Assad was a valuable client for Putin. And he couldn’t save him.
Fareed Zakaria
December 13, 2024
The Washington Post
The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria should be a reminder of a general truth that often gets obscured in the blizzard of conflicting and contradictory news stories that absorb us day to day: The West’s adversaries are often weaker than we think.
Recall how for decades the United States overestimated the strength of the Soviet economy and armed forces, the surety with which it claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and the frequent scares around Islamist militant groups such as al-Qaeda and more recently Hezbollah. Yet, over time what often becomes apparent is that these governments and groups are repressive, corrupt and dysfunctional — not attributes that help them thrive in the modern world.
Bashar al-Assad’s fall points to a direct lesson: Russia’s growing weakness. Moscow had been Syria’s patron for over half a century. Syria was Russia’s last major client state in the Middle East. Moscow had spent huge amounts of blood and treasure supporting Assad over the past decade. To lose that position is to become what Barack Obama dismissively called Russia — “a regional power.” In fact, even in Russia’s own region, relations have deteriorated with Armenia, a longtime ally that Russia failed to defend from Azerbaijani aggression because it’s bogged down in Ukraine. Russian forces in Africa are also increasingly facing pressure from a variety of militant groups.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia now resembles the Soviet Union in the 1970s. While it is still assertive and interventionist abroad, its economy at home is increasingly weak and distorted by its conversion into a wartime operation. But just as the external expansionism and internal mobilization could not mask Soviet decay forever, so today Putin’s bravado should not scare us. Think about it: If Russia were winning in Ukraine, would Putin threaten to use nuclear weapons?
Two scholars, Marc DeVore and Alexander Mertens, note in Foreign Policy that “Russia is losing around 320 tank and artillery cannon barrels a month and producing only 20.” Citing open sources, they note that Russia has lost almost 5,000 infantry fighting vehicles since its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian defense contractors can make only around 200 a year. Its labor shortages are acute in virtually every sector, something even Putin has acknowledged.
In the military, the starkest sign is that the Russian army has had to invite North Korea to send in troops to help it out. Noel Foster of the Naval War College wrote that Moscow’s desperation can be seen in the rising salaries and bonuses it has to offer to recruits: “As of July 2024, recruits from Moscow received a $21,000 enlistment bonus and wages amounting in total to just under $60,000 in their first year of service, effectively earning more per month than privates enlisting
in the US Army at the same time.” (Keep in mind that average Russian income is less than one-fifth that of America’s.)
All these weaknesses are obscured for now by a massive wartime transformation of the Russian economy. Defense spending is projected to be about 40 percent of the Russian federal budget next year. In addition, another 30 percent is expected to be spent on various national security and “classified” matters. Inflation is now around 9 percent. Perhaps most telling, its main sources of revenue are under severe pressure. Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas giant that in 2022 provided about $40 billion to Russian state coffers, announced a $6.9 billion loss in 2023, its first in more than 20 years.
Now is not the time to ease up the pressure on Russia. In fact, in an essay in Foreign Affairs, Theodore Bunzel and Elina Ribakova point out that there are many ways to tighten the economic screws going forward.
In a social media post after Assad’s fall, Donald Trump said that Russia was in a “weakened state” because of Ukraine and a bad economy, noting that “600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started.” That is exactly right. He also wrote that it was time for Putin to act, implying that the problem with getting a ceasefire or peace deal is Russia, not Ukraine. This is a refreshing shift from what had seemed in the past his tendency to blame Ukraine for getting invaded.
In that post, Trump also said that he knew “Vladimir” well. Then he surely knows that on this issue, the chief challenge he will face once back in the White House is getting “Vladimir” to abandon his dream of reconstructing Russia’s czarist empire. Putin has pursued that vision since his first days in office, launching a savage war in Chechnya soon after coming to power, invading Georgia in 2008, annexing Crimea in 2014 and attempting to conquer all of Ukraine in 2022. If Trump can convince Putin of that, he will be able to do what he has always said was his goal: end the war in Ukraine.