In 2014 Russia began a new phase in 21st-century geopolitics by annexing Crimea and destabilising the Donbas region of Ukraine. Policy makers and media analysts invoked the reemergence of a new ‘Cold War‘, declaring a Cold War II or Cold War Redux, or that the Cold War since 1945 had never really ended, just thawed temporarily. In 2015, it spread to the Middle East.

If the Cold War never ended, the events in Syria in 2024 reflect a loss for Russia/USSR of what was begun in the 1950s, when Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt forged an alliance with Nikita Khrushchev, allowing the Soviet Union to project its power into the heart of the Arab Middle East.

The 2015 agreement between Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian forces to Syria served as a replay from the Cold War alliance of the 1950s. That alliance unravelled in 2024, as Russia withdraws its forces from its naval and air force facilities in Syria. 

In 1955 the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) was formed, modelled on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It was also known as the ‘Baghdad Pact’, referring to the place it was signed, mimicking the ‘Warsaw Pact’. CENTO included Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, as well as the United Kingdom, a ‘northern tier’ of contiguous states seeking to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East.

In perceiving this alliance as a threat, the Soviets issued a statement on April 16 1955 via the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, declaring: ‘Striving for the development of peaceful co-operation among all countries, the Soviet government is prepared to support and develop co-operation with the countries of the Near and Middle East, in the interests of strengthening peace in this area.’

In the same year CENTO came into being, Gamal Abdel Nasser accepted the Soviet offer.

Nasser, brought to power by military coup in 1952, pursued ‘positive neutralism’ during the Cold War. He sought to maximise Egypt’s position in a bipolar system of international relations by playing off both the US and the USSR. This is how he financed the Aswan High Dam. He also sought to strengthen a third bloc within this bipolar structure, joining the Non-Aligned Movement, consisting of states such as Indonesia, India, and Yugoslavia, which sought to avoid taking sides with either superpower during the Cold War.

From Nasser’s standpoint, CENTO undermined his pan-Arabist project of unifying the Arabs against the neo-colonial ambitions of the UK and US. When the US refused to finance the Aswan Dam, Nasser leaned towards the USSR. In 1955, the same year as the formation of CENTO, the Soviets authorised a shipment of arms to Egypt. Soviet arms required advisers to come to Egypt for training and maintenance, giving the USSR a physical presence in the region.

Nasser allowed the USSR to ‘leapfrog’ over CENTO’s northern tier, giving it a presence in the Mediterranean. A nation with warm waters gave the Soviets facilities beyond their frozen ports for most of the year.

In 2015 Russian arms shipments arrived in Syria along with Russian advisers and military forces. This allowed Putin to strengthen his position on the Mediterranean.

In 2015 there were debates about whether the aircraft and forces provided to Assad would affect the military dynamics of the Syrian civil war, or whether this deployment was a Russian way of influencing the transition from civil war to a negotiated peace process in Syria.

The Russian deployment in fact gave Assad a victory by 2020, and precluded him from engaging in any political negotiations that might end the war. It proved to be Assad’s undoing as well as Russia’s.

By 2020, Russia had already won a tactical victory in the way the USSR established a foothold in Egypt. It never pressured Assad to engage with the rebels in the Idlib region. In fact, both the Syrians and Russians continued to bomb them.

During the Cold War, by declaring solidarity with Egypt, and providing it with weapons in its arms race against Israel, the Soviets positioned themselves as allies of the Arabs, leading to arms agreements later with Syria, and Iraq, after officers there overthrew the monarchy in 1958 and withdrew from CENTO.

The weapons and training the Soviets provided to the Egyptian, Syrian, and even Iraqi militaries, proved insufficient when countering Israel on the battlefield in 1967 or 1973. But regardless of the effectiveness of their military supplies, the Soviets could communicate to the US that they had gained a foothold in the region to counter America’s Middle East ambitions.  

Eventually, Soviet influence in the region began to wane, with Egypt expelling Soviet military advisers prior to the 1973 war, and losing relevance once the USSR had collapsed. Russia, however, maintained arms sales to Middle Eastern states because its arms industry needed revenues and it was Soviet-cum-Russian weapons that most Arab armies knew how to use. It even developed a robust arms trade with the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Post-Cold War Russia had maintained a naval refueling base in Tartus, Syria, even before the civil war erupted. However, Putin’s 2015 deployment generated fears and consternation among NATO policy elites. He had symbolically ‘leap-frogged’ once again into the region. Russia had  jumped over NATO-member Turkey (which was also part of CENTO before it disbanded in 1979).

By positioning forces in Syria, Russia demonstrated that it could project its power and presence to NATO and the US in a new arena beyond Ukraine. 

Moscow’s 2015 move is reminiscent of the geopolitical posturing of the 1950s in the Middle East, bringing up the clichéd image of various regional countries serving as a chess board between the US and Russia, with Putin having declared ‘check’. But just as the Soviets were expelled from Egypt in 1973 the Russians are losing Syria in 2024. It is the rebels, it seems, who declared ‘checkmate’.