Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (13 page)

Troubling as all of this is, it gets worse: Strong evidence points to both countries’ participation in what Rosett calls “the evolving global webs of illicit proliferation activities.” Both countries were involved, for example, in the nuclear-proliferation network run by Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan. These proliferation webs depend heavily on Chinese influence, and Beijing has facilitated these procurement efforts in multiple ways, whether as direct provider or middleman.

There is also compelling, if not yet confirmable, evidence that Iran and North Korea have shared expertise on tunnel construction for military purposes. In 1974, South Korean forces discovered a highly sophisticated system of massive tunnels located under the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea. Equipped with railroads, electricity, and vehicle transports, it was 35,000 meters long.
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A generation later, in the wake of the Israeli–Hezbollah war of 2006, Israeli forces discovered large networks of tunnels close to the Israeli border that were extraordinarily similar to those constructed under the Korean DMZ. As part of its schemes to bring in foreign capital, North Korea in the past has been known to lend out its tunneling expertise for a price.

Ronen Bergman, a senior officer in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard who defected, said, “Thanks to the presence of hundreds of Iranian engineers and technicians, and experts from North Korea who were brought in by Iranian diplomats . . . Hezbollah succeeded in building a 25-kilometer subterranean strip in South Lebanon.” Indeed, Beirut officials believe it likely that Iranian sources passed
the tunnel-construction blueprints on to Hezbollah, having obtained them first from North Korea.
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Barring an almost impossible coincidence, the tunnels in Lebanon were based on North Korean plans—meaning that either the North Koreans built the tunnels or Iran passed the plans on to Hezbollah. Either way, the tunnels episode makes clear how Iran and North Korea, already dangerous enough themselves, can serve as enablers of technology proliferation for still more dangerous, unpredictable third parties. In this case, the technology involved only tunnels. Next time, it might involve nukes.

SYRIA

“We have never changed our position on Syria and we never will”—thus Alexander Lukashevich, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, summarized Moscow’s outlook in December 2012, just as the international community seemed to be moving toward a consensus that Assad’s days as Syria’s president were numbered. Like the Russian diplomat who said he’d rather have a nuclear Iran than a pro-American Iran, the statement reveals Russia’s true priorities and loyalties. They may talk encouragingly and make a few half-helpful gestures, but in the end, they will stay on the side of their ally and client.

Recent developments—including Russia’s move to author the UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons—don’t change the reality of Lukashevich’s words. The resulting UN resolution contained no threat of force if Syria failed to comply with the disarmament terms. And while Assad will have to surrender his chemical weapons, Putin also took steps to keep the Syrian regime well armed otherwise. A major Reuters report in January 2014 reported that Russia had “stepped up supplies of military gear to Syria, including armored vehicles, drones and guided bombs, boosting President Bashar al-Assad just as rebel
infighting has weakened the insurgency against him.” The supply of arms from Moscow came shortly before peace talks were scheduled to begin in Switzerland.
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Such behavior has been par for the course for Putin. He continues to insist, for instance, that the chemical-weapons attack in August 2013 may not have been the work of Assad. He said: “We talk all the time about the responsibility of the Assad regime if it turns out that they did it, but nobody is asking about the responsibility of the rebels if they did it. We have all the reasons to believe it was a clever provocation.”
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Neither the U.S. nor the UK and France have expressed the slightest doubt that Assad perpetrated the attack. Russia’s ties to Syria make it difficult to take Moscow’s skepticism seriously. Putin has brilliantly used the crisis to paint himself as international peacekeeper. He also tapped into American war exhaustion. “At the time we tried to talk to the UK prime minister about our doubts on Iraq, but they didn’t listen, and look at the result,” he said. “Every day dozens of people die. Do you understand? Every day. What’s the result?”
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Russia is a longtime supplier of weapons to Syria, and throughout the civil war, Moscow sold Assad enough arms, both offensive and defensive, to help the dictator stay in power. The Russians’ arming of Assad not only took place at the same time they were publically calling for peace talks, but it also flew in the face of their own statements warning the West not to arm the rebels. “In our point of view, it [arming the Syrian opposition] is a violation of international law,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in March 2013.
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By Russian thinking, international law has nothing to say about arming the Syrian regime. The significance of Russian weapons in Syria has implications far beyond Syria’s borders; because the Russian shipments may also be shared with Assad’s terrorist ally, Hezbollah, they also have the potential to cause widespread havoc in the region. “If Hezbollah and Iran are supporting Syria and propping the [Assad] regime up,
then why shouldn’t it transfer those weapons to Hezbollah?” asked senior Israeli defense official Amos Gilad. “You don’t even have to be an intelligence expert, it makes sense that they will. If Hezbollah can put its hands on them, it will.”
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Russian (and Chinese) support for Assad is perhaps the most blatant example of the double game that Moscow and Beijing have played for years. In public, they call for peace conventions and author UN resolutions; behind the scenes, they back the Syrian regime to the hilt. Russia and China have stood with Syria for years, undermining the efforts of international institutions to mediate the conflict and bring an end to the bloodshed.

The Syrian saga has moved quickly since the chemical-weapons attack of August 2013, but all along, Russia and China have remained unswerving in their efforts to protect an important ally. By July of 2012, the two nations had blocked three UN resolutions since the uprising against Assad began. Among these were a British-sponsored initiative that would have placed sanctions on the Syrian government for failing to go through with a peace plan, including a cease-fire and demands that the Syrian government stop using heavy weapons against the opposition. The British plan also suggested the basis for a political transition. The Russians blocked a Security Council fact-finding trip to Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon to deal with the refugee crisis. Moscow said the trip was beyond the Security Council’s mandate.

“I don’t believe Syria would use chemical weapons,” Lavrov said in February 2013. “It would be a political suicide for the government if it does.”
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Six months later, Assad proved Lavrov wrong.

The Russians did all they could in the immediate aftermath of the attack to help Syria. They made only the most grudging concessions: They issued a public statement urging the Assad government to cooperate with UN investigators, while in the same breath they
alleged that the Syrian opposition, not Assad, was behind the attack. “It is now up to the opposition, which should guarantee safe access for the mission to the alleged place of the incident,” said the statement from the Russian Foreign Ministry.
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Lukashevich also fingered the opposition for the attack, saying, “This criminal act had an openly provocative character.” As evidence, he pointed to a YouTube video about the chemical attacks, time-stamped hours before they began in Syria. “So the talk here is about a previously planned action,” he concluded.
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Lukashevich overlooked something embarrassingly obvious: YouTube, run out of California, time-stamps all its videos, regardless of the time zone where they originate, by U.S. West Coast time, which is 10 hours behind Damascus.
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Even after the YouTube confusion had been explained, Foreign Minister Lavrov hammered away at the same theme. “There is information that videos were posted on the Internet hours before the purported attack, and other reasons to doubt the rebel narrative,” he said days later. “Those involved with the incident wanted to sabotage the upcoming Geneva peace talks. Maybe that was the motivation of those who created this story. The opposition obviously does not want to negotiate peacefully.”
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Lavrov was right about one thing: After the chemical attack, any hope for a Geneva peace conference was gone. But even Russian advocacy for the peace conference had amounted to less than met the eye. One reason they felt comfortable organizing the conference was that they knew it would fail, in no small part because they had insisted on Iran’s participation. “One must not exclude a country like Iran from this process because of geopolitical preferences,” Lavrov said. “It is a very important external player.”
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All the while, Russia maintained its assistance to Assad.

Lavrov’s advocacy for the peace conference came almost simultaneously with news that the Russian navy was bulking up its military and
naval presence in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, sending more than a dozen warships to patrol waters near Tartus, home to Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean. Analysts called the buildup one of Russia’s “largest sustained naval deployments since the Cold War.”
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Observers in the U.S. and Europe saw the Russian deployment as less about defending Syria and Assad per se—though it would certainly help do that—and more about warning the West, and Israel, not to make another Libya out of the Syrian conflict.

The naval show of force wasn’t only about ships. At the same time, the Russians announced that they would proceed with sales of advanced anti-ship cruise missiles, known as Yakhonts, to the Syrians. Russia had provided an earlier version of the missiles years before, but the new models are equipped with state-of-the-art radar systems. The updated Yakhonts would allow Assad’s military to “deter foreign forces looking to supply the opposition from the sea, or from undertaking a more active role if a no-fly zone or shipping embargo were to be declared at some point,” said Nick Brown of
Jane’s International Defense Review
. “It’s a real ship killer.”
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If that weren’t bad enough, it became clear in May 2013 that the Russians would almost certainly go ahead with the delivery to Syria of the highly advanced S-300 surface-to-air defense system. Thanks to Russian construction, technology, and know-how, Syrian air defenses were already highly advanced, but the new system could shoot down guided missiles and present a formidable, perhaps prohibitive, obstacle to warplanes trying to enter Syrian airspace. The U.S. persuaded Moscow to back off selling the S-300 to Iran—for which the Iranians eventually sued Moscow—but the Americans could not convince Russia to do the same regarding Syria.
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The issue of Syrian air defense bears on another threat: the likelihood that the Assad regime is transferring Russian arms, including the Yakhont missiles, to Hezbollah in Lebanon—a transfer that Israel,
for one, regards as a fact. In late April 2013, Russian Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov met in Beirut with Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah. Sources close to the meeting said that it concerned “the role of Russia in protecting the forces that are close to it” as well as the “matching ideological, economic, geostrategic, and security-related interests of Moscow and local forces” in the region.
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For Israel, the meeting was dispositive. The Israelis reportedly conducted airstrikes inside Syria in early 2013 targeting suspected weapons shipments to the terrorist group.
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But it was later revealed that the Israelis had never entered Syrian airspace; they had instead used a tactical maneuver called “lofting” to launch bombs across the border to the target about 10 miles inside Syria.
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If the Israelis were unwilling to challenge the regime’s existing air defenses, imagine the difficulties of doing so when Damascus is able to deploy the S-300 system. Israeli incursions into Syrian airspace may become prohibitive—and the Assad regime’s ability to move weaponry to its Hezbollah allies will be strengthened. Thus, supposedly “defensive” Russian systems enable Assad and his terrorist allies to go on the offensive.

American policymakers need to understand how the Russians see the situation in Syria. To the U.S., Assad is a bloody dictator who has to go. But the Russians have much at stake in keeping Assad in power. Moscow stands to lose up to $5 billion in arms sales if or when the regime falls. Russian companies have major investments in Syrian infrastructure and tourism. Taken together, Russia has close to $25 billion worth of interests in Syria. Syria is not only home to the Russian naval base in Tartus; the two countries have also agreed to return the former Soviet naval base in Latakiye to Russian control.
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Currently, more than 600 Russian technicians are working to update these Soviet-era bases.

Russia also sees compelling geostrategic reasons to support Assad. These include fear of “the spread of Islamic radicalism and the erosion
of its superpower status in a world where Western nations are increasingly undertaking unilateral military interventions,” as Russian defense analyst Ruslan Pukhov explained it in 2012.
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There is no question that Russia and China remain bitter that Western forces ignored their opposition to intervention in Libya and the ousting of Colonel Qaddafi. Desperate to stay in power, Qaddafi offered China and Russia a stake in the Libyan oil industry in exchange for support in 2011. For years before Qaddafi’s fall, Moscow had close military and commercial relations with Libya
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—and since Qaddafi’s demise, Russia has lost $4.5 billion in contracts.
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Both Russian and Chinese representatives told the
Financial Times
that they would have vetoed UN Security Council Resolution 1973—the one establishing a no-fly zone over Libya—if they had known how broadly it would be interpreted. Then-President Dmitri Medvedev publicly stated that the West “simply deceived Russia” with its Libyan intervention.
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“Russia’s current Syria policy,” wrote Pukhov, “basically boils down to supporting the Assad government and preventing a foreign intervention aimed at overthrowing it, as happened in Libya.”
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Forcing Assad to turn over his chemical weapons through the UN resolution does nothing to change the fundamental calculus.