Putin makes new friends as part of a grand plan

Russia is forging new alliances in the Middle East in order to diversify its foreign policy, writes Alan Philps

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi bids farewell to Russian President Vladimir Putin, at Cairo International Airport on February 10, 2015. AP

For a man whose country is under crippling western sanctions, Vladimir Putin has been doing a lot of travelling. He has visited India, Turkey and, at the beginning of this week, Egypt. The trip to Cairo attracted attention because of the exaggerated welcome he received. Al Ahram, the state-owned newspaper, lauded him as “The hero of our time” and Cairo was plastered with welcome signs far beyond the demands of diplomatic protocol.

The fact that some of the welcome signs were in English suggested that they were aimed at the Americans, in case they had failed to notice Mr Putin parking his Ilyushin 96 presidential jet in the heart of their Middle Eastern imperium.

At first sight Turkey and Egypt seem like odd allies for Mr Putin. Russia is the diplomatic and military mainstay of president Bashar Al Assad, whom the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has vowed to overthrow. Egypt also supports the Syrian opposition. But this does not stop a political rapprochement, amid promises of a new era in economic cooperation.

Both Egypt and Turkey have their reasons for wanting to show America – and domestic opinion – that they have some independence in foreign policy. As for Mr Putin, he is even more keen to show that he has partners beyond Europe and the United States, both of which have imposed sanctions over his annexation of Crimea and the backing of rebels in the east of Ukraine. Russia’s engagement with the West, a shared goal for the 25 years since the end of the Cold War, is going into reverse.

The cornerstone of Egyptian security is the $1.5 billion (Dh5.5bn) the army receives every year from Washington, contingent on maintaining its peace treaty with Israel. This allows the army to have access to US weapons and training. Some of this assistance – in particular, 10 Apache helicopters – was briefly withheld as punishment for the military overthrow of the elected Muslim Brotherhood government led by Mohamed Morsi. The aircraft were finally delivered in December, to help the military deal with the growing insurgency in the Sinai.

Despite the umbilical cord linking the Egyptian army and the Pentagon, it suits Cairo to blame the Americans for successive events. One example is its rapid acceptance of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is now banned as a terrorist organisation.

In 2012, when he was a general, president Abdel Fattah El Sisi said the US had “stabbed Egypt in the back” over the Muslim Brotherhood. But despite everything, there is no chance of Cairo reversing the legacy of the late president Sadat, who expelled Soviet advisers in 1972 and threw in his lot with the Americans.

This has not stopped trade booming between Egypt and Russia, and Mr Putin promising to help Egypt build its first nuclear power plant. He has also floated the idea of Egypt and Russia doing business in their own currencies.

In Turkey, Mr Putin’s action was even more stark. He announced the cancellation of the South Stream pipeline project, designed to take Russian gas to south eastern Europe and Italy. The project has been made unviable due to reduced European gas demand. There are also concerns in Brussels about becoming too dependent on Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant. But Mr Putin took the lead in repudiating it, and announced that the gas would be sold in Turkey, not Europe.

Mr Putin’s switch away from the West has been gestating at least since 2008, when Russia went into battle against the US-supplied and trained army of Georgia, on Russia’s southern border. The blowback from the eurozone crisis, which saw the rouble lose 16 per cent of its value in 2011, was a further spur.

By the time of his re-election as president in 2012, Mr Putin was ready to reorientate the Russian economy to withstand western pressure. As Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy of the Brookings Institution in Washington have pointed out, Mr Putin called on Russian oligarchs to bring their capital back to Russia, a process known as “de-offshoring”. He also began to diversify sources of imports.

This is not a return to Soviet-style autarky, where the economy is sealed off from the rest of the world. Rather, it is a government-led search for partners beyond the reach of the US treasury’s “smart” sanctions, which target any individual or organisation that uses the dollar. China is clearly the first priority, but Turkey and Egypt are useful too, as is India.

Mr Putin’s plan explains his surprising response to the imposition of western sanctions last year. He instantly banned the import of food from America and the European Union, to the despair of Greek fruit-growers and the delight of Turkish and Egyptian ones.

This self-imposed import ban had a greater impact than western sanctions on ordinary Russians who found supermarket shelves suddenly bare of some of their favourite foods. At the time it was seen as an own goal. But it makes sense as part of Mr Putin’s imports-diversification plan.

Will this work? Clearly Russia does not have the money or the armed forces to challenge American dominance in the Middle East. An economy that cuts itself off from US technology is never going to be first rate. But it does show that there is no shortage of countries willing to explore ways of doing business that are beyond the reach of the long arm of the US treasury, just in case they ever fall foul of Washington.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs

On Twitter: @aphilps