Abstract
This chapter covers the present and future challenges that the US foreign policy is being faced with in the Eastern Mediterranean. In particular, I will present the three different tests that China, Russia, and Turkey pose to the American status in the region, separating the theoretical terms competition from antagonism as well as from narcissism. The main question that this chapter answers is the following: What are the levels of negative influence which China, Russia, and Turkey pose to the US presence in the Eastern Mediterranean? Also, a series of personal proposals will be presented, which may be used by Washington in order to face, in a more effective way, the steep course ahead in the Eastern Mediterranean, without however forgetting that this work is a scientific monograph and not a policy paper.
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- 1.
On December 6, 2017, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Embassy in Israel will move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This was a fundamental decision since Jerusalem is the capital of Israel while Eastern Jerusalem, the sector of the city where the Wailing Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Church of Holy Sepulcher are situated, is being claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of the future Palestinian state. Regarding this particular action, President Trump proved to be not only bold in his decision, but rational as well. The status of Jerusalem and the hesitancy of many states to recognize it as the capital of the state of Israel offer the opportunity to radical elements among the Palestinian community to spread false hopes for taking back the eastern part of the city and to justify every action of religious violence by jihadist elements against Israeli or Western targets in general.
- 2.
Between 2000 and 2006, China lent $125 billion to African states, while it also offered $60 billion at the 2018 Forum on China–Africa Cooperation. The trade index between China and Africa has risen from $10 billion in 2000 to $190 billion in 2017. 12% of the African annual industrial production, i.e., $500 billion per year, is carried out by Chinese firms. China built the railway connection between Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya, the well-known Standard Gauge Railway, and it is being operated by the China Railway Group Limited. On top of that Beijing influences extensively the continent’s telecommunications, data, and information standards. The Chinese Channel Star Times broadcasts in 30 African states; two major Chinese media organizations, CGTN and Xinhua News Agency, are active in all the African continent, while China Daily, an English-written journal, has a pan-African circulation. Last but not least, there are 49 Confucius Institutes across Africa, the main soft-power mechanism of Beijing, while every year around 1000 African journalists participate in training and education programs in China and 2500 Chinese troops participate in the UN peacekeeping missions in Congo, South Sudan, and Mali. For more details regarding the Chinese presence in Africa, see Zhao (2015) and Batchelor and Zhang (2017).
- 3.
It has to be noted at this point that Sun Tzu is also deeply influenced by the Confucian philosophy, something that explains the former’s liking in hierarchy, in making sensible use of the natural resources of the kingdom, in respecting human life, and in perceiving King’s authority as the highest form of mortal patriarchal mastery.
- 4.
- 5.
According to the security dilemma theory, a course of random actions from a state that are taken in order to increase its own security may be perceived by another state as a direct threat to its own security. There are two options in this case: either the second state comes to rapid crescendo and attacks the first state in order to stop its empowering process, with this case having the archetypical paradigm of a preventive strike, or the second state begins an empowering process too. In this second case, both states enter into a spiral of direct antagonism that will eventually lead to a decision where one of them will decide to attack the other in order to put an abrupt stop to the whole process. The first IR theorist who made use of this specific term was John H. Herz (1950).
- 6.
Unlike what various specialists believe regarding the Thucydides’ Tra p that it is a synonym for the security dilemma it has to be a theoretical clarification here. I argue that the Thucydides’ Trap is the direct result of the security dilemma, in other words the entrance of two or more states into a one-lane highway. The steep and the narrow lane of the highway together with the high speeds of the states involved in this antagonistic race eventually leads to a collision, or in other words to war. It goes without saying that two or more states may be involved in a security dilemma predicament without being involved in a war situation, such as the U.S. and the USSR during the Cold War era. The reason for that was the Mutual Assured Destruction Doctrine which halted the two superpowers from hedging in the Thucydides’ Trap. In other words, while in the security dilemma the violent clash between the involved states is a matter of choice, and in the Thucydides’ Trap the war is inevitable.
- 7.
According to this particular theory that had been shaped by John J. Mearsheimer (2001), states are aggressive because of the main characteristics of the international system, i.e., anarchic and antagonistic, and that every great power is a power maximizer revisionist factor.
- 8.
According to defensive realism, a theory that had been shaped by Kenneth N. Waltz (1979), the main characteristics of the international system motivate states to seek for security instead of power maximization and thus operate as pro-status quo elements instead of revisionist mechanisms.
- 9.
According to Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig (2017) who shaped this specific term, the manipulation of societies through information technology and in particular the social media is a new method that states are making use either as a complementary process of soft-power policies or as exclusive acts of hoax targeting specific social groups that due to economic or educational backwardness are more receptive to those manipulative methods.
- 10.
The Tartars invaded and burnt Moscow in 1571 and the Poles in 1601; the Swedish Army invaded Russia in 1708, the French in 1812, the Poles in 1920, and Nazi Germany in 1941.
- 11.
For example, James G. Stavridis (2016), a true expert in international politics, argues, “… we are not in a new Cold War. I am old enough to remember the Cold War—it featured millions of troops on the Fulda Gap in Europe, ready to attack each other; two huge battlefields all around the world chasing each other in a massive Hunt for Red October world; and a couple of enormous nuclear arsenals on a hair-trigger alert poised to destroy the world. There was virtually no dialogue or cooperation between the Soviet Union and the NATO alliance. Proxy wars abounded. Fortunately, we are not back there.”
- 12.
The Halki Seminary or the Theological School of Halki was the main theological school of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople until the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1971 banned every private higher educational institution. For more details regarding the doctrinal importance of the seminary, see Ellis (2019a) and Hellenic Republic MFA (2019).
- 13.
This is a term that I have developed and it means that unlike the conventional forms of revisionism that are emerging after considerable structural changes, e.g., the Russian form of revisionism that appeared in the international system after 9/11 that signaled the active involvement of the U.S. in two open military fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Turkish revisionism is a blend of the structural changes that occur in the international system and of the perception that the state has for its own ontological being. For more details regarding this approach see Litsas (2014).
- 14.
The melancholy from the loss of the imperial status is exceptionally presented by the famous Turkish novelist and Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk in his autobiographical study about his city, Istanbul. As the writer underlines, “The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier, and more isolated than it had ever been in its two—thousand—year history. For me it has always been a city of ruins and of—end—of empire melancholy. I’ve spent my life either battling with this melancholy, or (like all Istanbullus) making it my own” (2005: 6). This melancholy of the lost imperial identity contradicts the approaches of various Turkish historians who present the Ottoman Empire as a corrupted and benighted political structure, with a long course of decline that ended with the establishment of the Turkish Republic by Kemal Atatürk .
- 15.
There are a number of Western analysts and diplomats who promote the view that Turkish narcissism is a result of the President Erdogan’s personality, which fervently supports Turkey’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy. Nevertheless, this analysis lacks in scientific validity because Turkey’s anti-Western attitude has appeared since the early days of the Republic, while the first major rifts with Washington appeared immediately after the end of the Cold War and in particular in 1996 and 1997, when Ankara turned down the American requests to make use of the Incirlik Air Base to strike targets in Iraq. It was the first time that Washington came to terms with the fact that Turkey’s conduct with the U.S. was far from being unconditional. During that period Mesut Yilmaz was the Turkish Premier, a systemic politician with long career as an MP, a minister, and eventually a PM.
- 16.
States that decide not to take an active part in the systemic procedures of the international arena and strive to survive by closely aligning with a more powerful state, offering their unconditional support in return by acting as puppet elements, are bandwagoning. As Stephen M. Walt (1987: 29–30) describes the bandwagoning process: “In general, the weaker the state, the more likely it is to bandwagon rather than balance. This situation occurs because weak states add little to the strength of a defensive coalition but incur the wrath of the more threatening state nonetheless. Because weak states can do little to affect the outcome (and may suffer grievously in the process), they must choose the winning side … Moreover, weak states can be expected to balance when threatened by states with roughly equal capabilities, but they will be tempted to bandwagon when threatened by a Great Power.”
- 17.
Perhaps the most characteristic and alarming statement of that sort comes from Erdogan himself. In September 2019, during an official speech to Turkish entrepreneurs, he stated that it is unacceptable that Turkey is not allowed to have nuclear arms (Daragahi 2019).
- 18.
Make America Reliable Again [in its foreign policy].
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Litsas, S.N. (2020). The U.S. Facing the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Different Cases of China, Russia, and Turkey. In: US Foreign Policy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36895-1_5
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