Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visited Syria February 15 to oversee Ukraine-related Russian military exercises. Media accounts report that long-range, nuclear-capable Tu-22M3 bombers and MiG-31K strike fighter jets carrying the latest Kinzhal hypersonic cruise missiles landed at the Russian air base in Syria’s coastal province of Latakia as part of the drills. Russian amphibious assault vessels docked at Tartous for refueling and maintenance before departing to the Black Sea for Ukraine-related military drills and deployment. Shoigu also met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus.

The Shoigu visit makes clear a number of realities about the impact of Russia’s intervention in Syria and the way it presaged, and prepared the way, for what is happening in Ukraine. It also provides hints of the type of challenges Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to make to the U.S.-led, rules-based international system that many countries, including in the Gulf, have benefited from. Syria has given Russia a strategic foothold in the Mediterranean and Middle East, with a naval base at Tartous (with a 49-year, free-of-charge lease, according to media accounts) and a newly expanded air base at Hmeimim, near Latakia. The war in Syria allowed Russia to test new weapons systems in combat conditions and show to the world that it has been formidably rearming its military since 2010. The Syrian intervention helped to give Russia the confidence it could intervene in a decisive fashion and challenge the West’s response.

This intervention further emboldened Putin and the Russian military; Putin was able to achieve many of his key objectives without incurring the “crippling costs” that many, including then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken, assumed would be inevitable. Putin’s Syria war makes clear that he is a gambler, and a very good one. Careful assessment of risk, confident bluffing, limited goal, and probing for weakness help shape this gambler’s strategy and the ways Russia is willing to deploy its military. Members of the Syrian Defense Forces in northeastern Syria indicated that the Russian military in Syria – its routine equipment and soldiers, unlike some of its high-tech weapons systems – was not particularly impressive; its trucks and armored vehicles broke down regularly, and its soldiers did not seem as fit or professional as the U.S. special forces the SDF worked with. But they said the Russian military punched way above its weight class, despite relatively small numbers, because its soldiers (or at least their commanders) were willing to take risks and did not seem constrained by the possibility of casualties. There also seemed to be confidence that with mutually agreed-upon rules of engagement and de-confliction procedures in place with the U.S. side, the Russian military could push the envelope in routine encounters and not be at risk of U.S. forces responding with lethal actions.

The one countervailing lesson Russian forces learned well in Syria, from the annihilating riposte U.S. special forces inflicted on Russian Wagner Group mercenary forces one fateful Deir al-Zour night in 2018, was to avoid at all costs direct conflict with U.S. forces where lethal power could be used. Several hundred Russian and Syrian regime troops were killed in a couple of hours, without a single U.S. casualty, after these forces attacked a small U.S. outpost near a Conoco gas plant. It is probably a lesson Putin has absorbed well and recognizes that his Ukraine invasion keeps his forces distant from a U.S. military shoring up NATO countries but still in an arena that allows for plenty of strutting, bullying, and threatening blandishments.

In dealing with Turkey in Syria, Russia gained confidence at playing a game of escalation with a NATO country, emboldening it with the certainty it can get out of an escalation with the West with its gains intact. A serious clash with Turkey in 2015, when it shot down a Russian bomber, and again in 2020, when clashes prompted by a Syrian regime offensive in Idlib left scores of dead and wounded Turkish soldiers and Russian-supported regime forces, seem to have convinced Russia it has mastered this escalation game.

And its Syria involvement returned Russia to the Middle East as a global power and a Middle East mediator that can talk to all sides. The Syria conflict has in some ways made Russia, certainly in the Middle East. Gulf leaders, for example, frustrated with the perceived weakness of former President Barack Obama for not enforcing his 2013 redline against Syrian regime use of chemical weapons – and angered at earlier U.S. failure to stand by long-time allies like Egypt’s ousted President Hosni Mubarak – admired Putin’s decisive intervention on behalf of Assad, whatever reservations they may have harbored about particular aspects of it. Putin looks brutal but effective and reliable. Russia’s successes in Syria also helped it exorcise the remnant demons of self-doubt and hesitancy that lingered after the drawn-out debacle in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

With Putin’s bloody, disrupting Ukraine gambit now underway, it’s clear operations in Syria helped usher in this new, Russia-recentered world order, that privileges disorder, disruption, disinformation, and use of military power and diplomatic muscle to intimidate and silence opponents. Whether by shoring up a threatened regime like Assad’s or, in the Russian cultural context, addressing historical, irredentist-fed grievances and attempting to shove aside the U.S.-led, loosely rule-based global order focused on open markets, security alliances, and democratic community, the Syria experience greatly fed Russian confidence.

Gulf leaders are watching carefully and are likely to engage in hedging and trying to keep a low profile as much as possible to avoid getting caught between Russia and the United States and Europeans. Gulf Arab leaders have been clear that one of their biggest concerns in coming years is the potential of being caught in the middle of a new cold war between Washington and Beijing. But because of the invasion of Ukraine, such an uncomfortable conundrum could arise more quickly between Moscow and Washington, suddenly and to their dismay. In the coming weeks and months, assuming the Ukraine crisis drags on, U.S. officials are likely to increase various forms of pressure on Gulf leaders. Russia, of course, will be pushing hard in the opposite direction, and even China may make its views, at least on principle, known.

Although pushing back against such pressure to the extent possible, while avoiding angering the United States, would seem the intuitive response, the truth is that the Ukraine invasion offers opportunity for some Gulf leaders. Qatar, for example, can certainly play an important role in offsetting a liquefied natural gas energy crisis for much of Europe, though not in the short term, and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates could help stabilize soaring oil prices by increasing production, although initial indications are that they have demurred. For most, however, such opportunities come with significant risks: If U.S. determination falters or there are fractures in the U.S.-Europe position, any Gulf country that moves toward pronounced support of the United States on this issue risks being caught flat-footed and exposed to Russian wrath and retaliation. But for some, this could be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to wipe the slate clean and open a new page with an administration desperately in need of allies to turn up the pressure and inflict high costs on Russia. Historically, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries were strongly aligned with a Western, U.S.-led, rules-based international system. If the Ukraine crisis spurs a resurgence in the Western alliance and a new determination to restore order on behalf of the existing global and regional status quo, all the GCC states would be obvious beneficiaries. And if they can help to make that happen, by helping to alleviate the global energy crisis and by siding with an international status quo alliance, they may well choose to. The Gulf Arab countries could find much to welcome in the prospect of a return to a more familiar and reliable international order and have little to gain from the proliferation of chaos, aggression, and coercion. The war in Syria and the destabilizing rise of Iran’s regional militia network amply demonstrate what kind of future the ascendance of international chaos that is being threatened by the Ukraine crisis offers to them.