Turkey’s destabilizing role, in addition to that presented to date in other parts of the world such as the Middle East (e.g. Syria, Lebanon, Northern Iraq), the Eastern Mediterranean (e.g. Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Egypt) and North Africa (e.g. Libya, Tunisia) has recently been extended to the Caucasus and specifically to the independent region of Nagorno-Karabakh, where a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan has taken place over the past week.
by T.C.-https://www.liberalglobe.com
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Certainly the crisis between Armenia and Azerbaijan is based on decades of hatred centered on the Nagorno-Karabakh, a region that the Soviet Union annexed in 1921 to mainly Islamic Azerbaijan and while the population of Nagorno-Karabakh was 90% Armenians and Christians in the religion, but also in the war that broke out between the two countries in the 1990s.
Photo by the website https://en.wikipedia.org
The war began in 1991 after the fall of the USSR and when Armenia-backed Nagorno-Karabakh unilaterally declared independence from Azerbaijan, and today’s results of this war are reflected in today’s maps.
But what we believe is that the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan would not have attacked Nagorno-Karabakh today if Turkey had not supported it and for reasons that we will explain below so that Turkey can reap diplomatic and geopolitical benefits from the West in other areas where its presence has already destabilised.
Turkey and Russia’s ‘soft underbelly’ security region
Russia considers the Caucasus region of the utmost strategic and geopolitical importance for its security and has therefore concluded a defence agreement with most countries in the Caucasus region and, of course, through a defence agreement it has concluded with Armenia, Russia supports Armenia.
Given Turkey’s declared aim to lead all Muslim populations in the world and especially in countries with Turkish-born populations, the Caucasus region is added as another confrontation and conflict of interest between Turkey and Russia and in addition to the confrontations between the two countries that already exist in the fields of the Middle East (Syria) and North Africa (Libya) respectively.
Relations between Russia and Turkey have now been based on the creation of an ad hoc understanding, if not cooperation, which enables both countries to participate in a mutually created control mechanism based on an “escalation ladder” of events so that their confrontations arise from the events that are evolving to not lead their relations in a situation that it could characterize as serious crisis.
Photo by the website www.fighterjetsworld.com
Turkey’s ‘double-faced’ diplomacy with the West and Russia
Turkey, in its effort to further highlight its geopolitical usefulness in the US and in the West in general and all this always within NATO’s framework, is constantly involved in geopolitical areas of increased interest to the West.
In this way, Turkey believes that as long as it manages to magnify its geopolitical usefulness in the West (but also in Russia in a similar way) then it will be able to ask (depending on the size of its geopolitical utility) for greater trade-offs and benefits from the West (and from Russia in a similar way).
The fact that Turkey is simultaneously approaching, if not embracing, Russia by showing it how useful it would be geopolitically if it were to move away from the West and NATO, enables Russia to “dream” of the collapse of NATO’s South Eastern European wing and its division, but with the aim of Turkey “capitalizing” these dreams of Russia at all times with concrete exchanges (funds to support its economy, purchase of hi-tech weapons systems, developed trade relations, withdraw Russia’s support to specific warring groups fighting Turkey in Syria, but also Russia not to put pressure on Turkey).
At the same time, the choice of Turkey’s geopolitical strategy to balance a tight geopolitical “rope” between the West and Russia has its purpose so that Turkey can maximize each time the trade-offs it can get from Russia and its Asian allies as well as from the West. But simultaneously Turkey has always shown to both the West and Russia that it is undecided whether to stay with the West or go with Russia and China.
The challenge facing Turkey
Turkey, and in particular seeing the introversion that the US has gone into over the past four years during the four years of Donald Trump’s Presidency with the aim of withdrawing/rewriting its forces from different parts of the world to better deal with China, is trying to fill these geopolitical gaps by considering itself a regional power.
In a geopolitical context in which the global superpower (USA) has entered a slow process of reviewing its fixed (until yesterday) strategic positions in various regions of the world (e.g. Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, Pacific and Indian Ocean respectively) it poses some opportunities for a country such as Turkey that likes to describe itself as a “regional power” but at the same time creates maximum pressures/challenges to its chosen expansionary policies.
These pressures/challenges occur in the form of a coalition of countries against Turkish expansionist policies and as they occur in the Eastern Mediterranean (Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Egypt), the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, the United Arabic Emirates, Israel), North Africa (France, Egypt, Greece) and most recently the Caucasus (Armenia, Russia).
Photo by the webside www.euroasianet.org
Why Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia is happening currently
The fact that for Russia its relationship with Armenia as well as for the Azeris the relationship with Turkey is a priority, Azerbaijan relationship with Turkey shows us that Turkey has pushed/given approval to Azerbaijan to attack the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, believing that in this way Turkey will be able to reheat in the geostrategic thinking of the West its geopolitical value as the embankment towards Russia and “advanced outpost” of the West respectively in the Caucasus region, especially now that in other geopolitical fields (e.g. Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa) it has against it the strong reaction of the West.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tactic is reminiscent of the days of World War II, when Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, saying it was fighting communism in favour of Europe and the Free World. It was then and before the Imperial Japan attack on Pearl Harbor (USA) that sympathies for Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler soared in US society.
The benefits that Turkey expects to reap from the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh region are therefore that this war will worsen relations between Russia and Azerbaijan, so that the USA again has a chance to reach Azerbaijan always through Turkey.
With this policy, Turkey hopes (as then in the Second World War with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany that attacked the USSR) that the anti-Turkish dynamic that appears in the American elite (i.e. Congress) will be interrupted by taking further supportive positions as to its wants that could be exchanged for claims in other theatres of geopolitical crises such as the Eastern Mediterranean. , the Middle East, North Africa.
