### Turkey's Interests

Turkey has fought, first Iran, and then Russia for control of the Caucasus for centuries. Georgia was not wrested away from Turkey (by Russia) until the mid-1800s . During the Soviet era, overt conflict over the area came to an end, and Turkey instead served as the West’s key ally in the region, playing the central role in containing the communist threat. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Turkey’s strategic role, and the millions of Western dollars that went with it, virtually disappeared. Consequently, a heightened role for Turkey in Transcaucasia and a pipeline passing through its territory would help to replace the loss of its cold war role as NATO’s linchpin in eastern Mediterranean.

Although Turkey has historical, ethnic, religious, cultural, and linguistic ties to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic, Russia has the far more recent economic and political ties to the region. The elites in all the Turkik republics were educated in Russia, speak better Russian than their native languages, and are fully “Russified”. Thus, the initial calls for pan-Turkism from Ankara, though they did elicit extensive enthusiasm from the newly independent states, soon came to nothing. Once Baku, Ashgabat, and Almaty realized that little financial help would be coming from Ankara, their eyes quickly turned back to Moscow. In the political sphere, the Central Asian republics have remained within Moscow’s orbit.

Nevertheless, Turkey continues to struggle for strategic influence over the area. For example, in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Turkey and Russia came down squarely on opposite sides. In fact, Turkey’s promise to Azerbaijan, to send in its troops if Armenia invaded the enclave of Nakhichevan, elicited a powerful counter-threat from Russia. “The warning of the CIS joint forces commander, Marshal Shaposhnikov, that Turkish intervention could lead to another world war,” shows just how seriously Russia took the Turkish danger.

Overall, Turkey’s relative geopolitical weakness in the Transcaucasus compared to Russia, the currently poor state of its economy, and Ankara’s dependence upon Russia’s natural gas and the flow of exports and imports from all the countries of the CIS, particularly the Caspian region, makes it likely that Turkey will eventually accept and come to support (no matter how reluctantly), whatever export route the oil companies decide upon. Too many Turkish financial interests are at stake in the economic growth of the region for Turkey to wholly refuse to cooperate with the pipeline, whether it is to Novorossisk, or through Iran.

Turkey Links