Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ism 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 dependen-
cies, for whom Ottoman rule was distant enough, and benign enough, at least when viewed
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 rela-
tionship: 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,
though he spent most of his life in Turkey. Moreover, neither Turkey nor Iran has suffered
a colonial relationship at the hands of the other. Geographically, their spheres of influence,
though overlapping, are to a large degree separate, with Iran lying laterally to the east of
Turkey. During the Shah's reign, both Turkey and Iran were pro-Western, and even when
Iran turned radical under the mullahs, Ankara was careful to maintain correct relations with
Tehran. There is little historically shocking about Ankara's embrace of the ayatollahs, even
as in a contemporary political context it had considerable shock value.
Consider: the United States, under a universally popular president at the time, Barack
Obama, was trying desperately, along with its European allies, to forestall Iran's march to
obtaining nuclear weapons, so as to prevent Israel from launching an attack on Iran; a nuc-
lear Iran would change the balance of power in the Middle East dramatically against the
West, while an Israeli attack against Iran might even be worse in terms of destabilizing
the region. Yet in May 2010, Turkey, along with Brazil, acted through a series of dramatic
diplomatic maneuvers to help Iran evade economic sanctions and thus gain critical time
in order to make such a bomb. By agreeing to enrich Iran's uranium, Turkey acquired yet
more stature in the Islamic world to go along with that which it has acquired by supporting
Hamas in Gaza. Iran has the potential “to help Turkey realize its core strategic goal of be-
coming an energy hub, delivering natural gas and oil [from Iran] to the markets of Western
ing from the Caspian Sea across the Caucasus, even as Turkey holds the power to divert
as much as 90 percent of Iraq's water intake from the Euphrates and 40 percent of Syria's,
Turkey joins Iran as a Middle East hyperpower, with pipelines running in all directions
filled with oil, natural gas, and water—the very basis of industrial life.
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