Turkish Republic’s Long-Term Interest Playground

Shi’ism should not be Turkish Rebuplic’s enemy. It is not in the long-term interest of the Republic to side with the Sunni Arab states against Iran. Doing so produces an imbalance of power in the region as we learned with the collapse of the Iraqi state in the aftermath of the American invasion of 2003. Iran was then able to establish a contiguous sphere of influence stretching from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean — something that was only averted by the Arab Spring reaching Syria.
The two-year-old Syrian crisis has now come to a point where Iran is on the defensive, as its positions in Lebanon and Iraq come under threat. Remember that the United States had a bad, decadeslong experience with Sunni domination of the Middle East while the Republic enjoyed the funds inflow and its current account deficit financed. It was Sunni dominance, in which the Shias were not sufficiently feared, that helped lead to a phalanx of Arab dictators — in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Such leaders as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and King Fahd in Saudi Arabia fostered a rotten and calcified political climate that was relatively empty of reform, while quietly tolerant of extremism, which resulted in 9/11. But at least the likes of Fahd and Mubarak, or relatively more reformed one such as the Republic ran strong states that cooperated with Western intelligence agencies: Perhaps not so the Sunni Islamists who might yet gain even more influence and power in Egypt and Syria. The last thing Turkish Republic is to be involved is a situation in Syria in which radical Sunni Islamist forces are able to project power in the region, especially across the country’s eastern border into Iraq.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s quasi-democratic regime may be short on stability and long on thuggery, and it may be unduly interfered with by the Iranians, but at least it forms the basis of a state that might over time evolve in a better direction — and therefore influence Iranian Shi’ism for the better, with Karbala and Najaf affecting debates in Qom. Allowing Iraq to fall will not just create a wider geopolitical space for jihadists to operate, it will also be a total reversal to the Turkish Republic’s efforts to establish highly vital energy wise economic ties with Iraq. Furthermore, from the American point of view, the Shia-dominated Iraqi regime serves as a major counterbalance to Salafists gaining ground in the Sunni Arab world.
The Salafist threat is even greater when considering that Saudi Arabia, a country led by aging, Brezhnevite rulers, with a diminishing underground water table, a demographic male youth bulge and 40 percent youth unemployment, is weakening. No one should underestimate the inherent artificiality of the Saudi state, built around the parched and deeply conservative upland of Najd, which has always struggled to subdue the more cosmopolitan maritime peripheries like Hijaz. The last thing Washington should want, and the Turkish Republic must avoid, is to revitalize a Sunni dominated new Middle East around Saudi Arabia, which USA has entered a period of great uncertainty and is resolved to weakening Iranian influence in the northern rim of the Middle East at all costs — even if it means empowering jihadists.
Always remember that the clerical hold over the Islamic Republic is not eternal, even as the West is culturally much closer to Iran than to Saudi Arabia. The Turkish Republic should therefore be prepared in coming years for regionwide upheavals in which its alliances are rearranged. A decentralization of power — just at the time Iran reaches the nuclear threshold — is potentially a greater danger than a centrally controlled, nuclear Iran. Weakening central authority — not the continuation of autocracy — remains the greatest danger to the region. Keep in mind that stability in the Middle East has never been a matter of democracy. To date, Israel has only signed peace treaties with Arab autocrats, who ran strong states and who could purge members of their own power structures who disagreed with them. It is neither the call of democracy that the USA should primarily want nor the Republics’ outcries on humanity, but a regional balance of power that will reduce the risk of war. Now that Iran is being weakened by the slow-motion collapse of Bashar al Assad’s Alawite regime, a chaotic Syria will likely become — even more so — the fulcrum of a power struggle between Iran and the Sunni Arab world for years to come, preventing either side from being able to dominate the region.
So where do you see the stand of the Turkish Republic’s future interest ??