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Interesting excerpt from the book The Accidental Superpower:
Turkey: An Ancient Power Awakes
For most of the past two millennia, the Sea of Marmara was
the richest spot on the planet because it was the crossroads.
Most land-borne trade between Europe and South Asia passed
through the pair of double peninsulas that bracket the Sea of
Marmara, while any waterborne trade between the Danube and
Black Sea and the Mediterranean passed through the Sea of
Marmara itself. For the many fortress cities of the Middle East,
Istanbul was the fortress that managed to somehow be rich
and cosmopolitan rather than starving and parochial. For the
often overrun peoples of the eastern Balkans, Marmara was
eternal—the epitome of secure civilization. Whether under the
Romans, Byzantines, or Ottoman Turks, Marmara was the
world’s jewel.
But all ages end. The rise of deepwater navigation greatly
diminished the land-borne trade routes by opening up cheaper,
faster, and safer routes that bypassed Persia and the
Hordelands. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 eliminated
what land-borne trade remained. The death blow for
waterborne commerce came shortly thereafter, courtesy of the
Soviet rise. With the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe in the
final months of World War II, the great navigable rivers of the
Black Sea, the Danube and Dnieper, became internal Soviet
waterways. Trade linkages that dated to antiquity disappeared
behind an iron wall of ideology, and the Sea of Marmara quite
literally became a backwater.
The military defeats of the century leading up to the Soviet
rise were in many ways just as painful for the Turks. They
had lost control of every province of their once-sprawling
empire that was worthy of the term. Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania,
and Serbia had been stripped from them along with the Levant
and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They still
held Marmara itself—having fought bitterly and successfully for it
at Gallipoli—but their only remaining territory was the rugged,
arid mountain knot of Anatolia, a land that had been useful as
little more than a buffer zone so long as there had been
civilization in Marmara. In the short course of only three
generations, the Turks had fallen from one of the great powers
to little more than a regional satrapy.
Rather than attempt to play a great game in which they
would be crushed, the Turks chose retreat. They fortified their
borders—all of which were now uniformly hostile—walling their
culture off from the world. After World War II, they fell under
direct Soviet pressure, forcing them to stiffly accept membership
in the rising Americans’ security and economic systems in order
to maintain independence.
Membership in Bretton Woods ended European preying
upon what was left of Turkish lands and allowed them access,
albeit with restrictions, to the European market. Between that
income and the locally generated capital from Marmara, the
Turks set about developing the near-useless lands of rump
Anatolia. Over the decades, road and rail snaked into the
highlands, turning villages into towns and towns into
manufacturing centers. In many ways, life in Turkey between
1950 and 2000 was a preview of the developing world’s
experience of 2000–2010: capital from a rich area flooding into
substandard lands because there were no other options.
Turkey didn’t awaken from some ninety years of geopolitical
slumber on its own. Once again, it was the Russians who
forced a change of Turkish circumstances, only this time it was
the Soviet collapse rather than the Soviet rise. In 1992, Soviet
forces simply dissolved, and Turkey’s entire eastern, northern,
and northwestern horizons opened at once. History restarted,
and the Turks, having been allowed to obsess about internal
issues for three generations, were unprepared. Just as they are
unprepared for the coming end of the free trade era.
All of the above leaves the Turks at the heart of one of the
world’s most mutable regions. Working clockwise from Turkey’s
southeast:
• Iraq will become the region’s wild card. Either it will become
a loose satellite under Iranian influence, or it will reconsolidate
under a harsh, Saddam Hussein–style militarized dictatorship.
Either way, the southeast will be Turkey’s most problematic
border.
• To the south, Lebanon and Syria will collapse as modern
states, devolving into a shatterbelt of poor and competing
city-states. The only country in the region with the capacity to
install order will be Turkey, but there will be little in the Levant
of meaningful interest. Turkey will be able to pick and choose
its friends, its enemies, and its issues.
• To the west, Greece will revert from being a country to being
a geographic expression and cease being a drain on Turkish
defense planning.
• To the northwest, the countries of Bulgaria and Romania
were under Soviet occupation, then brought into NATO and the
EU, and now face being cast out again as the free trade order
breaks down. They are likely to see the Turks as a rare
bastion of stability in an otherwise degrading Europe.
• To the north, Russian power will surge into Ukraine, opposed
by an ad hoc coalition of Poland, Romania, and Sweden. As
part of the Russian logic is to expressly limit Turkish options,
Ankara will have little choice but to join the fluid competition.
• To the east, the culturally ancient but politically neophyte
countries of Armenia and Georgia face collapse, both due to
internal political and military weakness and to overwhelming
pressure from Iran and Russia. And likely Turkey as well.
It is a lengthy, daunting list of changes and challenges, but
unlike for most countries in the new era, there are many
opportunities for Turkey as well. When countries have options,
it is very easy to put them into the “successful” category, but
harder to predict specifically what it is that they will do. The
natural thing for the Turks to do would be to expand. Turkey
has been experimenting in the past decade with extending its
diplomatic and economic footprint in the Arab world, but has
discovered that there is little there worth taking and what’s
there is a whole lot of trouble.
Still, some of Turkey’s options (and challenges) seem more
feasible (and more pressing). I see Turkey focusing its efforts in
three primary directions.
First, Bulgaria and Romania are a slam dunk. Whether
outright conquering, an Ottoman-style suzerainty relationship, or
a more traditional alliance, a formalized relationship with the
two Danubian peoples would solidify Turkish control over both
the eastern Black Sea and the lower Danube, end any possible
chance of food shortages, and put a plug in Russia’s ambitions.
Second, Turkey must secure some oil supplies. Luckily,
Turkey’s needs are moderate—it only requires about 700,000
bpd—and it has some options. Northern Iraq is home to the
Kirkuk oil fields, which are capable of producing more than
enough for Turkey as well as its Bulgarian and Romanian
relations. Additionally, Kirkuk already has infrastructure linking it
to Turkey, specifically a series of pipelines that terminate at
Ceyhan, Turkey’s southern energy hub and superport. Control
of northern Iraq would also give Turkey direct overlordship
over the largest Kurdish community not located in Turkey
already, allowing the Turks to better smother Kurdish
separatism.
Of course, control over northern Iraq will not come easily.
Kurds aside, Turkey will be entering into direct and unrelenting
competition with Iran. In terms of direct military competition,
the Turks hold the clear advantage: Their army is better
equipped, better trained, and actually skilled at military
operations rather than domestic pacification. They also, unlike
the Iranians, have an air force eminently worthy of the name.
For their part, the Iranians have a far superior intelligence
network and will delight in using it to spawn endless militant
activity among Turkey’s minority groups, first and most violently
the Kurds—both the preexisting Turkish Kurds in Turkey and
the new ones in northern Iraq.
Option two is equally viable from an economic point of view,
but is far more strategically circumspect: Azerbaijan. Like
Kirkuk, Azerbaijan’s offshore energy complex is capable of
seeing to Turkey’s needs, and like Kirkuk there is already
infrastructure bringing Azerbaijani crude to Ceyhan. Additionally,
the Azerbaijanis are actually Turkish ethnically and so would be
far more likely to welcome Turkish engagement than Iraq’s
Kurds. However, getting to Azerbaijan presents problems.
Georgia, a country that is for all intents and purposes a failed
state even before the free trade rubric dissolves, is in the way.
It isn’t so much that Georgia will resist meaningfully—based on
how Turkey’s efforts are packaged, it may even welcome
outright occupation—but moving into Georgia in force will put
Turkey at the very top of Russia’s shit list.
Which brings us to the third theater that the Turks are
likely to engage: Ukraine. This is not a must; Turkey can
choose to play the imperial game in Ukraine. Turkey would
vastly prefer that Russia remain an unanchored power in the
Hordelands, without a purchase in the Carpathians. Such a
vulnerable Russia will start breaking up from within a decade
or two. In particular the Turks would like to reprise their
strategy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and get a
grip on the Crimean Peninsula, as it would put the Russians on
the defensive without the Turks having to expose themselves to
the dangers of the Hordelands themselves.
But rather than help shove the Russians into oblivion, the
Turks may allow themselves to be bribed into neutrality.
Turkey doesn’t need Ukrainian wheat, or really even
Ukrainian trade. What it needs is natural gas. Ukraine doesn’t
have any, but it does control infrastructure that could bring it
natural gas… from Russia. Russia may be able to offer the
Turks recognition of Turkish supremacy in the lower Danube,
in exchange for some good deals on natural gas exports. If the
deals are exceedingly good, the Russians and Turks may even
be able to find a means of working around each other’s
interests in the Caucasus as well.
Should the Russians fail to make an offer that is sufficiently
lucrative from the Turks’ point of view, then the Turks will
be able to eject the Russians from the Caucasus wholesale and
hugely complicate Russian efforts in Ukraine. The Turks are as
young and vibrant as the Russians are old and sickly. Unlike
most of the developing world, they boast a large and growing
market that is not overly dependent upon external capital, or
even external demand.
The Turks can draw upon many groups of similar ethnicities
across the northern Caucasus region, most immediately the
Ingush, Dagestanis, Kabards, Circassians, and Chechens, and
farther abroad the Kazakhs and Uzbeks as well. Committed
Turkish opposition would be more than enough to unravel
Russia’s entire southern rim. Which isn’t to say that the
Russians would take it lying down. Russia would repay the
effort by using its world-class intelligence skills to destabilize
Turkey from within, stirring up every minority the Turks control whether in territories new or old.
Turkey: An Ancient Power Awakes
For most of the past two millennia, the Sea of Marmara was
the richest spot on the planet because it was the crossroads.
Most land-borne trade between Europe and South Asia passed
through the pair of double peninsulas that bracket the Sea of
Marmara, while any waterborne trade between the Danube and
Black Sea and the Mediterranean passed through the Sea of
Marmara itself. For the many fortress cities of the Middle East,
Istanbul was the fortress that managed to somehow be rich
and cosmopolitan rather than starving and parochial. For the
often overrun peoples of the eastern Balkans, Marmara was
eternal—the epitome of secure civilization. Whether under the
Romans, Byzantines, or Ottoman Turks, Marmara was the
world’s jewel.
But all ages end. The rise of deepwater navigation greatly
diminished the land-borne trade routes by opening up cheaper,
faster, and safer routes that bypassed Persia and the
Hordelands. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 eliminated
what land-borne trade remained. The death blow for
waterborne commerce came shortly thereafter, courtesy of the
Soviet rise. With the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe in the
final months of World War II, the great navigable rivers of the
Black Sea, the Danube and Dnieper, became internal Soviet
waterways. Trade linkages that dated to antiquity disappeared
behind an iron wall of ideology, and the Sea of Marmara quite
literally became a backwater.
The military defeats of the century leading up to the Soviet
rise were in many ways just as painful for the Turks. They
had lost control of every province of their once-sprawling
empire that was worthy of the term. Egypt, Bulgaria, Romania,
and Serbia had been stripped from them along with the Levant
and the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. They still
held Marmara itself—having fought bitterly and successfully for it
at Gallipoli—but their only remaining territory was the rugged,
arid mountain knot of Anatolia, a land that had been useful as
little more than a buffer zone so long as there had been
civilization in Marmara. In the short course of only three
generations, the Turks had fallen from one of the great powers
to little more than a regional satrapy.
Rather than attempt to play a great game in which they
would be crushed, the Turks chose retreat. They fortified their
borders—all of which were now uniformly hostile—walling their
culture off from the world. After World War II, they fell under
direct Soviet pressure, forcing them to stiffly accept membership
in the rising Americans’ security and economic systems in order
to maintain independence.
Membership in Bretton Woods ended European preying
upon what was left of Turkish lands and allowed them access,
albeit with restrictions, to the European market. Between that
income and the locally generated capital from Marmara, the
Turks set about developing the near-useless lands of rump
Anatolia. Over the decades, road and rail snaked into the
highlands, turning villages into towns and towns into
manufacturing centers. In many ways, life in Turkey between
1950 and 2000 was a preview of the developing world’s
experience of 2000–2010: capital from a rich area flooding into
substandard lands because there were no other options.
Turkey didn’t awaken from some ninety years of geopolitical
slumber on its own. Once again, it was the Russians who
forced a change of Turkish circumstances, only this time it was
the Soviet collapse rather than the Soviet rise. In 1992, Soviet
forces simply dissolved, and Turkey’s entire eastern, northern,
and northwestern horizons opened at once. History restarted,
and the Turks, having been allowed to obsess about internal
issues for three generations, were unprepared. Just as they are
unprepared for the coming end of the free trade era.
All of the above leaves the Turks at the heart of one of the
world’s most mutable regions. Working clockwise from Turkey’s
southeast:
• Iraq will become the region’s wild card. Either it will become
a loose satellite under Iranian influence, or it will reconsolidate
under a harsh, Saddam Hussein–style militarized dictatorship.
Either way, the southeast will be Turkey’s most problematic
border.
• To the south, Lebanon and Syria will collapse as modern
states, devolving into a shatterbelt of poor and competing
city-states. The only country in the region with the capacity to
install order will be Turkey, but there will be little in the Levant
of meaningful interest. Turkey will be able to pick and choose
its friends, its enemies, and its issues.
• To the west, Greece will revert from being a country to being
a geographic expression and cease being a drain on Turkish
defense planning.
• To the northwest, the countries of Bulgaria and Romania
were under Soviet occupation, then brought into NATO and the
EU, and now face being cast out again as the free trade order
breaks down. They are likely to see the Turks as a rare
bastion of stability in an otherwise degrading Europe.
• To the north, Russian power will surge into Ukraine, opposed
by an ad hoc coalition of Poland, Romania, and Sweden. As
part of the Russian logic is to expressly limit Turkish options,
Ankara will have little choice but to join the fluid competition.
• To the east, the culturally ancient but politically neophyte
countries of Armenia and Georgia face collapse, both due to
internal political and military weakness and to overwhelming
pressure from Iran and Russia. And likely Turkey as well.
It is a lengthy, daunting list of changes and challenges, but
unlike for most countries in the new era, there are many
opportunities for Turkey as well. When countries have options,
it is very easy to put them into the “successful” category, but
harder to predict specifically what it is that they will do. The
natural thing for the Turks to do would be to expand. Turkey
has been experimenting in the past decade with extending its
diplomatic and economic footprint in the Arab world, but has
discovered that there is little there worth taking and what’s
there is a whole lot of trouble.
Still, some of Turkey’s options (and challenges) seem more
feasible (and more pressing). I see Turkey focusing its efforts in
three primary directions.
First, Bulgaria and Romania are a slam dunk. Whether
outright conquering, an Ottoman-style suzerainty relationship, or
a more traditional alliance, a formalized relationship with the
two Danubian peoples would solidify Turkish control over both
the eastern Black Sea and the lower Danube, end any possible
chance of food shortages, and put a plug in Russia’s ambitions.
Second, Turkey must secure some oil supplies. Luckily,
Turkey’s needs are moderate—it only requires about 700,000
bpd—and it has some options. Northern Iraq is home to the
Kirkuk oil fields, which are capable of producing more than
enough for Turkey as well as its Bulgarian and Romanian
relations. Additionally, Kirkuk already has infrastructure linking it
to Turkey, specifically a series of pipelines that terminate at
Ceyhan, Turkey’s southern energy hub and superport. Control
of northern Iraq would also give Turkey direct overlordship
over the largest Kurdish community not located in Turkey
already, allowing the Turks to better smother Kurdish
separatism.
Of course, control over northern Iraq will not come easily.
Kurds aside, Turkey will be entering into direct and unrelenting
competition with Iran. In terms of direct military competition,
the Turks hold the clear advantage: Their army is better
equipped, better trained, and actually skilled at military
operations rather than domestic pacification. They also, unlike
the Iranians, have an air force eminently worthy of the name.
For their part, the Iranians have a far superior intelligence
network and will delight in using it to spawn endless militant
activity among Turkey’s minority groups, first and most violently
the Kurds—both the preexisting Turkish Kurds in Turkey and
the new ones in northern Iraq.
Option two is equally viable from an economic point of view,
but is far more strategically circumspect: Azerbaijan. Like
Kirkuk, Azerbaijan’s offshore energy complex is capable of
seeing to Turkey’s needs, and like Kirkuk there is already
infrastructure bringing Azerbaijani crude to Ceyhan. Additionally,
the Azerbaijanis are actually Turkish ethnically and so would be
far more likely to welcome Turkish engagement than Iraq’s
Kurds. However, getting to Azerbaijan presents problems.
Georgia, a country that is for all intents and purposes a failed
state even before the free trade rubric dissolves, is in the way.
It isn’t so much that Georgia will resist meaningfully—based on
how Turkey’s efforts are packaged, it may even welcome
outright occupation—but moving into Georgia in force will put
Turkey at the very top of Russia’s shit list.
Which brings us to the third theater that the Turks are
likely to engage: Ukraine. This is not a must; Turkey can
choose to play the imperial game in Ukraine. Turkey would
vastly prefer that Russia remain an unanchored power in the
Hordelands, without a purchase in the Carpathians. Such a
vulnerable Russia will start breaking up from within a decade
or two. In particular the Turks would like to reprise their
strategy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries and get a
grip on the Crimean Peninsula, as it would put the Russians on
the defensive without the Turks having to expose themselves to
the dangers of the Hordelands themselves.
But rather than help shove the Russians into oblivion, the
Turks may allow themselves to be bribed into neutrality.
Turkey doesn’t need Ukrainian wheat, or really even
Ukrainian trade. What it needs is natural gas. Ukraine doesn’t
have any, but it does control infrastructure that could bring it
natural gas… from Russia. Russia may be able to offer the
Turks recognition of Turkish supremacy in the lower Danube,
in exchange for some good deals on natural gas exports. If the
deals are exceedingly good, the Russians and Turks may even
be able to find a means of working around each other’s
interests in the Caucasus as well.
Should the Russians fail to make an offer that is sufficiently
lucrative from the Turks’ point of view, then the Turks will
be able to eject the Russians from the Caucasus wholesale and
hugely complicate Russian efforts in Ukraine. The Turks are as
young and vibrant as the Russians are old and sickly. Unlike
most of the developing world, they boast a large and growing
market that is not overly dependent upon external capital, or
even external demand.
The Turks can draw upon many groups of similar ethnicities
across the northern Caucasus region, most immediately the
Ingush, Dagestanis, Kabards, Circassians, and Chechens, and
farther abroad the Kazakhs and Uzbeks as well. Committed
Turkish opposition would be more than enough to unravel
Russia’s entire southern rim. Which isn’t to say that the
Russians would take it lying down. Russia would repay the
effort by using its world-class intelligence skills to destabilize
Turkey from within, stirring up every minority the Turks control whether in territories new or old.
