The Middle East is the key to wide-ranging,
economic, interlinked integration, and peace
By Pepe EscobarJanuary 28, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
Under the cascading roar of the 24/7 news
cycle cum Twitter eruptions, it’s easy for
most of the West, especially the US, to
forget the basics about the interaction of
Eurasia with its western peninsula, Europe.
Asia and Europe have been trading goods
and ideas since at least 3,500 BC.
Historically, the flux may have suffered
some occasional bumps – for instance, with
the irruption of 5th-century nomad horsemen
in the Eurasian plains. But it was
essentially steady up to the end of the 15th
century. We can essentially describe it as a
millennium-old axis – from Greece to Persia,
from the Roman empire to China.
A land route with myriad ramifications,
through Central Asia, Afghanistan, Iran and
Turkey, linking India and China to the
Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea,
ended up coalescing into what we came to
know as the Ancient Silk Roads.
By the 7th century, land
routes and sea trade routes were in direct
competition. And the Iranian plateau always
played a key role in this process.
The Iranian plateau historically includes
Afghanistan and parts of Central Asia
linking it to Xinjiang to the east, and to
the west all the way to Anatolia. The
Persian empire was all about land trade –
the key node between India and China and the
Eastern Mediterranean.
The Persians engaged the Phoenicians in
the Syrian coastline as their partners to
manage sea trade in the Mediterranean.
Enterprising people in Tyre established
Carthage as a node between the Eastern and
Western Mediterranean. Because of the
partnership with the Phoenicians, the
Persians would inevitably be antagonized by
the Greeks – a sea trading power.
