Turkey: new chief of staff

General Ilker Basbug takes over as chief of the general staff later in the month at a time not only of domestic tensions between the secularist establishment and the reformed Islamist AKP government but also of tensions in neighbouring Georgia.  Though by instinct a hardline secularist, he has made attempts to deal with the former problem -- by avoiding a purge of 'overly-Islamic' officers in a gesture to the government, for instance. The second problem is out of his hands -– politics in Turkey’s neighbour are key to its ambitions to become an east-west energy corridor and to diversify its own sources of supply.

The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline was nearly hit in the recent fighting between Russia and Georgia, and is not the only infrastructural link to Turkey that is vulnerable. The Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline is potentially open to Russian attack, as would be the Kars-Tbilisi-Baku rail link which Turkey, Georgia and Azerbaijan are planning to build.

Ankara has to balance these interests, and its longstanding alliance with Georgia, against its compelling need for good relations with Moscow, which also supplies much of its energy needs.  The good personal relationship between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin may help somewhat, and in order to square the diplomatic circle, Turkey may try and improve long-frozen relations with pro-Russian Armenia, which these pipelines skirt, in the hope of creating a new Caucasian security pact. That, in turn, might encounter problems with domestic hardliners -– demonstrating the interconnectedness of problems with which the government deals.