"I admit it. I made a mistake. I misjudged Putin’s response to Trump’s war against Iran. I’ve followed Putin for a long time. I first met him in 1991. I wrote my first Washington Post column warning about his autocratic ways in March 2000. During my five years in the Obama administration, I was in the room with Putin many times. And obviously, while working at the National Security Council as the top Russian advisor and then as the U.S. ambassador to Russia, understanding Putin was central to my job. Analyzing Putin has also been a theme of my scholarship for a long time. So, I usually feel confident about my assessments of his intentions and actions. But this time—assessing Putin’s reaction to the beginning of the US and Israeli war against Iran—I got it wrong.
When Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fell, Putin did little to help him, beyond providing a retirement home in the Moscow suburbs. When Israel waged major wars against Hamas and Hezbollah after October 7, 2023, Putin did next to nothing to help these alleged partners of Russia. Last January, when Trump removed from power another Putin ally, Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, he did nothing. In response to the US and Israeli bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June last year, Putin again did little to help his allies in Tehran. (On his tepid response, see this essay in Foreign Affairs by Abbas Milani and me here.)
So, I assumed that Putin would again do little to help his allies in Tehran in response to President Trump’s war against Iran that started two weeks ago. I assumed that Putin would instead try to bargain quietly with the Trump team to trade sanctions relief for a commitment not to help the theocrats as they struggled to hold on to power. Putin traditionally has never demonstrated any sentimentality to his autocratic partners around the world. Why would he now?
But I was wrong. In this war, Putin has taken a firmer stance. He is providing real, tangible assistance to our enemies in Iran. Credible reporting has revealed that Russian intelligence services are working closely with their counterparts in Tehran to provide targeting data used to attack U.S. military assets in the Middle East, as well as those of its regional allies. According to sources of the Wall Street Journal, it is believed that Iranian strikes on U.S. radar systems were aided in part by this Russian support. In addition, the WSJ reports, Russia is sharing intelligence with the Iranian regime about improvements it has made to Iran’s own Shahed drones, which are widely used by the Russian military in Ukraine and now being produced domestically in Russia. Putin is also providing no pressure on Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz.
So why is Putin providing genuine assistance this time around, when Moscow has offered only timid support to its allies in the past? Because this time, prolonging the war in Iran is of direct benefit to his own regime. As I wrote about in detail in my last Substack, there are several ways in which Putin has profited from Trump’s war in Iran.
· Skyrocketing oil and gas prices are generating windfall profits for Russian energy exporters. According to data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), this amounted to an estimated $ 6.9 billion in revenue for Russia in the first two weeks of the war.
· The U.S. military is using PAC-3 missile interceptors for its Patriot missile defense systems deployed in the Middle East. These are weapons that Ukraine had hoped to obtain to defend against Russian missile attacks. Amazingly (if also inaccurately), Trump officials are now blaming President Biden for depleting American munitions by sending too many of them to Ukraine.
· The world’s attention is now focused on the war in the Middle East and not on Putin’s war in Ukraine (indeed, negotiations on ending that war have since been suspended).
· Finally, to many around the world, the American preventive war against Iran— unprovoked and not in response to an imminent threat—looks just like Putin’s war in Ukraine. That’s another win for Putin.
Helping this war to drag on, therefore, serves Putin’s interests, which is why he decided to lean in and help the Iranians to fight the Americans and Israelis.
But what’s even more surprising is that Putin is paying no cost for this assistance. To date, he has not had to bargain with Trump—for instance, curtailing aid to Iran in return for sanctions relief—to achieve gains. On the contrary, President Trump has ultimately rewarded Putin by temporarily lifting sanctions on Russian oil, undermining efforts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine by restricting Putin’s ability to finance it. Trump and his team have also displayed a baffling indifference when questioned about Russian assistance to Iran. Trump dismissed a question on this very topic as “stupid” when asked about it at a recent White House event, and urged focus instead on the matter at hand—a roundtable on college sports. If Trump’s indifference to Putin helping the Iranian regime try to kill our soldiers and attack our military assets feels callous and unpatriotic to me, imagine how it must feel to those American soldiers actually fighting against Iranian forces?
Equally bizarre, Trump has continued to ridicule Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over the last two weeks for not making a deal with Putin. Furthermore, he dismissed Zelenskyy’s offer to help the U.S. and its allies with intercepting Iranian drones, drawing on the vast knowledge they have accrued in their own war with Russia (involving these very drones!). “The last person we need help from is Zelenskyy,” Trump told Meet the Press. Thankfully, several American partner countries in the Middle East have accepted assistance from Ukrainian drone experts.
Usually in war, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In Trump’s war against Iran, however, the friend of my enemy is my friend! So strange. So antithetical to American national interests.
I opposed Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. War must always be a last resort after all other non-military instruments for achieving American objectives have been exhausted. That was not the case two weeks ago. Nor was there an imminent nuclear or missile threat to the United States two weeks ago. And whenever a president decides to go to war, he should do so with the support of the American people and allies. As I wrote in this column weeks ago, I am still not sure what the ultimate aims of this war are. But now that we are in the fight, I want our armed forces to succeed with the fewest casualties, both to our soldiers, Israeli soldiers, and civilians in Iran and in the region. Putin is helping the Iranian armed forces kill and injure more of our people and attack more of our military assets. He should be punished, not rewarded, for that decision. It is not too late for Trump and team to reverse course."
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