Putin and Erdogan see themselves as heirs to proud
empires. But fighter jets and tough talk can’t mask imperial decline.
BY
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin
Before Crimea was
Russian, or Ukrainian, or even Soviet, it was Turkish. Well, Ottoman. And
Russia had already annexed Crimea once before 2014, long before — in 1783. This
was after a six-year war with the Turks, in which the Russians essentially
wiped out the Ottoman navy. The conflict ended with the Treaty of Kainardrji,
signed in 1774, which has come to be seen by historians as the first partition
of the Ottoman Empire, the beginning of its long, slow decline. In losing
Crimea to Russia, the Ottoman Empire, for the first time ever, lost Muslim
subjects to a Christian power. (The Crimean Tatars, who have been especially
opposed to Moscow’s newest takeover of the peninsula, are the vestigial limb
left behind by the Ottomans, bucking again at its new Russian owner — which
has, in turn, cracked down on them.)
That war and the treaty that ended it, Bernard Lewis wrote some 200 years
later, was “the turning point in the relations between Europe and the Middle
East.”
Nor would it be the
last time the Russians and the Turks butted heads. Over the next two centuries,
they would clash again and again as the Russian Empire pushed deeper and deeper
into the Ottoman heartland: the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the
Dardanelles. One young Russian army officer wrote about his experiences
fighting the Turks, French, and British at Crimea, in 1854. The work, which
came to be called The Sevastopol Sketches, was the
second the young man — Leo Tolstoy — ever published.
Which is all to say
that what happened yesterday, when the Turks and Russians clashed over who was
where when in the skies over a small sliver of land is nothing new in the
relations of these two erstwhile empires.
For that is what
they are. Both
Turkey and Russia
have the hearts and souls of massive, multi-ethnic empires, hearts and souls
that still beat inside trunks shorn of their expansive limbs, limbs for which
they still hunger today. Both exist today as greatly diminished, regional
powers struggling to project greater influence — the kind that befits empires
and their histories. And, in doing so, they assume their old stances, as if
from muscle memory. “When you travel to Turkey, do you trust even one Turk?” wrote Maxim Kononenko, a prominent, pro-Kremlin blogger. “And
so it is with all those who spoke in Turkey’s name today. They are all Turks
and you cannot trust them.”
Some Russians have
described yesterday’s shoot-down in larger historical terms: it is the first
time that there has been a real, military conflict between Russia and NATO, wrote the liberal
Slon.ru. Russian officialdom, however, is framing this squarely as a conflict
between Russia and the hotheaded, trigger-happy Turks. Wednesday’s evening
news, dedicated almost exclusively to the incident, made much hay out
of the fact that Washington and Europe, even NATO, spent all of Tuesday
chastising Turkey and throwing cold water on the idea that one plane and one
territorial incursion would lead to a wider conflict.
If anything, NATO
and the Europeans are the good guys in this interpretation of events —
certainly a first in recent Russian history. Why? Because Turkey, the villain
in this story, is trying to derail a grand, historic coalition against
terrorism, one that has Russia as its main axis. The de-escalation facilitated
by Western powers, the evening news report noted, “is needed so that this
conflict doesn’t harm the fight against terrorism in general and against ISIS
specifically.” That is, Russia sees itself as doing the work necessary to
protect the civilized world against the threat of terrorism, work that benefits
France, Britain, and the United States as much as it benefits Russia. (Left
unstated is the assumption that it doesn’t benefit Turkey, or its
Islamist-sympathizing government.) It is analogous to the way Russia has
portrayed its role in World War II, especially recently: Russia fought back the
menace of fascism for the good of the ungrateful West, which would have drowned
if not for Moscow’s help.
This is why,
beneath the propaganda and cynical geopolitical maneuvering, Moscow finds
Western critiques about its role in Syria so deeply frustrating, insulting
even. To Russia, such complaints are as old as time, centuries-old efforts to
block Russian imperial ambitions at every possible turn for no apparent reason
— even to the point of lining up with the Muslim Ottomans against Christian Rus
in the mid-19th century. And, much to Russia’s chagrin, this constant Western
interference greatly slowed Russian imperial expansion.
At the same time,
Russia has historically viewed the Turks as a good buffer against European
expansion. “If we have allowed the Turkish government to continue to exist in
Europe, it is because that government, under the predominant influence of our
superiority, suits us better than any of those which could be set up on its
ruins,” wrote Karl Nesselrode, the Russian empire’s foreign minister, in 1830.
Sound familiar? The instinct for maintaining the stability of unsavory
neighboring powers, even as Russia slowly chips away at their peripheries, is
an old one, encoded deep in the Russian state psyche. These other powers exist,
in one form or another, as mirrors in which Russia can see itself as an empire,
and preen.
I mention all this
ancient history because the conflict over the Russian plane in Turkish airspace
— and, according to my sources in the U.S. government, it was in Turkish
airspace — is not about the plane, or the airspace, or the Islamic State, or
even NATO. It is about two empires, the Russian and the Ottoman, that continue
to violently disintegrate to this day, decades after they have formally ceased
to exist. Look at Ukraine and Moldova, look at Syria and Iraq. These are the
death throes of empire, the long tails of their legacies, shaking themselves
out as the rest of the world tries to contain and smooth the convulsions of
transition.
And it is about two
men, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, without much irony, see
themselves as heirs to the two mantles of these two long-gone empires. They, in
turn, have revived those empires in the minds of their subjects, constantly
dangling before their eyes the holograms of greatness past. It is no surprise,
then, that, as the number of actors and the potential for conflict has grown in
Syria, that the first flash of it would happen between two men who feel so
keenly their countries’ phantom limbs.
* This article was first published by Foreign Policy on 25/11/2015
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