The Return of Marco Polo's World Read online

  Geographical divisions will be both greater and lesser than in the twentieth century. They will be greater because sovereignties will multiply; that is, a plethora of city-states and region-states will emerge from within existing states themselves to achieve more consequence, even as a supranational organization like the EU wanes and one like ASEAN is destined to have little meaning in a world of intimidation and power.*6 Geographical divisions also will be lesser because the differences—and particularly the degree of separation—between regions like Europe and the Middle East, the Middle East and South Asia, and South Asia and East Asia will decline. The map will become more fluid and baroque, in other words, but with the same pattern repeating itself. And this same pattern will be encouraged by both the profusion and hardening of roads, railways, pipelines, and fiber-optic cables. Obviously, transportation infrastructure will not defeat geography. Indeed, the very expense of building such infrastructure in many places demonstrates the undeniable fact of geography. Anyone in the energy exploration business, or who has participated in a war game involving the Baltic states or the South China Sea, knows just how much old-fashioned geography still matters. At the same time, critical transportation infrastructure constitutes yet another factor making geography—and, by inference, geopolitics in our era—more oppressive and claustrophobic. To be sure, connectivity, rather than simply leading to more peace, prosperity, and cultural uniformity as techno-optimists like to claim, will have a much more ambiguous legacy. With more connectivity, the stakes for war will be greater, and the ease in which wars can proliferate from one geographic area to another will also be greater. Corporations will be the beneficiaries of this new world, but being (for the most part) unable to provide security, they will ultimately not be in control.

  Nothing is more illustrative of this process than the Chinese government’s attempts to build a land bridge across Central and West Asia to Europe, and a maritime network across the Indian Ocean from East Asia to the Middle East. These land and sea conduits may themselves be interlinked, as China and Pakistan, as well as Iran and India, hope to join the oil and natural gas fields of distant, landlocked Central Asia with the Indian Ocean to the south.*7 China is branding these infrastructure projects “One Belt, One Road”—in effect, a new Silk Road. The medieval Silk Road was not a single route but a vast and casual trading network, tenuously linking Europe with China both overland and across the Indian Ocean. (The Silk Road was only named as such—the Seidenstrasse—in the late nineteenth century by a German geographer, Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen.) The relative eclectic and multicultural nature of the Silk Road during the Middle Ages meant, according to historian Laurence Bergreen, that it was “no place for orthodoxy or single-mindedness.” Medieval travelers on the Silk Road encountered a world that was, furthermore, “complex, tumultuous, and menacing, but nonetheless porous.” Consequently, with each new traveler’s account, Europeans saw the world not as “smaller and more manageable,” but as “bigger and more chaotic.”*8 This is a perfect description of our own time, in which the smaller the world actually becomes because of the advance of technology, the more permeable, complicated, and overwhelming it seems, with its numberless, seemingly intractable crises that are all entwined. The late-thirteenth-century Venetian merchant Marco Polo, who traveled the length and breadth of the Silk Road, is most famously associated with this world. And the route he traveled provides as good an outline as any for defining the geopolitics of Eurasia in the coming era.

  Faded Empires in Marco Polo’s Path

  Marco Polo, who began his twenty-four-year-long trek to Asia by sailing down the eastern shore of the Adriatic in A.D. 1271, would spend considerable periods of time in Palestine, Turkey, northern Iraq, Iran in its entirety (from the Azeri and Kurdish north to the Persian Gulf), northern and eastern Afghanistan, and China’s ethnic-Turkic Xinjiang Province, before arriving at the court of the Mongol emperor, Kublai Khan, in Cambulac (modern-day Beijing). From Cambulac he would make forays across the whole of China and into Vietnam and Myanmar. His return route to Venice would take him across the Indian Ocean: through the Strait of Malacca to Sri Lanka, up India’s western coast to Gujarat, and on side trips to Oman, Yemen, and East Africa. If the early-twenty-first-century world has a geopolitical focus, this would be it: the Greater Indian Ocean from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea, and including the Middle East, Central Asia, and China. The current Chinese regime’s proposed land-and-maritime Silk Road duplicates exactly the one Marco Polo traveled. This is no coincidence. The Mongols, whose Yuan Dynasty ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were, in fact, “early practitioners of globalization,” seeking to connect the whole of habitable Eurasia in a truly multicultural empire. And Yuan China’s most compelling weapon was—despite the Mongols’ bloody reputation—not the sword but trade: gems, fabrics, spices, metals, and so on. It was trade routes, not the projection of military power, that emblemized the “Pax Mongolica.”*9 Mongol grand strategy was built on commerce much more than on war. If you want to understand China’s grand strategy today, look no further than Kublai Khan’s empire.

  Yet, for Kublai Khan it didn’t altogether work. Persia and Russia were beyond Chinese control, and the Indian subcontinent, separated from China by the high wall of the Himalayas, with seas on both sides, remained its own geopolitical island. All the while, though, the Great Khan strengthened his base in what always has been Chinese civilization’s arable cradle, in central and eastern China, away from the Muslim-minority areas of the western desert. In all of this, the geopolitical characteristics of Marco Polo’s world roughly approximate our own.

  To be sure, Marco Polo equated the future itself with China. Coal, paper money, eyeglasses, and gunpowder were Chinese marvels unknown in Europe at the time, while the city of Hangzhou, with a giant moat and hundreds of bridges over its canals, was in Marco Polo’s eyes as beautiful as Venice. But traveling in Tibet he also saw the dark side of Yuan Chinese rule, with its wanton destruction and forced incorporation of a distant province.

  Aside from the geopolitical island of India, two especially consequential territories that Marco Polo describes in his Travels are Russia and Persia (or Iran, as it is now called). Russia he describes, just barely and from afar, as a profitable wasteland rich in furs, whereas Persia dictates much of his route. Persia, that is, Iran, is second only to China in Marco Polo’s eyes—in a similar way that the Persian Empire dominated the paths of both Alexander the Great and Herodotus. For Persia was history’s first superpower in antiquity, uniting the Nile, Indus, and Mesopotamia with trade links to China. As was so often the case in history, it was all about Persia, whose language by the High Middle Ages was the main vehicle for the spread of Islam throughout the East.*10 Thus, a map of thirteenth-century Eurasia during Marco Polo’s lifetime—overlaid by the “Empire of the Great Khan” and the “Khans of Persia”—is now the backdrop to something far more complex and technological.*11

  In all this complexity, keep in mind that empire remains the organizing principle of world affairs, given that the imperial experiences of Turkey, Iran, Russia, and China explain the geopolitical strategy of each country to this day. That same legacy also explains how each country could weaken or partially disintegrate. For it is the constancy of history that continues to define Eurasia—not only the stability wrought by empire, but also the chaos that emerged in the interregnum between imperial dynasties, as crises in the capital led to ungovernability in the far-flung provinces. And because of the way communications technology empowers individuals and small groups—in addition to the instability that erupts from the increasing interconnectedness of crises worldwide—threats to imperial-oriented power centers are now greater than ever. And this is to say nothing of the acute economic challenges all these states face, particularly Russia and China, whose own internal stability can never be taken for granted.

  So think of the first cartographic stratum of the new Eurasian map as
composed of Faded Empires: undeclared empires albeit, though still operating from an imperial mindset, whose official territorial control, in the cases of Turkey and Iran, is far less than that of their former imperiums—and greater in the cases of Russia and China. For what makes Russia and China especially vulnerable is the fact that these states still encompass territory of truly imperial dimensions, stretching beyond the homelands of their ruling ethnic and religious groups. George Kennan said that the strongest argument for imperialism was “contingent necessity,” meaning “unless we took those territories, somebody else would and that this would be still worse.”*12 For this reason, imperialism in one form or another will never die.

  Turkish, Iranian, and Central Asian Power

  Turkey and Iran, thanks largely to their long and venerable imperial legacies, are the most coherent states in the Near East, further buttressed by their natural geographies neatly encompassing the Anatolian land bridge and the Iranian plateau. By “coherent” I do not mean that their current regimes are altogether stable, only that their institutions have a degree of depth far greater than in the Arab world, so that they will likely recover from bouts of instability, such as the failed coup and consequent crackdown in Turkey in the summer of 2016. Turkey and Iran are messes, but don’t think for a moment that much of the Arab world isn’t an even greater mess. Take Saudi Arabia: a comparatively young and artificially drawn kingdom with no imperial legacy to draw upon, and with great regional differences between Najd and the Hejaz, whose water-starved population may double in a few decades, making it, in political terms, less and less coherent. Moreover, mainly because of the natural gas revolution in the United States, Saudi Arabia is no longer the global swing producer of hydrocarbons. Energy expert Daniel Yergin writes, “The new Saudi strategy is to use oil revenues to diversify the economy and build the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund as the investment engine for development.” The target, he writes, “is to increase non-oil government revenues at least sixfold by 2030.”*13 Nevertheless, even if the Kingdom achieves all or part of this goal—and that is very doubtful—it is safe to say that Saudi Arabia’s geopolitical power has, at best, peaked.

  Turkey’s dynamic regional policies under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan mark a return to a more historically rooted Ottoman imperial strategy—something, in turn, that was first introduced by the late prime minister Turgut Özal in the 1980s and early 1990s. Özal, a deeply religious Muslim like Erdoğan (but without the latter’s authoritarian tendencies), saw so-called neo-Ottomanism as pluralistic and multi-ethnic, thus providing a basis for peace between Turks and their fellow-Muslim Kurds, and also allowing for Turks to reach out to Turkic peoples in Central Asia, as well as to fellow Muslims in the Arab and Persian worlds. It was not an aggressive and antidemocratic strategy, in other words. To be sure, the “narrow…western orientation” of Turkish foreign policy that we in the West both admired and considered normal during the middle decades of the Cold War, when the military ruled Turkey, was actually an aberration—the singular invention of that fierce secularist, Mustafa Kemal “Atatürk,” who abjured Ottoman imperialism, and by the way, was no democrat.*14 The dictatorial Kemalist state so geopolitically convenient to the West will never come back. Turkish society has become too sophisticated for that. And yet it must also be said that Erdoğan, in his own very compulsive authoritarianism, and in his attempt to subdue the Kurds within Anatolia itself, is to some degree a Kemalist, striving in vain for a mono-ethnic Turkish state, even as his vision of Turkey as a power broker in the Levant is very Ottoman. This is not a contradiction, though. Because of the way that ethnic Kurdish areas overlap Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, protecting Turkey’s modern, Kemalist borders at a time of war in Syria and Iraq requires a forward policy of Ottoman-like expansion. Turkey’s worst nightmare is losing control of ethnic Kurdish areas in eastern Anatolia. Thus, it must always be on the offensive in some oblique form.

  That is why we see Turkey building an oil pipeline in northern Iraq and having in the recent past supported the Kurdish Democratic Party there against the pro-Iranian Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, while also working against Kurdish defense units in Syria. Clearly, Kurdistan itself is weak and fragmented, despite its media image as being the only success story to emerge from the Iraq War. Kurdistan will ultimately provide the long-term geopolitical battleground for Turkey versus Iran: something that is a revival of the Ottoman-Safavid imperial conflicts of early modern history.

  Whereas Turkey’s imperial tradition (Seljuk and Ottoman) lay wholly within the Islamic ages, making the values of Erdoğan’s rule actually very natural, Iran’s imperial tradition (Median, Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sassanid) predates Islam. The exception was the Safavid Dynasty, whose adoption of Shi’ite Islam in 1500 led to a disastrous war with the Sunni Ottoman Empire that cut off Iran from Europe.*15 It is this history that creates a certain tension between Iran’s Islamic ideology and Iran’s idea of itself as a successful great power in the Near East. To wit, Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president whose ministers negotiated the nuclear agreement with the West, would like Iran to evolve into a regional economic power, with a revitalized capitalist-style system, open to the world, much like China has become. But the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, sees Iran as more like the old Soviet Union, whereby if it compromises its Islamic ideology it is likely to disintegrate, given how ethnic Persians dominate Iran’s mini-empire of minorities. Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace calls this division “the Pragmatists versus the Principlists [those who believe in first Principles].” Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group divides each of these two groups, in turn, into those who are more and less radical, so that there are at least four distinct factions competing for influence within Iran’s multiple power centers. This extremely decentralized arrangement “inherently favors continuity,” according to Vaez.*16 Both Vaez and Sadjadpour suggest that Iran will not move over the coming years—despite the nuclear agreement—toward the Chinese model. The model of the old, pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union is more likely to hold. That is, rather than become a truly dynamic postmodern empire-of-sorts and attractor force in both the Middle East and Central Asia, with a normalized relationship with the West, Iran may continue for a number of more years as a corrupt, resource-rich, grievance-driven state.

  Though smaller in numbers than those who want to see a more revitalized Iran, the clerical and Revolutionary Guard elites will fight and die to stay in power because they have literally nowhere else to go—while many of Rouhani’s supporters in the government could always flee to the West (where they were educated at the same time that the hard-liners were fighting in the trenches of the Iran-Iraq War). As one analyst advises, considering the mass violence that the Iranian hard-liners are perpetrating in Syria to keep Bashir al-Assad in power, just imagine what they are prepared to do to keep themselves in power inside Iran. Remember that dictatorships collapse often when the dictator himself—because of age and infirmity—loses the sheer will to remain in power. Examples of this include the Iranian shah in 1979, Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania in 1989, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011. That certainly won’t happen soon to the murderous elites now ruling Iran.

  Iran will likely continue onward as a semi-dysfunctional power with an aggressive foreign policy in the Levant. There may be small uprisings in future years in places like Baluchistan in the southeast of the country and in Khuzestan in the southwest, but they will be containable. Iran, with a civilizational sense of itself to no less a degree than China or India (or Turkey even), will not dissolve like the artificial states of the Levant and other parts of the Arab world; nor will Iran progress, however. In terms of atmosphere, if not in the specifics, both Iran and Turkey in the coming years might come to resemble the Turkey of the long decade of the 1970s, when Turkey was nominally democratic, but a political and institutional mess, dominated by the cult of the military, with a weak, center-left prime minister, Bulent Ece
vit, who ended up invading Cyprus.

  Turkey and Iran, both slowly calcifying under very different types of authoritarian regimes, elected or not, will, nevertheless, remain safe from outright collapse, despite political upheavals to come, especially after Iran’s Supreme Leader dies. Their old-new rivalry over Kurdistan eventually will come to overshadow the greater disintegration of Syria and Iraq, whose formal power centers in Damascus and Baghdad will never again govern effectively because of all the regional players—with their vastly different geopolitical agendas—implicated in the fighting everywhere between the Mediterranean and the Iranian Plateau. The map of former Syria and Iraq will continue to resemble a child’s messy finger-painting with Sunni and Shi’ite war bands expanding and contracting their areas of control—the result being flimsy and radical micro-states, with cities like Mosul and Aleppo oriented as much toward each other as toward their former respective capitals, in the way of old caravan routes. Given a somewhat diminished Saudi Arabia to the south, the continued cratering in the desert reaches of the Levant will further leverage the strength of the politically troubled Turkish and Iranian plateaus. Remember that right now there are millions of Arab refugees from these wars stuck in the region whose children are not being educated, making the next generation even more prone to radical Islamist propaganda. Concomitantly, it is in both the Turkish and Iranian national interest—whatever Ankara and Tehran may say publicly—to keep the Arabs weak, divided, and warring against each other. In sum, even the collapse of ISIS and the survival—or removal—of the Bashar al-Assad regime will not lead to any real form of stability.