To end the conflict in Syria, a ceasefire between Turkey and Russia has been signed. Later Iran agreed to support the peace plan as well. This also paved the way for peace talks in Kazakhstan between the Syrian government and opposition. The Russo-Turkish agreement comes in the wake of a more limited deal between Ankara and Moscow that enabled the withdrawal of civilians trapped in the rebel-held districts in northwestern Syria’s Aleppo. If the comprehensive ceasefire plan holds, the multilateral peace talks that are likely to be held in the Kazakh capital, Astana, next month will have a better chance of ending Syria’s tragic civil war.
Turkey and Russia have been on opposite sides of the conflict, with Turkey arming fighters opposed to Russia’s ally Assad. Last November, Turkey shot down a Russian military jet it said had violated its airspace, prompting a rupture in relations. Following an attempted coup against him over the summer, though, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid his first post-coup visit to Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and began to mend the rift. Turkey and Russia brokered a deal with Syrian rebels, and without the United States, to evacuate civilians from Aleppo. The foreign and defence ministers from Russia, Turkey, and Iran are still scheduled to meet in Moscow to discuss the situation.
The Turkish-Russian cease-fire deal almost eclipsed an equally sensational story. On December 28, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused his Western partners in the anti-IS coalition of supporting the fanatical group along with the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Unity Party (PYD). Erdogan went so far as to claim that he had “evidence” that US-led coalition forces in Syria had given support to both IS and the PYD. Ankara considers the PYD an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has been fighting the Turkish government for independence and autonomy since 1984. Turkey, the United States and the European Union list the PKK as a terrorist group.
The American response was anything but low key. At the daily press briefing of 27 December, US State Department’s deputy spokesman Mark Toner characterised Erdogan’s claims as “ludicrous” with “no basis for truth.” As can be expected, while pro-government media outlets in Turkey gave serious coverage to Erdogan’s claims, the leading opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet underscored Toner’s response.
The rise of a Russian-Iranian-Turkish triumvirate is a hugely significant development. On the contrary, they have a long and distinguished history of rivalry and warfare extending back for centuries and stretching into recent decades. During the Cold War, Turkey was a key NATO ally; Iran supported the Afghan rebels against the USSR, while the USSR supported Iraq against Iran.
But after the end of the Soviet Union, Russia’s relations with both countries significantly improved. Iran’s opposition to Russia during the Chechen wars of the 1990s was muted. Russia was worried about external ideological influence over its largely Sunni Muslim population, but it feared Saudi Arabian Wahhabism far more than it did Iranian Shiite influence.
More than that, Russia has kept up close relations with both sides in regional rivalries. This means consistently engaging with Iran economically even as it seeks to contain Iranian influence in the longer term, and maintaining good relations with countries for whom Iran represents a direct threat, in particular, Israel, but also Saudi Arabia.
Russia’s relationship with Turkey has been more intense, but no less contradictory. Turkey has opposed Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but also signed up to the Turk-Stream pipeline to Russia, a natural gas supply route under the Black Sea that will bypass and weaken Ukraine.
The two countries’ backing for different sides in the Syria conflict strained their bilateral relations. The breaking point came when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane in November 2015. However, that crisis paradoxically showed the degree to which Turkey’s relations with the West had weakened. Friendly relations were restored in June 2016 and consolidated by Putin’s unconditional support for Turkish President Erdogan after an attempted coup.
The war in Syria and anti-Russian protests in Turkey over Aleppo did not detract from the re-energized official friendship. Both Russia and Turkey went to great lengths to prevent the assassination of the Russian ambassador in Ankara from scrambling their alliance.
Turkish-Iranian relations, meanwhile, have traditionally alternated between co-operation and competition, but since the “Arab Awakening” protests of 2011, competition has been the dominant mode. As Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has turned away from the secular, modernising values of Ataturk, the republic’s founder, so rivalry with Iran has been less on the grounds of political ideology (secular versus theocratic) and more about identity (Sunni versus Shia).
However, the fear of an Iranian-dominated “Shia crescent” predates the founding of Iran’s Islamic Republic. Like Russia’s earlier criticisms of Turkey’s “neo-Ottomanism” and the West’s concerns over of Russian “Eurasianism”, the fear is a resurgence of an imperial project.
This is the paradox at the core of the Russia-Turkey-Iran triad: their longtime geopolitical competition motivates not only their periodic conflicts but also their cooperation.
All three were empires long before they became nation-states. Like the Western empires, but unlike China, they have lost much of the territory they previously ruled. However, the reduction in scale was less radical than that of the Western European empires, and they retain (both by default and design) elements of their former imperial role. The imperial past was less repudiated than in the West but remains a prominent part of their national psychologies.
The West strongly influenced all three states, but none was ever completely under Western rule — and nor did the West ever completely accept them. All of them saw top-down attempts at modernization and Westernization give way to anti-Westernism and reversion to what were seen as more traditional forms of political culture. Turkish scholar Ayse Zarakol has written about how resentment at being “excluded” from the West influences these countries’ self-image and foreign policy, but these “irrational” factors tend to be ignored by mainstream international relations scholars.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that, in Turkey, as in Russia and Iran, politics and foreign policies are largely defined by the ambiguous relationship with the West and globalisation, and their common experiences mean they can understand each other’s behaviour and concerns rather well. With that advantage, they can move rapidly between conflict and cooperation.
The writer is scholar at Fatima Jinnah Women University, Rawalpindi