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Authors: Robert D. Kaplan
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contact with that of the Middle East. The national independence struggles of the nineteenth century in Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece encouraged the rise of Arab nationalist societies in Damascus and Beirut. Similarly, modern terrorism was born at the beginning of the twentieth century in Macedonia and Bulgaria, before filtering into Greater Syria.
In the early twenty-first century, Turkey boasted a vibrant and politically dominant Islamic movement, an immense military capability compared to almost any country in the Middle East save Israel, an economy that had grown 8 percent annually for many years, and still managed over 5 percent growth during the worldwide recession, and a dam system that made Turkey a water power to the same extent that Iran and Saudi Arabia were oil powers. These factors, seen and unseen, allow Turkey to compete with Iran for the locus of Islamic leadership and legitimacy. For years Turkey had been almost as lonelyas Israel in the Middle East. Its Ottoman era overlordship complicated its relationship with Arabs, even as its relations with neighboring Syria were overtly hostile, and those with Baathist Iraq and fundamentalist Iran tense. In 1998, Turkey was actually on the brink of war with Syria over Damascus’s support for the radical anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party. During this time Turkey maintained a virtual military alliance with Israel, confirming its status as a Middle East pariah. But all of this began to change with Erdogan’s and the Justice Party’s assumption of power, which came at the same time as the West’s downward plunge in Turkish public opinion, owing to Turkey’s virtual rejection by the European Union and an increasingly truculent right-wing America and right-wing Israel.
Turkey did not withdraw from NATO, nor break diplomatic relations with Israel. Rather, under Erdogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey adopted a policy of “no problems” with its immediate neighbors, which in particular meant historical rapprochements with Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Because of Turkey’s economy, so much more technologically advanced than its neighbors—and growing faster, too—Turkey’s robust influence in the Balkans to the west and the Caucasus to the east was already an established fact. Bulgaria, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were all flush with Turkish appliances and other consumer goods. But it was the Turkish championing of the Palestinians, and the intense popularity of the Turkish people which that engendered in Gaza, that made Turkey an integral organizational fact in the Arab world to a degree it had not enjoyed since Ottoman times. Neo-Ottomanism might have been a specific strategy developed by Davutoglu, but it also constituted a natural political evolution: the upshot of Turkey’s commanding geographical and economic position made suddenly relevant by its own intensifying Islamization. Neo-Ottomanism’s attractiveness rested on the unstated assumption that Turkey lacked both the means and the will in this era of globalization to actually carve out a new-old empire in the Middle East; rather, it rested on Turkey’s normalization of relations with its former Arab dependencies, for whom Ottoman rule was distant enough, and benign enough, at least whenviewed across the span of the decades and centuries, so as to welcome Turkey back into the fold now that it had turned hostility against Israel up several notches.
Davutoglu’s real innovation was reaching out to Iran. The civilizations of the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus, Turkic and Persian respectively, have had a long and complex relationship: Persian, as I’ve said, was the diplomatic language of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, even as the Ottomans and Safavid Persians were long at odds militarily in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One can say that the Turkish and Iranian peoples are rivals, while, nevertheless, their cultures and languages deeply intertwine; Rumi wrote in Persian,
In the early twenty-first century, Turkey boasted a vibrant and politically dominant Islamic movement, an immense military capability compared to almost any country in the Middle East save Israel, an economy that had grown 8 percent annually for many years, and still managed over 5 percent growth during the worldwide recession, and a dam system that made Turkey a water power to the same extent that Iran and Saudi Arabia were oil powers. These factors, seen and unseen, allow Turkey to compete with Iran for the locus of Islamic leadership and legitimacy. For years Turkey had been almost as lonelyas Israel in the Middle East. Its Ottoman era overlordship complicated its relationship with Arabs, even as its relations with neighboring Syria were overtly hostile, and those with Baathist Iraq and fundamentalist Iran tense. In 1998, Turkey was actually on the brink of war with Syria over Damascus’s support for the radical anti-Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party. During this time Turkey maintained a virtual military alliance with Israel, confirming its status as a Middle East pariah. But all of this began to change with Erdogan’s and the Justice Party’s assumption of power, which came at the same time as the West’s downward plunge in Turkish public opinion, owing to Turkey’s virtual rejection by the European Union and an increasingly truculent right-wing America and right-wing Israel.
Turkey did not withdraw from NATO, nor break diplomatic relations with Israel. Rather, under Erdogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey adopted a policy of “no problems” with its immediate neighbors, which in particular meant historical rapprochements with Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Because of Turkey’s economy, so much more technologically advanced than its neighbors—and growing faster, too—Turkey’s robust influence in the Balkans to the west and the Caucasus to the east was already an established fact. Bulgaria, Georgia, and Azerbaijan were all flush with Turkish appliances and other consumer goods. But it was the Turkish championing of the Palestinians, and the intense popularity of the Turkish people which that engendered in Gaza, that made Turkey an integral organizational fact in the Arab world to a degree it had not enjoyed since Ottoman times. Neo-Ottomanism might have been a specific strategy developed by Davutoglu, but it also constituted a natural political evolution: the upshot of Turkey’s commanding geographical and economic position made suddenly relevant by its own intensifying Islamization. Neo-Ottomanism’s attractiveness rested on the unstated assumption that Turkey lacked both the means and the will in this era of globalization to actually carve out a new-old empire in the Middle East; rather, it rested on Turkey’s normalization of relations with its former Arab dependencies, for whom Ottoman rule was distant enough, and benign enough, at least whenviewed across the span of the decades and centuries, so as to welcome Turkey back into the fold now that it had turned hostility against Israel up several notches.
Davutoglu’s real innovation was reaching out to Iran. The civilizations of the Anatolian and Iranian plateaus, Turkic and Persian respectively, have had a long and complex relationship: Persian, as I’ve said, was the diplomatic language of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, even as the Ottomans and Safavid Persians were long at odds militarily in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. One can say that the Turkish and Iranian peoples are rivals, while, nevertheless, their cultures and languages deeply intertwine; Rumi wrote in Persian,
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