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by Rod D. Martin
December 19, 2024
Transcript: Rod Martin here, coming to you live from beautiful Destin, Florida, about the disaster Russia has just incurred in Syria.
Syria has been an essential part of Russian strategy for decades, going far back into the 1950s. And some of you may even remember Pat Frank’s famous post-apocalyptic novel, Alas, Babylon. That nuclear war starts just off the coast of Syria. So that was 1959. This has been going on for a very, very long time.
Russia is highly dependent on its bases at Tartus and Latakia to be able to supply its fleet in the Mediterranean, but also its adventures in Africa.
People in the United States have probably not been paying as close attention to the African situation as people in France have. Because, in point of fact, the Russian Wagner Group, which is the mercenary army that has been so involved in the Ukraine war and that nearly carried out a coup d’etat a year ago, actually has been very active elsewhere around the world, including rolling up the old French Empire in West and Central Africa.
The Russians depend on this for a lot of things. They make a lot of money off of this. They have undermined the European Union through this. They hold a lot of cards as a result of this adventurism, which is relatively low cost, relatively easy for them to achieve, except it all has to be serviced logistically out of Syria.
You may have wondered why the Russians got involved in the Syrian civil war in the first place. That’s an awful lot of why.
The contest in Syria is primarily about hegemony. On the one side, ongoing Russian hegemony in the area to control those bases, plus Iran projecting power across the north of Iraq and Syria and into Lebanon against Israel. And on the other side, Turkey, which has significant ambitions in the region that I’ve talked about a great deal on rodmartin.org. You should check that out going back years.
Erdogan absolutely imagines himself a new Ottoman sultan, and he’s very much hoping that HTS is the tip of the spear that will give him a new de facto colony or even colonies if by dislodging Hezbollah and Iran from Lebanon he can take back what used to be the Paris of the Middle East.
In any case, Russia cannot, under any circumstances that are possibly foreseeable, support its adventures in Africa without Syria. Simply can’t be done.
And as of the current news reports that we’re hearing, the Russians are being forced to pull out of those bases, certainly pull out of the countryside, but actually abandon Tartus and Latakia.
This is a cataclysm for Russia. And it gets even worse than that.
Russia doesn’t really have access to the sea. The Black Sea, of course, has become a bit of a Ukrainian lake. Their drones are doing a masterful job of blowing up the remnants of a Russian navy. The Baltic has become a NATO lake with the accession of Sweden and Finland.
Murmansk is certainly a possibility for the Russians, but it’s awfully far away. It’s all the way up in the Arctic. And anything that sails out of Murmansk has to get all the way around NATO in Norway, NATO in Britain, NATO in Iceland, NATO in Greenland.
This isn’t really feasible. And it’s worse than that. The Russian task force based at Tartus probably isn’t seaworthy enough to even get to Murmansk.
So they’re stranded. They’re in a lot of trouble. They don’t have any good way to get home. They certainly don’t have any way to project power.
What we have just seen is not merely the extension of Turkish power as Turkey seeks to become a regional hegemon. It’s not just the roll-up of Iran. It is the end of Russia’s foreign imperial ambitions. They are limited now to the hellscape they have created in Ukraine and similar environs.
And the truth is, for all the talk of, oh, my goodness, the Russians are going to march on Warsaw or Berlin or Paris, the truth is we all know all too well that Russia can’t even get to Kiev.
So Putin is in a lot of trouble. And that’s where we are today.
I encourage you to read today’s article on exactly these topics. There’s also a video in that article by Peter Zeihan who elaborates on some of these points.
And I also want you to go and look at our featured article, My 10 Favorite Books of 2024. It’s almost Christmas. You need to buy presents. These are the ones.
So thank you, and we’ll talk to you next time.
