Seeking to explain how Vladimir Putin has extended his country’s influence throughout the Middle East—with arms sales, energy investments, and of course the military intervention in Syria—Vance Serchuk compares his strategy with that employed, mutatis mutandis, by Henry Kissinger during and after the Yom Kippur War. By showing its willingness and ability to support its ally Israel during that conflict, the U.S. established itself as the powerbroker between the warring parties, demonstrated that Moscow could not be counted upon for effective support, and eventually brought Egypt into the American camp in the cold war. Serchuk writes:

This, in fact, is much the same calculus that Putin has applied to the Syrian civil war since its outbreak. . . . Of course, there is no moral equivalence between Washington’s steadfast defense of its democratic ally Israel under threat of annihilation in 1973 and Putin’s rescue of one of the world’s most brutal dictators from a popular uprising demanding basic freedoms. . . .

[But] by backing Assad to the hilt, Putin could showcase the inability of American power to achieve its declared objective and therefore ensure its progressive irrelevance to the U.S. allies in the Middle East that had, like Washington, hitched themselves to Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. At the same time, by becoming indispensable to the Syrian dictator’s survival, Putin positioned himself to be the most important factor not only for the regime in Damascus but also, in time, for its stymied opponents.

Today, Putin’s intervention in Syria has similarly situated Russia so that it is closer to each of the Middle East’s contestants than any of them are to each other. . . . Last year senior Russian leaders similarly made a show of flying directly from Tehran to Tel Aviv, according to senior Israeli officials, subtly demonstrating their capacity for precisely the kind of shuttle diplomacy that Kissinger made his stock-in-trade after the Yom Kippur War.

But, Serchuk goes on to argue, Putin—despite wishful thinking in both Jerusalem and Washington—won’t use his influence to restrain the Islamic Republic, as demonstrated by his swift reneging on his promises to Israel that he would keep Iranian forces from its borders:

[W]hile Russia has been content to let the Israelis keep the Iranians in check through a campaign of airstrikes in Syria, its interest is in establishing a kind of equilibrium there—with itself at the center. Even if Russia were able to expel Iranian forces entirely from the country—a dubious proposition, given its light military footprint—actually doing so would diminish the Kremlin’s importance at the heart of this new Levantine order. It would also put the burden of preserving Assad in power exclusively on Moscow. Both are contrary to Russia’s self-interest.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.