Soleimani assassination: US strike has called Tehran’s bluff

The Iranian government is still reeling in the aftermath of the most significant assassination of 21st century. The decision taken by the Donald Trump administration to take out General Qasem Soleimani, on 3rd January 2020 makes for a dramatic and destabilising opening to the decade in the Middle East.

Taking out the head of the unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard devoted to extra-territorial special operations, is a move as powerfully symbolic as it is potentially reckless. The likely response will be aggressive actions through Iran’s proxy militia groups either directly against US assets and soldiers, or a targeted attack against one of America’s allies in the region. The situation in Iraq, which is once again on the brink of civil war, is likely to deteriorate further.

The immediate aftermath of Soleimani’s death also raises as many interesting questions about the future of Russian geopolitical influence as it does about tired clichés centred on US imperialism. When Donald Trump’s actions are placed within a wider Middle Eastern picture, US influence looks far more imperiled of late than imperial. A new decade is dawning in a destabilised Middle East in which the American superpower is steadily, if inconsistently, retreating from the stage.

One consequence of the slow US departure from the scene is that an opening has been created for Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. A  military entente has been taking place between Russia, China, and Iran. Between the 27-30th December, Chinese, Russian and Iranian naval forces conducted joint drills in the northern part of the Indian Ocean. Iran’s Rear Admiral Gholamereza Tahani said on Iranian state television that the drills were primarily intended to improve the security of waterways and trade in the area.

It was also intended as a display of accord and concentrated naval power in an area close to the US-allied UAE. Tahani added that one “effect” of the joint-exercises would be “to show that Iran cannot be isolated” and demonstrate “the new triangle of power in the sea”, showing that relations between the three countries “have reached a meaningful point and may have an international impact.” Indeed, the Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Wu Qian confirmed that the Chinese navy’s guided-missile destroyer, “Xining”, was also taking part in the drills.

Now, in the light of the Soleimani killing, the asymmetry in power and influence between China and Russia on the one hand, and Iran on the other, has been made patently clear. Whatever the adverse consequences of the US President’s actions, he has clearly called Tehran’s bluff – the US is able, and willing, to hit Iran’s strategic personnel and targets in a way which it would surely not countenance in the cases of China or Russia. In the aftermath of the Soleimani assassination, the Iranian government has been exposed as the geo-military weak link in the fledging Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis.

The Iranian regime’s weakness is a product of its troubles on the domestic front, where the Trump administration’s imposition of “maximum pressure” has hit the economy hard. The sanctions introduced in May 2018, and escalated in June 2019, have had wide-reaching consequences, crippling Iran’s financial and oil sectors and costing the country as much as $200 billion. Iran has lost nearly 90% of its oil exports, while shortages of food and medicine are hurting the population.

At the same time, protests against the regime have highlighted that the government in Tehran is far from being invulnerable. Anger at what is seen as the mismanagement of the economy and rampant corruption at home, combined with misguided foreign interventionism, has led to disenchantment with the theocratic regime. In December 2017, Iranians took to the streets, chanting “Death to Khamenei”. In November and December 2019, protests over a surprise increase in gasoline prices quickly turned into one of the greatest threats to the regime since it was created in 1979.

While a brutal crackdown by the regime and the outpouring of national support in the wake of Soleimani’s assassination has stifled the protest movement, the parliamentary elections due in February 2020 may provide a renewed locus for popular demonstration. Even the regime’s erstwhile supporters are now alarmed by the latest wave of opposition – BBC Persian reported on the 2nd of January 2020 that one hundred conservative activists petitioned the Supreme Leader to demand major structural reforms to allay the “collapse of the regime”.

With Tehran in such turmoil, Putin now looks likely to continue moving more and more towards his counterpart in Ankara, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, as his Middle-Eastern lynchpin. In October 2019, Erdoğan flew to the Russian President’s summer residence in Sochi, where the two leaders brokered the arrangement whereby Turkish and Russian troops would take over control of patrolling the Turkish-Syrian border, pursuing the displacement of Syria’s Kurds from the region in the process. In November, Putin and Erdoğan signed an arms deal, in which Turkey will buy a Russian S-400 missile system which defence analysts say will pose a direct challenge to the NATO alliance.

All of these movements are part of the slow gravitation of the Turkish state away from the orbit of NATO and towards a Eurasian alliance with China and Russia. And through entente with Erdoğan, and by his military’s presence in the skies and naval bases of Syria, the Russian President has become the Middle East’s true power broker, at least in the troubled Levant.

After centuries of tense rivalry between Turkish rulers and Russian empires seeking control over the waterways of the Dardanelles, Putin and Erdoğan are increasingly on the same page. In the first place, they command similar positions in their respective countries – they are both “competitive authoritarians”, skilful political operators who retain power by the manipulation of unfair democratic elections, a patriotic domestic politics, and an activist foreign policy.

But there is also more than that underpinning the agreements between the two leaders – they both wish to provide a counterweight to the geopolitical influence of the US and the UAE in the Middle East. They are also both invested in a stable, and pliable, state in Assad’s Syria. Turkish governments have been threatening to invade Syria since the 1990s for fear that the country provides a haven for Kurdish fighters hostile to Ankara.

Erdoğan also has ambitions of his own in the region, and he is increasingly seeking to shape the political dimensions of the neighbouring Arab World and the Maghreb. While the eyes of the world have been distracted by the assassination of Soleimani, Erdoğan has acquired support in the Turkish parliament to send troops to aid the UN-backed Libyan government in Tripoli – the Government of National Accord (GNA). He announced on the CNN Turk TV channel that Turkish soldiers are currently being sent to cooperate with the GNA, which is on the back foot against an insurgency in the east of the country led by General Khalifa Haftar. General Hafter is in turn backed by Egypt and the UAE.

The reshaped geopolitics of the Middle East in the coming decade could still be turned to the advantage of the US. Playing the power broker in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused the US much grief. It has proven costly both in terms of financial resources and the lives of US servicemen. It has also sapped morale at home, where the national mood has for a while been one of exhaustion at the heavy price of foreign interventionism. In the end, it may be wiser for the US to make a retreat, focusing on the strength of connections between Washington, Israel, and the UAE. It is perhaps time to let the Kremlin and Ankara become toxified by the burdens of state building in a region plagued by too many ailing states.