We are rejuvenating our political entity. We have gotten better in building states.

Our quest to the West had started in the 6th century; we set our foots on Anatolia in the year 1000 as the Qiniq branch of Oghuz Turks. Tughril (990–1063) and his brother Chaghri (989–1060) – two nephews of Turkic warlord Seljuk – founded a small homeland near the Aral Sea, which, a short century later, would have grown to be as large as the half of today’s Europe.

Alp Arslan, Malik Shah, and Ahmad Sanjar continued their expedition to the West. Four centuries later they had to flex their empire-building muscles and conclude their move to the west. This time, Osman and his sons created the second largest empire (after the British) in modern times that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa between the 14th and early 20th centuries. The empire also controlled an eastern region of Central Europe from the 16th to the late 17th century.

Am I bragging about them? You bet; I do. They stood up to Crusades, the creeping of capitalistic economies, and military threats for almost 400 years. But when that Empire, with its military, economic, and diplomatic might, began hindering the British (and French) impulsions to redraw the map in the region, the first thing they did was to apportion its lands. The British and French did that with the Sykes–Picot Agreement, with assent from the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy, to define their mutually agreed spheres of influence and control in an eventual partition of the Ottoman Empire.

The agreement, based on the premise that Russia, France, and Great Britain would achieve success in defeating the Ottoman Empire in the forthcoming war, led to a series of secret agreements to share its lands. However, it did not work according to the plan; as usual, the British tried to cheat the French out of the newly discovered Middle Eastern oil. Italians did not agree with the crumb falling from the table of the Triple Entente (the informal understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland) which did not save the Ottoman Empire but still paved the way to the Great War (1914-1918), more accurately known as the First War of Partition.

'We are a nation that has made Anatolia our homeland'

The big infighting among the Europeans did not save the Ottoman Empire entirely; but what President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently called the "devlet aklı" (state mind, or in Machievelli’s terms: The doctrine of the reason of state/ragione di stato) helped Turks and their partners in the Ottoman Empire to keep the foundation stone of the Empire in their hands: Anatolia and partially Thrace.

Erdoğan explained how the roots of this empire-building skill rested, or Turks’ experience over many millennia: "We are a nation that has made Anatolia, the ancient homeland of humanity, our homeland, having gone through several tests for a thousand years, from the Byzantine armies to the Crusades, from the Mongolian attacks to the national struggle!"

Anatolia was really the venerable home of humanity; new archeological findings show Anatolia has seen the emergence of the most ancient farming communities in the world. The pre-pottery Neolithic-age monuments provide insight into the belief that people lived in Anatolia about 11,500 years ago. Turks, in partnership with many other people, created two major empires on it.

Now we are in the process of the third one. Not that the Republic of Türkiye is our third such endeavor; we have had 14 such states under our belt when we set foot in Anatolia two millennia ago. The Turkish Republic is the 17th all-in-all.

If those previous ones are to be judged, our kingdoms, khanates, and empires live really long lives, and the first 100 years of this last one can be referred to as the "starting phase" of this effort we are indulging in.

The Sykes-Picot partitioning of the Ottoman countries was the only beginning. They came at us with their partitioning schemes at the Serves Conference. Should it be accepted by the nation, the Turkish homeland would be squeezed into the central quarter of Anatolia. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson joined the lions’ den with his own map which would create a greater Armenia and a unified Kurdistan. The prime minister of Israel recently confessed that the "Promised Land for Jews" was not only a passage in the Old Testament but a gradually incoming reality, which, as you know, includes a large section of Anatolia.

Rise from ashes

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, first the great commander of the War of Independence and later the great architect of the republic, created an army out of the remnants of the Imperial Armed Forces, which neither had arms nor forces to fight the Greek occupation army. It was a miracle to win those battles against Greek armies fortified by first the British and later by the United States.

It was also another miracle to put together a government apparatus in a country whose capital Istanbul was under British Occupation, with all the officers and bureaucracies either loyal to the ancient regime or suspicious of the new government in Ankara. Mustafa Kemal and his nascent regime had to quell the Kurdish and religious rebellions, too.

But all went well. The one-party regime led to a multi-party democracy. After a couple of military interventions in the civilian regimes, the new Türkiye finally embarked on the new openings by healing the ethnic and political wounds of the early years of the republic which was scarred by the fascistic influences of the era. But our age-old imperialist adversaries helped create the separatist PKK terrorist organization, this time. Right now, those imperialists are busying themselves with dismembering our neighbors Iraq and Syria and creating a so-called "Kurdish" state to barricade Israel from Iran.

Despite all those dreams, promises, and maps of those ravenous wolves, we are recreating our homeland in "the ancient homeland of humanity" which we made our own for the last 2,000 years. The beginning was not a very happy occasion for us after losing the six-century-old edifice; we had to fight the cronies of British and American imperialist, the sickly Greek occupation army; we might have lost some sections of our homeland. But we never had irredentism because we always believed in peace and in being good neighbors. We are still trying to curb the proxies of the imperialists fighting the PKK extensions in Iraq and Syria, and thus, protecting their territorial integrity.

New beginnings are not very easy. But we have enough experience and willpower to succeed in our Republic of Türkiye. Besides, the third time’s the charm.