https://forum.kajgana.com/tg%3A//emoji?id=5226948110873278599&t=0 The Return of the Kaiser-e-Rum
The rise of a Turkish-led order is a historic development in a region beset with perpetual chaos, and marks the end of four hundred years of European influence.
When Troy shall overturn the Grecian state, And sweet revenge her conqu’ring sons shall call, To crush the people that conspir’d her fall,” John Dryden translated a prophecy in Virgil’s Aeneid. That power (for Virgil) was Rome, founded by a legendary Trojan. When the Ottoman Sultan Fâtih Sultan Mehmed conquered Constantinople in 1453—in no small part thanks to Central European tech transfer, incompetent Eastern Europeans squabbling, and Western European buck-passing—he took the the title of Kaisar-e-Rum (Caesar of Rome) and founded what he considered a tolerant and multiethnic if not necessarily liberal empire similar to the original, a second founding of the empire by another traveler from the East.
There is nothing that America can do, nor should she try. As President Donald Trump said, “this is not our fight”: a prudent realism that more statesmen should follow. The Middle East is a region we cannot shape nor should we try; the best option is perhaps detachment, allowing a local equilibrium to form organically.
But with the collapse of Syrian secularism, the victory of Turkish-backed Azerbaijan against Armenia, the rollback of Russian power and influence in both Ukraine and Syria partly on the strength of Turkish drones, and the utter destruction of the Axis of Resistance throughout the Levant, Turkey is now the central power (so to speak) of the region.
From the neutrality that history allows us, one can claim that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has consolidated his position as one of the most powerful and far-sighted men of his generation. The man who took over Hagia Sophia and turned it back over to the word of God has his eyes firmly set on dominating the Aegean in the west and the Levant in the south.
Turkey is now at the peak of its regional influence in perhaps over a century, having defeated Russia in Armenia and Iran in Syria. The sons of Troy are eyeing glory again. With the fall of Assad and the collapse of Baathism, it is also curtains for secularism in the region, as well as the end of over 400 years of European influence, British, French or Russian.
A new and very different order is about to rise as a very old power returns to form. The region will not be the same again in our lifetime.
The rise of a Turkish-led order is a historic development in a region beset with perpetual chaos, and marks the end of four hundred years of European influence.
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