Foreign policy

Putin Can Cautiously Enjoy the Iran Drama From the Audience

There will no doubt be some form of Iranian retaliation, but so long as the conflict does not escalate out of control, while it is hard to know for sure whether Tehran or Washington will ultimately gain the most, Moscow may be quietly satisfied.

While he may or may not be personally angry about the death — although we have no reason to believe there was any personal bond there, even though they met in 2015 — he must be satisfied that this plays to his narrative, that America is essentially an arrogant, imperial power.

Back in 2007, in his (in)famous speech to the Munich Security Conference, he had warned of the dangers of a “unipolar” — in other words, U.S.-dominated — world, in which there was nothing to stop “an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force — in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”

Once again, he can point to US actions as seeming to justify Russia’s current campaign to push back against the world order it represents, and also to explain and excuse away Moscow’s own ventures into the bloody realm of “targeted killings.”