Everyone remembers this expression, “the mother of all battles.” Saddam Hussein used it in January 1991, at the beginning of the first conflict against the West. It was also repeated in April 2003 when the second Gulf War began. Though the expression is disputed (it would only be the result of a translation error, from Arabic, of a metaphor that should have been translated as “the battle of all battles”), it is still set in the mind of the general public.
At a time when a new war of extreme violence rages in the same place, it may be time to understand that all the stakes of this conflict are actually on the sea and for the sea – particularly the Mediterranean Sea.
Named so by the Romans, it has been, for at least three thousand years, the sea of all battles, the location of innumerable conflicts; because its control is the key to supplying the countries on its shores. The Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Venetians, Crusaders, Ottomans, Genoese, and many others, fought for its control. Then, it disappeared from history books, when the centre of world power shifted to the North Sea, then the Atlantic, the Pacific and now the China Sea.
However, the Mediterranean has not ceased to play a major geopolitical role. It is even at the heart of the today’s issues.
For example, the stakes related to the Mediterranean can explain what is currently happening in Syria and Iraq.
Especially for the Russians: President Putin’s obsession has always been to guarantee his country access to all the seas. Consequently, he has strengthened Vladivostok’s military infrastructure and the Baltic ports. The reconquest of Crimea is also a consequence of this obsession, as it guarantees Russian access to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, crossing the Strait of Bosporus. But in fact, since the Soviet era, the real access of the Russian fleet to the Mediterranean has been ensured by the installation of a naval base in Syria, Tartous, 30 km from the Lebanese border. It was almost abandoned during the collapse of the USSR, (as were the bases in Egypt and Ethiopia), but has since become absolutely strategic for the last ten years. And the Russians seem to have greatly upgraded it, to make it a base for nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine. Similarly, they have strengthened their Hmeimim airbase nearby.
For these two bases, the Russians seem to have obtained from the Syrian regime a guarantee of impregnability, hence their support for the Assad dynasty.
So, if Westerners confirmed to them their ownership of this enclave, the Russians would have much less reason to support the Alawite regime and perpetuate this terrifying conflict.
But will we, in Washington and Paris, want to give back to Russia its full place in the community of Mediterranean nations? Will we want to recognize its full place in Europe? This is one of the real issues at stake through these massacres.
The strategic role of the Mediterranean does not stop there. And even if global warming will soon make many ships that are now coming from Asia by the Suez Canal transit across the poles, and therefore by the Mediterranean, the tremendous economic and demographic growth of Africa will revive this too often forgotten sea. The construction of new ports in Morocco and Tunisia is the first manifestation of it.
It will no doubt be necessary to then remember the enigmatic sentence of the founder of Singapore, the visionary Lee Kwan Yew, when he said, a long time ago, to a friend: “Your problem, to you Europeans, is that the Mediterranean is much too small “…
It would indeed be time to think about it.
j@attali.com