by PEPE ESCOBAR
While everyone is concentrated on the possibility of a tectonic shift in US-Iran relations, and while a solution may be found for the Syrian tragedy in another upcoming set of negotiations in Geneva, Turkey is silently toiling in the background. Let’s see what these sultans of swing are up to.
We start on the internal front. Abdul Mejid I, the 31st Ottoman sultan (in power from 1839 to 1861) always dreamed of a submerged tunnel under the Bosphorus linking Europe to Asia.
It took “Sultan” Erdogan, as in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to make it happen, when last month he inaugurated – on the 90th anniversary of the founding of Ataturk’s Republic – the US$3 billion, 76-kilometer Marmaray rail system which, in the hardly hyperbolic words of Mustafa Kara, mayor of Istanbul’s Uskudar district (where the tunnel comes out), will “eventually link London to Beijing, creating unimagined global connections”. [1]
It certainly helps that this technological marvel fits right into China’s extremely ambitious New Silk Road(s) strategy which, just like the original Silk Road, starts in Xian, and aims to cross to Europe via, where else, Istanbul. [2]
So the fact remains that “Sultan” Erdogan simply has not been downed by the Gezi Park protests last June. All the ruling party AKP’s mega-projects – supported by millions in rural Anatolia, ignored for decades by the secular elites in Istanbul – are alive and kicking.
By 2025, more than a million commuters will be using the Marmaray. The third Bosphorus bridge, close to the Black Sea, is being built – despite Alevi fury that it will be named after Selim The Grim, a sultan who ordered the slaughter of thousands of Alevis. Same for the new six-runway airport northwest of Istanbul. And then there’s the 50 km “crazy canal” (Erdogan’s own definition), linking the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea, so monstrous tanker traffic may be diverted away from the Bosphorus. The Turkish green movement insists this could destroy whole aquatic ecosystems, but Erdogan is unfazed.
That oily Kurdish factor
In the wider world, Turkish foreign policy is now on overdrive. And inevitably, it’s all related to energy.
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu earlier this month hosted Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Ankara. Then he went to Baghdad and met Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Davutoglu also visited Washington; he wrote an editorial published by Foreign Policy praising the US-Turkish “strategic partnership”, now facing “an increasingly chaotic geopolitical environment”; and he made sure to support US-Iran negotiations.
Asia Times Online for more