By Dr. David Wurmser
January 21, 2020

In Part I of this piece, we reviewed how Russia is informed by a civilizational concept of foreign policy. It sees itself anchored to both an ancient Byzantine legacy, as well as a Eurasian power – which is an amalgamation of pre-Renaissance European culture with Mongolian culture, according to the works of its leading ideologues and theologians. And in turn, it projects onto the Middle East a strategic concept that there is a vertical geographic axis, within which Russia as a Eurasian power is the northern, and dominating, anchor. Further south, the Middle East is increasingly defined by the resurgence of ancient cultures/civilizations – three urban (Byzantine, Indo-Persian, Jewish) and two originally nomadic (Ottoman and Arab).

If there is a remnant of the great Byzantine civilization beyond Russia itself, it is not in its cradle in Asia Minor, but in Greece and in the periphery of Asia Minor: namely, the Christian communities of the Balkans and Middle East. Russia tends to focus as much on populations as on territory – an expansive evolution of the early concept after the Soviet collapse of the “near abroad.” The more Russia sees itself as the heir of Byzantium, the more it sees itself as the protector of Byzantium’s populations, namely Greek and Middle Eastern Christians, which it sees not as tired stragglers clinging to life, but the core civilization of the western Levantine fertile crescent and, more importantly, an extension of itself.

Interestingly, Russia seems to have more of a population-oriented rather than territory-based concept of its Byzantine inheritance, at least thus far. As such, it appears not to view the land of Israel as Byzantine trust territory, and thus has little territorial design on it. It is interested in its Christian inhabitants, though, which explains why Putin, when he last visited Israel , at first planned on dispensing with the habitual “balancing” visit to the Muqata in Ramallah and Abu Mazen, and instead met with church leaders in Bethlehem. In Israel, he sought discussions with the Jews and displayed support for the Christian community. He reluctantly agreed in the end to go the Muqata for a minimal half-hour visit as an afterthought, the optics of which only emphasized his disinterest.

Further east, the West continues to see Iran as a non-Arab Muslim nation – a definition the Iranian regime itself has an interest in advancing in its quest to invent and lead a new version of a pan-Islamic (rather than Sunni) Nasserism. While the West has in the recent decades appreciated the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, it does not know what to make of Iran’s ancient history beyond filing it away as a quaint history lesson, or a residue leaving ethnic tensions. It fails to grasp the unifying, civilizational and powerfully nationalist, emotive aspects of it. It views Iranian attitudes toward the West as a natural extension, thus, of the attitudes reigning in the rest of the Middle East.1 And yet, if Russia views itself as the inheritor of Byzantium, Christendom and ancient Hellenica, then the Iranian population increasingly sees itself as the inheritor of the legacy of Cyrus the Great and the Persian empire, more than it now views itself as a regional Islamic leader. In other words, Iranians see themselves as distinct from the Middle East, or perhaps, older and more genuine (pre-Islamic, Indo-European) than what we would understand as the Middle East.

Increasingly in Iran, the language of opposition – which has proven explosively dangerous for the regime — is assuming the menacing mantle (for the regime) of a nostalgic return to its Persian roots. The works of Ferdowsi written well over 1000 years ago are growing in importance as seditious texts. Pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus has become an act of subversion, so the regime tries to bar visits. The seeds of this revival were sown before the rise of the Islamic revolution in Iran precisely because the royal Iranian government was strongly attempting to restore ancient Persian history and encourage its domination within Iranian identity to dilute the influence of Islam and power of its clergy. It took the Iranian revolution and its popular rejection, however, to cause those seeds to grow. As the Islamic revolution in Iran falters, the popular language of hope and aspiration naturally assumes an ancient Persian form.

Moreover, Iran belongs also to an ancient Indo-Persian civilizational grouping. An urban culture for millennia, it still has deep culture and population ties to India and many populations in between. Nor are Indians neutral on Iran. Many Indians view Iran as cousins, as a relative in the ancient Indus-basin civilization. Moreover, India is home to a robust Persian exile community still practicing Zoroastrianism, and many of these Persians now form India’s business elite.

Simply stated, Iran is in the process of returning to its Indo-Persian foundations – perhaps re-inventing it in somewhat forced fashion through the obscuring mist of nostalgia.

Further south is Israel. In Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Huntington goes to great lengths to try to prove that Jewish people are not a distinct civilization – ultimately arguing that the miniscule size of the community cannot muster civilizational critical mass. And yet, his efforts betray his own suspicions, as Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much.” Israel is in fact re-emerging as one of the few, core civilizations with its own ethnicity, religion, language group (the only remaining north-Semitic tongue) and culture in the Middle East. Moreover, it is again assuming its highly influential and strategic role in helping shape the region – ironically, without intending to or being consciously aware of it.

Israel is often called the “start-up nation” – a term popularized by the book of the same name by Senor and Singer which fails to credit the enduring influence of ancient civilization and limits Israeli innovation to being nothing more embedded than a fairly recent result of the unique circumstances and tribulations of the Jewish people’s struggle in world War II and Israel’s creation and demands of survival.

While certainly also an attribute of several other civilizations, innovation has marked Jewish civilization from inception with the moment the quest to struggle with understanding unknown abstraction guided Abraham’s behavior. The intangibility of monotheism – the concept of the abstract deity – was reinforced by a prohibition on its representation through icons and statues. This cultural proclivity to innovation was born of a restlessness, a struggle and conflictual relation with the abstract power guiding the unknown. The name of the Jewish people – Israel – translates into “wrestler with God” (Isra-El), the allegory of which was Jacob’s actually wrestling with the divine, and the change of his name, and that of his descendants, to “Isra-El.”

So unique was this proclivity to struggle with the abstract that the Greeks took intense interest in the name, and chose to use it to refer to the people and land of Israel – Palaistis, from which the name Palestine was coined by Greeks to refer to Jews by their own self-appellation already in 400 BC (the common wisdom that it came from the Romans’ renaming of Israel with the name of its ancient nemesis, the Philistines, is actually erroneous since the name Palaistis – παλαιστής — already appeared in Greek texts, such as Herodotus, four to five centuries earlier to refer to Jews and their land, using the exact translation of the word Isra-El). Such naming was consistent with Greek practice, since they generally used Greek translations, not transliterations, of the name people gave themselves. Phoenix (purple) is a translation of Canaan (purple snail dye), and thus Phoenicia.

This restlessness — this constant state of struggle with the abstract and unknown – grounds the tendency to never settle accepting what is as is. Innovation is the upside of this otherwise non-palliative, culturally-rooted restlessness, since it leads to a civilizational proclivity to fiddling with things and ideas. But this proclivity toward innovation also enabled the Jewish people to preemptively politically and theologically adjust to survive. Consistently, whether it was Abraham, Simon the Just’s transformation of Judaism’s leadership not only to Pairs (Zugot) but also to lay the onus of knowledge at every Jews’ feet rather than priestly elite (implying also universal literacy), to the rise of the Mishnaic and Rabbinic Judaism, the removal of Rban Gamliel to Yavne on the eve of destruction, or to the Geonic tradition in Babylonia (6th Century onward) during exile of writing the first Talmud, the pre-existing proclivity to innovation enabled the Jewish people to preemptively adjust politically and theologically to survive. This ingrained cultural proclivity to innovate helps explain the unlikely survival, as the British historian Paul Johnson termed it, of the Jewish people against the current and expectations of history.

This point is far beyond being merely a curiosity or semantics. It suggests that Israel’s innovation will not only persist, but thrive, in an age of reduced threat. Indeed, the historical record suggests the Jewish people have played an innovative role within the economies of the nations in which they lived in the diaspora but reach their greatest heights in periods of greatest freedom and a reduced sense of communal threat.

Innovation may have been ingrained in Israeli culture since the beginning of the state, but the type of innovation has changed in the last decades. The stress, privation and danger of constant threat either in the diaspora and in Israel’s first decades more likely retarded, or at least distorted, than nurtured the full potential of the Jewish people toward innovation. It forced its innovative nature to largely limit itself to leveraging existing or known technologies and applying them in novel ways. At first, Israeli innovation tended to be adaptive, not pioneering. It provided tactical solutions within paradigms to problems, rather than challenging the paradigms. This engendered several episodes of respected and exported Israeli know-how, especially in the defense industries, but the volume of pioneering versus adaptive innovation were fewer and rarer and failed to sufficiently amount to a reputation of Israel’s “punching above its weight.” Moreover, since a large percentage of innovation was adaptive, the global application of Israeli innovativeness was limited to global needs which coincided with Israeli needs. As horrific an event as it might have been, Israel’s disappearance in its first half-century would have hardly registered an impact on the global economy, and thus its economy never registered as a vital Western interest.

What marks Israeli innovation in the current era and going forward – and explains the rise of Israel as an economy that punches above its weight — is that it has now transcended both adaptive creativity and limited local applicability. Israel has emerged at the forefront of pioneering innovation, and in an inversion of its past circumstance, it is geared toward answering global innovative demand even if it is not applicable to the Israeli market. Israel is now a research innovator and incubator on an international level servicing major global industries rather than just its own economy. More and more sectors, not only high tech, but also traditional large-capital industry such as the automotive sector, view Israel as a critical incubator for the global economy. As such, Israel’s economy has now emerged as a significant Western strategic interest in its own right. As such, millennia-old Jewish civilizational attributes and the state of Israel are finally aligned. China and Russia see this as culturally rooted, not circumstantial as most in the West do, and thus they appreciate it more as a resilient and permanent strategic condition than many in the West cannot fathom.

The Jews, even in ancient times, tended to be introverted and sucked into great power conflicts rather than volunteer to engage in them. While the Davidic empire (House of David) had its moments, neither have the Jewish people displayed any imperial ambition nor has Judaism sought universality. Still, although generally clueless about its impact, Israel is unwittingly emerging as competition for Russia’s vision. Israel is neither solely European nor Asian nor African. Culturally, Israel is also a Eurasian amalgam with a long history of interactions with both Europe and Persia. But its pedigree is Semitic, with strong Persian and Hellenistic and later, renaissance European influences rather than Russia’s pre-renaissance European-Mongolian origin. So, not only does Israel pose a challenge to Russia as an important model for the West, but it also occupies the same space, but with radically different foundations, in Russia’s grand Eurasian concept. At the same time, Israel is emerging as the eastern Mediterranean power able to challenge neo-Ottoman designs on Greece and Cyprus, and may play a role in assisting regional minorities, such as Christians and Kurds. In this, it is aligned with Russian interests. This positions Israel in a better light for Moscow.

As such, Russia views the rise of Jewish civilization in Israel ultimately with anxiety and ambiguity. Israel is certainly part of the occident, like Russia, but it also is part of the orient, like Russia. As such, while nowhere near as powerful as Russia, it occupies the same space as Russia — but unlike Russia, all the underlying indices of cultural health suggest Russia is old and tired, and Israel – despite its ancient pedigree – is young and vibrant. For Russia, which seeks to be the premier Eurasian power in its “vertical geographic axis,” this must be disconcerting.

Not only does Israel compete with Eurasian Russia by straddling both European and Asian culture, it also could preempt Russia’s ability regionally to secure compliant allies in the long run, such as Iran. Obscured by the intense recent hostility of the Islamic Republic against Israel, it is to be noted that in contrast throughout history, Jews have traditionally had substantial interactions with the Persian empire, with several episodes rising to the level of immense strategic importance to both. It is not to be ruled out that another such moment is approaching.

Israel by the very act of being, let alone being who it is, is damned to a complicated relationship, half unwitting ally and half unintended foe, with Russia. And unlike the West, Russia understands far better the strategic importance of the nation.

In part III of this series, we will examine Russia’s views on the persistence of the two originally nomadic cultures, the Ottoman and Arab, and conclude with how this strategic concept will interact with and affect the interests of the United States.

Learn More About Dr. David Wurmser

Citations
1: The West, at any rate, mistakes these attitudes, believing the predominant “rage” is driven by a deep sense of grievance and post-colonial anguish born of Western arrogance and oppression dating back as far back as the Crusades. There is far more evidence that the theologians and ideologues driving the rage, in fact, act far more as a result of deeply-held contempt for Western civilization mixed with the rage born of witnessing the injustice of a supposedly superior civilization’s (their brand of Islam) being dominated by the eclipsing power, influence and confidence of the supposedly inferior Western civilization.

By Dr. David Wurmser
January 21, 2020

As the new year begins, the Middle East looks eerily similar to the way it has for the last several new years’ eves. Despite civil war in Syria and Libya, those who based their prognosis on the persistence of the reigning paradigm appear vindicated. That paradigm rested on several assumptions. First, the savviness of the rulers of the Arab states, along with the predictability of the traditional opposition (namely the Muslim Brotherhood) survived as the foundation for understanding the region. Second, the outlier power, both geographically and religiously, namely Iran, remains the greatest challenge. Third, the outlier revolt, namely ISIS or al-Qaida, while disturbingly resilient, failed to genuinely challenge the predominance of the ruling elites or established opposition of any Arab nation, and thus remains contained. And fourth, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains at the edge of eruption and thus begs resolution.

And yet, as George Elliott observed in Silas Marner, “The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”

In fact, the warning signs of change are present that very little of what has been will continue to be. In short, as we enter the new year and decade, our understanding of the architecture of the Middle Eastern politics will founder, our imagination will be challenged, and an entirely new “shape” driven by hitherto ignored or nigh-invisible forces will define the Middle East.

In an article making waves, especially among those who are still seeking to realize their dream first articulated during the initial “Arab Spring” that Google and the internet would transform the region, Jonathan Alterman at the Brzezinski Center, believes his studies reveal a rise of individualism informing the current wave of demonstrations in the fertile crescent capitals.

Were such individualism to emerge, then it would indeed upturn the established order. And yet, such a rise in individualism would be startling since it contradicts the essence of familial, social, political, economic and religious life among Arabs Muslims, the culture of which is an amalgam of tribal and communal structures of safety and protection and a theological sense of being on the historically right side of revelation – itself also an intangible structure of protection. Neither pillar serves as a firm foundation for individualism, and in fact, gravitates against it. Thus, if there is indeed a rise in individualism, it would mean a cultural, religious and indeed civilizational shift in these communities. As such, the optimism in the liberal West that the Arab world is finally beginning to modernize would be warranted.

But cultures and civilizations do not easily change. In fact, the historical record shows that their persistence over eras and upheavals is stunning. Indeed, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the Ancient Regime, the underlying culture even after such a cataclysmic event as the French Revolution survived; its structures and patterns just assumed new masters derived from the disillusioned back benches of the old elites. Two thousand miles away, and a century later, the same observation could have been made about the Middle East after the Ottoman collapse: Arab-Ottoman elites, many of whom naturally even spoke Turkish rather than Arabic, who had become increasingly frustrated with the rise of Turkish nationalism rose to take over the residue of the Ottoman imperial administration after the war and became the new elite (in many ways not even new, but now just independent) of the old but now fragmented structures. Students of Russian history would probably make the same observations of the transition from Czar to commissar. Simply put, cultures, absent a millennially traumatic event or population shift, do not change much, and even then, only slightly.

What then are we to make of the rise of individualism Alterman appears to identify? What Alterman detects may be accurate, but something else is afoot than the rise of a classically liberal concept of individualism. Sadly – because it is not in the American interest either as a nation or as the leader of Occidental civilization – the Russian leadership may be ahead of the U.S. in understanding this idea. Thinkers and theologians like Alexander Dugin and Tikhon Shevkunov may or may not be close confidents of Vladimir Putin’s – there are conflicting assertions – but they and their associates clearly are attuned to Putin’s strategic mindset. Specifically, they view the course of history through the prism of the persistence of ancient culture and civilization in shaping identities and geopolitics, including in the modern era. 1

Russia envisions itself on the one hand as the true heirs to Byzantium (leaders of the Orthodox church, indeed all Christendom, in all variations), which explains why the greatest historians of the Byzantium were Russian, led by the greatest of them all, Alexander Vasiliev. On the other hand, some see Russia as the fusion of pre-Christian Mongolian and early (even pre-schismatic) Orthodox-Christian European identity, which its intellectuals call “Eurasianism.” Indeed, while Putin has focused on the post-Christian soul of Europe as evidence of its decline and fall, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself at other times defined Russian foreign policy as moored to it being a Eurasian bridge, which is both Mongolian and European.2 This “Eurasian” outlook divides the world into vertical axes, with Russia being the northern anchor of the axis reaching into the Asian Middle East, while western Europe moors the north of the axis spreading southward into Africa.

Part and parcel of the belief held by Russian theorists is that Russia is “Eurasian.” Russia also imagines itself as the savior of a perishing European civilization that has abandoned both its Christian and European civilizational foundations for a multicultural, liberal ratatouille with a chaotic and drifting identity. Russia offers itself as the model – pre-Renaissance Christianity and strong (authoritarian) leadership — for Europe’s return to sanity. Indeed, there is even a rebellion within the Russian church to establish a mythically pure version of the Orthodox church – represented by Father Tikhon Shevchuk – against the “corrupted,” Europeanized church clergy influenced by western ideas of liberalism since the Great Schism and Renaissance, an embrace which is seen as responsible for Orthodoxy’s long decline.

This view of history as the re-assertion of culture and civilization of a millennium ago (not just pre-World War I) has led Russia’s strategists, who are also stripped of any notion of the universal aspiration of individual freedom, almost effortlessly to identify trends in the Middle East largely still invisible to Western eyes or distorted by our unflinching confidence in the spread and eventual triumph of universal human freedom. Specifically, we in the West continue to look at the Middle East as a collection of over 20 states, currently under stress, and rend by regional rivalries over ideologies, such as Arab nationalism, Islamism, or Sunni-Shiite tensions, but still operating within the framework of the Sykes-Picot post World War I partition. Moreover, we in the West still view Israel as the odd-man out, Turkey as no longer a wholly Middle East state, but a Europeanizing work in progress. Warts and all, we still view this structure as a workable foundation of a slow march toward modernity and “normal” international politics.

In contrast, while Russia almost certainly continues to view these ideological rivalries as relevant, it also views them being played out through deeper, more primordial structures. Being attuned to the resilience and power of culture and civilization to move history, Russia sees more clearly than we do that the region already is entering the post-Sykes-Picot system. The Middle East state system is in collapse and emerging in its wake are several core civilizational entities around which the region will be defined going forward. The control of, or alliance with, either Russia or the West with those core civilizations will determine the course and fortunes of those ideological rivalries.

So, the trend toward individualism – which is more accurately described as a revolt of individuals against the abusive state – is marked not by traditional rivalries, such as Shiites revolting against Sunni rule or vice versa, but Shiite Lebanese, Iraqis and Iranians revolting against Shiite rulers. And yet, at the moment, we do not see this spreading into Amman, Riyadh, Doha, Manama or Dubai. The explanation may well be that domination in the fertile crescent of Arab identity, which in the end remained ultimately nomadic and thus entirely social, is being rattled by the temptation — which is driven by rejection of the abysmal state of governance across the Muslim world — of nostalgic forms of identity, such as Persian, Pheonician/Crusader, Byzantine. Attended by an untethered sense of social belonging and identity caused by failed governance, the populations of older civilizational remnants appear to be re-asserting their attributes against the Arab, essentially nomadic overlay, which is inherently more familial, tribal or communal.

In contrast, upheaval in societies at the heart of Arab culture to the south of the Arab Crescent (such as in Amman), or among Sunni tribes across the Asia Middle East, appears to seek new structures of patronage to fulfill a distinctly non-individualist identity and reestablish stability and safety. It is a retreat into looking for the framework of the comforting, all-encompassing father-leader-family sort. Hence the attraction of the ISIS/al-Qaida model, as well as some sort of weird love-hate attraction to Israel and the West emerging since they represent “safety.” They are not running away from “tribe,” “father” or “family,” but seeking to replace it with another version.

In these nostalgic forms of opposition, inherently urban populations – such as those in the fertile crescent cities — assume a greater self-motivating, self-guiding, and self-realizing form, namely individualism. As such, what Alterman discerns may not be first sign of the entry into the Islam of what the West would like to see as enlightened modernism, but really the beginning of the nostalgic re-assertion of the urban civilizations of the fertile crescent, with all the chaotic and often individualistic elements of urban culture, against their Islamic overlay with its heavily nomadic overtones of community-based structures of protection. Indeed, these demonstrators in Beirut and Nabatiyah, in Baghdad and Najaf, and in Tehran and Mashhad, are employing the language of asserting rights, not seeking protection. They accuse their rulers of having stolen from them, trampled on them and violated them – namely the language of a sovereign citizen (i.e., member of a city) challenging his government. In contrast, demonstrations among counterparts in other parts of the Middle East appear to focus more on accusing rulers of having failed to provide security for their person, protect their families, deliver them proper welfare, or act with sufficient noblesse and fairness to their communities – all forms of language appropriate for tribal members petitioning a chief.

So what are those cultural-civilizational centers which are emerging and which the Russians appear to have more adeptly identified than we? In the Asian Middle East (east of Suez), there are primarily three urban cultures/civilizations —the Byzantine remnant, the Indo-Persian ancient “Aryan” cultural-civilizational bloc, and the Jews resurrected in Israel — and two additional nomadic-imperial cultures/civilizations – the Ottoman-Mongolian revival carrying the banner of Islam and Sunni Muslim (tribal) Arab culture. We will examine how Russia’s civilizational concept of foreign policy, interacts with each in Part II of this series

Learn More About Dr. David Wurmser

Citations
1: https://www.memri.org/reports/contemporary-russian-thinkers-series-–-russian-anti-liberal-philosopher-alexander-dugin
2: https://www.memri.org/reports/understanding-russian-political-ideology-and-vision-call-eurasia-lisbon-vladivostok

By Dr. David Wurmser
December 17, 2019

Over the last several years, President Erdogan consolidated his grip on the structures of power, security, law, education and public discourse in Turkey. And yet, he recently suffered a humiliating electoral setback when an opposition leader was elected as mayor of Istanbul. Undaunted, President Erdogan used his domination of courts to annul the election, but during the rerun, he lost again but this time with so much larger a margin that he had no choice but to concede. Since his electoral defeat in Istanbul, he has turned his attentions increasingly into a more aggressive foreign policy along three fronts: first, an escalation of his involvement in Libya against Egyptian-supported factions; second, an invasion of northern Syria and now third, a controversial assertion of vast Turkish maritime claims subjecting the entire eastern Mediterranean Sea to Turkish domination.

In Libya, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) -led Turkish government, armed and supported (possibly even with mercenaries) the shrinking number of factions aligned with the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA) head, Fayez Sarraj, including the Samoud Faction led by Muhammad ben Dardaf, one of the leaders of the raid on the US embassy in Benghazi until his recent untimely demise. After several Turkish shipments and agents were intercepted and exposed, Erdogan’s foremost strategic rival, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah as-Sisi, countered by launching a campaign to destroy the GNA via its own Libyan proxy, General Belqassim Haftar, whose Libyan National Army (LNA) exploded out of eastern Libya to take all but a small part of Western Libya surrounding the capital city of Tripoli. Ankara’s moves also met with significant pushback from France and the United States, both of whom shifted to a far more neutral position between the two Libyan blocs.

Although largely defeated in Libya last Spring, Erdogan has not yielded; he escalated his ambitions and surged strategically.

In Libya, the AKP-led Turkish government regrouped and escalated its involvement. Pro-AKP papers even boasted that Ankara was supplying the GNA with sophisticated and banned weapons as well as bragged that Turkish commanders were orchestrating and perhaps even directly participating in attacks on Haftar’s forces. 1

Absent a US response, Russia has taken its own advantage of the strategic vacuum.

Russia had during the Obama years exploited US opposition to Haftar and its coldness to Egypt to establish relations with the LNA. In September, Moscow saw Turkey’s escalation as an opportunity to escalate its own assistance to Haftar, to the point at which its mercenaries are reportedly present now in Libya. 2

In October, Turkey invaded Syria to depopulate a border cordon of “hostile” populations, such as Kurds, Armenians and other Christians (including in Ras al-Ayn to which Armenians refer as their “Auschwitz” for the slaughter of 80,000 Anatolian Armenians there in 1916). Turkey again ran up against a Russian response, as Moscow saw its own interests challenged in supporting the Assad regime and restoring his realm. Turkey was allowed to establish its border cordon, but at the cost of coming right up against Russian troops.

Finally, in November, Ankara signed the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) agreement with al-Sarraj’s Lilliputian Libyan realm. Far from a technical agreement adjusting and codifying maritime lines, the deal attempts to upturn the architecture of stability and security in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey has not yet published the agreement and map which it deposited to the United Nations on December 7, but its diplomats and journalists have revealed most of its parameters. 3 Using a questionable argument about continental shelves and extending its zone out 200 miles from them, these maps:

• annex a cluster of Greek islands (the Kastelorizo cluster) to Turkey,
• strip the Greek islands of Rhodes and Crete of all their waters to the west,
• wrap around Cyprus to such an extent that almost no territorial waters are left to the Greek entity in Nicosia, and
• cut into waters claimed by Egypt to bring the Turkish line to abut Libya’s and bring it within 100-200 KM of the Libyan coast.

These claims reduce almost the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean to a Turkish maritime economic exclusionary zone which severs the remaining waters of Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria from the west. Perhaps even more alarming is that Turkey’s maps erase whole island clusters (Kastelorizo) that are part of Greece, suggesting Ankara may intend their occupation.

Moreover, the former secretary general of the Turkish Defense Minsitery, Umit Yalim, also laid claim last year to most of the Greek island of Crete, and the islands surrounding it, stripping Crete of any territorial waters and opening up the waters to the west of Crete as a further expansion of Turkish territorial claims.

“At the present time, Greece should immediately evacuate and surrender to Turkey three quarters of the Island of Crete along with the five Turkish islands, being Gavdos, Dia, Dionisades, Gaidhouronisi, and Koufonisia, that surround it and which it holds under occupation. It should also immediately evacuate all its military units, including the Iraklion Air Station, which is in the Turkish region of the Island of Crete.” 4

The context, imagery, and climate surrounding Erdogan’s moves are as disquieting as the actual moves themselves. Turkey’s Libyan adventures, its invasion of northern Syria, and its assertion of a maritime zone at the expense of Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt are attended by the threatening language and symbolism of imperial expansion swirling under President Erdogan. President Erdogan himself often engages in inflated rhetoric, but he also uses two particular newspapers as his mouthpieces, namely Yeni Safak (the official AKP party paper) and Yeni Akit, and several favored commentators in its pages, especially Ibrahim Karagul (editor-in-chief of Yeni Safak) and Harun Sekman, to telegraph his ambitions and condition the Turkish people.

The language employed mixes foreboding despair with swaggering confidence. On the one hand, Turkey is portrayed as besieged by the world powers and their agents who are obsessed with and conspiring to destroy Turkey. After the EEZ deal, Ibrahim Karagul wrote:

“[E]nemies … were encircling Turkey and making plans to corner it in Anatolia and tear it to pieces. They were dividing the Mediterranean, completely eliminating Turkey from this sea – which was once a Turkish Lake – and making it impossible for us to breathe … All the countries that stood against the Ottomans in World War I were now on the anti-Turkey front in the Mediterranean” 5

The imagery of a historic siege sharpened early last summer, when Karagul described sending a drilling ship – provocatively named Barbaros Pasha after the Ottoman admiral who defeated Genova and consolidated Turkish control of the eastern Mediterrenean in the 16th Century — into Cypriot waters:

“There is no option other than to strengthen Turkey’s hand and make extraordinary defense preparations. … The threat is coming directly from the West and targeting Turkey’s existence. Sieging Turkey from the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the north of Syria, building fronts within the country are all preparations …” 6

And throughout, time is traversed as if collapsed into one moment; what happened in 1546 is as valid and active as in 2019, both in terms of the acute conspiracy against the Ottoman empire and the glorious Ottoman response. In other words, the verdict of the entire Ottoman empire’s half-millennium history, survival and legacy is being played out here and now under Erdogan. Karagul again:

“Consider it as part of a great showdown. Turkey’s game-changing legacy being propelled into action once again, the reconstruction of the multinational front aimed at eliminating this, and every location within our reach becoming battlefields of this showdown. Think with the destinies of the battles of Preveza [1538] and Lepanto [1571] in mind. It is as though the millennium-old political history has been carried over to the present and squeezed into a few years. This is the kind of struggle we are putting up … [E]very activity, every intervention, every defense from North Africa to the Persian Gulf, from the Red Sea to the coasts of the Caspian should be considered a global intervention aimed at ‘stopping Turkey’ and an area of resistance against it. The vastest international coalition after the Çanakkale war is surrounding Turkey.” 7

On the other hand, Turkey is portrayed as a global power, on par with the superpowers.

“[W]hen we include our seas, territorial waters, continental shelf as well, Turkey’s surface area grows to an extraordinary scale. This leads to radical changes when we look at the map… This massive country grows greater in our eyes… If we take into account Turkey’s ethnic area, we see a spectacular power from Europe to Asia, the Middle East to the depths of Africa.”

And its aims are equally vast, causing the world’s powers quake in fear:

“We are rediscovering the ‘memory’ that allows us to see the region, political history, our nation’s political codes, our history-maker and region-builder role, our perception of Turkey, our perception of the Ottomans and Seljuks, and to see all these in a single picture… This means great changes not only for Turkey but the entire region. It means tremors, earthquakes are on the way. It means the entire established order will crumble… The Seljuks are back; the Ottomans are back; the showdowns from World War I are back; the Anatolia defense is back; the claims of past centuries are back; in brief, everything that belongs to us is back. We have seen that they are all ours, they belong to us.” 8

Erdogan himself on December 9 placed Egypt, Israel and Cyprus on notice that the development of their hydrocarbons assets in the Levant and Nile Delta basins demand Turkish approval, since any gas transmission structure from the fields in either of the three countries would now have to pass through Turkish maritime claims:

“With this new agreement between Turkey and Libya, we can hold joint exploration operations in these exclusive economic zones that we determined. There is no problem, …Other international actors cannot carry out exploration operations in these areas Turkey drew (up) with this accord without getting permission. Greek Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and Israel cannot establish a gas transmission line without first getting permission from Turkey.” 9

Evoking the Ottoman golden age of dominance in the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey is again on offense and schooling the great powers in Turkey’s global superpower capabilities through the painful lesson of humiliation. Karagul wrote in early December:

“Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha returns after 473 years… The real ruler of the Mediterranean is back. The Turkey-Libya deal changed the nautical map; the Sevres Plan [Which Divided The Ottoman Empire In 1920] blew up in their face … The deal between Turkey and Libya not only ruined all plans over the Mediterranean but it also showed the world that Turkey has a Mediterranean map.” 10

And the commentators increasingly dispense with the word “Turkey” to describe the country and employ ever more often instead the term “Ottoman” to both evoke and blur the distinction between nationalism and Islamism. The drilling ship, the Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, was described not as a Turkish vessel, but as an “Ottoman frigate.” 11

President Erdogan signals his policy to his ranks through these editors and journalists, and at times to the broader population. As such, these series of articles should be seen less as analysis or observation, but potentially as a blueprint crafted by Erdogan himself.

While it is foremost a European interest to respond to this, the EU will unlikely follow through on its initial protests. Erdogan will assert his leverage, which includes: 1) threatening to open the mass immigration floodgates of refugees to Europe, a threat against which Europe really has no response, therein terrifying the EU’s elites, who fear a strong populist European anti-refugee reaction, and 2) threaten to release ISIS terrorists. Europe is simply not equipped to confront such threats effectively, so they will feel immense pressure to de-escalate. Ankara will feel emboldened and act yet more aggressively toward Greece because of this, and Erdogan’s dangerous transformation of his nation culturally by enflaming imperial ambitions and revanchism will accelerate.

A strong American response could bring this imperial chest-thumping to an end, especially were the US fleet to take up a presence near the “erased” islands of Kastelorizo and craft a coalition among several eastern Mediterranean allies under American leadership. While not militarily negligible, Turkey does not have a history of suicidal military adventurism. Nor is its current rise fueled by real power projection, but by indulgence. Turkey’s population is divided, with Erdogan always in danger of losing his grip electorally, as the elections in Istanbul showed earlier this year. Indulgence-delivered victories validate his leadership, but military conflict resulting in failure would indict it – and Erdogan appears to understand that.

And yet, Russia appears more likely to act than the U.S. as its moves in Libya and in Syria recently suggest. During the Obama administration, when tensions first emerged over Turkish attempts to assert its presence in Greek Cypriot waters, the United States not only failed to defend its NATO ally, Greece, over Cyprus, but subcontracted to the Russians to send a carrier (Admiral Kuznetsov) and missile cruiser to stand Ankara down. Since then, the Russians have had a standing fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. Yielding again to the Russians to restrain Erdogan would continue the Obama-era policy of abdicating to a Russian naval presence based in Syrian ports the traditional stabilizing role provided by the US Sixth Fleet.

Learn More About Dr. David Wurmser

Citations

1: https://www.yeniakit.com.tr/haber/libyadaki-ser-ittifakina-turk-darbesi-bae-ve-haftere-osmanli-tokadi-931595.html
2: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/world/middleeast/russia-libya-mercenaries.html
3: https://www.ekathimerini.com/247070/article/ekathimerini/news/turkish-diplomat-posts-map-with-anakaras-view-of-continental-shelf and http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2019/12/01/experts-eastern-mediterranean-deal-with-libya-signals-turkeys-future-deeds-in-region/amp
4: https://www.memri.org/reports/former-secretary-general-turkish-defense-ministry-writing-prior-turkish-president-erdoğans
5: https://www.memri.org/reports/celebrating-turkey-libya-agreement-editor-akp-mouthpiece-pens-historical-blueprint-return
6: https://www.memri.org/reports/turkish-pro-government-daily-turkish-oil-exploration-ship-sent-north-cyprus-ottoman-frigate
7: https://www.memri.org/reports/turkish-pro-government-daily-turkish-oil-exploration-ship-sent-north-cyprus-ottoman-frigate
8: https://www.memri.org/reports/celebrating-turkey-libya-agreement-editor-akp-mouthpiece-pens-historical-blueprint-return
9: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-libya-erdogan/erdogan-says-turkey-and-libya-can-hold-joint-exploration-in-eastern-med-idUSKBN1YD23G
10: https://www.memri.org/reports/celebrating-turkey-libya-agreement-editor-akp-mouthpiece-pens-historical-blueprint-return
11: https://www.memri.org/reports/turkish-pro-government-daily-turkish-oil-exploration-ship-sent-north-cyprus-ottoman-frigate