The U.S. drone strike at Baghdad’s international airport that killed Major General Qassem Suleimani, head of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), has opened a new and potentially bloody act in the ongoing Middle Eastern drama. Suleimani had been as persistent a thorn in the side of the Americans as he had been an icon for the Iranian regime. The Quds Force bridged intelligence gathering, covert operations and overt military capabilities to make it the premier instrument for Tehran’s asymmetric campaigns against Washington and its efforts to carve out its own sphere of influence in the Middle East. This is a direct challenge to the Iranian regime — assassinating a serving senior officer on a third party’s soil — and indeed to Iraq’s sovereignty, especially as Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was also killed in the attack. The Iraqi parliament voted to demand the expulsion of US forces from its soil (a long-held Iranian ambition). Of course, Donald Trump, facing first impeachment and then re-election, will likely not mind this, as it will allow him to make good on one of his campaign promises. This strike does not look like part of a Middle East strategy so much as an admission of its absence, a quick fix of fire and fury and Fox-friendly optics. (It didn’t take long for people to note the parallel with Bill Clinton launching airstrikes on Iraq in December 1998, in the midst of his own impeachment scandal.) 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.” It also allows him to play the sober statesman. Russian news hyped that he and France’s President Macron had spoken and expressed their common concerns, while Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova highlighted the lack of any international mandate for the attack and archly noted that “American politicians have their own interests, given that this is the pre-election year.” Likewise, although the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal was on life-support after the unilateral withdrawal of the United States in 2018 and the re-imposition of sanctions, Russia can safely present itself as on the side of the angels, as Suleimani’s death pushes Iran further towards renuclearization. JCPOA may be all but dead — but being in the JCPOA process is another opportunity for Moscow to assert its global standing. There is also a direct benefit from seeing Iran directly challenged. Tehran and Moscow have certain interests in common, especially in minimizing U.S. influence in the Middle East, but they are at best frenemies. Tehran and Moscow may both be supporting Damascus, for example, but they have different agendas, and part of Russia’s reasons for intervening in 2015 had been precisely to prevent Syria from becoming an Iranian vassal.