Economics & Inequality Retirement Security Education Health Care Homeland Security Election Reform Media & Politics International Affairs TCF Project Sites: Donate to TCF Join our Listserv  Taking Note Home About TCF News Room Join our Listserv Russia's Policy in the Middle East: Prospects for Consensus and Conflict in the Middle East     Email    Printer-Friendly Dmitri Trenin, The Century Foundation, 3/2/2010 View other Russia Working Group papers. In "Russia's Policy in the Middle East," Dmitri Trenin maps the complicated relationship between Russia and the Middle East, and how Russia's renewed involvement in the region will have far-reaching effects on American foreign policy. Russia, by the mid-2000s, had recovered from its domestic crisis, and so did its global ambitions. While Moscow’s principal interests still lie mostly toward the west, the Middle East is back on Moscow’s radar screen and Russia’s withdrawal from the region has been reversed. The Middle East is important to Moscow for several reasons-- its physical proximity; the Muslim factor, as continuing religious and political turbulence within the Muslim world brings radical ideas and militants from the Middle East into Russia and impacts Russia’s policy in the Caucasus, the central Russian republics of Tatarstan and Bashkortostan, and post-Soviet Central Asia; large emigration from Russia to Israel, where 20 percent of the population are former Soviet Jews; the energy riches of the region; and Russian attention to the current U.S. focus on the region, and American military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Download the paper. Edition: online    Copyright 2010 The Century Foundation. Privacy Policy NY Office: 41 East 70th Street—New York, New York—10021—Phone:212-535-4441—212-879-9197 DC Office: 1333 H Street, NW—10th Floor— Washington, D.C. 20005— Phone: 202-387-0400— Fax: 202-483-9430