The Loom of Time Quotes

“In 2017, Erdoǧan established an alliance with the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) so that he could govern as a nationalist Islamist, with an aggressive military approach against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria, Iraq, and Iran that dovetailed perfectly with his neo-Ottoman imperialism in the Middle East.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“The Europeanized and whiskey-sipping secular elite in Istanbul and Ankara—the true spiritual descendants of Atatürk—could do nothing to help America, whose invasion of Iraq even they themselves opposed. This was all prologue to Erdoǧan’s Islamicized Turkey gradually moving closer to Russia and radical Arab groups.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“Erdoǧan still maintained popularity with a Turkish population that is more anti-Western and far more religious than it was during the Cold War, when Turkey’s membership in NATO, its friendship with the West, and its close ties with Israel could be taken for granted. Those days when the secular generals held power behind the scenes are long gone. After all, Turkey’s attempts to gain entry to the European Union have over the years been regularly rebuffed, humiliating Turkish Muslims.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“The Greek Orthodox Church, which split from the Latin Church in the A.D. 1054 schism between Rome and Constantinople, “opted,” in Toynbee’s words, “for political submission to the [Muslim] Turk in preference to accepting the Western Christian Pope’s ecclesiastical supremacy.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“By the standards of Gibbon and Toynbee, the big story in the Middle East today is not necessarily the failure of democracy—but the departure of empire. With empire gone, the issue is to stave off anarchy.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“Monoethnic nationalism, more than multiethnic imperialism with its cosmopolitan quality, has been more lethal toward minorities.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“Rather than a straightforward movement for democracy as commentators from the West self-referentially claimed at the time, the Arab Spring was something more general: a revolt against decadent, luxurious, and discredited central authority.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“Santayana says that whereas the teachings of Jesus constitute “pure Hebraism,” the incarnation of God in man is a “pagan conception,” made into a universal ideal by the vitality of Greek thought, which combined art and beauty with morality.[”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

“Erdoǧan’s nationalist Islamist approach to history asserted that once Turks had fully embraced Islam they would be prepared to become the natural leaders of the entire Muslim world, in a sort of return to empire.[28] This was the core of the Ottoman mentality, which for many hundreds of years gave the Muslim world a dependable dynastic direction following the many wars over succession that had typified the early Islamic centuries under Arab leadership.”
― Robert D. Kaplan, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China