11 hours ago
Iran will learn the hard way Putin is not an ally to be trusted
If Tehran's mullahs are hoping that their supposed ally Vladimir Putin will come to their aid in their hour of need, they are in for a shock. Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi was in Moscow this week to drum up support from the Kremlin. Putin obligingly condemned the US attack on Iran as 'absolutely unprovoked aggression' with 'no basis and no justification.' He also vaguely promised to 'assist the Iranian people.'
But words are likely to be the only thing the Iranians will get out of Moscow. Iran is learning the hard way Putin is not an ally to be trusted. In January, with much fanfare, Putin signed a 'comprehensive strategic partnership' treaty with Iran's president. But, crucially, that treaty does not contain a mutual defence clause.
Other than statements of support for the embattled Iranian regime, there is no sign that Russia intends to take any serious practical steps to help their supposed allies – except perhaps to send Russian-made versions of the Iranian Shaheed drones to replenish their stockpiles.
Putin did the same thing to his erstwhile ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. As rebel troops closed in on Damascus late last year, Moscow refused to send troops or more air power to prop up the failing regime – though it did send a single plane to evacuate Assad and his family to exile in Moscow.
Instead, Putin has his eyes on a far larger prize – to leverage the Iran conflict to boost his own standing in the world. In the immediate aftermath of Israel's initial bombing strikes Putin spoke to Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.
His offer to all three was the same – to act as an intermediary to help arrange peace, and further down the road to help put together a new deal limiting Iran's nuclear programme.
Putin's main strategic goal is to return Russia to its historic role as a global power that can stand alongside China and the US. If that means throwing his puny alliance with Iran under a bus, so be it.
This is no surprise. Russia's relations with post-Revolutionary Iran have always been two-faced. At various points over the last three decades Moscow has helped Iran make ballistic missiles, sold them air defence systems and fighter planes – not to mention building a civilian nuclear reactor at Bushehr that gives the mullahs their fig leaf excuse for enriching uranium.
At the same time Russia has dragged its feet on providing Tehran with its most modern anti-missile systems and state of the art Su-35 fighters. And most importantly Russia was a signatory to Barack Obama's 2015 nuclear deal that lifted sanctions in exchange for a stay on Iran's nuclear weapons programme.
The truth is that Putin wants to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran almost as much as Trump does. Russia shares a sea border with Iran in the Caspian, and does not welcome Iranian interference in the Caucasus or Central Asia which Moscow regards as its back yard.
What Putin wants most out of the US-Israeli war on Iran – other than a few months of high oil prices, which will fill his coffers nicely – is the chance to play middleman and peacemaker between Washington and Tehran.
That will allow Putin to present the Ukraine war as just one conflict among several that need to be resolved. And as long as Putin is making himself useful to Trump, talk of further sanctions will be forgotten.
At the beginning of his reign in 2000, Putin badly wanted to sit at the world's top table as an equal to the most powerful leaders on the planet. But as Putin frequently claims in speeches and essays, the West ignored and humiliated Russia, and systematically sponsored regime change in Russia's neighbours. Russia's biggest mistake was to put too much trust in the West, Putin said in 2022, and the West's biggest mistake was that 'you saw this trust as weakness and abused it.'
That narrative of resentment is what has fuelled all Putin's aggressive behaviour since he invaded Georgia in 2008. Now, the Iran conflict has given Putin an opportunity to take his place once again among the grown-ups and cosplay as the leader of a superpower. And Iran, like Syria before it, is just a pawn in the Kremlin's great game for respect and recognition.
