We at the Jordan Center stand with all the people of Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the world who oppose the Russian invasion of Ukraine. See our statement here.
Above: View of the Dhofar Mountain Range in Yemen.
Philipp Casula obtained his PhD in sociology at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and researched Soviet policies in the Middle East.
From Messianism to Pragmatism was the subtitle of a seminal book on Russian foreign policy in the Middle East, published in 1993. The author, renowned scholar Alexey Vasiliev, argued that, increasingly, what motivated Soviet and Russian decision-making in international affairs were not ideological considerations, but sober, rational and “pragmatic” concerns. This notion of “pragmatism” has also guided Western assessments of Russian foreign policy, which framed the nation as a "pragmatic" and "rational" actor. The ongoing war in Ukraine, however, contradicts any notion of Russian "pragmatism." For example, if Russian politicians truly feel that their country is "encircled" by NATO and fear Ukrainian membership in the organization, invasion is hardly a "pragmatic" step, since it serves only to make NATO more attractive for Ukrainians in the future.
This war, which Putin "justified" through rhetoric that gives special importance to questions of territorial and spatial control, seems to highlight the Russian preoccupation with re-establishing spheres of influence. Especially important to these "justifications" is a specific vision of history, which seeks to legitimize Russia's territorial claims.
However, the crisis runs deeper than recent rhetoric. The history of Russian-Ukrainian relations is one of estrangement. It is a story of how two countries, despite many similarities, have parted ways — not only in terms of space and history, but also in terms of society, culture, and politics. In many ways, the history of the two nations illustrates Russia's lack of soft power. As this post will show, this lack is rooted in Russia's fundamental lack of empathy for, and recognition of, other world nations.
Prior to the war in Ukraine, another prominent instance of Russia's failure to exercise soft power occurred in the Middle East. The Russian intervention in the Syrian Civil War changed the stakes of the conflict and resulted in an established presence of Russian troops in Syria. It is precisely hard power that yielded the desiderata of Russian foreign policy, giving the country a firm foothold in a key Middle Eastern region. As in the past, this Russian “return” to the Middle East ignores the potential of soft power, i.e., the power of attraction.
One seeming exception to this rule of a Russian or Soviet lack of soft power is South Yemen, which from 1967 on modeled its political system very closely on that of the USSR. South Yemen was much more ideologically aligned with the Soviet Union than any other Middle Eastern country at that time. Eager to spread its socialist revolution into the Gulf area, South Yemen (along with the USSR) supported the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) in its efforts to “liberate” the region of Dhofar and overthrow the Omani regime.
As I have shown in a recently published paper, the Soviets' understanding of the conflict was limited and conditioned by condescending perceptions of the state of development and of local interpretations of socialism that did not draw directly on Soviet prescripts. Yemeni revolutionaries drew inspiration from other liberation movements, especially those in Palestine, Vietnam, China, and Cuba. Meanwhile, Soviet journalists, policymakers, and academics assessed the prospects for socialism in Yemen against Soviet standards alone. Generally, Soviet observers were not willing to accept heterodox views of socialism and doubted that certain countries could achieve socialism at all. It did not help that many Middle Eastern movements and regimes prioritized the achievement and consolidation of national independence over socialism.
In the 1970s, Soviet reports on Yemen and Dhofar appeared in Soviet media such as Azia i Afrika segodnia [Asia and Africa Today] or Pravda. These articles displayed a mix of admiration for Yemeni revolutionary zeal and condescension for their backwardness and “misunderstanding” of socialism. Instead of centering the political potential of Yemen and Dhofar, publications focused on exoticizing Yemen and romanticizing the liberation movement, highlighting the physical features of Yemeni and Dhofari people and the "Oriental" beauty of female revolutionaries, and disregarding the political importance of the inroads that socialism had made in the region.
Material from the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee (SKSSAA) reveals a less romantic picture of Yemen and Dhofar. The SKSSAA was the main Soviet interlocutor for all liberation movements in the developing world, a kind of unofficial ministry of foreign affairs. In the case of Yemen and the PFLOAG, the SKSSAA entered local bureaucratic routines and formed a symbiosis. The existence of both organizations depended on a permanent fight for socialism in Dhofar. Routine messages offer evidence of day-to-day work to stage a variety of events.
In particular, and most importantly, the SKSSAA awarded scholarships at Soviet universities, one of the most important commodities the Committee had to offer. The SKSSAA also routinely extended flattering notes on the importance of the Dhofari revolution. Meanwhile, the Yemeni side quickly learned what kinds of language yielded Soviet material support. At the same time, from the Soviet perspective, it was unacceptable for Yemeni revolutionaries to inscribe themselves into what historian Abdel Razzaq Takriti called a “global community of Revolution that boasted its own practices, literatures, modes of expression, ideologies and signs.”
The Soviet side thus largely failed to appreciate the political uniqueness and importance of the Dhofari experience. It was also unable to grasp the potential of other socialist currents in the Middle East, reducing possible cooperation to giving or withholding of material support. This form of “pragmatism,” as Alexei Vasiliev termed the Soviet Union's approach to the Middle East in the 1970s, was reciprocal, pointing to a lack of Soviet soft power.
Where does this historical over-reliance on hard power leave Russia in the Middle East — or indeed, in Ukraine— today? In the Middle East, Russia persists in the approach it learned during late socialism, in which cooperation with Arab movements never becomes a true partnership, instead remaining a business relationship maintained (or discontinued) according to mutual advantage. From the perspective of this worldview, there is no need even to understand or accept other countries' motivations or cultures, still less to learn from them.
This pattern repeats itself in contemporary Ukraine: Russia negates Ukraine's cultural identity and sovereign existence, denying its population the right to an alternative, democratic form of governance. At the same time, Russia seems unable to attract Ukraine by economic, cultural and political means. In neither of these dimensions does Russia offer an inclusive vision for a common future Ukraine can accept — because it negates Ukraine itself.
The war has only consolidated this soft-power deficit. Lacking any power in the cultural and economic realms, and due to the political or diplomatic incapacity of its political class to to empathize with their Ukrainian interlocutors, what remains is "pragmatism," which ultimately can entail violence and war. As foreign policy, "pragmatism" has thus shown itself to be very unattractive.
