by Parag Khanna
To connect Russia’s expanding food output to Asia’s demand, Japan, China, and South Korea have each found a role, turning Russia’s Far Eastern capital of Vladivostok (“Lord of the East”) into a special economic zone for food processing and export. Vladivostok lies on a sliver of eastern Russia that blocks northeast China from having its own port on the Sea of Japan; hence China must use Russia’s port. The other growth business in Vladivostok is casinos, owned and operated by Chinese hospitality magnates for high rollers coming from nearby Harbin, from which China is upgrading the railway line. In the early 1700s, Tsar Peter the Great founded Saint Petersburg as Russia’s capital in an attempt to bring Russia closer to the European center of the world. “If he were alive today,” jokes Dmitri Trenin, “he would move the capital to Vladivostok.”
Russian strategists are keen on taking advantage of the power shift to Asia, making sure the next generation of diplomats will have enough Farsi, Turkish, Mandarin, and Japanese speakers in its ranks. The centuries-old tension in Russian strategic identity between European Westernizers and nationalist Slavophiles thus no longer captures Russia’s intentions, which call for a “Grand Eurasia” in which Russia will straddle the European commonwealth and the Asian megaregion.
Turkey Marches East
From the Huns to the Seljuks to the Ottomans, Turkic peoples have been knocking on Europe’s door for well over a millennium. In the fifteenth century, the Ottomans sacked Constantinople and prevailed over Christian Byzantium. But in the early twentieth century, Europeans dismembered the Ottoman Empire. After that, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s vision of Turkey marching culturally (not militarily) westward to join the civilized nations of Europe animated much of Turkey’s twentieth-century foreign policy, particularly its application for EU membership. But whereas the late 1990s and early 2000s were a time of earnest optimism about Turkey’s prospects, the lack of agreement over how to resolve its dispute with Greece over Cyprus, tensions with the United States over using NATO air bases in Turkey during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Erdoğan government’s escalating crackdowns on opposition froze meaningful negotiations. Since that time, the Arab refugee crisis and Erdoğan’s heavy-handed response to a botched coup attempt against him in 2016 have poisoned relations further.
When the Arab uprisings broke out in 2011, many claimed that a secular, moderate, democratic Turkey could be a role model for its Arab neighbors. Instead, the violent spillover of the Arab vortex fueled Erdoğan’s metamorphosis into a modern oriental despot who imprisons military officers and opposition figures, intimidates intellectuals and journalists, and sends former allies into exile. He further wants to Islamicize Turkey’s educational system through a new curriculum in Arabic and Koran studies intended to produce a “pious generation.” With no predictable timeline for his stepping down, the neo-Ottoman Erdoğan has surrounded himself with a praetorian guard of so-called Eurasianers who believe that the West is out to isolate Turkey. As bitter as its relations with Europe have become, Turkey will remain a member of the Council of Europe and European Customs Union, while also drawing more than half of its inward investment from Europe, whose banks need to support Turkey’s recovery from its economic crisis precisely because they are so exposed to its market. But Turkey has lurched toward Asia in response to both its political rejection by Europe and the mix of turbulence and opportunities lying to the east.
As with Russia, most of Turkey’s territory lies squarely in Asia, but unlike in Russia, most of Turkey’s population does as well. Also, Turkey is nearly 100 percent Muslim (with 80 percent of the population Sunni and 20 percent varieties of Shi’a), making it less schizophrenic about its Asian spirit. Turkish ethnic, linguistic, and cultural affinities stretch across the Caucasus and Central Asia (the former “Turkestan”) all the way to Mongolia, to which Turkish Airlines began nonstop flights in 2013 and where Turkey has undertaken large-scale preservation of cultural monuments. Turkey’s overtures to its Turkic brethren in Central Asia have laid the foundations for the landlocked region to achieve greater westward connectivity. In the past five years, coordinated investments have made serious headway to link Central Asia and Anatolia in a twenty-first-century Silk Road of freight railways, upgraded ports on the Caspian Sea (Baku in Azerbaijan, Aqtau in Kazakhstan, and Turkmenbashi in Turkmenistan), and energy corridors across Kazakhstan to China. Already Turkey is the passageway for Caspian energy to Europe via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to the Mediterranean Sea, helping Europe reduce its dependence on Russia. Soon it will be the conduit for natural gas from Turkmenistan and Iran as well.
Turkey has been the eastern pillar of the NATO alliance since 1952, yet it is poised to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which many refer to as the “NATO of the East.” No doubt joining an Asian security group is the kind of revenge against the West that Erdoğan seeks and why Russia is backing Turkey’s bid. Turkey also purchased $2.4 billion worth of surface-to-air missiles in 2017 despite the hostile state of NATO-Russian affairs. In Washington and Brussels, strategists have yet to consider how such a move would force them to recalibrate their policies toward Turkey—but they should as Turkey forms an entente with its two former rivals from the Ottoman era—Russia and Iran—to protect their (admittedly divergent) interests in the Arab theater from US and NATO encroachment.
Though it is hard to imagine a Chinese military base in Turkey, the economic dimensions of Turkey’s accelerating Asianization are evident. Turkey’s annual trade with China doubled to $27 billion from 2007 to 2016, with China accounting for 13 percent of Turkey’s imports (with another 8 percent coming from other Asian countries). To correct the massive imbalance in China’s favor, China is sending business delegations to buy from Turkey and inviting Turkish businesses to sell in China, even loosening visa regulations for Turks. In 2015, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) bought Teksilbank, providing more capital for it to finance trade for Turkish companies. Turkey’s commerce with Iran, South Korea, India, and the UAE is also growing quickly and on par with its trade volumes with major European countries. In its broad ties across Asia, Turkey’s exports of marble, copper, and other commodities has grown, as have its imports of textiles, computers, and other machinery. Though there is no free trade agreement between Turkey and India, Japan, or China, improvements in infrastructural connectivity have gone a long way toward boosting the efficiency of their trade. Japanese investors were crucial to stabilizing the Turkish lira during the country’s 2018 currency slide.
Investment will prove more important than trade in facilitating Turkey’s eastern outreach. The Chinese phone handset maker ZTE has bought nearly 49 percent of Türk Telekom, setting the stage for the two to jointly execute infrastructure contracts in the dozen countries lying between them. Turkish State Railways has plans to lay 9,300 miles of new high-speed and conventional rail lines domestically and into its neighbors Georgia and Iran, most of which will be built by Chinese companies. One freight line already connects Turkey via Iran to Pakistan, and new freight railways will soon launch regular service between Istanbul and Urumqi by 2020. Not surprisingly, Turkey enthusiastically joined the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as one of the dozen largest shareholders and was immediately rewarded in 2016 with a $600 million loan to complete the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline from Azerbaijan all the way across Turkey to southern Europe. Europeans may resent Turkey’s Asian tilt but will benefit from it nonetheless.
Iran’s opening also positions Turkey to leverage its geography as an Asian gateway. Not only do European luxury trains now traverse Turkey carrying European tourists to Iran for holidays, but new European investments (despite US sanctions) in Iranian gas production will mean that more Iranian pipelines via Turkey to Europe will be built. Even though Turkey and Iran differ on policy toward Syria and Iraq, Turkish banks, businesses, and money changers have long colluded in sanctions evasion, bartering energy, gold, and other commodities. As sanctions ease, Turkish entrepreneurs are l
ikely to be the largest cohort of foreigners in Iran, supplying ever more gold jewelry, tobacco, and foodstuffs.
Turkey and Iran have also renewed their defense cooperation to protect their borders from Arab instability and suppress Kurdish aspirations. As host to more than 3 million Syrian refugees, Turkey does not have the luxury of pretending it can focus on Europe when it shares a six-hundred-mile-long border with Syria and is constantly battling Kurdish militias. But as Syrian reconstruction gets under way, Turkey will feel commercial pressure to restore trade ties with Syria as Iran moves ahead with lucrative contracts to rebuild the country’s electricity grid, water and sewage facilities, and telecommunications infrastructure. Iraq’s future also remains uncertain as Iran’s influence penetrates its military, politics, and economy; Mosul and other cities demolished by the war against ISIS rebuild; and Kurdistan continues to chafe for independence. With numerous scenarios still possible and the outcome beyond any single power’s control, Turkey will have little patience for Europe, the United States, or others attempting to dictate its interests. It will seek instead both to buffer against the instability of its Arab neighbors and to profit from their rehabilitation.
Eastern Sunrise: The “Middle East” Looks East
While parts of East Asia have surpassed the West in living standards, pockets of West Asia have become a smoldering ruin. The further west one goes in Asia, the more violently societies are burning in a cauldron of sectarian fragmentation, civil war, and state failure. An estimated 200,000 Iraqis have been killed since the US invasion in 2003 and an estimated 500,000 Syrians since 2011. Syria’s civil war has resulted in many of its cities being bombed into ruins, their remaining residents scavenging in barbaric conditions. West Asia’s refugee crises are also the worst in the world. Europe’s challenges in hosting 1 million refugees arriving in recent years is numerically trivial compared to the burden carried by Asians themselves. Turkey is dealing with 3 million refugees within its borders, Pakistan is home to 1.5 million more, and Lebanon and Iran each has 1 million.
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are the three most significant powers reorganizing the West Asian zone they anchor. This Mashriq (“place of sunrise”) region corresponds largely with the eastern Mediterranean region Europeans have called the “Near East” and refers specifically to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. This subregion of West Asia is experiencing today what Southeast Asia did in the 1970s: postcolonial disintegration and proxy geopolitical cockfighting among foreign powers as Sunni Arab states and Shi’a Iran back irreconcilable sectarian militias. The weapons employed in Syria by the government and rebels come from as far as the United States, Russia, Croatia, and Qatar, but Syria has become today’s most terrifying example of Asian blood on Asian hands.
The Saudi-Iranian rivalry is equally prominent in smaller and more vulnerable states. Saudi Arabia has long treated Lebanon as a wholly owned subsidiary, and in 2017, when it suspected Lebanon’s prime minister, Saad Hariri, of cooperating too closely with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah, he was summoned to Riyadh to tender his resignation and held under house arrest. Meanwhile, for Iran, both Syria and Lebanon are not only passageways to the Mediterranean but also staging grounds for strategic leverage against Israel. And in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia seeks to quash the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, the world’s worst humanitarian disaster continues to unfold, with widespread famine and starvation. The UAE runs Aden’s airport and seaport, its military guides the security services, and Emirates Red Crescent tries to rebuild hospitals.
For the past quarter century, the Arab world has been the West’s problem, with Asians free riding on Western military involvement and financial contributions. But now that most of the significant long-term energy contracts, infrastructure projects, and diplomatic initiatives are tied to Asian powers, the Asian-Arab nexus will determine West Asia’s future more than any diktats from Washington or London. As legacies of the Western colonial past such as arbitrary borders are reorganized, the only clear trend in the present chaos is that the United States’ role will be far less decisive. Whereas the United States sees the region mainly through the prism of ISIS and Hezbollah, regional anchors are searching for a power balance that will reorder the entire region. The recently established Saudi-Iraqi Coordination Council advances Saudi interests, while Iranian-backed parties and paramilitaries kowtow to Iran. At the February 2018 Iraq Reconstruction Conference, the United States provided a mere $3 billion in credit lines versus the $30 billion pledged by Asian and multilateral donors.3 Syrians used to proudly call themselves “eastern Mediterranean.” Now they know their future is Arab-Asian. The next ring of Asian powers is also busy developing the economic infrastructure that will ensure that those countries—however they stabilize—will be far more tied to the East than to the West in their next incarnation. China and India are already the largest purchasers of Iraqi oil. The Iraqi army used Chinese-made killer drones in its successful 2017 assault on ISIS, and China’s Huawei Technologies outbid European bidders to win the contract to build Iraq’s telecom infrastructure, which it rolled out in just twelve months. Ben Simpfendorfer, a veteran observer of Asian commerce who advises business delegations from East Asia exploring Iraq’s economy, feels that political risk and cultural distance are manageable obstacles. “Businesspeople are businesspeople. Where there’s an opportunity to make money, they’ll find a way to do it,” he says.
Other Arab countries that have failed to build meaningful postcolonial identities are also seizing the chance to deepen strategic ties with the world’s largest and fastest-growing economies. Jordan is trying to graduate from its reputation as an Arab and Western aid orphan by inviting in Asian investors to help build its economic base. Saudi Arabia has begun the construction of a $500 billion city called Neom located at its border with Jordan to assert its commercial reach into the Mashriq region. Jordan also became a founding member of the AIIB, rewarded with immediate approval of financing to construct new shale-oil and renewable-energy power plants, a special economic zone for manufacturing and logistics near the strategic port of Aqaba, and a $3 billion deal for China to build a national railway network. Within a decade, the old Ottoman-era Hejaz Railway will become part of the new Asian Silk Road network.
Israel is also working to draw more support from across Asia. Israel’s unique historical circumstances make it the most Western society in West Asia. In this multireligious, multiparty democracy, most of the Jewish population (75 percent) are second- and third-generation native-born citizens, with the largest share claiming European descent. Despite the turbulence in the region, Jewish migration to Israel from France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Belgium has risen over the past decade. With terrorism and anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called upon all Jews to return to Israel and fortify its demographic base. Yet, like Turkey and Russia, Israel feels increasingly shunned by the European Union, which has pushed for an independent state for Palestinian Arabs, while European groups have launched divestment and boycott campaigns against it. Israel’s response has been to double down on democratic illiberalism: in 2018, its parliament passed a resolution declaring the state’s raison d’être as being a home for Jews and Jewish values, with no mention of minority rights. Even though the United States provides robust military assistance to Israel—and Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital—Israeli leaders know that many American Jews challenge the need for a special alliance they feel provides the Israeli government excessive impunity.
Israel has therefore begun to court China and India heavily. For more than a decade, Israel’s growing ties with India have been described as a potential “axis of democracy” amid an arc of hostile Muslim authoritarian states. In 2017, Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, a public recognition of Israel being India’s third largest arms supplier, with cooperation deepening across critical areas such as cybersecurity and missile defense, as wel
l as crucial economic priorities such as agrotechnology and water recycling, both areas in which Israel excels.4 Israel is home to nearly 90,000 Jews of Indian origin, and the country’s new talent visa, meant to fast-track foreign engineers into the tech sector, is targeting a new generation of Indians. In 2017, Netanyahu traveled to India for six days, bringing a delegation of 130 officials and business leaders.
Israel has also set its sights on increasing its exports to China, even at the risk of providing sensitive dual-use technologies codeveloped with the United States. Not only has this arrangement caused friction with the US Department of Defense, but China may be passing such technologies onward to Iran, which may use them against Israel. Such a feedback loop is a telltale sign that countries coexist in a common regional security complex—even if they don’t appreciate it. The Chinese footprint in Israel is also growing. To alleviate the housing shortage in Tel Aviv, Israel has brought in nearly ten thousand Chinese construction workers, while Israel’s renowned universities such as the University of Haifa and the Technion in Tel Aviv are welcoming hundreds of new Chinese students each year. The Technion also has a joint campus in Guangdong focused on artificial intelligence research. The less the United States allows Chinese investments in sensitive US tech companies, the more China may divert its interest to Israel, where it already has $16 billion in investments and has launched a Sino Israel Technology Innovations fund to invest in dozens of Israeli start-ups each year.