by Pepe Escobar: posted with the author’s permission and cross-posted with The Cradle
Photo Credit: The Cradle
A deeply NATO-entrenched Turkey is heading east, but not in the way you think. Erdogan’s ‘Asia Anew’ strategy is all about Turkic primacy, and will likely be at odds with Chinese and Russian-driven integration plans
The information dropped like a Hellfire in the middle of a productive discussion with a group of top analysts in Istanbul: Across the Turkish establishment – from politicians to the military – over 90 percent are pro-NATO.
Eurasian ‘hopefuls’ in West Asia need to factor in this hard truth about Turkey’s oft-confusing foreign policies. The ‘Erdoganian neo-Ottomanism’ that runs through Turkey’s current ruling system is deeply colonized by a NATO psyche – which implies that any notion of real Turkish sovereignty may be severely overvalued.
And that sheds new light on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s perennial geopolitical waffling between NATO and Eurasia.
Let’s start with the mediation offered by Erdogan on the Russia-Ukraine drama, which for all practical purposes would mean a mediation between Russia and NATO.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu may not be the one dictating Ankara’s policy – my interlocutors stress that the man who really has Erdogan’s ears is his spokesman Ibrahim Kalin. Still, Cavusoglu’s latest talking points were quite intriguing:
- “Russian and Belarussian sources” told him there will be no “invasion” of Ukraine.
- The West “should be more careful” in making statements “about the allegedly possible ‘invasion’, as they lead to panic in Ukraine.”
- “We, as Turkey, are not a part of a conflict, war, problem, however, any tension affects us all, the economy, energy security, tourism.”
- “We will have a phone conversation with [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov on Wednesday, [then] with [Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro] Kuleba. We will happily agree to mediate if both parties agree. We gladly agree to host a meeting of the Minsk trio.”
- “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin should not close the door. They [the Russians] don’t have a positive or negative answer.”
Ankara’s efforts in positioning itself as a mediator may be laudable, but what Cavusoglu cannot possibly admit in public is their futility.
As much as Ankara enjoys good relations with Kiev – Bayraktar TB2 drone sales included – the heart of the matter is not even between Russia and NATO; it’s between Moscow and Washington.
Moreover, Erdogan’s offer had already been sidelined by notorious opportunist – and totally out of his depth – Emmanuel Macron, via his meme-celebrated visit to Moscow, where he was politely but bluntly dismissed by Putin.
The Kremlin has been making it very clear, even before issuing its demands on security guarantees, that the only interlocutors that matter are the people in charge – as in the Russophobic/neocon/humanitarian-imperialist combo that remote controls the current president of the United States.
How to “Make Turkey Great Again”
It will be a hard slog to “Make Turkey Great Again” in Washington, even if they’re both part of the NATO matrix. It’s one thing to inaugurate the $300 million Turkevi Center – or Turkish House – in Manhattan, near the UN headquarters, complete with a top-floor presidential suite for Erdogan. But entirely another thing for the Americans to allow him real sovereignty.
Still, whenever he’s snubbed, Erdogan always comes up with a thorny counter. If he is prevented from meeting the real players behind ‘Biden’ last September in New York and Washington, he can always announce, as he did, his intention to buy yet another batch of Russian S-400s which, irony of ironies, is a missile system designed to destroy NATO weaponry. As Erdogan then boldly proclaimed: “In the future, nobody will be able to interfere in terms of what kind of defense systems we acquire, from which country, at what level.”
Global South players, from West Asia and beyond, have been following with enormous interest (and trepidation) how Ankara, from a secular, well-behaved NATO semi-colony on the periphery of the EU eager to join the Brussels machine, turned into an Islamist-tinged regional hegemon – complete with supporting and weaponizing “moderate rebels” in Syria, dispatching military advisers to Libya, propelling Azerbaijan with armed drones to defeat Armenia, and last but not least, promoting their own, idiosyncratic version of Eurasian integration.
The trouble is how Turkey is supposed to pay for all this ambitious overreach – considering the dire state of its economy.
Quite a few Justice and Development Party (AKP) politicians in Ankara are avid promoters of a “Turkic world” that would stretch not only from the Caucasus to Central Asia but all the way to Yakutia, in Russia’s far east, and Xinjiang, in China’s far west. It isn’t hard to imagine how this is viewed in Moscow and Beijing.
It was actually Devlet Bahceli, the leader of the ultra-right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), a top Erdogan ally, who presented a revised map of the Turkic world to the Turkish president.
The response by Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, who happens to be a Turkologist, was priceless. At the time, he said that the heart of the Turkic world should be in the Altai mountains. That is, in Russia; not Turkey.
And that brings us to the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), the new denomination of the former Turkic Council, as approved by their 8th summit last November in Istanbul.
The OTS has five members (Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan) and two observers (Hungary and Turkmenistan). The secretary-general is a Kazakh diplomat, Baghdad Amreyev.
An initial visit to their lovely, salmon-colored historical palace in Sultanahmet – prior to an upcoming official conversation – establishes some much needed context. Among the dazzling Byzantine and Ottoman neighboring structures, we find the tomb of the last Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II, who happens to be none other than Erdogan’s role model.
Depending on who you talk to – the largely AKP-controlled media or Kemalist intellectuals – Abdulhamid II is either a venerable religious leader fighting subversives and the Western colonial powers in the late 19th century or a retrograde, fanatical nutcase.
The OTS is an immensely intriguing organization. It brings together a NATO member with the second most-powerful army (Turkey); an EU member (Hungary, yet still an observer); two CSTO members, that is, states very close to Russia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan); and a supremely idiosyncratic, permanently-neutral gas superpower (Turkmenistan).
Even at OTS headquarters they agree, smiles included, that no one outside Turkey knows about the real aims of the organization, which are loosely framed as investment in connectivity, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), green technologies and smart cities. Most of the investment would be supposed to come from Turkish companies.
Until recently, Erdogan was not exactly focused on the Turkic world in Central Asia – which was considered too secular from an Islamist point of view, or even worse, a bunch of dreaded crypto-Kemalists. The focus was on the US-defined MENA (Middle East/Northern Africa) region – which happened, historically, to include the key Ottoman lands.
The record, of course, shows that these neo-Ottoman incursions did not go down so well in Muslim lands. Hence the spectacular re-entrance of Eurasia into Turkish foreign policy. It may sound swell in theory, but way more complicated in practice.
Crisscrossing Eurasia
The OTS may be unified by language – but you won’t find many people speaking Turkish across Central Asia: they’re all about Russian.
History and culture is a different story, and it goes something like this:
As Peskov correctly pointed out, the Turcophone peoples originally came from the Altai mountains – between Mongolia and Central Asia. Between the 7th and the 17th centuries, they were invested in a conquering migration drive in the opposite direction compared to Alexander The Great and his Hellenistic successors, the Seleucid kings and then the Arabs under Islam.
So, for a long time, we had a few ephemeral empires founded by Turkish dynasties and built essentially over Persian Sassanid structures, with an add-on by Turkmen groups, until the Ottomans, based on Byzantine structures, established an imperial system that lasted for no less than five centuries.
In terms of ancient connectivity, the route of the steppes lay more to the north of Eurasia – and was followed in the 13th century, with spectacular success, by Genghis Khan and his successors. We all know today that the Mongols built the very first, real Eurasia-wide empire. And in the process, they also took the southern route traveled by the Turks and Turkmen.
Just like the Persian, Greek and Arab empires, the Turkic and Mongol empires were bent on continental conquest. The main line of communication across Eurasia was always, in the precise definition by Toynbee, “the steppe and desert chains that cut across the belt of civilizations, from Sahara to Mongolia.”
Much like China’s recent revamp of the Silk Road concept, Erdogan – even as he’s not a reader and much less a historian – also has his own neo-Ottoman interpretation of what makes connectivity run.
Instinctively, to his credit, he seems to have understood how the conquering migration runs of the Turko-Mongols from Central Asia towards West Asia ended up shattering this huge zone of discontinuity, very hard to move around, between East Asia and Europe.
The sun “rises again from the East”
Erdogan himself went no-Eurasia-holds-barred at the November summit of the OTS: “Inshallah, the sun will soon start to rise once again from the East.”
But that ‘East’ was very specific: “The Turkestan region, which had been the cradle of civilization for thousands of years, will once again be a center of attraction and enlightenment for the entirety of humanity.”
The mere mention of ‘Turkestan’ certainly sent shivers all across the Zhongnanhai in Beijing. At the OTS though, they assure the organization has absolutely no designs on Xinjiang: “It’s not a state. We unite Turkic states.”
Much more relevant to the ground is the OTS drive towards “sustainable multimodal connectivity.”
Enter a twin strategy juxtaposing the Trans-Caspian East-West Middle Corridor Initiative – a trans-Eurasia link – and the Zangezur corridor, linking the South Caucasus to both Europe and Central Asia.
Zangezur is absolutely key for Ankara, because it allows for a direct link not only to its key OTS ally Azerbaijan but also to Turkic Central Asia. For the past three decades, this connectivity route happened to be blocked by Armenia. Not anymore. Still, a final agreement with Armenia is pending.
In theory, the Chinese New Silk Roads – or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – and the Turkish Middle Corridor binding the Turkic world are complementary. Yet only (connectivity) facts on the ground will tell, in time.
The fact is, Turkey is already neck deep in a major connectivity drive. Take the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway connecting Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan. Ankara may not have anything nearly approaching the scale and scope of the BRI master road map, which plans all steps to 2049.
What has been designed is a Turkic World Vision – 2040, adopted at the OTS summit, with the Middle Corridor billed as “the shortest and safest transport link between East and West,” including a new special economic zone (SEZ) called Turan, in Kazakhstan, to be launched in 2022.
This SEZ will be exclusively for OTS members and observers. The Turan steppe, significantly, is also considered by many in Turkey as the original home of Turkic peoples. It remains to be seen how Turan will interact with the Khorgos SEZ, at the Kazakh-Chinese border, an essential node of BRI. As it stands, the view that Ankara will pose a major systemic threat to Beijing in the long run are mere speculations.
The bottom line is that the OTS is part of a larger Erdogan initiative also not well known outside Turkey: Asia Anew. It’s this initiative that will be guiding Ankara’s expanding connections across Asia, with the OTS promoted as one among many “tools of regional cooperation.”
Whether Ankara can leverage this vastly ambitious strategic reading of geography and history to build a new sphere of influence depends on a lot of Turkish lira that the Erdogan coffers sorely lack.
Meanwhile, why not dream of becoming Sultan of Eurasia? Well, Abdulhamid II would never have thought that his future pupil would upstage him by going East – like Alexander The Great – and not West.
It has been alleged by some that Russia under Putin is a ”one-man show”, which it is not. Turkey under Erdogan is a much more convincing case in point. If anything, Erdogan’s Ottoman-inspired nonsense (East/West/North/South) sustained a jolting blow in Kazakhstan just over a month ago. Turkey minus Erdogan is simply an ordinary NATO poodle as Pepe makes clear. But, still, there are some intriguing things about Erdogan’s perspicacity that spring to mind, not least his handling of the refugee torrents at the expense of Turkey’s partners in crime. That might come in handy also for post-Erdogan Turkey.
Surely it is time for Kurdistan to be developed in eastern Turkey ? It could be a buffer zone to protect Armenia and isolate Azerbijan from the lunacies in Ankara.
There must be a scenario by which Turkey expresses the diversity of its ethnic groups in geography rather as US hoped in Syria and Iraq ?
Translation, ‘stop making trouble in my backyard, I want to be the one who does that’
Erdogans ambition is clearly bigger then his capability. Involvement of Hungary is interesting. Their founding national mythology is about Hungarians as fighting bellicose horsemen of central Asian steppes, riding into Europe before 1000 AD and conquering meeker populations living then in Danube basin. Huns are supposed to be ancestors mof modern Hungarians.
That may well be true from historical and language point of view, but genetic picture of modern Hungarians has a lot of Slavic influence. Just look at physiognomy of Orban. He could be a Polish politican or Ukie oligarh :-)
Looks like a NATO Trojan horse into Asia under the “uniting the Turkish world” excuse.
Yes, the old 18th and 19th centuries British-Ottomen alliances of conveinence seems to be back. Indeed it is clear to all with the eyes to see it.
Together, the British and Turks, just like Israel, use the infinate magic printing press of uncle Sam to bank roll nefarious plans all around the world.
They then run and hide behind Uncle Sams carrier groups and 6000+ deliverable nukes when China, Russia, Iran, and other nations look like they raise a hand against them.
MI6 Pet Terrorists and White Helmets work with Turkey in Syria.
MI6 and British Spec Ops work with Turkey in the Black Sea and even inside Ukraine (with more than a few analysts suggesting that Turkish pet terrorists are actually deployed inside Ukraine).
MI6 and British Spec Ops with Turkish pet terrorists work together inside Libya.
British, Israeli, and Turkish intel work side by side on the “shared” island of Cyprus – with the British using thier several bases (including “that” infamous yet little one at the Turkish-British line of seperation) on Cyprus to support operations inside Syria and Libya. The British regualry give advanced air defence and radar cover to Israeli jets flying undeclared war missions in the region – ensuring that neither Syrian fighter jets nor Russian fighter jets can pursue and intercept – and if any long range sams are launched they get shot down as the many explosions seen and heard close to Cyprus (and even remains of Syrian/Russia air defence missiles being found on Cyprus) attest.
MI6, CIA, and Turkish intel (including turkish trained pet terrorists) were either thrown out of Kazakstan or killed outright during the recent attempted colour revolution.
MI6, CIA, Turkish intel, and British Spec Ops still operate openly inside Afghanistan.
MI6, CIA, and Turkish Intel and military have a well known presence inside Tajikistan.
The Turkish are openly active inside Turkmenistan.
MI6, CIA, Turkish Intel and Turkish military are openly active inside Azerbaijan, with Israel also having a presence inside Azerbaijan (FOB for Iranian missions).
British, Turkish, and Israeli advisors are active inside Georgia.
MI6, CIA, and Turkish Intel have either directly supported or politically expressed support for the puppet “Guido” in Venezuela, with the British also spending £Millions developing thier old Naval and spy base just a few miles off the coast of Venezuela to accomodate modern NATO warships and modern Intel facilities.
It is facinating that where ever the Russians have an interest – anywhere in the world – the British, Americans, and often the Turks too just happen to “show up” and by coincidence chaos follows too.
It is almost as if the British, Americans, and the Turks are fighting a hybrid war against Russia, but that would be just a conspiracy theory……….
My thoughts as well. The Turks worked in tandem with the MI6 in the failed coup attempt in Kazakhstan. The brits haven’t given up on controlling Central Asia, and Turkey happens to be their ‘regional henchman’. Russia and China better have some countermeasures prepared.
In France we have a old saying: a dog always come back to it’s vomit.
The links between Russia-China must tighten with Iran.
This alliance will be able to easily drown that puppy in its vomit. And send it sowing chaos in west, in east Méditerranée.
It’s funny how Erdogan plans on connecting that huge landmass from Yakutia all the way to Istanbul only through such a narrow (2-3 Km width) Zangezur corridor. He certainly must have future plans conquering Armenia or even parts of southern Russia just to make his map look more uniform and also make sure he doesn’t have to always jump over the Caspian back and forth.
Regarding this whole ‘Ottoman Empire’ thing. I kind of get it the honor thing. If I was Mexico, I’d be pissed off at the U.S. stealing half of my country and I wouldn’t blame it if some of them look lustily at southern California, New Mexico, and Arizona [and even Texas] but anyway back to Erdogan.
Turkey is still a pretty big country but is it barren of resources? Did they just get really bad luck that despite its size that all they got was rocks, mountains, and bitterness. I hope they at least get to charge a toll to the U.S. / NATO ships crossing into the Black Sea.
Not sure what you mean by ” bad luck”…Turkey has a highly privileged, enviable geopolitical situation.
The bridge between East and West. Gate keepers of the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Inheritors of Byzantium and Ottoman empires.
The fact that Erdogan cannot make anything positive out of it is entirely due to his own shortcomings.
Rather humourous is the neo ottaman dream. So many competing pan plans in that region. At some time , if not already a great deal will be struck to accomodate various dreams and turkey will be the meal.
Yes many competing plans…
BTW this pan-Turkic dream towards the east has replaced the neo Ottoman dream towards the West. All at dream level ..
“An initial visit to their lovely, salmon-colored historical palace in Sultanahmet – prior to an upcoming official conversation – establishes some much needed context. Among the dazzling Byzantine and Ottoman neighboring structures, we find the tomb of the last Ottoman Sultan, Abdulhamid II, who happens to be none other than Erdogan’s role model.
Depending on who you talk to – the largely AKP-controlled media or Kemalist intellectuals – Abdulhamid II is either a venerable religious leader fighting subversives and the Western colonial powers in the late 19th century or a retrograde, fanatical nutcase.”
I don’t know about Abdulhamid II, but Sultan Erdogan obviously should be placed in the latter category: a retrograde, fanatical nutcase.
In this sense, Erdogan is perfect as an American and NATO ally, given that the USA and NATO have a proud tradition of covertly sponsoring and supporting retrograde, fanatical nutcases as their assets.
See Al-Queda, Al-Nusra Front, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Kosovo Liberation Army, ISIS-Daesh, and a charming nutcase named Usama Bin Laden.
Me, the dog and his sister everybody has got a slight impression that next time the Exceptionalistan provides a nice coup against this 8th century Satrap, the Russian intelligence will not save him again.
QuIte the opposite they might give the Langley guys the coordinates of the
sub-Prophet overlord.
The only useful thing for us that Turkey could do, would be leaving NATO. I strongly doubt they will ever do it. Unless they are kicked out, but that’s not about to happen either…
Me, dog and his sister everybody has got a slight impression nowadays that next time the Exceptionalistan provides a nice coup against this 8th century Satrap, the Russian intelligence will not save his skin again.
Quite the opposite they might give the coordinates of the ottoman sub-Prophet to the Langley hyenas.
I thought by now it was well understood that the Americans do not allow anyone any real ‘sovereignty.’
One either kisses the Godfather’s ring, or one sleeps with the fishes. That is the rule in America.
Erdogan’s policy can be aptly summed up as, “dancing on the heads of snakes”.
That said, I find this analysis lacking on many pivotal angles, chief amongst which is religious. This blindspot is a self-inflicted blindness that follows the one-eyed “secular analysis” which in turn lacks the veracity for a balanced view much less worldview.
If and when Turkey/Erdogan approached being such a powerful player in the midst of Eurasia, Iran, China and Russia will prevent his plan.
It always looks good and sometimes gets close, but these kinds of Empires don’t reach birth. The big players in Eurasia are not going to be outplayed by Turkey.
My humble mind and a look at the world map tell me that these Turkish ambitions are just challenging a strengthening of the Russia-Iran and also Iran-China axes.
And I also think that Kazakhstan can become a bigger problem for the RF, than Ukraine could ever become….
Nobody despised Erdogan more than the many Secular Kemalist Turks in Turkey. Unfortunately, responsible, democratic Muslim leadership that might cut into their wars or end the bloodshed is the last thing that the Neo-Con, War Mongering Bankster Colonialists want in the Middle East.
A perfect explanation of why Erdogan and Turkey should never be trusted by Russia (nor China). No matter how much we would like to think Turkey might leave NATO,it’s not true. Having 90% of Turkey’s establishment as pro-NATO says everything that needs to be said.
Scholz has tacitly agreed, like NATO did in Yugoslavia, Russia has a right to intervene in a R2P basis to save 10m Russian ethnics from the bandera concentrationcampguards/kapo oligarch genocides. Go Putin, NO UNSC mandate required as with Belgrade bombing. .
Thank you and well done Pepe for another enjoyable article. You are a breath of fresh air in these times. You provide a valuable glimpse into angst-laden Turkish psyche. We know you are in a delicate location, and need to return to Anatolia in the future, and so are forced to speak even more circumscribed than usual. We can read between the lines of your between the lines.
I agree Turkey unfortunately remains and will remain for foreseeable future a stalking horse of Empire, as you discovered where “over 90 percent are pro-NATO… deeply colonized by a NATO”. It is hard to break emotional bonds forged over 100 years, in spite of countless evidence of the rotting state of Empire. America and Europe used to be quite beautiful, albeit largely a visual Hollywood concoction, prior to the 1980s..
Turkey is as full of crazy contradictions as Ukraine, where Nazis break bread with Jews. In this case fanatical MB cadres plot with fanatically secular Kemalists on ways to survive Rumsfeld-Cebrowskian dismemberment and on the futile resurrection of aspects of Ottomanism. IMO both hopes will be dashed, in great part due to their regional rampages and over-reach with every neighbor. Turkey morphed from “no problems with neighbors” to no more friends.. We are most fortunate the Sun does not shine twice on the same despotic Hegemon..
Anglo-Zionists in their current death-spiral are forced to outsource guerrilla warfare on the BRI to their proxies, among them the Turks. The hook they use, besides stroking chauvinism, is “…the dire state of its economy … [and] a lot of Turkish lira that the Erdogan coffers sorely lack.” They got them tightly by the family jewels. Sending him to Dubai to obtain a next temporary line of credit from nemesis MbZ is the salt on the wound.
“Even at OTS headquarters they agree, smiles included, that no one outside Turkey knows about the real aims of the organization..” I respectfully disagree. Perhaps they craft the real mission in London and/or Geneva? Smiling savvy businessmen Turks appear on-board largely for social connectiveness over excellent coffee, and for new trading opportunities out East. They were blocked in EU and Arab directions due to historical animosities, and are now focused on Africa and Asia. Perhaps, as with the Masons and secret societies, the real mission is known only to the select top layer.
Re: “the Organization of Turkic States (OTS), the new denomination of the former Turkic Council,” – this is an expected shenanigan of Anglo-Zionist “Image Masseuses” to have revolving nomenclature such as in Al-CIAda franchise. They rebrand every decade or so, in order to change the topic of their ongoing criminality. A horse remains a horse, whether you paint on it black and white stripes and relabel it a zebra.
“In theory, the Chinese New Silk Roads – or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – and the Turkish Middle Corridor binding the Turkic world are complementary.” In practice, as crafted by Anglo-Saxons, they are mortal competitors. Perhaps some Turkic states and interests have benign intentions, but they will be shaped by larger forces towards conflict and severing BRI before being allowed their own connectivity. As with all Empire initiatives, it is not win-win, but win-lose alternative. The keys to sincere and benign intentions of Turks will be (1) an end to participation in color revolutions such as in Kazakhstan, (2) expansion of their Eurasian rail network, which is inimical to Empire. Anglo-Saxons waged world wars to break Berlin-Baghdad rail and trans-Siberian, etc.. The people of Mackinder have an existential fear of long rail lines on the World-Island..
In summary, thank you so much for this insight from Turkish perspective. I wish them well – provided they no longer serve as spoils-sports and stooges of Empire. Like most, they need urgent emancipation from the claws of Empire. There are those who understand it, such as Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, reaching out to China and Russia and multipolarity. We hope these forces soon become dominant throughout the Turkic lands.