Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made no secret of his desire to revise Turkey’s century-old borders. He claims parts of Bulgaria, Greece and Cyprus, and Turkish forces occupy parts of Cyprus, Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, Turkish special forces are backing Azerbaijani special forces who are currently occupying dozens of square miles of Armenian mainland.
If China is salami slicing to advance its imperialism and Russia is creating proxy states among its neighbours, Turkey’s strategy appears to be using its demand for a corridor as a means to advance its imperialist interests.
Consider Turkey’s actions in northern Iraq. Having warned of military action for weeks, Turkey launched an intensive bombing and occupation campaign to eliminate the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq. It is no secret that Turkey hates Kurds in general and the PKK in particular. When his proxies fail to win elections, Erdogan accuses the winning Kurdish politicians of sympathy for the PKK, justifying the replacement of his opponents with his own supporters. But Erdogan understands that blatant racism is unseemly, so he markets his aggression to the international community in other ways.
Enter the economic corridor. Turkey justifies its military action on the pretext of enabling an economic corridor from Turkey through Iraq to the Persian Gulf. Turkey claims that the PKK could endanger trade and Turkey needs to eliminate them, but doesn’t care that the corridor roads do not pass through the territories and villages Turkey is currently bombing. In fact, just as the late Iraqi president Saddam Hussein built highways that purposely bypassed Shiite cities, the proposed Turkey-Iraqi corridor avoids Iraq’s Kurdish cities.
Ankara has also turned the corridor demand into a potential casus belli with Armenia: Turkey and Azerbaijan say they could seize territory by force if Armenia does not agree to a corridor linking the two countries across southern Armenia. The corridor in question would be at least 40 miles long, roughly the distance between Washington, DC, and Baltimore.
Armenia is reluctant to accede to such demands because a Turkish corridor would divide the country into more easily understood parts and cut it off from other trading partners. Armenians are also correct that if Turkey and Azerbaijan opened their borders to normal trade, there would be no need for a corridor. This simple fact highlights the irony that Turkey is using the corridor demand as a tool of imperialism rather than a means to facilitate trade.
The same is true in Cyprus. In August 2023, Turkish Cypriot forces attacked UN peacekeepers in the buffer zone that separates Cyprus from the Turkish-occupied territories. Turkey and its apologists justified their actions by refusing to allow Turkish forces to build a direct road through the buffer zone to Pyla, in effect creating a corridor to the few towns where Greek and Turkish Cypriots coexist. But legally, even if the Cypriot government agreed not to deploy troops there, neither Turkey nor its proxy government in the occupied territories have the right to do so, since the buffer zone remains sovereign Cypriot territory. Turkey knew this, but calculated that it could use the corridor argument to justify further land grabs.
Turkey’s pattern of behavior is clear, even if the West barely recognizes it due to the artificial bureaucratic divisions that classify Western diplomats and analysts. The Turkish corridor is today a Trojan horse cloaked in the language of diplomacy and development.
But Turkey has an Achilles heel. Erdogan is a tactically brilliant politician but a fundamental fool, with an academic record far below that of a summer school valedictorian; he is essentially a street thug in name only, who never got into one of Turkey’s elite, let alone a mid-level, high-ranking university. His sense of history is based more on argument than fact, and so he doesn’t understand that revisions could work against Turkey.
For example, the most effective diplomatic move to reject Erdogan’s demands for a revision of the century-old Treaty of Lausanne, which established modern-day Turkey’s borders, would have been to use any revision as a means to reclaim Greek territories unjustly lost after ethnic cleansing. Does Erdogan want to nullify the Treaty of Lausanne? Fine, then let’s make Izmir Smyrna again.
The same can be said about Armenia. After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson sent General James Harvard to report on Armenia’s relations with the Ottoman Empire after the Armenian Genocide, with a view to the possibility of a U.S. mandate as a protectorate. The result was a comprehensive report that argued, in part, that Armenia needed a corridor to the sea if it was to survive. Harvard was right, and he is right now. If Turkey opens the door to a corridor, the West should open its door in the opposite direction. Armenia needs a corridor if it is to survive. Trabzon (Trebizond) is historically Armenian and would be a logical choice for the end of the corridor.
As President Erdogan welcomes the corridor, it is time for the West to assert its position to right a historical wrong: President Erdogan has opened the door, and the US and France should walk through it.
