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2 THE ROVING
EYE Turkey: The sultans of
swing By Pepe Escobar
To follow Pepe's articles on the Great
Arab Revolt, please click here.
At the sixth al-Jazeera forum in Doha in
mid-March, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet
Davutoglu gave a remarkable speech. He argued that
the great 2011 Arab revolt was "necessary in order
to restore the natural flow of history". According
to him, "abnormalities" had to be corrected; the
carving-up strategy of colonialism (which, for
instance, severed historical links between
Damascus and Baghdad); and the Cold War (which,
for instance, made enemies out of Turkey and
Syria). The time had come, he
said, when an ordinary Arab
can change history.
Davutoglu also
stressed that the Middle Eastern masses - "who
want respect and dignity" - must be heard. He
emphasized the need of transparency,
accountability, human rights, the rule of law, and
that "the territorial integrity of our countries
and the region must be protected" - referring
specifically to Libya and Yemen.
Then
there was the Leaders of Change summit in
Istanbul, also in mid-March. Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan described Turkey as "a democratic
social state based on social justice". He also did
not mince words when criticizing the West for not
really supporting the great 2011 Arab revolt - or
at least procrastinating; and he warned about the
temptation of invading Libya as the US invaded
Iraq. If there were any regime change in Libya, it
should come from within, not via foreign
intervention.
Erdogan also had time to
destroy the failed concepts of end of history,
clash of civilizations and the war on terror,
while Davutoglu chastised the West for believing
that "Arab societies didn't deserve democracy, and
needed authoritarian regimes to preserve the
status quo and prevent Islamic radicalism". Their
conclusion: what's going on in the Middle East
today holds out the promise of showing the way
towards a "global, political, economic and
cultural new order".
Now that's the kind
of talk when you want to position yourself as a
regional leader and the ultimate bridge between
East and West. Erdogan already held the moral high
ground among the Arab world's masses; he had
explicitly called, from the beginning, for
president Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt.
Soon everyone from Casablanca to Muscat was
talking about the Turkish model as the blueprint
for the new Arab world. But then came Libya.
Turkey had billions of dollars invested in
Libya, not to mention over 20,000 workers
(evacuated in a matter of days). Ankara also
clearly saw how the West was making a major power
play for a possible new Libya. From inside the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Turkey
forcefully condemned United Nations resolution
1973 while being at the forefront of sending
humanitarian help. And all this while Turkish
business already prepared their return to Libya.
These moves spell out a very skillful
diplomatic game - to say the least. The question,
thus, is inevitable; what is Turkey really up to?
Full power ahead Before 2050,
Turkey will be the third European power and the
ninth world power - with more people than Germany,
a first-class army, and a capability to display
plenty of soft power via its good universities, a
strong and diverse economy, technical know-how and
the ruling party's ability to "sell" its brand of
democratic Islam. Soon Turkey may become a
full-time member of the hot BRICS group of
emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa). Last year, at a summit in Brasilia,
the coming of "BRICTS" was seriously discussed.
No wonder eyebrows have been seriously
raised. Western misconception, fueled by centuries
of historical baggage, fears Erdogan of the
Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP) party
as a neo-Ottoman sultan - and aspiring caliph -
leading an informal empire ranging from the
Eastern Mediterranean to Western China, from the
Balkans to the Middle East (and he might even -
God forbid - go for the reconquista of Jerusalem
...)
Even before the great 2011 Arab
revolt, the US State Department's eyebrows had
been particularly affected. One of the WikiLeaks
cablegate's most explosive revelations was the
labeling of Erdogan as unreliable and even
"anti-American" - as he is a practicing Muslim
cultivating serious and political ties with Iran,
not to mention being too independent from
Washington in all regional matters, from Iraq to
Central Asia.
President Barack Obama was
forced to place a courtesy call to Erdogan last
December. In other times, that call would subtly
imply that any Turkish president who really
supports the US should not fear a military coup.
But these are multi-polar times ... If only the
State Department had bothered to understand the
sophisticated Turkish take on a region the Sublime
Porte (the palace entrance to the chief minister
of the Ottoman Empire) dominated for half a
millennium.
Go East, young Turk
The point was never that America is losing
Turkey - or that Erdogan is a neo-Ottoman caliph
(whatever that means ...) The point is to
understand what Turkey's strategic depth is all
about. It's all in a book: Stratejik Derinlik:
Turkiye'nin Uluslararasi Konumu (Strategic
Depth: Turkey's International Position), published
in Istanbul in 2001 by Ahmet Davutoglu, then a
professor of international relations at the
University of Marmara, now Turkey's foreign
minister.
Davutoglu hails from Konya, in
the south central steppes of Anatolia, where the
great 13th century Sufi poet Rumi is buried (Rumi,
by the way, was an Afghan, born in Balkh, although
"Rumi" means literally "Anatolian"). Konya also
happens to be the heart of the AKP party. But much
more than expressing the worldview of a new
political/religious elite from Anatolia and cities
in the Black Sea defying the traditional, secular
elites of Istanbul and Ankara, the book by the
"neo-Ottoman Kissinger" is an organic expose of
current Ankara geopolitics.
Davutoglu
places Turkey at the center of three concentric
circles. 1) Balkans, Black Sea basin, Caucasus. 2)
Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. 3) Persian
Gulf, Africa and Central Asia. Thus he places
Turkey as the privileged gateway for accessing the
Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, the Red Sea and the
Persian Gulf.
In the former bipolar world,
Ankara was a passive actor - a mere weaponized arm
of the US/NATO. Now Turkey is a key player in the
Middle East; as Davutoglu puts it, "this is our
home". As influence areas go, Turkey may claim no
less than eight: Balkans, Black Sea, Caucasus,
Caspian, Turkic Central Asia, Persian Gulf, Middle
East and Mediterranean.
Many may not know
- although the Pentagon does - that Muslims
control no less than eight strategic bottlenecks
for global naval traffic: Dardanelles, Bosphorus,
Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, Hormuz, Malacca, Sonda and
Lombok, plus the condominium in Gibraltar.
To put this all in
perspective Davutoglu even comes up with a
formula: neo-Ottomanism + pan-Turkism + Islam =
Great Turkey.
Neo-Ottomanism links to Arab lands but
also the Balkans; pan-Turkism links to Central
Asia; and Islam links to the whole dar-al-Islam,
the lands of Islam, from Morocco to Indonesia.
This is what Russian strategists would call the
"near abroad". So as much as Germany is the
central and autonomous power in Europe, Davutoglu
stresses that Turkey performs the same role
further east. It's all based on cultural and
economic vectors - soft power, not weapons.
There are doubts about strategic depth
(see Danger
signs in Turkey's strategic depth Asia Times
Online, June 22, 2010). But the key point is that,
in economic terms, Turkey would love nothing
better than to become the new China. For this to
happen, it's essential to configure Anatolia as
the ultimate Pipelineistan strategic crossroads
for the export of Russian, Caspian-Central Asian,
Iraqi and Iranian oil and gas to Europe.
That's exactly where Turkey meets its top
trade partner, Germany. But it may be a long and
winding road ahead. A Transatlantic Trends 2010
poll (see here)
revealed that only 38% of Turks and 23% of
Europeans believe Turkey will ever be accepted
into the European Union (EU). This does not mean
that Turkey has given up on Europe; it's now
applying a different strategy.
Crucially,
Davutoglu ranks the partnership between Turkey and
Iran as equivalent to France and Germany. It's
under this marker that should be analyzed the link
between Ankara and Brasilia at the UN Security
Council last year against Washington, London and
Paris over the ultra-strategic Iranian nuclear
dossier.
Davutoglu's circle in Ankara is
very much aware that the Orientalist-named Middle
East has been for over half a millennium the
privileged arena of an Ottoman-Safavid rivalry.
Syria - close to Iran - is a critical
case. Ankara has been advising Damascus to reform
- and fast. In the words of Turkish President
Abdullah Gul, "There can be no closed regime on
the Mediterranean coast. [President Bashar] Assad
is aware of this, too ... We are sharing our
experiences with him and we do not want chaos in
Syria."
At the same time, Ankara knows
very well the House of Saud is freaking out with
the increasingly closer relationship between
Ankara and Tehran. Yet it helps that Gul lived in
Jeddah for many years and knows how the Saudis
think. Plus the fact that the Ottomans knew
everything one needed to know about the power of
sectarianism in the Middle East. A firm
realpolitik signal is that Ankara did not oppose
the Saudi invasion of Bahrain (well, just a
little).
An explosive
neighborhood Now momentarily buried by all
the turbulence related to the great 2011 Arab
revolt, a crucial regional fact is that Ankara now
sees Tehran as the golden door to Central Asia and
the Persian Gulf. This means certified extra
turbulence ahead for Washington, Jerusalem and US
Arab client states, as Turkey has become a
forceful, inescapable actor in both the Iranian
and the Palestinian question (no wonder after the
Mavi Marmara episode Erdogan became
informally known as "the King of Gaza").
A
sound Davutoglu maxim though is "zero problems
with the neighbors". And what a dodgy neighborhood
that is. In Turkey, there are more Azeris than in
Azerbaijan; more Armenians than in Armenia; more
Albanians than in Albania and Kosovo; more
Bosnians than in Bosnia; and more Kurds than in
Iraqi Kurdistan. These are all potential powder
kegs.
For example, Ankara is very active
economically in Iraqi Kurdistan - but at the same
time there are ample suspicions that the US
Central Intelligence Agency and the Israeli Mossad
may be behind renewed Kurdish attacks against
Turkish forces in southeast
Anatolia.
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