On March 15, the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov received senior Hizballah officials in Moscow; two days later, Lavrov’s Israeli counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi, arrived in the same city for consultations. Shortly thereafter, Lavrov set off for the Persian Gulf, while Vladimir Putin flew to Turkey, where he attended the ribbon-cutting of a nuclear plant Russia built. Jonathan Spyer notes that in these meetings alone, the Kremlin shored up relations with all three of the Middle East’s rival blocs: the Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, the Sunni Islamists led by Qatar and Turkey, and the pro-Western countries led by Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and the UAE.

This approach contains a measure of sophistication, and has resulted in Moscow emerging as the go-to mediator on a variety of regional files which the United States has chosen, through weariness or other priorities, to [ignore]. When mediation is needed between Israel and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, Russia is the only relevant candidate, as has been demonstrated on two significant occasions recently.

In all these areas, Russian tactical pragmatism has proved an asset. In a manner quite unfamiliar to Western practices, but well in accordance with Middle Eastern realities, the Russians care little about final resolution of conflicts, and hardly at all about the mode of governance and the ideology of the elements with which they deal. They proceed on the basis of current shared interests, rather than longer-term partnerships. They are comfortable in the environment of frozen conflicts and divided countries, and have no sense of urgency in the need to rectify either of these situations.

In the fragmented spaces that characterize large parts of the post-2010 Arab world, this tactical flexibility can bring advantages. It enabled the Russians, for example, to support, ostensibly, the reconquest by their “ally” Assad of the entirety of Syria, while subsequently negotiating the current de-facto partition of the country in order to draw Turkey further from NATO and closer to the Russian orbit. It has enabled Moscow also, notably, to acquiesce to the near-weekly bombing raids by Israeli aircraft against targets belonging to Moscow’s supposed partner in Syria—Iran.

Russia’s regional approach has paid dividends largely because of the vacuum left by the partial U.S. disengagement from the Middle East.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.