Special to WorldTribune.com

By GIS/Defense & Foreign Affairs

The Russian government has revived its fortunes to its south in the past few years. To do so it has been forced to play a delicate, low-key, balancing strategy dominated by the reality that the two states to its south on which it most depends — Turkey and Iran — are historically and currently antagonistic toward each other.

Moreover, both Turkey and Iran are cautious (and historically hostile) toward Russia, despite their respective current strategic dependencies on Moscow. The result? Three major states which need each other, but which do not trust each other.

Iran views too much Russian help for Turkey as equating to too much support for the various Sunni Muslim covert wars to topple Iran’s influence in the region, and particularly to remove Iran from its access to the Mediterranean via Syria.

Turkey views too much Russian help for Iran as counterproductive to Ankara’s efforts to rebuild Turkish influence in the area of the old Ottoman Empire. Moreover, it sees Russian support for Iran also paralleling Moscow’s support for Armenia which has contributed disproportionately to the decline in Turkish international credibility in recent months and years, given Armenia’s ability to highlight Turkey’s refusal to recognize its genocide against Armenians in 1915.

If anything, Moscow’s relations with Tehran seem more stable and of greater depth than its relations with Turkey.

Despite this, in the short term, Turkey’s role in Moscow’s new energy supply chain to Europe is seen as critical to the Turkish economy and Turkey’s relations with Europe, the ultimate destination of Russian gas exports via the “Turkish stream” pipeline. This pipeline, with 63-billion cubic meters a year (bcma) capacity (the same as the now-defunct South Stream project), would come online in December 2016, taking Russian gas to European markets, but bypassing Ukraine.

Nothing is set in concrete, but Turkey does offer Moscow one of its few southward paths to export gas to Europe without going through Ukraine. But Turkey does have some leverage in this; its relationship with Azerbaijan as a gas supplier gives it a measure of choice. Turkey and Azerbaijan in March 2015 started construction of the 1,850km Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline (TANAP) which, by 2018, would provide 10-billion cubic meters of Azeri gas a year (bcma) to EU consumers and six bcma to Turkish customers.

Russia’s ability to balance this triangular relationship is further complicated by Moscow’s deep and positive relationship with Israel, a state which Turkey and Iran view with considerable hostility. Significantly, however, neither Iran nor Turkey find their mutual antipathy toward Israel to be sufficient to create common cause against either Israel or to pressure Moscow.

In addition, Moscow has also been able to entertain other strong relationships in the region: with Greece and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean, and, carefully, with Iranian ally Syria; and also, more deeply and aggressively with Egypt.

How, then, would Moscow prioritize its relations in the region?

Certainly Iran would figure high on the list, but Moscow is clearly reluctant to surrender any of its relationships. It favors discretion, caution, and long-term architecture above insistence on compliance with Moscow’s policies. Even with Iran, Moscow has cautiously side-stepped disagreement on the issue of nuclear weapons, despite Russian concerns over Iran’s nuclear weapons plans.

Nikolay Kozhanov, writing on the Carnegie Moscow Center web site on May 5,  (“Understanding the Revitalization of Russian-Iranian Relations”), noted: “Russia’s political elite … remember that, as opposed to Turkey, the Islamic Republic did not use the fall of the Soviet Union to aggressively spread its influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia by propagating the ideas of the Islamic revolution or funding local nationalist and radical religious movements. Moreover, in the mid-1990s, Moscow and Tehran united their efforts to stop the civil war in Tajikistan.”

What seems clear is that no other power has the ability to balance relations — and potentially act as an arbiter behind the scenes — in this region as skillfully as Russia. Russia, however, has refrained from exerting its influence to demand that Turkey rein in its support for jihadist and Muslim Brotherhood activities in the region, activities which cause concern for Iran, Israel, and Egypt. Equally, it has not pressured Iran to step back from its growing hostility toward Turkey, and may even find the prospect of a dismembered Turkey potentially rewarding for Russia.

And yet Moscow has been restrained yet friendly toward Greece, not encouraging Athens to break with the EU or the eurozone. Could it potentially see, if Turkey fails it, a gas link which — in some future scenario — has pipelines flowing even further to the south, across Iran, Iraq, and Syria to join the trade across the Eastern Med.?

Moscow is playing a longer, and more nuanced game in the region than perhaps any other player. As a result, it stands to emerge strongly a decade hence, even if the U.S. wins its empty iconic deal with Iran.

  Kremlin is cultivating all key regional players, While White House focuses on Iran, WorldTribune.com