Trump’s “madman strategy” has benefited Putin

“The White House madman’s strategy” has benefited Putin.
In my previous two articles, I explained how US President Trump made his Jerusalem sortie within the risk-all approach known in Washington as the “madman strategy”. This strategy, which rides roughshod over all the restraints and codes of diplomacy, amounts to bending your opponent’s wrist with bare force.
However, as has been seen, this “strategy” has gone awry and, in a flash, has secured superiority for Putin in the Middle East.
As against Washington’s decision to violate the classical “Oslo line” in which it adopts a so-called equidistant position towards the Palestinians, and recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Putin set out on a vital Middle East tour. And he did not return with empty hands from any stop on the tour.
The void created in the region through the White House’s “madman strategy” has thus been filled all at once with the “vision of descending to the Mediterranean” that the Russians have harboured ever since the time of Peter the Great.
 
Stronger than in the Soviet period
With the latest tsar Putin, at the first stop on the tour that commenced at the Khmeimim Air Base in Syria, undertaking to withdraw a portion of the Russian units that had completed their mission, he secured a new air base for himself at Khmeimim and renewed use of the Tartus base was also arranged.
The Russian head of state, proceeding to Egypt following Syria, similarly made a new arms agreement in Egypt along the way.
The Russian leader, who convened with Erdoğan in Turkey, Assad in Syria and Sisi in Egypt, once more went on the attack over a joint Egyptian-Russian air base in addition to a nuclear power station on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt.
These “base gambits” enable Russian military jets in practice to control the skies in the area stretching from the North African firmament to the Gulf countries and Eastern Mediterranean.
They provide the opportunity for exceptionally wide military-political control in the region.
Experts point out that Cairo and Moscow have not been in such close cooperation since the time of Nasser. They recall that even in the period when the Soviet Union was at the height of its power, Moscow did not have such a dominating position in the Middle East game of chess. Putin’s friends in the Middle East today are not limited to Assad, Erdoğan and Sisi, who under normal conditions are at one another’s throats. Putin is also in a web of diplomatic relationships that court the wonder of Iranian head of state Rouhani and Saudi King Salman, who are also deadly mutual enemies.
The rapprochement between Moscow and Saudi Arabia, which was directly in the enemy ranks in the Afghanistan war that triggered the Soviet collapse, is of a “historic” nature.
Putin, who signed a three-billion-dollar arms agreement with Saudi King Salman while on a visit to Moscow, described the development himself in his own words as being a “turning point.”
Obama’s indecisive, hesitant policies in the Syrian war and Trump’s “mad” sorties have delivered the Middle East to Putin on a golden platter.
Putin, who entered the “Great Game” in the Middle East on Assad’s side in September 2015, has managed to win over all the principal Muslim leaders, Sunni and Shiite.
 
Closer to Israel, too
But this has not in any way prevented Putin from conducting a sensitive counterbalancing policy with Israel. Moscow, which in the Soviet period assumed patronage of the Arab countries, especially Syria, and so distanced itself considerably from Israel, has since the Putin 2000’s looked only to expand Russia’s sphere of influence in the Middle East.
Putin was thus the first Russian leader to visit Israel in 2005 and, in the words of the Russian head of state, the presence of “one million Jews of Russian heritage” in Israel makes “Israel special for Moscow.”
Following Trump’s latest Jerusalem sortie, it should come as no surprise, despite all the special relations he has developed with the Muslim world, to see Putin hedging his bets in his actions and words. Putin went no further than saying, “The decision over Jerusalem’s status should be made through the Israeli and Palestinian sides’ negotiations!” in a joint statement he made with Erdoğan in Ankara at the start of the week. This in fact is what everyone from Macron to the European Union is saying. But, none of these big international actors today has the clout that Putin does in the Middle East.