British Prime Minister Clement Attlee had rightly stated, “he who rules the Mediterranean Sea rules the world”. In today’s tri-polar world struggles for mastery over the Mediterranean have restarted with different dimensions. The United States controls most of the oceans and seas directly or through allies. Formidable problem to have an access to warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea is being faced by Russia and China which are strategically handicapped and commercially crippled to showcase their products rich markets of the Middle East and Europe.
Russia cannot flex its muscles in the Middle East and Asian markets and China from Shanghai is handicapped to get an easy access to the Middle East and African continent. Russia remains vulnerable to its access to previously known as Constantinople and presently known as Istanbul to Bosphorus Bridge. Its navy cannot launch any maneuvers in the region.
For several strategic and commercial reasons, Russian President Putin held a meeting with Turkish President Erdogan Tayyip lately. The meeting comes on the heels of a growing malaise in Turkey’s relations with the West. The Western leaders have criticised the Turkish leadership’s reaction to the July 15 failed coup-especially the purges that have so far targeted 80,000 people in the military, judiciary, media and education sector. Stronger reactions followed when Erdogan accused the West of having prior knowledge of the coup and threatened to reinstate capital punishment.
In contrast to Western leaders, Putin is using the occasion to “reset” Russian-Turkish relations. He is building on Erdogan’s cleverly-worded letter of apology that enabled him to save face and meet Putin’s demands for lifting of sanctions and prepare the ground work for this summit.
Turkey has a long and complicated relationship with Russia that stretches back centuries. Turkish history textbooks highlight the many wars Russia fought against the Ottomans, but also how the Soviets assisted Turkey in pushing back against the Western occupation of Turkey in the aftermath of World War I, as well as how this close relationship remained in the early years of the Republic. However, the relationship came to an end with Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s, and when Turkey’s border with the Soviet Union (the Turkish-Georgian border today) was sealed. The coup de grace came when Stalin made territorial demands on Turkey at the end of World War II and made clear his desire to see a pro-Soviet government in Ankara-along the lines of those in Eastern Europe. This propelled Turkey into the Western fold and Turkey became a member of Nato in 1952.
The summit between the two leaders was pre-planned, but the coup attempt added another layer of importance to it, particularly with Putin promptly offering any post-coup assistance Turkey might need. It comes at a time when the West has failed to sympathise with the dire situation facing Erdogan and the Turkish public-not to mention the population’s strong conviction that the United States was somehow involved in the coup. People deeply resent that the alleged mastermind of the coup attempt, Fetullah Gulen, resides in the United States and have a hard time believing that the United States somehow had no prior knowledge of Gulen’s plans.
With these developments and events set in motion do suggest an expected Turkish departure from the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. Major US think tanks are seriously evaluating the consequences of Turkish fresh policy maneuvers which deter the United States itself from interdicting Russian Navy in Mediterranean Sea.
This is a big question, and a difficult one to answer with certainty. Turkey’s relationship with the West dates back to the Ottoman Empire, when its leaders turned to the West as a source of inspiration for their modernization efforts. The Turkish republic itself has long aspired to become “Westernized” in a number of fields, such as its system of governance, rule of law, economics, and science, as well as day-to-day life. Since the end of World War II, it has become incorporated into a number of institutions, including the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund, Nato, the OECD, and World Trade Organisation, and maintains very close relations with the EU-all of which are the institutions that constitute the basis of the international liberal order today.
Furthermore, unlike Russia, Turkey is not an energy exporting country. Instead, it has to have a functioning liberal market economy that can export and attract tourism to generate revenues, jobs, and growth. As much as Russia was an important economic market for Turkish exports in 2014 (the last full year not affected by sanctions), these exports were still less than those to the United States, which is considerably further away. Furthermore, in 2014, 44 percent of Turkey’s export went to the EU, compared to only less than 4 percent to Russia. The vast majority of foreign direct investment in Turkey comes from the EU. It is doubtful whether Russia could provide the technological innovation and the global market access that comes to Turkey with these investments. In spite of the tense political relations with the EU, the bloc is still Turkey’s economic lifeline.
Additionally, the purges have weakened the Turkish military at a time when Turkey’s neighbourhood is in turmoil-where Russia has recently annexed Crimea and ferments secessionism in Ukraine and Georgia (not to mention the threat of the ongoing chaos in neighbouring Syria). Nato membership should now be more indispensable to Turkey’s national security than it was a month ago. Furthermore, as much as Turkey has considerably adjusted its policies over Syria and is now seeking closer co-operation with Russia to arrive at a diplomatic solution, it is not clear whether the two countries are actually on the same page on Syria: Many policies need to be ironed out, including those over the issue of PYD (the Kurdish organisation fighting ISIS), which Turkey considers a threat to its national security.
Realpolitik should be the guiding principle for Turkish decision makers, as they question the merits of the country’s relationship with the West. In the meantime, as Carl Bildt has noted, the West needs to recognise that Turkey has experienced a trauma, and that Erdogan deserves the benefit of doubt-with the clear caveat that the West will soon want to see concrete signs that the rule of law will be respected, Turkey’s slide toward authoritarianism will be halted, and capital punishment will not be introduced in a moment of frenzy. It’s important to bear in mind what Turkey and its region would look like if Turkey had not joined up with the West. Where would Turkey be today? More prosperous, more stable? Probably not.
Finally, there is no harm in Turkey developing closer relations with Russia; yet this relationship will be more beneficial if Turkey remains in the Western fold and a member of the international liberal order. The West must recognise this, and make sure not to push Turkey into an “axis of the excluded.” In the meantime, the United States should take Turkey’s concerns about Gulenist involvement in the attempted coup very seriously and cooperate in its investigation, even if the extradition issue may be a thorny one. Additionally, more sympathetic public messaging-especially ahead of John Kerry’s possible forthcoming visit-could go a long way in helping to rebuild trust between the two countries.
Meanwhile in a major development US Director for Defence Policy Control on White House Steve Andreasen has cautioned that the B-61 tactical nuclear weapons stored in Turkey could easily be seized by ‘jihadists’. He questioned, “what if the Turkish base commander at Incirlik had ordered his troops surrounding the perimeter of the base to turn their guns on the US soldiers that reportedly guard US nuclear storage bunkers there?”
The question posed by Andreasen plagues the minds of the America’s national security establishment in the wake of the failed government overthrow in Turkey as an increasingly frustrated Erdogan regime has laid the blame for the coup squarely at the feet of the United States both for failing to extradite alleged mastermind Fethullah Gulen and also for an array of reasons resembling conspiracy theories.
The situation facing Nato’s storage of nuclear weapons in Turkey was already among the defense alliance’s most critical vulnerabilities with the base, holding at least 50 B-61 tactical nuclear weapons with a charge upwards of a 100 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, sitting only 60 miles (97km) away from Daesh strongholds across the Turkish-Syrian border.
The danger of jihadists engaging in an offensive on the critical Nato base is that much greater with the Turkish people, and increasingly the country’s officials, expressing disdain for the alliance. “We are in for a long stretch of political uncertainty in Turkey, exacerbated by growing anti-Americanism,” explains Andreasen. “Any nuclear weapons stored there are more likely to complicate than to improve the domestic political currents in play.”
The national security expert provides a very simply prescription for the potential danger to America’s national security interests – “Let’s get our nuclear weapons out of Turkey.” Turkish-Russo detente is differently termed by Stratfor. It says, “Over the past week, geopolitics analysts from around the world have focused a great deal of attention on the talks between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan in St. Petersburg August 9.” Naturally, Stratfor was no exception, publishing its own commentary on the meeting.
However, Russian commentators have noticed that something was very off about the think tank’s analysis. For her part, PolitRussia contributor Olga Ikonnikova suggested that the analysis looked more like propaganda than an objective inquiry.
“To get Washington to take its demands seriously, Russia needed to position itself as both a spoiler and a mediator in a conflict consuming the United States’ attention,” the think tank wrote. “First that conflict was Iran, but once the United States negotiated its way to the Iran nuclear deal, Russia shifted its focus to Syria,” the analysis added. Meanwhile, Stratfor noted, Turkey’s policy against its Kurdish minority in the south of the country, and efforts to destabilise neighbouring Syria, was really just an indication of Ankara’s security concerns. “Just as Russia had decided to deepen its involvement in Syria, the Turkish government was making plans to step in to deal with the growing Kurdish and Islamic State threat,” the analysis reads.
“As much as the United States benefited from Turkey being at odds with Russia and thus more committed to Nato at the time, the White House decided it was better off facilitating a rapprochement between Moscow and Ankara if it meant reducing the risk of another major accidental collision on the Syrian battlefield that could draw in the United States,” the think tank noted.
Azhar Masood, "The quest for warm waters," Business Recorder. 2016-08-21.Keywords: Economics , Global warming , Economic sanctions , Nuclear weapons , Geopolitics , International Monetary Conference , Russia , America , Turkey , Britain , ISIS , PYD , OECD