“Wikileaks: Turkey was ready to launch military operations against Russia in 2008.”

Earlier this past week, a little article on an English-language Armenia news site blared a headline with potentially world-changing implications: “Wikileaks: Turkey was ready to launch military operations against Russia in 2008.” [1]

According to the piece, Turkish leadership during the 2008 war informed their counterparts in Russia that further incursions into Georgia — and specifically in the historically Turkey-aligned, Muslim Georgian region of Adjara – would be responded to with military force from the Republic of Turkey, Georgia’s neighbor and a leg in a great power triad that also includes Russia to the north and Iran to the southeast. Georgia, needless to say, occupies geography at the space where the influence from these three ancient super-civilizations collide. [2]

“According to [an alleged Wikileaks] document,” reads the December 7 article on News.Am, a “Turkish delegation told Medvedev that if Russia conducted military operations near the 100-kilometer zone surrounding the Turkish border, the Turkish side, as a NATO member, would have the right and even be obligated to place their units into military operations and protect the territory of neighboring member states of the alliance.”

If true, this is major news as, if anything, relations between Ankara and Moscow have been most visibly on the up and up over the past few years under the moderate Islamist AKP government despite an entrenched historical rivalry. Just as telling is the extent to which Turkey’s ‘neo-Ottoman’ resurgence has taken hold in the country’s corridors of power and how Turkey’s policymakers see Georgia as a key spoke an emerging Turkish hub.

Turkey, a NATO member state and a budding contender for a leadership role in central Eurasia, maintains a large and extremely well-equipped military that is built along NATO standards. Though not a nuclear power, its conventional forces are quite well-trained and might be more than a match for Russia’s famously insubordinate, creaky Caucasus formations that disproportionately rely on militias and conscript-heavy forces. Turkey can also amass more troops more quickly than their Russian counterparts, who patrol vastly longer borders with a concomitant increase in the number of potential security flashpoints that require dedicated garrisons.

It goes without saying that the conventional narrative of the August 2008 war between Russia and Georgia — and indeed the general geopolitical climate in the region — is sufficiently volatile enough without the added variable of a Turkish military confrontation with invading Russian formations. For many reasons, armed conflict between Turkey and Russia would be a major blow to regional and Eurasian security and could set off a much larger, transcontinental war involving NATO and other major powers.

Michael Hikari Cecire