##saudi arabia #terra cognita #oil #water #2055 #
We are pleased to share our second article published in the GEAB on May 15, 2025.
Türkiye 2053: A major military power in Eurasia
#terracognita2089 #turkey #defense #eurasia #2053
The Terra Cognita 2089 section is designed to open up a wider time frame for our anticipations. Based on a critical analysis of the long-term strategic documents (Visions) produced by a growing number of countries and regions, we map out the global future that major world players are in the process of designing. In March, we inaugurated this section with the vision of a green Saudi Arabia by 2055. This month, we take a closer look at the future of Erdogan’s Turkey.
Turkey is probably one of the most strategically planned countries in the world. With a vision rooted in the humiliations of the past and their remaining scars (the West’s dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire), for the past 21 years one man has had a vision of the desirable and realistic repositioning of his country: Receb Tayyib Erdogan.
This vision talks a lot about the crossroads nature of the country, a bridge between east and west, north and south, also in terms of global rank (being at the forefront of developed countries); it talks about education and economic power, technologies (military, telecoms, transport, digital, etc.), society (Islam, Turkishness, values, democracy); etc…To achieve this, Erdogan has laid out a roadmap that began in 2011 with a long-term vision to 2071, refined in 2020 towards a nearer horizon of 2053[2], via a first step in 2023, anchored in the 12thDevelopment Plan (2024-2028), all now summed up in a simple mantra: “21-The Century of Türkiye”.
But as in the case of Saudi Arabia, rather than describing every aspect of the Vision, we have sought out the common thread, the quintessence. What do we think is the “driving force” behind this Vision? We think we’ve found it: putting the Turkish army back to work for the Turks!
The Janissary syndrome
From the end of the 14th century to 1826, the janissaries were a key military force in the Ottoman Empire. The Turks were excellent horsemen but poor infantrymen and therefore looked to the Balkans and the Christian Caucasus for infantry made up of child-trained fighters. The Janissaries were the elite infantry unit that served the Sultans for 5 centuries. Totally devoted (they were not allowed to marry or trade), they were rewarded with comfortable salaries and influential positions in the administration and the army… until 1826, when, having undoubtedly become too important and certainly not sufficiently up to date with European military modernization, they were almost all massacred by Sultan Mahmoud II under the pretext of mutiny. Christians in the service of a Muslim empire? History was ironically reversed when, in 1952, Turkey agreed to join NATO in order to secure its Eastern flank, preventing the USSR from gaining access to the Mediterranean via the Dardanelles Strait and the Bosporus in the context of the Cold War.Since then, the Turkish army has become NATO’s second largest (between 350,000 and 800,000 men, depending on how you count it, compared with the 200,000 French, Polish and German troops that make up the EU’s largest armies) ... tbc
Discover the full article in GEAB #195
