by Daniele Santoro
1. The war in Ukraine was the unexpected multiplier of Turkish power. By directly challenging the US on the Ukrainian battlefield, Russia attacked the ‘rule-based world order’ that applies to the Rest of the World, but not to the hegemon itself and its ‘special’ clients (see Israel). This exposed the superpower’s structural inability to govern global complexity and favoured the manoeuvres of America’s rivals, fuelling the yearning of the (former) Eurasian empires to recover their imperial status.
Among these, Turkey enjoys quite a peculiar position, fruit of the equally peculiar parabola followed by the Turkish nation in its transition from empire to republic. This position is confirmed by the ‘exorbitant privilege’ enjoyed by Erdogan, an almost avowed rival of America – in some Washington circles Ankara is now considered a sort of appendage of the Axis of Evil – who can weaken the Empire from within. First and foremost by leveraging Turkey’s decisive NATO participation – Turkey intends to remain a member for the foreseeable future, so much so that it has been entrusted with the organisation of NATO’s 2026 summit. It was precisely in Washington, on the occasion of the summit celebrating the Alliance’s 75th anniversary, that Erdogan gave a further demonstration of his independent-mindedness. Not by opposing massive Western aid to Ukraine, but by planting three rigid stakes. First: any initiative leading to a direct confrontation with Russia must be avoided. Second: the solution does not lie in further prolonging the conflict but in a ‘lasting peace achieved through dialogue’, which is hindered above all by the ‘attitude of some of our Western allies’. Third: ‘Putin and I do not agree on everything. However, we can discuss the issues among ourselves and go into details on how to solve specific problems’. Translated: Russia must not lose, because the stakes of Moscow’s war – the abolition of the US-led world order and the restoration of a global system based on imperial spheres of influence – are also vital to Ankara’s grand strategy.
Moreover, the conflict in Ukraine must end with a peace brokered by Turkey, in which the fundamental term of the axiom is Turkish mediation, not peace. No matter what peace, it matters that it is mediated by Erdogan. Peace, like war, is a means. Not an end. Above all, an agreement must be reached with Putin before the waning of America’s grip on Europe and Central Eurasia resurrects imperial ghosts. The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘war of ’93’ come to mind.
The collapse of America’s European empire and its Afro-Asian appendages is not a matter of immediate concern. But Turkey and Russia are seeing American hegemony gradually disintegrate, witnessing the inexorable expansion of Chaosland, the extension of which increasingly tends to coincide with that of the globe, United States included. The senile dementia exhibited by the current American President – convinced that his successor is his deputy – is not an individual pathology. It reflects the state of the hegemon. Erdogan is throwing himself on the carcass of the Empire with his usual greed, moved as ever by the traditional policy of incalculable risk. The Turkish President is wallowing in chaos and intends to take advantage of it to erode America’s imperial power. From within. To start with, by neutralising America’s imposition of sanctions, a tool that is now more fundamental than war for the Empire’s survival. First, by allowing Iran to circumvent US sanctions through the gas-for-gold scheme, then by acting as a platform for exports and imports into the Russian Federation of goods sanctioned by America, finally by allowing China to export its electric cars to Europe while avoiding the additional tariffs imposed by Brussels at Washington’s request.
Those who wish to evade American sanctions have only to knock on the külliye of Beştepe. This equivocal ambiguity reflects the structurally hybrid nature of the geopolitical identity of the Turks, hence of the Republic of Turkey. Ankara is proudly a member of NATO, of which along with France it is the most influential partner after the United States. It is associated with the European Union by a customs union agreement – a privilege that Brussels does not grant to any other non-Member State, except for principalities, statelets and (post-)imperial dependencies – which has revealed its not inconsiderable geopolitical importance in the Chinese electric car affair.
But at the same time, Erdogan implores Putin and Xi Jinping to admit Turkey to the Russian-Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, where it is a dialogue partner, and to BRICS, while successfully contending with the Iranian (actually another Turk) Ali Khamenei and the Saudi Muhammad bin Salman for the leadership of the Islamic ecumene and claiming the spiritual leadership of the Organisation of Turkish States. This latter association is ideally destined to evolve into an imperial (con)federation through which the second-generation Young Turks aspire to geopolitically channel towards the Republic founded by Gazi Mustafa Kemal Ataturk the peoples who recognise themselves in the centuries-old greeting displayed by the footballer Merih Demiral at the Red Bull Arena in Leipzig.
Turkey is whatever it needs to be. Turkish, Muslim and Asian, but also European and Western. Part of the developed world, but also part of the Global South. A strategic component of the American Empire, but also a potentially lethal threat to the superpower’s hegemony. In essence, Turkey is itself and its interests. And it is in the light of this banal reality that Ankara will calibrate its moves in the Ukrainian game.
2. Ukraine means the strategic depth of the Black Sea, the body of water that has most influenced the Turks’ geopolitical fortunes. As the etymology of the place name symbolically testifies. The Turks associate colours with cardinal points: north is black, south is red, west is white, east is green. When they settled in Anatolia at the end of the 11th century, the Seljuk clans hastened to rename the aquatic spaces surrounding the peninsula accordingly. Thus, the Pontus Eusinus became the Black Sea (Kara Deniz), the Mare Nostrum the White Sea (Ak Deniz), the Sinus Arabicus the Red Sea (Kızıl Deniz) – the absence of a Green Sea in the east stands out. In reality, the chromatic attribute is only figurative. For the cardinal colours the Turks have two lemmas, one (siyah, beyaz, kırmızı) to denote the colour in the strict sense, the other (kara, ak, kızıl) to denote its allegorical meaning. For example, Erdogan’s party is the White Party (Ak Parti), hence the clean, transparent, immaculate, uncorrupted party. And among these shades, black stands out in importance.
Black is associated with the North, the direction that in Turkish imagery leads to the Sky, to the Moon. Black in a figurative sense (kara) is synonymous with majesty, supremacy, celestiality. It is in this sense that the term is prefixed or appended to the name of great military commanders, sovereigns, or dynasties. For instance, the Ottoman general who led the siege of Vienna in 1683 was called Kara Mustafa Pasha, while the Karakhanids (Karahanlılar) – the Turkish dynasty that ruled Central Asia from the mid-10th to the early 13th century – were ‘those of the black khan’, i.e. ‘those of the northern khan’, hence ‘those of the supreme khan’.
But kara is also one of the Turkish lemmas for ‘land’, especially in the military sense. The ground forces are the Kara Kuvvetleri, the ground operation is kara harekatı. It is a sort of magic formula that excites the imagination of the average Turk. In October 2019, ‘Operation Fountain of Peace’ taking place east of the Euphrates was being broadcast in prime time. While Turkish warplanes and drones bombed PKK positions and US President Trump threatened to ‘obliterate’ the Anatolian economy, Turks waited anxiously in front of their TV screens for the ‘ground operation’ to begin. The guest of honour on State TV was Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu. The presenter asks him the fateful question: ‘When does the ground operation start?’ The then would-be successor to Erdogan falls silent, looks at the clock, then falls silent again, looks at the clock again. ‘Now.’ The chill running down the entire nation’s spine is sharply felt. Because bombing enemies from the air does not have the same feel to it as fighting them on land. So much so that on the night of 15 July 2016, many Turks rejoiced at the news that Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev had apparently ordered a ‘ground operation’ against the coup plotters. The surprising aspect of the story is not that the news was fake, but that a not insignificant proportion of Turks considered a ‘ground operation’ to be decisive while the enemy had control of the skies.
The Black Sea is therefore the North Sea, hence the Supreme Sea. Above all, the Black Sea is the “Land Sea”. It is a space in which the liquid element and the solid element merge to generate a singular terracqueous dimension. In a properly geopolitical sense. Ottoman control of the Black Sea in fact assumed a predominantly terrestrial declination. The Ottomans extended their sovereignty over it by conquering Constantinople (hence the Straits) and the outposts located in Crimea and along the mouths of the Don, Dniester, and Danube. The objectives were to structurally separate the Eusinian littoral from the Cuman steppe, to block river access routes to the Land Sea, to keep the Sarmatian plain wild and violent enough to prevent the formation of an enemy power there. Ottoman control of the Black Sea did not derive from sea power but from the solidity of the fluvial fortresses and garrisons established there. It was these land defences that made it a ‘pure and chaste virgin’. But also – Christian doctrine would see no contradiction here – the ‘source of all seas’, as the great 17th-century traveller Evliya Çelebi dubbed it. This evocative image reflects the unparalleled affection that the Turks have always had for the sea that washes the northern shore of Anatolia. So much so, in fact, that the authors of the successful television series Dirilis Ertugrul – carefully supervised by the pedagogical apparatuses – intended to place the discovery of the sea by the proto-Ottomans precisely on the Black Sea, instead of the Aegean. Not least because the Supreme Sea coast and its hinterland climatically conquered the Turks from the very beginning. Coming from the arid Central Asian steppes and from the equally arid Iranian plateau, the nomadic Turkmen immediately fell in love with the region’s climatic diversity. Forests, streams, rivers. Moisture, fog, rain, fertile land, high pastures. Everything a Turk who grew up on grassy steppes devoid of trees and watercourses, and therefore climatically and nutritionally inhospitable, could wish for.
This is probably also why the Black Sea is the real deep Anatolia. It is here that the Turkish-Anatolian cultural tradition is cultivated and cherished. That violence that allows the Turkish nation to cyclically regenerate itself – the Turk of the Black Sea considers it an inalienable human right to own a weapon (at least a white arm, possibly a firearm). It is no coincidence that the two current leaders of the Turkish nation hail from the Black Sea. Erdogan’s family hails from Rize, that of his challenger-in-chief Ekrem Imamoglu from Samsun. Mustafa Kemal, too, was made an adoptive Eusinian by the revolutionary hegira carried out across the stormy waters of the Land Sea, inevitable protagonists of the most decisive geopolitical event in Turkish history in recent centuries. Incidentally, a year before the Kemalist Hegira, the Azerbaijani composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov had set to music what was to become the most famous Anatolian folk song, the poem with which his illustrious compatriot Ahmad Javad – author of the current national anthem of the Republic of Azerbaijan – had paid homage to the sacrifice of Ottoman soldiers during the first months of the Great War: Chirpynirdi gara deniz, naturally dedicated to the Black Sea. It is said that Mustafa Kemal, listening to its verses, shed warm patriotic tears.
The Black Sea is thus the litmus test of Turkish power. The Ottomans’ rise to global superpower status was triggered by the conquest of the Land Sea, via Constantinople, Trabzon, then the rest of the Eusinian littoral. This expansion ushered in the apogee of the 16th century, while the contraction of Ottoman sovereignty over the Black Sea caused the decline of the Empire of the heirs of Osman. The decisive moment was neither Lepanto, as a large part of Western historiography claims, nor Navarino, as contemporary Turkish strategists assert, but the conquest of the fortress of Azov by Peter the Great in 1696. The virgin was violated. The Russians entered the waters of the Supreme Sea. It was an irreversible dynamic. The land-river defence system of the sea had collapsed.
The Sarmatian plain ceased to be a wild frontier and became a border between two empires. The Tsars succeeded where the Khans had failed for two millennia: they made the Eurasian steppe – the Wild Fields – the territory of a modern imperial state. The steppe empire took on its final manifestation. The Turan is statehood. Ivan IV bore the title of Tsar, but also that of ulu han. Moscow became the Third Rome, but also the heir to the Golden Horde: Caesar and Genghis Khan. From that moment on, the game with Russia in the Land Sea and its peripheries decided the fate of the Ottomans. The Empire would be dismembered by the Europeans, but without the Russian factor, the dynamics of the so-called Eastern Question would have been very different. Russia, as an Eusinian power, became the real unknown in, first, the Ottoman then the republican geopolitical equation, the one that decided the Empire’s decline and the Republic’s subsequent international positioning. And however much the rounds of the age-old Turkish-Russian confrontation may be played out in arenas geographically far removed from Eusinian waters, the Black Sea remains the ultimate geopolitical stakes in the ambiguous competition between Ankara and Moscow.
3. Turkey’s Ukrainian, hence Eusinian, strategy is articulated in three phases, coinciding with as many global scenarios. In the first phase, the current one, Ankara’s goal is to avert American victory and prevent Russian defeat. American hegemony must remain buried under Ukrainian rubble. In this sense, the short-term pillar of Turkey’s grand strategy was enunciated with unimpeachable academic rigour some fifteen years ago by Stephen R. Sestanovich, former special advisor to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations: the Turks ‘want us out of their way’. Above all, they intend to become co-players in the American decline, offering their indispensable services to Washington at an ever high geopolitical price. To the point of making the powerless superpower unable to do without them. Specularly, for the Turks Russia must win the challenge with the US, but not the war in Ukraine. Russian victory must be such as to humiliate the Americans, to convince their clients – Greece and the PKK above all – that the hegemon will have neither the energy nor the resources to defend them at the decisive moment.
But Moscow must emerge from the conflict drained, unable to use its territorial conquests in eastern Ukraine and the Eusinian littoral to increase military pressure on the Black Sea and the Straits. As a result it must find itself even more in need of the ambiguous cooperation with Ankara. If this is the price to pay to deal a low blow to American hegemony, from Turkey’s perspective at this stage Russia can preserve its territorial conquests in Eastern Ukraine, including Crimea. Not least because if Crimea remains under Russian occupation and Ukraine becomes a failed state in its own right, it becomes paradoxically easier for Ankara to try to bring the ancestral peninsula back under its sovereignty in the medium term. This may indeed be the first major success of Erdogan’s Russian-American tightrope walking, of the unscrupulous acrobatics by which the Turkish President sets out to assist the declining Americans and at the same time foment Russia’s ambitions. America’s increasingly conspicuous decline offers Turkey extraordinary opportunities, but also hides potentially lethal pitfalls. The most disturbing: a partition of the planet between the US and China, with Russia ending up in the Chinese-led bloc and Turkey being forced back into the American fold. This would be a nightmare scenario that Ankara intends to avert at all costs. First by proposing to increase China’s presence in Anatolia, so as to make Turkey a prize for both powers. This was the message conveyed to the authorities of the People’s Republic by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan on his recent trip to China. It turned out to be a great success story since many other Chinese investors seem intent on emulating Byd. Fidan’s ‘historic’ visit to East Turkestan, complete with a colourful Turkestan tie, is an unmistakable sign that Erdogan’s message has been heard in Beijing. And yet it is entirely unlikely that with a few billion in investment, the Chinese could contend with the Americans for Turkey. The People’s Republic would probably not even open the issue at the global partition table with Washington. This is why Ankara needs Moscow. And Moscow needs Ankara. Both Eurasian powers are perfectly aware of the fact that in the medium term – two to three decades – they will not have the necessary resources to take the lead of a geopolitical aggregate capable of resisting Sino-American pressure. The only solution to preserve their respective strategic autonomy is to instrumentally co-manage a sufficiently broad sphere of influence – pieces of Africa and the Middle East, the Caucasus, Central Asia, shreds of Europe (Serbia, Hungary) – to form a non-aligned bloc between the US and China. A supreme strategic priority that in the coming decades will palliate the structural rivalry between Turkey and Russia.
A particularly striking manifestation of this geopolitical project will be the likely visit to Ankara of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, 14 years after his last trip there. On the eve of which the leader of the Damascus regime said he ‘saw what many do not want to see: the birth of an alliance dictated by common interests; of a space in which politics, interests and infrastructure coincide. It is a new map also welded by territorial contiguity. On it, regional and emerging powers move. […] Syria, Iran, Turkey, but also Russia – all countries that are connecting each other, even physically, through gas and oil pipelines, railways, road networks, power systems. One big perimeter uniting five seas: the Mediterranean, Caspian, Black, Red Seas and the Arabian Gulf. We are talking about the centre of the world’. Erdogan extends the invitation; al-Assad accepts it conditionally; Putin mediates discreetly, anticipating geopolitical success. The reunion will most likely be preceded by an exploratory meeting between al-Assad and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, who was already in charge of the Syrian dossier as Head of the Secret Services.
The importance of Syrian dynamics naturally goes far beyond the albeit strategic Levantine space. The fundamental geopolitical issue is that in Syria, the strategic interests of Turkey and Russia diverge radically, but Ankara and Moscow are managing with some success to settle these differences in the name of a more immediate strategic priority: dealing a lethal blow to American hegemony. Which in the Syrian context means making the US military presence east of the Euphrates untenable, thus forcing the superpower into a humiliating retreat, a goal formalised in July 2022 in Tehran by Erdogan, Putin and the late Iranian President Raisi. If Ankara’s calculations are correct, in half a century – the third phase, the long run – American decline will be an accomplished fact. The hegemon will no longer be a hegemon, its superpowers will have been diminished and normalised. The Turkish-Russian bloc will have made a Sino-American global condominium impossible. Eurasia will have sunk into anarchy. Conflicts will have multiplied. Complexity will have increased in inverse proportion to the powers’ ability to simplify it. The external constraint that makes physiological Turkish-Russian confrontation counterproductive will have disappeared. And the Black Sea represents the prism through which the three phases of the ambiguous intrigue between Ankara and Moscow can be scrutinised synchronously. Here Turkey and Russia avoid even indirect confrontation. They cooperate by competing as in other quadrants, but do not spare each other low blows. The militarisation of Crimea and the strengthening of the Russian Black Sea Fleet have a profound – perhaps overriding – anti-Turkish dimension, as made explicit by former Armed Forces Chief of Staff Valery Gerasimov, who in 2016 was keen to point out that, ‘Several years ago […] it was said that Turkey is virtually the master of the Black Sea. Now everything is different’. In reverse, with the closure of the Turkish Straits to warships immediately after the start of the ‘special military operation’ Erdogan intended to signal to Putin that despite everything he remains fully aware of what is at stake in the centuries-old clash that has the Supreme Sea as its epicentre. Meantime, the Turkish President keeps the Istanbul Channel gun on the table and uses the grain deal to gauge the state of Eusinian power relations with the Kremlin. He mounts guard over the Bosporus to prevent the Russians from bathing in the warm seas, those in which Turkey intends to establish its Blue Homeland: a terracqueous crasis modelled on the ideal prototype of the solid waters of the Land Sea, a fluctuating refuge for the imperial ghosts that lie dormant under American hegemony.
Translated by Dr Mark A. Sammut Sassi.
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