The Revenge of Geography (42 page)

The prospect of peaceful regime change—or evolution—in Iran, despite the temporary fizzling of the Green Movement, is still greater now than in the Soviet Union during most of the Cold War. A liberated Iran, coupled with less autocratic governments in the Arab world—governments that would be focused more on domestic issues because of their own insecurity—would encourage a more equal, fluid balance of power between Sunnis and Shiites in the Middle East: something which would help keep the region nervously preoccupied with itself and on its own internal and regional power dynamics, much more than on America and Israel.

Additionally, a more liberal regime in Tehran would inspire a broad cultural continuum worthy of the Persian empires of old: one that will not be constrained by the clerical forces of reaction.

A more liberal Iran, given the large Kurdish, Azeri, Turkomen, and other minorities in the north and elsewhere, may also be a far less centrally controlled Iran, with the ethnic peripheries drifting away from Tehran’s orbit. Iran has often been less a state than an amorphous, multinational empire. Its true size would always be greater and smaller than any officially designated cartography. While the northwest of today’s Iran is Kurdish and Azeri Turk, parts of western Afghanistan and Tajikistan are culturally and linguistically compatible with an Iranian state. It is this amorphousness, so very Parthian, that Iran could return to as the wave of Islamic extremism and the perceived legitimacy of the mullahs’ regime erodes.
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If the Iranian plateau is the most pivotal geography in the Greater Middle East, then the land bridge of Anatolia, or Asia Minor, follows in importance naturally from it. Just as the Iranian plateau is completely covered by one country, Iran, so is the Anatolian land bridge, by Turkey. Together, these two countries, defined by mountains and plateaus overlooking desert Arabia from the north, boast a combined population of almost 150 million people, slightly larger than that of all the twelve Arab countries to the south which comprise the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula. One would have to add Egypt and the rest of North Africa stretching to the Atlantic in order for the Arabs to demographically overwhelm the weight of Turkey and Iran.

Turkey and Iran—crucial parts of both Mackinder’s wilderness girdle and Spykman’s Rimland—also contain the Middle East’s richest agricultural economies, as well as its highest levels of industrialization and technological know-how. The very existence of Iran’s
nuclear program, and the indigenous ability of Turkey to follow suit if—for the sake of national prestige—it wished, contrasts sharply with Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, which lack the intellectual capacity for their own such programs, and would therefore require a technology transfer from an existing nuclear power like Pakistan.

Turkey, like Iran, constitutes its own major region, influencing clockwise the Balkans, the Black Sea, Ukraine and southern Russia, the Caucasus, and the Arab Middle East. Especially in comparison to the Arab world, Turkey, writes Stratfor strategist George Friedman, “is a stable platform in the midst of chaos.”
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However, while Turkey impacts all the places around it, Turkey’s position as a land bridge bracketed between the Mediterranean to the south and the Black Sea to the north makes it, in part, an island nation. The lack of dry-land contiguity means that though Turkey influences the surrounding area, it is not geographically pivotal in the way that Iran is to its neighbors. Turkey’s influence in the Balkans to the west and Syria and Mesopotamia to the south is primarily economic, though in the former Yugoslavia it has lately become involved in post-conflict mediation. Only in the Caucasus, and particularly in Azerbaijan, where the language is very close to Turkish, does Turkey enjoy the level of diplomatic influence that can dramatically affect daily politics.

Turkey, it is true, controls the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates: a terrific geographical advantage, giving it the ability to cut off the supply of water to Syria and Iraq. But were Turkey to actually do this, it would constitute the equivalent of an act of war. Thus, Turkey must be subtle in pressing this advantage. It is the fear that Turkey might reduce the water flow, through upriver diversions for its own agricultural development purposes, that can give Turkey considerable influence over Arab politics. A relatively new geopolitical fact that is often overlooked is the Southeast Anatolia Project, whose centerpiece is the Ataturk Dam, twenty-five miles north of Sanliurfa near the Syrian border. Almost two thousand square miles of arable land in the Harran plateau is being irrigated via gravity-flow water diverted from this dam. The whole Euphrates River dam system,
planned in the 1970s and built in the 1980s and 1990s, which actually has the capacity to pump water as far as the water-starved West Bank in Palestine, will make Turkey a greater power in the Arab Middle East in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. The heightened political profile that Turkey has adopted of late should be seen in the context of this new geographical reality.

While recent headlines show Turkey turning its attention to the Middle East, this was not always the case. From the rise of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the thirteenth century, the Ottomans were mainly focused on their northwest, toward Europe, where the wealth and lucrative trade routes were. This was a pattern that had begun in the late Middle Ages, when the ascent of Central Europe and of the Carolingian Empire acted like a magnet for Turkish tribes, who themselves had gravitated westward across Anatolia to the Balkans, to the most fertile agricultural lands in Asia Minor’s immediate vicinity. Turkey may be synonymous with the entire Anatolian land bridge, but (as with Russia) the nation’s demographic and industrial heft has for centuries been clustered in the west, adjacent to the Balkans, and relatively far from the Middle East. But though the Ottomans were clustered near Europe, Anatolia’s exceedingly high and rugged terrain, with each mountain valley separated from the next, hindered the creation of tribal alliances that might have challenged Ottoman control in the areas closer to the Caucasus and the Middle East. Indeed, because geography made for social “disruption” in eastern Anatolia, organized dynasties like the Seljuks and Ottomans could rule for hundreds of years at a time from their base in faraway western Anatolia, i.e., European Turkey, without worrying about unrest in the east.
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Just as the dizzying topography of eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East made it hard to organize a challenge to the European-based Russians, the same with Anatolia and the Ottoman Turks—except that because Anatolia had long borders with seas, the rulers in Constantinople were much less paranoid about incursions on their peripheries than were the Russians. Anatolia is compact; Russia sprawling.

Thus, Turkish demography has accentuated Turkish geography.
Anatolia is further removed from the Middle Eastern heartland than the Iranian plateau, and the northwestern spatial arrangement of the Turkish population in recent centuries has only made it more so. Ottoman military forays into Central Europe, which had the flavor of nomadic wanderings and culminated in 1683 with the siege of Vienna, were eased by Europe’s own political fragmentation. France, Great Britain, and Spain were focused on outmaneuvering one another, and on their colonies in the New World across the Atlantic. Venice was involved in a long struggle with Genoa. The Papacy was entangled in other crises. And the Slavs of the southern Balkans were divided against themselves, another case of a mountainous geography encouraging social and political division. Finally, as the early-twentieth-century foreign correspondent Herbert Adams Gibbons writes, “From Europe, Asia Minor and more could be conquered: from Asia, no portion of Europe could be conquered.”
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He meant that in order to truly consolidate the barren stretches of Anatolia and expand into the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks first required the wealth that only the conquest of the Balkans could provide. Facilitating this fluid arrangement between Europe and the Middle East was the location of the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, a safe harbor granting access to the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and North Africa, while also the terminus of caravan routes from Persia, the Caucasus, and beyond.

Arising from this geography came a sprawling, multinational empire that by the late nineteenth century was in its death throes, with the Ottoman Sultanate only giving up the ghost in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (Father Turk), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who forged a modern state in Anatolia following the imperial losses in the Balkans and the Middle East, was an authentic revolutionary: that is, he changed his people’s value system. He divined that the European powers had defeated the Ottoman Empire not on account of their greater armies, but on account of their greater civilization, which had produced the greater armies. Turkey would henceforth be Western, he said, marching culturally and politically toward Europe. Thus, he abolished the Muslim
religious courts, forbade men to wear the fez, discouraged women from wearing the veil, and replaced the Arabic script with the Latin one. But as revolutionary as these acts were, they were also the culmination of a Turkish obsession with Europe going back centuries. Though Turkey remained neutral during most of World War II, Kemalism—the pro-Western, secularist doctrine of Kemal Ataturk—guided Turkey’s culture and particularly its foreign policy right up through the end of the first decade after the Cold War. Indeed, for years Turkey entertained hopes of joining the European Union, a fixation that Turkish officials made clear to me during many visits to the country in the 1980s and 1990s. But in the first decade of the twenty-first century it became apparent that Turkey might never gain full membership in the EU. The reason was blunt, and reeked of geographical and cultural determinism: though Turkey was a democracy and a member of NATO, it was also Muslim, and thus not wanted. The rejection was a shock to the Turkish body politic. More important, it merged with other trends in society that were in the process of issuing a grand correction to Turkish history and geography.

Actually, the European orientation that Ataturk imposed on Turkey entailed a contradiction. Ataturk was born and brought up in Salonika, in northern Greece, among Greeks, Jews, and other minorities. He was a man of Europe, in other words, as Salonika in the late nineteenth century was a multilingual outpost of cosmopolitanism. Likewise, Ataturk’s definition of nationality was strikingly modern. For he oft declared that whoever says he is a Turk, speaks Turkish, and lives in Turkey is a Turk, even if he be a Jew or Christian. He moved the capital to Ankara, in the heart of Anatolia, from Istanbul (Constantinople) in European Turkey, because of Istanbul’s association with the ancien régime. And he made no effort to regain lost Ottoman provinces in the Balkans or the Middle East: rather, his strategy was to build a uniethnic Turkish state out of the heartland of Anatolia, which would be firmly anchored toward Europe and the West. The keeper of the Kemalist flame would be the Turkish military, for authentic democracy was a thing to which Kemalism never got around during Ataturk’s lifetime. The problem, and this would take
decades to play out, was that by focusing on Anatolia, he unwittingly emphasized Islamic civilization, which was more deeply rooted in Asia Minor than in the European Turkey of Constantinople and the sultanate. Furthermore, democracy, as it developed in Turkey in fits and starts between periodic military coups, delivered the electoral franchise to the mass of working-class and devout Turks in the Anatolian hinterlands.

For the first few decades of Republican Turkey’s existence, the wealth and power resided with the military and with the ultra-secular Istanbul elite. During this period, American officials had the luxury of proclaiming Turkey’s democratic status even as the Turkish generals were responsible for its pro-Western foreign policy. That began to change in the early 1980s, when the newly elected prime minister, Turgut Ozal, a devout Muslim with Sufi tendencies from central Anatolia, enacted a series of reforms that liberalized the statist economy. A slew of large firms were privatized and import controls loosened. This led to the creation of a nouveau riche middle class of devout Muslims with real political power. Nevertheless, Ozal’s genius in the later years of the Cold War was to stay politically anchored to the West, even as he softened the arch-secularist tendency of Kemalism to give religious Muslims a larger stake in the system. Turkey became at once more Islamist and more pro-American. Ozal’s Islamism allowed him to reach out to the Kurds, who were united with the Turks in religion but divided by ethnicity. The Turkish generals, supremely uncomfortable with Ozal’s religiosity, stayed in control of national security policy, which Ozal did not challenge, because he and the generals were in broad agreement about Turkey as a NATO bulwark on Spykman’s Rimland of Eurasia facing off against the Soviet Union.