Brandon J. Weichert

The Russian Navy is not out of
the Mediterranean Sea.
Momentous, once-in-a-generation geopolitical changes are underway in the Middle East. Since November of last year, with the sweeping away of the Iranian and Russian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, from power, a new order is rising. Whether this new order will last, or if it will even serve American and allied interests, remains very much in question.
The fact of the matter is, though, the Russo-Iranian alliance in the Middle East has been dealt a serious blow with the loss of Assad’s regime in Syria.
That is now being made all the more evident by the fact that the new Turkish-backed Islamist government in Damascus, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has officially evicted the Russian Navy from its Eastern Mediterranean redoubt in Tartus.
The Russian naval facility in Tartus had been in Russian hands since the 1970s, when the then-Soviet Union made an alliance with Hafez Assad, the blood-soaked father of Bashar Assad. Over the years, Tartus had fallen into disrepair, notably in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War. Moscow, however, maintained its foothold there.
Russia’s Quest for Warm Water Ports
After all, Russian leaders have striven to expand Russian access to warm water ports since the age of Peter the Great. Tartus represented one of only a handful of major Russian warm water ports from which their navy could operate unimpeded all year round.
Other than Tartus, the Russians have only warm water ports in Vladivostok, Sevastopol, and Kaliningrad. From Tartus, Russian forces were able to project power in the Mediterranean Sea. More importantly, however, the Russians were able to use Tartus as a key base to conduct counterterrorism missions as well as to use it as a logistics hub for Moscow’s ongoing operations throughout Africa.
By the time the Syrian Civil War erupted at the tail end of the Arab Spring (or Islamist Winter), Russia’s military had decided to intervene directly against various jihadist elements seeking to overthrow Assad’s regime, with the witting or unwitting support of the West.
As an aside, many of the jihadists who comprised the ranks of ISIS and Al Nusra Front (al Qaeda in Syria), along with a coterie of other, smaller terrorist groups, founded HTS.
Between its Middle East foray and the African mission, the Tartus base, despite its relatively small size, punched well above its weight in terms of importance. Now, it’s gone.
Western policymakers and propagandists are spiking the football, so to speak, now that the Russians are out of Syria. But this may very well be a case of “if you break it, you own it.” If HTS reverts to its jihadist roots, then it is likely that the Americans and Israelis will have far greater problems on their hands in the long-run in Syria than they ever had before with Assad running things and the Russians maintaining a small warm-water port there.
The gains that America has made from the exit from Tartus are particularly small because the Russian Navy is not out of the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, around the same time that HTS was storming across Syria, Russian-backed militants in the war-torn North African nation of Libya under the command of General Khalifa Haftar were intensifying their own offensive against the Turkish-backed groups struggling to control Libya.
Out of that morass, Moscow let it slip that they were interested in building a brand new, sprawling warm-water port in chaotic Libya. Russia already has a few airbases there, and reports have emerged that Moscow has been moving large numbers of aircraft and transport ships to Eastern Syria, which is controlled by Haftar’s pro-Russian Libyan militants.
Libya is a Greater Prize for Putin
Libya has Africa’s largest proven oil reserves and, just as in Syria, the Russians are competing with Islamist Turkey for control over the country (ostensibly for control over those energy sources).
The loss of Syria ended the decade-long push by Moscow and Tehran to build a nexus of pipelines to transport Middle East fossil fuels through Syria into Europe. Now, Syria will be controlled by Turkish-backed HTS, meaning the energy will flow through Turkey into Europe, and benefit the powers of both the Middle East and the West that are not aligned with Russia.
Libya, though, is another matter.
Having been on the backburner of geopolitics since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 (and the devastating events at Benghazi a year later), Libya is set to explode once more on the headlines, as there is no way that Russia can simply ignore the pristine opportunity for their naval power projection in the Mediterranean that a potential base on the Libyan coastline offers.
What’s more, Libya’s location in Africa positions Russian supply lines much closer to their interests on the continent—all while still allowing the Russian military to project power into the Middle East next door.
While the loss of Syria is unquestionably a short-term humiliation for Moscow, the longer-term strategic benefits may go to the Kremlin. Russia now has the chance to shore up Haftar’s forces in Libya, thereby denying Libya to the oil-hungry Turks and their jihadist proxies there, all while making it possible for Moscow to establish a larger, more modern naval facility. Such a facility would make it far easier for Russia to project power into resource-rich Africa and the Middle East—all as the Americans are on the backfoot in Syria and are almost completely boxed out of Africa.
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Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest.
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