Non-fiction: Eastern tilt of the Axis

This troubling but powerful book discusses an obscure chapter of the First World War, as it highlights indelicate matters such as the origins of the Nazi links with Turkey's Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), otherwise known as the Young Turk Government. To his credit, Sean McMeekin, an assistant professor of International Relations at Bilkent University in Turkey, focuses on the German "holy war" strategy after Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany embarked on a "half-mad imperial enterprise of fin-de-siècle Europe" (page 34).

McMeekin homes in on many idiosyncrasies and personalities that were nothing short of catastrophic. He describes how a certain Baron von Oppenheim manipulated leading officials in Berlin, for example, who were nothing more than self-loathing Jews who lived with lies. His was the imagined existence of the "Orientalist", someone who moved in mysterious circles and confronted dangers with ease.

Much like Lev Nussimbaum, the Jewish-Azerbaijani author better known as Kurban Saeed, Baron von Oppenheim was neither a baron nor a "von". He was not even an Oppenheim, either in the dynastic or the religious sense of the word, but the wealthy grandson of Salomon Oppenheim, founder of a well-known German bank. In the event, and beyond his lavish lifestyle, von Oppenheim influenced senior German decision-makers, many of whom bought into his great empire elixir. Somehow, he managed to persuade Kaiser Wilhelm II that the future of the German empire was in the East, especially since such acquisitions could create power parities with Britain, France and Russia. Like Nussimbaum, von Oppenheim filled the emperor's ears with anti-Semitic bile, which was relatively easy at the time.

Interestingly, and long before the German idea was applied, there was "concrete evidence that Turco-German-jihad action plans were ready to go when the guns of August started firing" (page 87).

As McMeekin writes, this meant that the Berlin-Baghdad railway was built to establish a bridgehead in the Near East to exploit its natural resources and not necessarily to revive the nearly bankrupt Ottoman Empire. In the event, while German companies were rewarded with mineral exploration privileges for some 19 kilometres on either side of the tracks, construction was not swift. It actually took four decades to complete the line (1903 to 1940) due to unending financial and technical delays. In the interim, a major war altered all considerations, which resulted in defeat for both.

Still, even if the poorly advised German leader successfully persuaded Constantinople to join the war effort on the side of the Axis powers, the tragedy that ensued in Asia could not be ascribed exclusively to Constantinople's gullibility. Rather, men such as the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamed II, who ruled between 1876 and 1909, and his CUP successors, Jamal Pasha and Enver Pasha, among others, were anxious to embark on extremist adventures to enhance their power vis-à-vis their Hashemite rivals. In other words, while Germany's financial support was persuasive, what clinched it for Constantinople was the chimerical dream of recovering lost territory and the putative re-emergence of a decaying empire.

Moreover, CUP minions perceived the Berlin Axis as a tool against their religious rivals in Makkah, as they envisaged jihads of their own to liberate Muslims from Western domination, sanctioned the Holocaust against Armenians in 1915 and predicted a world where Islamism and a German empire would blend in full harmony. Ironically, CUP leaders banked on Kaiser Wilhelm II's personal romance with Islam, intensified by national strategic imperatives, and fed into the old man's fantasies. Mercifully, it would fall on the Sharif Hussain of Makkah to reverse his position in June 1916 and launch his tribes against the Ottomans in a popular "Arab revolt" that was organised by the British spy Lawrence of Arabia.

When Baghdad fell to the British imperial army in March 1917, the unfolding Russian Revolution rekindled Turkish hopes — and German aspirations — to return to the Middle East.

Constantinople occupied Azerbaijan but the move would not guarantee victory. The Allies imposed an armistice on the defeated Ottoman forces at the Greek port of Mudros and while the German railway from Constantinople to Baghdad was nearly completed, its purposes lay in ashes.

As McMeekin illustrates, the blame should not be placed on the kaiser alone because he behaved foolishly. Rather, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire was primarily the result of mediocre Ottoman officials who joined a great conflict when their nation was too weak and divided to win anything. Although post-CUP leaders such as Kamal Ataturk learnt the appropriate lesson and wisely stayed out of the Second World War, it was the British prowess to play the Great Game far more successfully than they, or the Germans, which guaranteed an Allied victory in the Middle East.

Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is the author of the forthcoming Legal and Political Reforms in Saudi Arabia (2011).

The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power By Sean McMeekin, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 461 pages, $29.95