Can Vladimir Putin End the War in Iran?

The obvious question about Putin brokering peace in Iran is this: Why the hell would he want to?

The Iran war is one of the best things to happen to him in years.

It’s a bonanza for his economy. With the strait closed and oil prices spiking from the global supply shock, Russia is raking in an extra $150 million per day. The longer commercial traffic stays bottled up in the Persian Gulf, sending prices higher, the more exorbitant that windfall will become.

It also means renewed leverage for Russia over Europe, which has tried weaning itself off of cheap Russian energy and is now discovering how expensive that can be. “If European companies and European buyers suddenly decide to reorient themselves and provide us with long-term, sustainable cooperation, devoid of political pressures … then go ahead. We’ve never refused,” Putin said a few days ago, offering to resume sales to the continent. “Long-term” cooperation presumably means a rethink about whether Ukraine deserves sovereignty.

Speaking of which, the Iran war is also making it easier for Russia to terrorize Ukrainians. U.S. air defense munitions that otherwise might have ended up protecting cities like Kyiv are now needed to protect American service members in the Gulf. “If Putin was feeling any pressure to negotiate [over Ukraine] before, and it’s not clear he was, it’s gone for now,” one EU official told Politico. “The U.S. is distracted and burning through some of the weapons Europe wants to purchase for Ukraine. … It’s a very gloomy scenario.”

There are intangible benefits to Moscow from the Iran conflict too. After four years of having its battlefield prestige torched by Ukraine with help from the United States, the Kremlin is now enjoying payback by supplying Iran with intelligence on U.S. targets. There’s nothing Russia can do to restore its own military reputation, but there are things it can do to damage America’s, and it’s doing them. The icing on the cake would be forcing the president of the United States to dial up the czar and beg for a solution to the de facto hostage crisis in the strait.

Seems pretty cut and dried. What could Putin possibly gain relative to all that to make ending the Iran war worth his while?

Well, there is the small matter of a potential quid pro quo with the White House involving Ukraine.

Last week former Trump national security adviser turned prosecution target John Bolton told CNN that he worried about the terms of the bargain Russia might offer the president. “Donald, you know, you’re right. We should not be fighting with each other here,” he imagined Putin telling Trump. “Let’s make a deal. We’ll cease all intelligence … to Iran if you cease the supply of all intelligence to Ukraine.” The president might accept that, Bolton fretted.

Indeed he might. To Trump, that would be a twofer, a way to expedite the end of not one but two conflicts that are currently bedeviling him. At last he’d have a pretext for abandoning Ukraine that he could semi-seriously sell to Americans: I didn’t want to do it but I had to in order to protect our boys.

Would Putin trade the oil dividend he’s been reaping since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz for a significant advantage in Ukraine that he can secure by convincing Iran to reopen it? Quite possibly, I think.

Especially if that quid pro quo came packaged with further sanctions relief from the White House. A few days ago the Treasury Department granted India a monthlong waiver to purchase Russian oil without U.S. retaliation to help that country cope with the supply in the Persian Gulf drying up. It would be easy for Trump to justify extending that policy to other nations to reward Putin for his assistance with Iran, framing it as a measure to ease gas prices as quickly as possible for consumers after the Iran crisis.

The Kremlin would also benefit from an outcome in Iran that reasserted its influence over the global order, at least in its near-abroad. “The current paradigm seems to be that the U.S. does what it wants, and no one else, Russia included, can do much about it,” a source in Moscow complained this week to The New Yorker, hinting at another unexpected role reversal between our two countries. America has traditionally scolded Russia for settling its disputes militarily, without regard for diplomacy or international law; now, with Russian power diminished and a Putin-esque figure in the White House, the scolding runs the other way.

Brokering peace in Iran would be Russia’s way of reestablishing that the world remains multipolar to a greater degree than Donald Trump would have everyone believe. And, perverse as it may seem, it would let Ukraine’s tormentors argue that they’re as much a force for global stability as postliberal America is. Putin didn’t start any wars that threatened to destabilize the world economy within the first 12 days, right? And hey—when it comes to seizing territory from NATO members, the United States is now at least as much of a threat as Russia is.

If nothing else, the Kremlin might be willing to help end the war in Iran simply because its leverage in this matter isn’t indefinite. Should the U.S. military figure out a way to neutralize the threat to oil tankers in the strait, most of Russia’s usefulness to Trump as a liaison to Tehran will evaporate. Admittedly, that doesn’t seem likely—some analysts think nothing short of a ground operation to seize Iran’s coastline will do—but every day that Putin waits increases the odds that the crisis will be resolved without Russian input.

That probably explains why he offered his assistance to Trump during their phone call this week. Even so, enlisting Putin to pressure Iran to reopen the strait is worth doing for the White House only if there’s good reason to believe the Iranians would bow to that pressure.

My guess is that if you asked the average American what it’ll take to get oil in the Gulf flowing again, he or she would say it’s simple. Once the U.S. and Israel stop attacking, Iran will stop firing at ships in the strait.

I’m not sure that’s true. Various statements from regime figures this week suggest that holding the global oil supply hostage isn’t a mere matter of pressuring its enemies to stand down. It’s a form of punishment that might persist even after the bombs stop falling.

When the president said a few days ago that the war will be over soon, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded with a statement declaring that they “are the ones who will determine the end of the war.” Iran’s top national security official elaborated on that this morning. “Trump says he is looking for a speedy victory. While starting a war is easy, it cannot be won with a few tweets. We will not relent until making you sorry for this grave miscalculation,” he wrote, appending his message with the hashtag “#TrumpMustPay.”

Empty bravado? Maybe. But a few days ago one expert told the Wall Street Journal he believes Iran might not agree to stop shooting even if the United States and Israel are willing. The Iranian “calculus is that [their enemies] paced themselves out,” he said, “and that in coming days the U.S. and Israel will run out of interceptors and they will be able to inflict much more harm on every one of the U.S. allies in the region, and then Trump will be coming to beg for some kind of ceasefire, for which they could dictate the terms.”

If the regime’s determination to prolong the conflict seems unlikely to you, ask yourself this: What have the U.S. and Israel achieved strategically since the first 48 hours or so of the war?

They’ve accomplished a lot tactically, destroying Iranian missiles, aircraft, and naval ships. But as far as I can tell, they’re not meaningfully closer to any of the various big-picture strategic goals that Trump has offered to justify the mission. Iran’s enriched uranium remains buried under the rubble from last year’s bombings, presumably reachable by excavators in time. There’s been no popular uprising by Iranian civilians amid the chaos of the air campaign. And the regime remains intact—and is likely to stay that way, according to the latest assessment from U.S. intelligence.

A bunch of its leaders are dead, yes, but a group of lunatics obsessed with religious martyrdom is plainly willing to pay that price to accomplish its goals.

The closest thing to a strategic victory for the good guys is that Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbors has been temporarily degraded. But that’s not much of a victory, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week: “From the Gulf’s perspective, a wounded but undefeated Iranian regime would represent the worst possible outcome, as it would retain the ability to terrorize cities such as Doha or Dubai with drones, and continue disrupting oil traffic through Hormuz.”

The bad guys, on the other hand, have achieved many of their strategic aims. They’ve put Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu on the hook for an energy calamity that could tank the world’s economy. They’ve demonstrated their resilience against the combined power of two of the most formidable militaries on Earth. And they’ve raised the cost to Arab nations of allying with the U.S. by successfully menacing those nations’ oil infrastructure. If this ends with the mullahs still in charge, more radicalized than they were before, and bent on deterring future military campaigns to take them out, everyone in the region who’s worried about Iranian nuclear weapons will need to worry that much more.

So why wouldn’t they fight on and keep the war going for a while?

If they get lucky, they might even open a rift between the U.S. and Israel. Trump prefers an outcome in Iran like that in Venezuela; he’s indifferent to the nature of the regime that governs the country provided that it answers to him. Israel wants nothing less than regime change after decades of being targeted by a fanatic Shiite revolutionary cohort and its proxies. The longer Iran keeps shooting into the strait, the more likely the two partners’ goals will diverge: The White House will want a ceasefire deal that ends the energy bottleneck, but Tel Aviv will want to stay the course and eliminate an existential threat.

And remember, in this case it takes two to TACO.

That’s the situation that Vladimir Putin, peacemaker, would confront if Trump were to seek his help in getting Iran to stand down.

As an Iranian partner, Russia does have cards to play with Tehran. Volodymyr Zelensky believes Moscow is supplying Iran with drones and missiles while CNN has heard that the Russians are now providing the Iranians not just with intelligence on American targets but advice on drone tactics gleaned from the war in Ukraine. “Specific tactical advice would indicate a new level of potentially lethal support,” the outlet alleged.

Russia could, in theory, threaten to cut all of it as a way to pressure Iran to wrap up the war. And the Iranians might find that exit ramp attractive depending on how humiliating the circumstances of America’s withdrawal look to be. If Trump is willing to “extract the U.S. from the war and make the case that the military had largely achieved its objectives”—i.e. cutting and running amid pro forma claims of victory if only Tehran will reopen the strait—then maybe the regime will conclude that’s as total as a strategic victory is likely to be and accept Russia’s request to cease fire.

But if they’re determined to teach the U.S. a hard lesson about never messing with it again, turning Hormuz into a killbox for tankers until oil hits $200 per barrel, then one can imagine them ignoring Putin. That would be another way in which the Ukraine and Iran wars are symmetrical: In each case, the U.S. and Russia are managing client states who have strong ideological motives to resist coercion by their patrons to get them to stop shooting. The Ukrainians have spent 13 months fighting on despite Trump’s effort to bully them into carving off a piece of their country for Russia. Now, perhaps, it’s Iran’s turn to do the same with Putin.

But here again, the two conflicts aren’t analogous, are they? The president’s pressure on Ukraine has been sincere and intense; Putin’s pressure on Iran would be considerably gentler and probably not in earnest at all. For the reasons I explained earlier, he won’t be crying into his borscht if Iran decides it wants to bloody the White House’s nose by keeping the strait closed and sending global demand for Russian oil through the stratosphere.

Two autocrats, each deluded about his ability to impose his will via military force but only one stupid enough to start a war that’s directly benefiting the other: That’s who’s responsible for the conflicts in Ukraine and Iran. Americans are led by the stupider one.