ONE AFTER THE OTHER, the SS-N-30A Kalibr cruise missiles streaked into the air, the plumes of flame beneath them lighting up the early morning skies over the Caspian Sea. There were twenty-six in total, fired in rapid succession from four Russian warships. Turning to the West, they flew for more than 900 miles across Iran and Northern Iraq at speeds of up to 600mph before hitting eleven targets near the Syrian city of Aleppo. Each missile was packed with 990lb of explosives.
It was not the most efficient or cost-effective way to hit the rebels trying to topple President Bashar al-Assad. Pentagon sources claimed that at least four of the missiles, which are similar to US Tomahawks, crashed way short of their target in Iran – an assertion Moscow angrily denied. Yet it was the perfect way of showcasing Russia’s growing military might. Within hours, footage of the missiles’ launch, cut together with animated graphics of their path, appeared in a two-minute video posted on YouTube by the country’s defence ministry. The release of the video coincided with President Vladimir Putin’s sixty-third birthday. He made a televised appearance with Sergey Shoygu, the defence minister. ‘The fact that we launched precision weapons from the Caspian Sea to the distance of about 1,500 kilometres and hit all the designated targets shows good work by military industrial plants and good personnel skills,’ said Putin, in what sounded like a sales pitch for Russian military technology.
The cruise missile strikes took place a week after Russian warplanes had for the first time provided air cover for a ground offensive by Syrian government forces. In the days that followed, the Russian defence ministry’s official Twitter account posted daily video clips taken by surveillance drones showing the deadly results of its air strikes on sites in Syria. The ministry’s Facebook page was updated with details like the number of sorties flown and targets hit. It was as if the Kremlin had watched how the US government and media had presented Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and tried to follow suit.
Russian television viewers, who for the previous eighteen months had been bombarded with images of Moscow-backed separatists fighting in Ukraine, were now shown their armed forces’ heroics in Syria. The pictures of the new intervention were accompanied by a different but equally powerful narrative. While the enemy in Ukraine had been portrayed as neo-Fascists nostalgic for the days of their Second World War collaboration with Nazi Germany, the battle in Syria was an equally black-and-white one, between the country’s elected president and bloodthirsty Islamists.
Putin’s intervention in Syria – which followed his defiant seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in March 2014 – underlined just how much had changed in the quarter of a century since the newly independent Russian Federation emerged from the wreck of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1991. Putin’s message to the world was clear: Russia was back.
WHEN GEORGE H. W. BUSH, starting the final year of his momentous single term as president, approached the lectern to deliver his State of the Union speech in January 1992, he could be excused a swagger in his step. The United States was now the sole superpower. ‘In the past twelve months, the world has known changes of almost biblical proportions,’ Bush told Congress. ‘And even now . . . I’m not sure we’ve absorbed the full impact, the full import of what happened . . . But communism died this year . . . The biggest thing that has happened in the world in my life, in our lives, is this. By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.’
Bush’s hyperbole was understandable. For the previous four decades the world had been divided into two rival camps, one centred in Washington, the other in Moscow. Capitalism and communism were locked in a global battle for influence. Events from Cuba to Angola to Vietnam were viewed through the prism of the Cold War. The massive nuclear arsenals accumulated on each side meant the threat of total annihilation was only ever minutes away.
But the communist bloc was no more. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, had tried to save his country by humanising it, but instead he unleashed forces that would destroy it. First its satellite states, then the Soviet Union itself began to splinter. When some of Gorbachev’s closest allies staged a failed coup in August 1991 in a last attempt to save their country, they unwittingly dealt it a fatal blow. Just over four months later, the Soviet Union disappeared. An extraordinary experiment begun in 1917 to create a new kind of society like no other before it had ended not with a bang but a whimper. As Francis Fukuyama argued in his book The End of History and the Last Man, which was published a few days after Bush spoke, the fundamental values of liberal democracy and market capitalism on which America had been built now reigned unchallenged across the planet.
How was the West to deal with the fifteen new states that emerged from the wreckage of the Soviet Union – and especially with Russia, by far the largest and most challenging of them all? It may no longer have been an adversary, but was it already an ally? And what would replace the policy of containment that had guided the United States since the early days of the Cold War? This was the question that Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former National Security Adviser, posed in an article in the March/April 1994 edition of the influential journal Foreign Affairs, in which he despaired at America’s failure to come up with a ‘well-considered and historically relevant successor to the grand strategy of the Cold War years’.
Much has happened in the years since Brzezinski’s article: the tentative cooperation of the 1990s and early 2000s has been replaced by confrontation; Russia has annexed the Crimea and fomented a war in eastern Ukraine that has killed more than six thousand people – among them the 298 people on board a Malaysian airliner flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Russia’s muscle-flexing in Syria has added another source of friction. While commentators in America and Europe rail against Putin’s aggression, opinion polls in Russia show that fascination with the West and all things Western has been replaced with a level of hostility not seen even at the height of Soviet rule. The world is in danger of sliding into a new Cold War.
Yet, remarkably, the West has still not put together the ‘well-considered and historically relevant’ policy that Brzezinski called for more than two decades ago. Sanctions imposed on Russia over Crimea have not prompted the Kremlin to climb down. Barack Obama, for all his attempts to bring a new, more cerebral approach to American foreign policy, proved no more adept at managing relations with Russia than the two Bushes and Bill Clinton before him. Devising an effective strategy to deal with the Kremlin is one of the major challenges that faces the new President Trump, following his victory over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Trump promised during his campaign to adopt a collaborative rather than confrontational approach towards the Kremlin. It remains to be seen whether his policy will succeed where his predecessors’ failed.
Just as America was convulsed by the question of ‘Who lost China?’ in the aftermath of Chairman Mao’s victory over the nationalists in 1949, so now we must ask: ‘Who lost Russia?’