Just a few years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin seemed to have reasserted Moscow’s influence in the Middle East after decades in which it had waned. As Putin deepened ties with longstanding Russian allies Iran and Syria while nurturing more cordial relationships with Israel and the Arab monarchies, his pragmatic realism seemed to represent a more comfortable alternative to what many countries in the region perceived as the United States’ naïve and destabilizing commitment to promoting democracy.

This strategy allowed Russia to become an important counterweight to the United States in the region, but it also paid dividends closer to home. Leaders in the Middle East were notably quiet in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Not even Israel, a close U.S. ally, criticized Russia, let alone took part in sanctioning it.

But over the past 20 months, Russia’s standing in the Middle East has cratered. Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks has devastated the so-called axis of resistance, the Iranian-backed network with which Russia had forged close ties. The Assad regime in Syria, long a valuable Russian client, collapsed spectacularly. U.S. and Israeli strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities severely weakened Russia’s most important regional ally. As a result, Russia’s reputation as a patron and guarantor of security in the region lies in tatters. In the new Middle East now taking shape, Moscow is no longer needed.

Moscow’s failures will resound beyond the Middle East. Whether the result of Putin’s conscious decision not to intervene or of the Kremlin’s inability to do so, Russia’s abandonment of partners in the region should be a sobering lesson for Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party: that in times of crisis, Russia will not be a reliable ally.

For the United States, Russia’s declining influence in the Middle East should also prompt further reflection. For years, policymakers and scholars have debated the strength of the Russian-Chinese bond and whether it made sense to try to drive a wedge between them or encourage their codependence while raising the costs and risks it poses to both countries. But Moscow’s recent setbacks in the Middle East have clarified a basic fact obscured by Chinese and Russian talk of a special relationship. Russia is a fair-weather friend. In the event of a U.S.-Chinese conflict—for example, a fight over Taiwan—Washington can expect Moscow to remain on the sidelines, just as it did its partners in the Middle East.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, Russia ceased to be a major international actor, including in the Middle East. Focused instead on integrating a democratizing Russia into the West, Russian President Boris Yeltsin aspired to join Western institutions such as the G7, the World Trade Organization, and NATO, devoting little effort or resources to maintaining Soviet-era relationships with autocratic adversaries of the United States, such as Iran and Syria. A decade of economic depression further prevented Russia from engaging countries in the region.

Putin, who won the presidency in 2000, gradually ended Moscow’s neglect of the Middle East. After the 9/11 attacks, he quickly embraced U.S. President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.” To assist the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, Russia helped the United States open military bases in what Putin considered his sphere of influence, the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Even as Putin broke with Bush over the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s close ties with Russia, the Russian president continued to work with Washington in the Middle East on issues of mutual interest, most important among them a joint effort to deny Iran a nuclear weapon. In 2010, Russia voted alongside the United States on UN Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed what were at the time the most comprehensive multilateral sanctions against Tehran. Five years later, Russia joined the United States, along with China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom,........

© Foreign Affairs