Sultan shines in the court of
the Dragon King
Pepe Escobar
The graphic image of Turkey
pivoting away from NATO towards the Russia-China strategic partnership was
provided, in more ways than one, by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan visiting
Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing right after the G20 in Osaka.
Turkey is a key hub in the
emerging New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative. Erdogan is a master at
selling Turkey as the ultimate East-West crossroads. He has also expressed much
interest in joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), led by
Russia-China, whose annual summit took place in Bishkek a few days before
Osaka.
In parallel, against hell and
high water – from threats of sanctions by the US Congress to NATO warnings –
Erdogan never budged from Ankara’s decision to buy Russian S-400 defense
missile systems, a $2.5-billion contract according to Rostec’s
Sergei Chemezov.
The S-400s start to be shipped
to Turkey as early as this week. According to Turkish Minister of Defense
Hulusi Akar, their deployment should start by October. Much to Washington’s
ire, Turkey is the first NATO member state to buy S-400s.
Xi, as he welcomed Erdogan in
Beijing, stressed the message he crafted together with Putin in their previous
meetings in St Petersburg, Bishkek and Osaka: China and Turkey should “uphold a
multilateral world order with the United Nations at its core, a system based on
international law.”
Erdogan, for his part, turned
up the charm – from publishing an op-ed in the Global
Times extolling a common vision of the future to laying
it out in some detail. His target is to consolidate Chinese investment
in multiple areas in Turkey, directly or indirectly related to Belt and Road.
Addressing the extremely
sensitive Uighur dossier head on, Erdogan deftly executed a pirouette. He
eschewed accusations from his own Foreign Ministry that “torture and political
brainwashing” were practiced in Uighur detention camps and would rather comment
that Uighurs “live happily” in China. “It is a fact that the peoples of China’s
Xinjiang region live happily in China’s development and prosperity. Turkey does
not permit any person to incite disharmony in the Turkey-China relationship.”
This is even more startling
considering that Erdogan himself, in the past decade, had accused Beijing of
genocide. And in a famous 2105 case, hundreds of Uighurs about to be deported
from Thailand back to China ended up, after much fanfare, being resettled in
Turkey.
New geopolitical caravan
Erdogan seems to have finally
realized that the New Silk Roads are the 2.0 digital version of the Ancient
Silk Roads whose caravans linked the Middle Kingdom, via trade, to multiple
lands of Islam – from Indonesia to Turkey and from Iran to Pakistan.
Before the 16th century,
the main line of communication across Eurasia was not maritime, but the chain
of steppes and deserts from Sahara to Mongolia, as Arnold Toynbee wonderfully
observed. Walking the line we would find merchants, missionaries, travelers,
scholars, all the way to Turko-Mongols from Central Asia migrating to the
Middle East and the Mediterranean. They all formed the stuff of interconnection
and cultural exchange between Europe and Asia – way beyond geographical
discontinuity.
Arguably Erdogan is now able
to read the new tea leaves. The Russia-China strategic partnership – directly
involved in linking Belt and Road with the Eurasia Economic Union and also the
International North-South Transportation Corridor – considers Turkey and Iran
as absolutely indispensable key hubs for the ongoing, multi-layered Eurasia
integration process.
A new Turkey-Iran-Qatar
geopolitical and economic axis is slowly but surely evolving in Southwest Asia,
ever more linked to Russia-China. The thrust is Eurasia integration, visible
for instance via a frenzy of railroad building designed to link the New Silk
Roads, and the Russia-Iran transportation corridor, to the Eastern
Mediterranean and the Red Sea and, eastwards, the Iran-Pakistan corridor to the
China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, one of Belt and Road’s highlights.
This is all being supported by
interlocking transportation cooperation agreements involving Turkey-Iran-Qatar
and Iran-Iraq-Syria.
The end result not only
consolidates Iran as a key Belt and Road connectivity hub and China’s strategic
partner, but also by contiguity Turkey – the bridge to Europe.
As Xinjiang is the key hub in
Western China connecting to multiple Belt and Road corridors, Erdogan had to
find a middle ground – in the process minimizing, to a great extent, waves of
disinformation and Western-peddled Sinophobia. Applying Xi Jinping thought, one
would say Erdogan opted for privileging cultural understanding and
people-to-people exchanges over an ideological battle.
Ready to mediate
In conjunction with his
success at the court of the Dragon King, Erdogan now feels emboldened enough to
offer his services as mediator between Tehran and the Trump administration –
picking up on a suggestion he made to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the
G20.
Erdogan would not have made
that offer if it had not been discussed previously with Russia and China –
which, crucially, are member signatories of the Iran nuclear deal, or Joint
Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA).
It’s easy to see how Russia
and China should consider Turkey the perfect mediator: a neighbor of Iran, the
proverbial bridge between East and West, and a NATO member. Turkey is certainly
much more representative than the EU-3 (France, UK, Germany).
Trump seems to want – or at
least gives the impression of imposing – a JCPOA 2.0, without an Obama
signature. The Russia-China partnership could easily call his bluff, after
clearing it with Tehran, by offering a new negotiating table including Turkey.
Even if the ineffective – in every sense – EU-3 remained, there would be real
counterbalance in the form of Russia, China and Turkey.
Out of all these important
moves in the geopolitical chessboard, one motivation stands out among top
players: Eurasian integration cannot significantly progress without challenging
the Trumpian sanction obsession.
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