In his Oct. 2 column titled “Turkey Is A Global Power. Now It’s Time For Azerbaijan To Rise. Iran Backing Armenia! What’s Tehran Afraid Of?” in Turkey’s AKP mouthpiece Yeni Şafak daily, the paper’s editor-in-chief İbrahim Karagül said Turkey had gotten its “geopolitical mind” back into action after a century-long hiatus. “This is a history-maker, region-builder mind that founded very powerful empires on earth,” he wrote, further describing it as power in Turkey’s political genes.
Karagül stated that the “world order’s central actors” were watching Turkey’s “geopolitical mind” in action with great surprise. This mind is now operative in the Caucasus, he wrote, but we can see it “everywhere … We saw it first in northern Iraq. Then in Syria, followed by the East Mediterranean, and the Aegean.”
Now that Turkey has gotten its “geopolitical mind” back, he claimed, Ankara will no longer be under the U.S. and Europe’s tutelage, since it is a rising new global power. “As a nation … we rejoice in this rise. Our aim is not to spread conflicts but to replace, reinstate what rightfully belongs to us,” he wrote. In this regard, it is worth noting that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in a recent speech broadcast on KararTV: “Jerusalem is our city; it is a city from us,” stressing that the current physical appearance of the Old City, which is the heart of Jerusalem, was built by Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
Karagül further stressed that Turkey is spreading throughout the whole region the powerful political wave that started in Anatolia. Turkey’s geopolitical mind is now in the South Caucasus, and united with Azerbaijan, has formed a surprising power, he said. Stating that Azerbaijan had unleashed a “war of independence” in Nagorno-Karabakh, Karagül mentioned that there will not be an attack on “Armenia’s territory,” adding “the terrorist occupation on Azerbaijani territory is being ended.”
Karagül finally assessed that Turkey is defining and dictating the geopolitics of the new world order. “The Turkish public’s mind map will change. Its perception of the Iran and Saudi Arabia axis will change radically. … We witnessed these deep changes in Syria and Iraq. We saw it in the East Mediterranean, in Libya, in the Aegean. We are now seeing it happen in the Caucasus. … Turkey has become a star,” he wrote.
The full article is available at the MEMRI website.