Leon Hadar: Understanding Moscow's Mideast Policy

Leon Hadar, senior analyst at Wikistrat, a geostrategic consulting group, is the author of Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

A spoof of a BBC promo has been circulating on the Internet: "Greece is Collapsing, Iranians are getting aggressive & Rome is disarray. Welcome back to 430 BC!"

But you don't have to go back to antiquity for news: "The Levant and the Balkans are boiling, the Turks are angry, the Russians are aggressive & the West is nervous. Welcome back to 1853!"

The bloodshed in Syria, the economic collapse of Greece, an assertive Russia and a nervous West are not going to produce a rerun of the Crimean War, when czarist Russia fought against a military alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman Empire.

But at a time when neo-Ottomanism is rising in Ankara, it may not be surprising that Moscow is experiencing a resurgence of neo-Byzantinism...