Teaching my students journalism, I urge them to avoid banality in their reports — such as ‘Spring is green’, ‘fish lives under water’, or ‘Russia and Turkey apparently used to be the countries fought each other more than any’.
These old writer’s platitudes still have great influence on us — but if you scrutinize some of them, you would discover that the reality is quite different.
In the 1560s, Suleiman the Magnificent, one of the greatest Turkish rulers, responded to his fellowman Kasim Pasha when the latter attempted to push the Mastermind of Istanbul to attack Russia: ‘I have no reason to unleash a war against the Moscow Tzar as our grandfathers lived in friendship and the Muscovites have seized no Turkish properties’, the Sultan pointed out. Shouldn’t we base our modern relations on such a cornerstone — rather than on previous fake narrative objected to split the two greatest nations of Eurasia?
And another fact of the same series. From his rise to power in 2002 and till August 2022, the Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has payed 25 visits to Russia: more than to any other country including the US. Averagely, the Turkish leader was meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin (or some of his deputies) every 8-9 months during the last 20 years.
Thereby, both presidents have made a covert revolution in international affairs which only the historians of the future will filly assess. In the past, one of the reasons of the 1962 Cuban Crisis was the deployment of American nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey aimed to strike the USSR from the territory of this key NATO member. Later, in the 1990s, international terrorists conducted the war against Russians in Chechnya were able to find a shelter in then-time Turkey.
On the other hand, Russia during most of its modern history intended to capture Turkey’s Bosphorus and Dardanelles; finally this Russian claim was officially approved by the Western-designed 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. Isn’t it strange that London and Paris — that previously dismissed any Russian attempt to increase — at that time surprisingly endorsed the Russian anti-Turkish alignment? But if we assume that it was the same old Western policy objected to turn its potential competitors against each other, the entire case would be obvious.
Same way, obvious will be the secret of the unprecedented this-day Turkish-Russian alliance. The West exploited Turkey as a perfect NATO military site, but refused to grant it a EU membership despite its 35 years of application. Washington used Ankara as a key tool in the US’ Near East strategy, but neglected the essential Turkish right to maintain its secure zones in Eastern Mediterranean, Northern Syria, and other areas. At worst, the West — with all its lucrative desire to democracy — supported the 2016 coup attempt which could throw the country into the new 1919.
Russia faced the same hostile attitude. For decades, it had been trying to became a minor partner of the West, but every time something was insufficiently perfect. At present, the West guilts Russia in the 2022 Ukrainian crisis which is in fact Western-driven. In 2018, the West shamed Russia for its activity in Syria to solve the Syrian crisis along with Turkey. In 2012, when Russia even did not think about Damascus or Crimea and supported the West in its UN resolution to invade Libya, the West found violation of rights of sexual minorities in Russia — etc, etc, etc.
Doesn’t it absurd? I think the word ‘Untermensch’ from the Third Reich’s vocabulary is a proper description of such an attitude. The Western powers really consider Turkey and Russia — as well as Iran, or China, or Africa — as a second-class person. On the contrary, Putin and Erdogan — together with China’s Xi, or Ethiopia’s Abiy, or any other non-Western leader — treat a counterpart as an equal partner.
Of course, Ankara and Moscow has mutual problems, such as the supply of Bayraktar drones to Ukraine, or Russian position regarding the Libyan crisis. But both have much more in common than in division. Thereby, the Russian-Turkish trade amount is about to almost double and reach $50 billion this year ; moreover, these financial interactions are likely to go to national currencies instead of the Western ones.
Applying this model, both countries replace iniquity with equality, dictatorship with dedication, and hegemony with harmony — which will turn the US-sparked world chaos into the global security.
In the childhood, our generation was listening to the stories about the wars our grandfathers had won. At present, we have our own: a struggle for the new world model — despite all the upcoming attempts of alien actors to disrupt our alliance. Will we be able to take this challenge?
