watching from Tehran.”
These recriminations were compounded by others over the forced write-off of the US$30 billion dollars that Assad’s regime owed Iran in loans on top of the many billions that sustained Iran’s activities in the country these past years, now a wasted expense. The loss of the nuclear program would mean a further large investment down the drain, as well as a loss of prestige. All of this has occurred amid an economic downturn that is already squeezing the population, which raises questions about the perdurance of the Islamic Republic. As the Daily Mail put it in a headline: “The smell of regime change is now in the Tehran air.” More surprisingly, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that the “biggest U.S. interest” in Assad’s fall is “that this uprising in Syria in the long run triggers a pro-democracy uprising in Iran.”
As for Russia, few observers are forecasting an uprising or regime change, but Moscow is widely recognised to be the other big loser in Syria. In 2017, with control over most of Syria restored to Assad, President Vladimir Putin addressed a ceremony honouring the Russian forces now to be sent home in triumph. “The goal that needed to be addressed with the help of the large-scale use of the armed forces, has been ... brilliantly resolved,” he exulted. “Our Armed Forces ... have shown [their] growing power.” He warned that they could return: “If the terrorists [i.e., the opposition to Assad] raise their heads again, we will deal unprecedented strikes unlike anything they have seen.”
Putin also announced that the Russian naval and air bases established in Syria would be “permanent.” This foothold in the eastern Mediterranean would provide the Kremlin with a launchpad to the rest of the Middle East and Africa, a step up in its claim to be a global power. Now, the future of these two “permanent” bases—a naval base at Tartus and an airbase at Hmeimim—is uncertain.
Satellite imagery has shown large amounts of equipment being moved from these bases. It seems unlikely that Moscow could reach an agreement with the new government of Syria to retain them. For a start, airstrikes that killed thousands of Syrians during the civil war—not to mention the bombing runs, however feeble, against the recent uprising—were launched from these bases. This is bound to be recalled with bitterness. And there would be practical complications. For example, one of the main reasons Russia maintained these bases was to support one side in Libya’s civil war. Turkey, which is the number-one patron of HTS, supports the opposite side. Assad owed his neck to Russia, so he was in no position to assert sovereignty. Syria’s new regime rules despite Russia, making it hard to see how these bases could remain in Russian hands.
Moscow’s loss of standing from the fall of Syria can be grasped by revisiting this triumphalist 2020 analysis by Fyodor Lukyanov, the head of Russia’s leading foreign-policy think tank:
Russia has indeed established itself as the most influential player in the region. Almost nothing gets done in Syria without Moscow’s approval and involvement. ... Thanks to its activities in the Middle East, Russia’s status in the international hierarchy has risen considerably. ... Russia’s aim is to strengthen its strategic position in Syria by using its own military bases as footholds in the Mediterranean area. However, this objective is about its own international positioning rather than control in the region.
Compared to the losses Washington absorbed when it fled Afghanistan in 2021, where its presence was never about footholds or bases or international status, Russia has suffered a much heavier blow. “Our catastrophe,” a prominent Russian military blogger called it.
III.
US president Joe Biden was quick to take credit for this setback to American foes. “Neither Russia nor Iran nor Hezbollah could defend this abhorrent regime in Syria,” he said. “And this is a direct result of the blows that Ukraine [and] Israel have delivered [in] their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”
This was only partly true. The Biden administration’s support for Ukraine was generous and consistent, but at each successive stage of the war, it denied Kyiv the more powerful weapons it was pleading for, and the use of which military experts endorsed, for fear of escalating the conflict, as if this goal came ahead of reversing Russia’s aggression. And while Biden did offer strong backing to Israel in its war with Hamas, that backing was less than unflagging. But with respect to Israel’s war with Hezbollah, US support was much more ambiguous.
Visiting Israel within a week after Hamas’s attack, when Hezbollah had already begun its daily bombardment of Israel, Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that “no one should do anything that widens this conflict in any way.” This seemed intended, at least in part, to warn Israel not to go beyond a tit-for-tat exchange with Hezbollah and try to crush it, as defence minister Yoav Gallant advocated. “No wider war,” became the administration’s watchword vis-a-vis Lebanon. Thus, when Israel’s pinpoint bombing killed Nasrallah, the White House let it be known that Biden was “furious” over the “timing.”
However the credit for Assad’s overthrow is to be apportioned, the more important question is what comes next. Although HTS led the rebel assault, at least a half-dozen militias have been involved in fighting the former regime and often in fighting one another. Of these intramural conflicts, the most intractable and dangerous pits the Syrian National Army, sustained by Turkey, against the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are Kurdish and have 900 American soldiers as advisors. The battle is an extension of the Turkish government’s longstanding war against its domestic Kurdish armed opposition, and it continued in northern Syria even after the rebels captured Damascus. (On 19 December, the Pentagon spokesman announced that the US force there had been temporarily augmented, raising its numbers to 2,000. Perhaps this was intended as a deterrent to Turkey.)
Aside from ongoing battles between militias, the new government faces the need to preserve or establish public order. Assad’s rule was bloodthirsty, and even though HTS has declared an amnesty for police and soldiers who turn in their weapons, there were also irregular forces, called shabiha, who did some of Assad’s dirty work and who are unlikely to go unpunished. Videos have already circulated on social media of summary executions of alleged members of this group. But the Washington Post quoted an Alawite community leader, who asked plaintively, “Who is the judge? Who decides who is shabiha or not?”
The answer to that question is unlikely to be determined in a calm manner, much less with legal formalities. The difficulty was captured in another quote in the Post’s report, this one from a morgue. As news of Assad’s fall spread, Syrians flocked to prisons and morgues, seeking information about loved ones who had disappeared. From one of the latter, the paper quoted:
“Go outside and kill them like they killed our children,” screamed a woman who was searching for her two teenage boys, who were arrested from their classroom in 2015 and never seen again. “We want revenge,” she screamed.
Perhaps the need for order prompted Jolani’s decision to import to Damascus parts of the HTS-appointed government of Idlib, which was led by Mohammad al-Bashir, now named the interim prime minister of Syria. But that decision has been criticised for Jolani’s failure to involve or consult the other groups. Al-Bashir has spoken of transition to a new constitution that should be in place by March, but this seems unrealistic. Who will write this constitution and how will it be adopted? Jolani has promised elections eventually but argues that they cannot be held right away because a huge part of the population has been displaced since 2011, millions outside the country.
Jolani has announced the goal of disbanding all the groups and subsuming the fighters under the ministry of defence, a sound idea, but how to get from here to there? The others are not likely to lay down their arms without confidence that they will be safe and have a real voice in the new government. For now, while HTS controls Damascus, Aleppo, Hama, and other municipalities in the eastern half of the country, the other militias control various other parts. Reuniting the country will require compromises and a measure of trust. Even if HTS had the will and the means to sideline the other groups, which it doesn’t, it lacks sufficient personnel to govern Syria unless it wants to rely heavily on Assad’s bureaucracy, which is likely to be an unworkable solution. It will need the other groups and the constituencies they draw on.
Jolani does not speak about democracy, but of some kind of hybrid system mixing traditional Islamic institutions like a Shura Council with popular participation. He speaks often about protecting minorities, and he even uses some terms that sound borrowed from American discourse. “There must be a social contract between the state and all religions to guarantee social justice,” he says. And “diversity is a strength.” In Idlib, according to Syria expert Aaron Zelin, Jolani has met with Druze and Christian leaders, and their communities have generally been safe, but they lack the same (attenuated) political rights enjoyed by Muslims, and restrictions on public displays of Christian worship have been reported.
HTS has roots in ISIS, the most extreme of all Islamist groups. Then, it allied with al Qaeda. Eventually, after moderating a little further, it fought both of them. Today, Jolani, the political leader, seems to have moderated more than some of the HTS clerical authorities. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) recently translated a fatwa by a religious body that it described as affiliated with HTS, approving suicide bombings. Suicide is forbidden by Islam, but “‘martyrdom-seeking operations’ are permissible,” said the fatwa.
This appeared to be part of an abstract theological discourse among extreme Islamists, not a discussion of a specific planned action. However, other eye-opening pronouncements by HTS figures are more concrete. Jonathan Spyer of the Middle East Forum, reports that Abd al-Rahim Atoun, whom he describes as the highest religious authority of HTS and whom others have identified as the second in command to Jolani, has called Hamas’s war against Israel launched on 7 October, “the greatest act of Islam in this era.”
These anecdotes raise a critical question. If Jolani is entirely sincere in his evolution to moderation—which an outsider cannot know—will he be able to bring his movement along with him? In addition to his soothing words about inclusiveness and tolerance domestically, since coming to power, Jolani has also declared his desire for peace with all countries, including Israel. He protested Israel’s extensive bombing campaign to destroy the military assets left by Assad’s regime, but he expressed his objection in tones more plaintive than threatening.
Some observers have expressed concern that Israel’s actions may be poisoning relations with the new regime in Syria. But Assad left behind an immense store of highly lethal items, and Jerusalem had to consider the unsettled state of that country, the extremist roots of HTS, and chilling pronouncements such as Atoun’s exaltation of 7 October. It is not hard to understand why Israel didn’t want to risk seeing those weapons fall into hands more belligerent than Assad’s, even if one wishes that Netanyahu was as articulate in extending an olive branch as he is in delivering a warning.
IV.
As of now, Israel is clearly one of the big winners in Syria. Assad’s fall nearly completes the destruction of the Axis of Resistance. Iran’s ally is gone and with it any prospect of rearming Hezbollah, endangering the latter’s grip on Lebanon. That grip is weakened by its defeat at Israel’s hand and the destruction of its leadership as well the loss of its arms conduit. And there is another factor. Syria and Lebanon are deeply entwined. Many families are mixed across the two nationalities. Between 1976 and 2005, Syrian forces occupied Lebanon. Then, from 2012 until this year, Lebanese forces—that is, Hezbollah—occupied Syria. Assad’s regime proved to be weak, but Hezbollah nonetheless gained potential strength from having that neighbour at its back. Now, the tables are turned: that neighbour is an enemy of Hezbollah’s.
The destruction of Iran’s axis also serves to restore Israel’s deterrence power, which some feared had been fatally damaged by Hamas’s 7 October attack. It had been weakened over the preceding decades. The last “war” that Israel clearly won was the Al Aqsa Intifada of 2000–05. It then failed to achieve victory in its war with Hezbollah in 2006, accepting a meaningless UN resolution as an ending. After that came a series of small wars with Hamas between 2008 and 2014, in which Israel settled for “mowing the grass”—pruning Hamas’s capabilities and awaiting its next attack. Throughout this time, Iran helped to furnish Hamas and Hezbollah with a couple of hundred thousand missiles and rockets, surrounding Israel with a “ring of fire” and making it uncertain who was deterring whom.
Small and outnumbered as Israel is, the aura of its power is what saves it from relentless attack. With a few farsighted exceptions, the Arab and Muslim worlds still do not accept Israel as a neighbour. Yet, most of that world has made explicit or tacit peace with the Jewish state simply because they know that making war on it is self-defeating. Survival depends on deterrence for all states in theory, but for Israel this is more concretely so.
The current war with the axis of resistance is still not over. Israel is determined to finish off Hamas, and there is yet a reckoning coming with the Houthis and Iran itself. In the end, if things play out in Israel’s favour, this war may be followed by a peace agreement, not only with Saudi Arabia, but also with a bevy of other Arab states. When the Ayatollahs are overthrown, Israel will have peace with Iran, too. In that dream scenario, Israel would enjoy a more secure existence than it has ever known.
One cloud over this idyllic image is the other big winner of the Syrian revolt—Turkey, the main patron of HTS. Its president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is an Islamist of the Muslim Brotherhood strain. In an article for MEMRI, of which he is vice president, Alberto Fernandez, who has served as a US official dealing with the Middle East, suggests that with Erdoğan’s help and guidance (and Qatar’s money), HTS might erect an Islamist state in Syria. It would shun the extremism of ISIS and instead reflect the relative moderation of the Muslim Brotherhood. This could energise emulators across the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan, and North Africa, where Islamist movements already boast substantial support but have been held in check by their respective governments.
Such Sunni Islamist states might mostly avoid direct confrontation but would be unfriendly to the West, to Israel, and to the liberties of their citizens—women and minorities especially. Those targets of its enmity would face the disappointment of seeing the challenge of Shi’ite Islamism replaced by Sunni Islamism. For Israel, that might mean a cold peace in the short run but not acceptance, and the prospect of new conflict eventually. For the US, it would mean a region devoid of the close ties it currently enjoys with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others. This would be a boon to those bent on cutting America down to size.
This brings us to what may be the largest benefit of Assad’s ouster. In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, chief foreign-affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov posed the provocative question, “Has World War III Already Begun?” The initiators of that war are yet another axis, comprising Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. Each has imperial goals in its own region, but the path to those goals depends on neutering American power and the international order it has sustained.
That axis has crystalised around Putin’s war against Ukraine. The Putin-Xi summit of February 2022 declared a “partnership without limits,” setting the stage for Russia’s invasion. Then, as the war proved far more difficult than Putin imagined, he turned to Iran for drones and missiles and then to North Korea for weapons and even troops. Despite the rhetoric about no limits, China has been more reticent about sending arms although it has offered a steady stream of dual-use components.
But the Ukrainians, with Western help, have stymied Russia. They may in the end be forced to cede some territory, but they have successfully defended their sovereignty, and Putin will have little to show for the Russian people’s great sacrifices. By tying down Russia while Israel reduced Khamenei’s “resistance” from a “ring of fire” to a mere “faith,” they have cost Russia its Syrian ally and probably changed the global calculus.
China is the most powerful partner in the axis Trofimov envisioned, but it is also cautious. It has undoubtedly noted that, as power players, its putative allies have come up hollow. Going to war alongside them must now look like a much less appealing prospect than when Xi hosted Putin three years ago. Beijing will surely want to postpone World War Three or rethink it altogether. In their valiant self-defence, Ukraine and Israel may have spared the world a new global conflagration.
