The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

party, were about to be become a majority in a few years. And their fundamental
theme was democracy: the more democratic Turkey became, the more their
Islamist power would increase; for they linked the West with Turkey’s autocratic
military power structure, which was ironic, but true.
“When will the United States support democracy in Turkey?” the man next to
me at the Virtue Party dinner had asked. “Because until now it has been
supporting the military.” Before waiting for my answer, he added: “I have been
to Israel, and there, democracy is more developed than in Turkey.”
6
And that was the big thing I got wrong. Because moderate Turkish Islamists
were then relatively open-minded about Israel, I assumed they would always be
so. In fact, circumstances would change dramatically: the result of the Turks’
own historical evolution as electronic communications brought them into closer
contact with pan-Islamist thought (the defeat of geography in other words), and
the specific actions and mistakes of both the American and Israeli governments
in the coming years.
At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, Turkish

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geography mirrored Turkish politics. Bordering Greece in the west and Iran in
the east, Bulgaria in the northwest and Iraq in the southeast, Azerbaijan in the
northeast and Syria in the south, even as more than half of Anatolia is Black Sea
or Mediterranean coastline, Turkey is truly equidistant between Europe, Russia,
and the Middle East. The same with its foreign and national security policy.
Turkey was still a member of NATO, cooperated with U.S. intelligence services,
maintained an embassy in Israel, and had facilitated indirect peace talks between
Israel and Syria. But it was conducting military incursions against the Kurds in
northern Iraq, was helping Iran avoid sanctions for developing a nuclear weapon,
and was politically and emotionally behind the most radical Palestinian groups.
The Israeli commando raid in May 2010 against a flotilla of six ships bringing
humanitarian supplies from Turkey to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, and the
ferocious Turkish reaction to that, was the catalyst for announcing to the world
Turkey’s historic pivot from West to East. Turks saw the struggle for Palestine
not as an Arab-Israeli fight, in which as Turks they could play no part, but as a
conflict pitting Muslims against Jews, in which Turks could champion the
Muslim cause. Among the key insights that often get overlooked in the late
Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington’s 
The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order
, of which Turkey represents a prime illustration, is
that globalization, while a force for unity on one level, is a force for
civilizational tension on another, since it brings large and spread-out solidarity
groups together; and so while the Islamic world lacks political cohesion, Islamic
consciousness nevertheless rises alongside globalization. Thus, the Islamic
aspect of Turkish identity grows. This happens at a time when the non-Western
world becomes healthier, more urbane, and more literate, so that there is a rise in
the political and economic power of middle tier nations such as Turkey.
7
Turks helped lead the House of Islam for almost 850 years, from the Seljuk
Turk victory over the Byzantines at the 1071 Battle of Manzikert in eastern
Anatolia to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Western Allies in 1918.
Only for the past century have the Arabs really been at the head of Muslim
civilization. In fact, until the Iranian Revolution of 1978–1979, even the then 50
million Muslims in Iran were largely invisible to the West; just as 75 million
Muslims in present-day Turkey were largely invisible until the Gaza flotilla
crisis erupted at the same time that the Turks made a deal with Iran to accept its
enriched uranium, and voted against sanctioning Iran at the United Nations.
Suddenly, Western publics and media woke up to the blunt geographical fact of
Turkey.
Then in 2011 came the uprisings against tired autocracies across North Africa
and the Middle East, a beneficiary of which in a historical and geographical

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sense was Turkey. Ottoman Turkey ruled North Africa and the Levant for
hundreds of years in the modern era. While this rule was despotic, it was not so
oppressive as to leave a lasting scar in the minds of today’s Arabs. Turkey is an
exemplar of Islamic democracy that can serve as a role model for these newly
liberated states, especially as its democracy evolved from a hybrid regime, with
generals and politicians sharing power until recently—a process that some Arab
states will go through en route to freer systems. With 75 million people and a
healthy economic growth rate until recently, Turkey is also a demographic and
economic juggernaut that can project soft power throughout the Mediterranean.
It simply has advantages that other major Mediterranean states proximate to
North Africa—Greece, Italy, and Spain—do not.
Yet there are key things to know about Turkish Islam, which indicate that the
West may find a silver lining in Turkey’s rise in the Middle East.
Indeed, if we knew a little more about Jalal ed-Din Rumi, the thirteenth-
century founder of the Turkic 
tariqat
that was associated with the whirling
dervishes, we would have been less surprised by Islam’s compatibility with
democracy, and Islamic fundamentalism might not seem so monolithic and
threatening. Rumi dismissed “immature fanatics” who scorn music and poetry.
8
He cautioned that a beard or mustache on a cleric is no sign of wisdom. Rumi
favored the individual over the crowd, and consistently spoke against tyranny.
Rumi’s legacy is more applicable to democratizing tendencies in the Muslim
world than are figures of the Arab and Iranian pantheons with whom the West is
more familiar. The eclectic nature of Turkish Islam, as demonstrated by Rumi,
goes together with Turkey’s very Westernization. Turkey’s democratic system,
though imperfect and influenced for too long by an overbearing military,
incorporated orthodox Islamic elements for decades. Unlike quite a few Arab
states and Iran, Turkey’s industrial base and middle class were not created out of
thin air by oil revenues. Again, we have geography to thank for the advanced
level of human development in Turkey compared to most places in the Middle
East. Turkey’s position as a land bridge not only connects it to Europe, but made
for a wave of invasions by Central Asian nomads that invigorated Anatolian
civilization, of which Rumi’s poetry is an example. It was the Ottoman Empire
that played a large role in bringing European politics—at least the Balkan variety
of it—into intimate 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

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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 lonely as 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