By J.E. Dyer, CDR, USN (Ret.), LIBERTY UNYIELDING
Plenty of news outlets have commented already on Russia’s use of an Iranian air base to launch bomber strikes on Syria. Tu-22M3 Backfires flew from Hamadan, Iran on Tuesday, 16 August to conduct strikes against targets in Aleppo, Idlib, and Deir Ez-Zor (the latter in eastern Syria), supporting the ground fight against Syrian rebel groups.
It’s always worth taking a moment to remind readers that these are not systematic attacks on ISIS. Russia’s targets are the rebel groups that hold portions of western Syria, in defiance of the Assad regime. The main effort right now is the battle for Aleppo, in which ISIS has no real part. For what it’s worth, some of the groups Russia is attacking are (or have been) supported by the U.S.
At this point, given the disarray of our Syria policy, it’s not worth much.
With that out of the way, we can move on. We noted nearly a year ago the significance of Russia turning the air space of Iran and Iraq into an air corridor for Russian strategic purposes (see here as well). That’s not a fresh insight; one of the likely developments was always that Iran would allow Russia to use Iranian bases as well as her air space.
What matters now is not the operational-level, fuel-saving implications of the new arrangement for Russia, but the transformative strategic-level implications – especially in conjunction with the other recent deployments of Russian forces.
To cut to the chase, Russia now has a form of geostrategic access through southern Asia that she has never had before, but has sought for the last three centuries.
This is what our vice president would call a big effing deal. Until this week in 2016, there has never been a time when Russia could conceivably project military power through Iran, into the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Now Russia can conceivably do that. The door has been opened.
Let’s take just a moment to put that in perspective. All of the jockeying by Iran in Iraq and Syria over the last few years has followed the old routes of previous conquests and confrontations: clashes with the early Islamic expansion, with the Crusaders, with Tamerlane from Central Asia, with the Ottoman Empire. Go back further, and the armies of ancient Persia were dominant in the lands of modern Iraq and Syria for decades at a time.
But Russia being able to wield military power across Iran and project it into the “Great Crossroads” of chokepoints running from the eastern Mediterranean to the Horn of Africa and the Indian Ocean? That has never happened before.
Indeed, it has for centuries been the policy of Europe, and then the United States, to discourage such access by Russia. The Truman Doctrine – the first major statement of geopolicy by the U.S. after World War II and the formation of the UN – was focused precisely on deterring Stalin’s attempts to push through Iran, Turkey, and Greece, for just such a geostrategic purpose.
Follow-on U.S. policy, like the policies of Britain, and to a lesser extent France (and even Germany) in the preceding centuries, has been consistent with the “red line” of the Truman Doctrine. Russia mustn’t slice through Southwest Asia, and gain the leverage over the Great Crossroads that would allow her to effectively demand tribute for trade and political access by others.
Obama has never shown any sign of upholding that (or any other conventional) policy principle. Now, within the space of just a few years, the old alliance and enforcement arrangements that bolstered the policy and made it credible have crumbled. The retreat of American power under Obama has made it possible for Russia to achieve something she has sought since the reign of Peter the Great, but could never manage.
In a sense, the timing in technological history is right. Even today, Russian armies in Iran would be too alarming to tolerate, as the prospect of them was after World War II. But the world has been conditioned now to regard without alarm great nations’ forward-deployed air assets, wielded not only by Russia (or the former USSR) but by America, the British Commonwealth, and the NATO nations. Fighters, multi-role aircraft, even heavy bombers roam the globe’s airfields without changing facts on the ground. They don’t seem to carry any special implications today.
A major political-military shift
But in reality, they do. The implication we have rarely had to think about since the last decade of the Cold War is the implication from national cooperation and air space access. Not much changed politically in that regard, once “Soviet adventurism” petered out some 30 years ago.
But it’s back with a vengeance, and now, this week, it’s a factor not only in Syria and Crimea, and not only involving tactical weapon systems. Iran’s agreement to let Russian bombers operate from an Iranian base is by far the most important aspect of what was revealed on Tuesday.
As of now, Iran and Russia have referred to the basing agreement as applying to the “fight against terrorism in Syria.” (See here and here also.) It would require the adoption of additional joint objectives for Russia to use Iranian bases for other purposes.
But if you think that can’t happen, you haven’t been paying attention for the last five years. The world is already being transformed by events that you would have said seven years ago could not happen. There’s no such thing today as “can’t happen.”
So the fact that the door is opened now to something like Russian bombers flying from Iran to attack U.S. facilities in Diego Garcia or Djibouti, as well as in the Persian Gulf, has material meaning. It can’t be ignored.
If Russian theater bombers like Backfires could fly from Iran, moreover, Russian strategic bombers like Tu-160 Blackjacks could have clearance to fly through Iran – again, for the first time in history.
The Near East
This major step for Russia comes in conjunction with other deployments that will enable Moscow to set an area-denial perimeter around much of Asia, and probably expand it over time. I wrote about one a few days ago: the S-400 deployment to Crimea. …
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