Russia And Syria: Cold War Redux

The way Russia turned the Syrian war around puts a question mark on the future of US domination of the world.

- Surya Gangadharan

There’s something strangely familiar about the conflict in Syria. It seems like a replay of what we saw decades ago in the Cold War, when Washington and Moscow fought each other, not directly, but through a range of proxies in various parts of the world, from Southeast Asia to Africa and Cuba.

The Cold War analogy could also be attributed to continuing Russia-US rivalry, whether in the latter’s refusal to allow Moscow a place in the European community of nations or in Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the occupation of two Ukrainian provinces last year in response to US-inspired “colour revolutions”; or before that in 2008, when Russia intervened in support of two breakaway provinces of Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) as that country moved to join the US-led NATO.

But the Cold War was, at its core, an ideological struggle between ‘godless’ communism as exemplified by Soviet Russia, and the so-called free world led by the US. In the current conflict in Syria, however, there is no ideology at stake, rather it reflects a struggle between the Sunni and Shia strains of Islam into which, ironically, the US and Russia (reviled otherwise by the Islamic world) have got involved for very different reasons.

Regional Geopolitics

Let’s take a look at the role of the two main US backed regional players, the Saudis and Turkey, both Sunni majority countries that are accused of covertly backing the Islamic State (IS) even when the IS represents a threat to the stability of their governments.