In a Senate hearing last week, the State Department’s third-ranking official issued a stern warning to the Kremlin concerning its planned sale of the S-300 air defense system to Iran. “We have made it very clear to the Russians,” declared Under Secretary for Political Affairs Thomas Shannon, “that we consider this to be a bad move, that we consider it to be destabilizing and not in keeping with what we’ve been trying to accomplish, not only through the JCPOA, but broadly in terms of our engagement with Iran.”
Vladimir Putin begs to differ. Yesterday, to the sound of crickets at Foggy Bottom, Tehran announced that Moscow had delivered the first part of the surface-to-air missile system. The Russian leader’s defiance should come as no surprise. After all, Putin is trying to accomplish very different things from what the State Department wants, not only through the nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), but broadly in terms of his engagement with Iran.
The Russian and Iranian regimes typically describe the S-300 as a defensive weapon, and so it is. It can shoot down planes or cruise missiles up to 90 miles away and would complicate any American or Israeli effort to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites. But the S-300 also constitutes an offensive system, and it harbors the potential to shift the military balance of power in the region, which is yet another reason Tehran wants it so badly — and Moscow, one of its most important allies, remains eager to sell it.
RELATED: Vladimir Putin’s Big Short
For example, Iran could move the truck-mounted and highly mobile S-300 to support its Houthi proxies in Yemen, which could then shoot down Saudi fighter jets. Putin himself has referred to such a possibility, noting last year, during a call-in TV show in Russia, that the S-300 could serve as “a deterrent factor in connection with the situation in Yemen.” Tehran could also export the system to the Assad regime or the terrorist group Hezbollah, which could then use it to deter Israeli air strikes from across the Lebanese or Syrian border. Alternatively, if Iran positioned the S-300 on its southern border, it could detect American and allied military flights in nearby bases and disrupt civilian air traffic.
In effect, the S-300 enables Tehran to threaten the airspace of its neighbors. In this sense, Russia’s own use of the S-300 functions as a model. As Will Cathcart, a former media adviser to the president of Georgia, observed last April at the Daily Beast: “Putin has sent S-300 missile systems to Crimea and just about every breakaway Russia region on the map. This is not to protect those regions, of course. The point of the S-300 is to project power and achieve armed tactical control over the airspace of those territories.”
