Pope Leo XIV's visit, the heartland, rimland geopolitics, and religions

The visit to Istanbul and Nicaea (İznik) that Pope Leo XIV will make on November 28, 2025, on the 1700th anniversary of the "Nicene Creed," in which it was declared that Jesus is of the same essence as God, is not merely a simple act of faith. On the other hand, the gathering in Nicaea of representatives of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, which separated 971 years ago by excommunicating each other (The Great Schism), is a significant move that contributes to the rimland geopolitics surrounding the heartland of the West, at a time when the pains of establishing a multipolar global order are being felt. It derives its power from the hegemonic mind that utilizes revelation. 

The Return of Religion to Geopolitics. Today, religion is being heavily utilized in the process of changing hegemony, in politics, economics, war, and the construction of social identity, in both eschatological (apocalypse-centered salvation narratives) and theopolitical (directing politics through the search for divine legitimacy) forms. Current geopolitical conditions have moved religion back to the pre-Westphalian (1648) period after 400 years. Revelation has now replaced science; faith has replaced thought. And politicians see no harm in this, because for them, especially for finance capital, religion is never an end but an excellent tool of governance. In that era, too, religion was the primary source of legitimacy for state sovereignty; kings ruled in the name of God, and wars were waged for the sake of "justice and religion." The Westphalian order destroyed this theopolitical integrity, introduced the principle of secular sovereignty, and separated religion from politics. However, the fractures in the current global order, crises of hegemony, and identity conflicts have turned religion back into a political tool. Thus, the world is moving out of the secular framework of modernity and into a period where, just as before Westphalia, concepts of God, fate, and salvation are being placed back at the center of geopolitical language. Another feature of this period is that while the influence of religion increases in every field, corruption, immorality, and collapse are also on the rise. It is as if the two areas are competing with each other.

The Changing Global Order. The first quarter of the 21st century is a period of restructuring in which world politics, economics, and military balances are changing rapidly. The shift of production and trade centers to Asia, the creation of new corridors for energy and financial flows, and the challenging of American maritime hegemony in the Western Pacific, the Arctic, and the Red Sea are transforming the infrastructure of the global order. The neoliberal paradigm was shaken by the 2008 crisis and has entered a collapse with the pandemic, energy shocks, and regional wars. The fact that financial assets have risen to seven times the size of the real economy and income inequality has reached its peak demonstrates the unsustainability of the system. The US is no longer the sole superpower; it is weakening under the weight of debt, social polarization, and production weakness. Its navy has shrunk, and it has lost the capacity to wage war on three fronts simultaneously. While technological superiority no longer guarantees victory, asymmetric resistance models and strategic patience are coming to the fore. While China and Russia are advancing with long-term strategies, the US and the West are trying to establish dominance by creating crises, which deepens global chaos. On the other hand, the Iran–Israel war and the Red Sea crises have shattered the West's image of invincibility. The inclusion of Israel in the geopolitical equation with its eschatological and financial power has made the process even more complex. Like every hegemon that is declining and moving toward inevitable collapse, the US is striving to use time to its advantage, to take positions in the new era, and to close this period with the least amount of damage. Because what is actually collapsing is not US hegemony, but the 500-year-old Atlantic era that began with the Age of Discovery, as it yields its place to Asia. Today, for the finance capital oligarchy that is never satisfied with profit, the cycle of war, credit, debt, and arms sales has become a vital tool. However, the West is no longer strong enough to maintain its five-century-old hegemony. With the Ukraine War that began in 2022, the global reckoning is effectively underway, and the West has lost this war. 

Why is Religion Becoming Politicized? The biggest reason for clinging to religion as a political tool today is to make people forget socio-economic problems, to normalize income inequality, the state's withdrawal from health and education, and diminishing union and social rights within the cycle of fate for societies, and ultimately to serve the purpose of cooling the energy of boiling masses. Religion also serves to legitimize war among poor masses through the polarization it creates. For example, for a fundamentalist Israeli, a Muslim Palestinian has no value. Furthermore, even though both are Orthodox Christians, Ukrainian Orthodox believers have been turned into enemies by dividing their churches and patriarchs. Or, Catholic Ukrainians living in the West hate Ukrainians living in the East who speak Russian. 

The Reconciliation of Jesus and Judas in the US. Today, the US is among the countries where religion is used most intensively in politics. In this context, the first of the most prominent reasons for the prominence of religion is the increasing influence of Israel and Zionism in the US, and the other is the collapse of US hegemony. As the collapse has increased, so has the clinging to religion. In the US, religion has become so prominent in the last 75 years that, for example, with the rise of Evangelicalism, the political and theological rapprochement between the Christian world and the Jewish tradition has become one of the fundamental pillars of Western ideology under the name of 'Judeo-Christianity.' Evangelicalism, also expressed as Christian Zionism, centered the belief that the Jewish people are "God's chosen people" by linking the promises of the Old Testament to the state of Israel in a political sense. Two separate revelations that have been enemies for centuries have now become one body. The Old and New Testaments are now one. For centuries, Christianity's deep-rooted tradition of hatred and exclusion toward Jews through Judas was radically reversed in the US due to the moral shock created by the Holocaust, the ideological needs of the Cold War, the Evangelical eschatology's understanding that "Israel must be strengthened for the return of the Messiah," and the influence of the American Jewish community on media, academia, and finance; thus, the concept of "Judeo-Christianity," which never existed in historical reality, was engineered in the mid-20th century by politics, intelligence apparatuses, and Evangelical apocalyptic theology and placed at the ideological foundation of American identity. While the post-Holocaust sense of guilt offered the West an opportunity for moral rehabilitation, US strategists gathered Christians and Jews into a single bloc against communism with the slogan of "Western civilization that believes in God"; after 1967, the Evangelical movement declared Israel a necessary actor in the apocalypse process; the American Jewish community, which influences most of the cultural sphere, carried this new narrative of unity to all layers of society. Thus, it formed the ideological backbone of today's American foreign policy, Middle East strategy, and the Zionist–Evangelist alliance. Imperialism, with the contribution of the finance capital oligarchy, also transformed the religion of Islam, which is oriented toward conscience and peace, into an ideology of armed struggle, especially after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and Western intelligence agencies went even further, introducing these groups to terrorism and using them for their own interests. For example, ISIS has never attacked Israel even once to this day.  How else can the fact that former Al-Qaeda terrorist Colani was welcomed with great prestige at the White House be explained? Today, neocons, evangelicals, Zionists, and masonic and techno-feudal structures within the US are waging a power struggle using religion with different agendas.

The Awakening of China, the Philosophy Society. In this multi-layered, multi-unknown, and complex process, the most important rival for the US is China. Unlike the West, which has paused secularization and turned into a fundamentalist and militant religious society, China, a philosophy society, has replaced the USSR in Cold War geopolitics. With one difference. China, which practices state capitalism, is not an ideological rival for the US. The competition is global influence and the founding of a new world order, which has inevitable consequences in its economic and military form. This challenge is not a simple matter. It is not easy for Western hegemony, which has completed 500 years of finance capital accumulation, colonialism, dozens of regional wars, two world wars, and one cold war as the victor, to accept defeat. In this struggle, war, terror, religion, coups, embargoes, sanctions, drugs, mafia, false flag operations, and every method imaginable will be and are being tried. 

The West, Insatiable for War. Today, seven major and serious wars/crises are the battlegrounds of Western hegemony. Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Taiwan, the South China Sea, the Red Sea, and Venezuela are the areas where the arm-wrestling is intensifying. Every crisis in these areas has been instigated by the West. If the 2014 Kiev coup had not occurred in Ukraine and NATO expansion had not been on the agenda, Russia would not have entered the Donbas region to protect ethnic Russians. If Israel, under US protection and full support, had accepted the Palestinian state and abandoned the Greater Israel project, and lived in peace with its neighbors, especially Lebanon, in the Eastern Mediterranean, it would not have turned the region into a bloodbath amounting to genocide, nor would it have carried out a surprise attack on Iran. In such a situation, the Yemeni Houthis would not have closed the Red Sea by applying asymmetric warfare. If the US continued to recognize the Chinese maritime jurisdiction areas it has recognized since 1945 in the South China Sea and did not make provocations that would change the status of Taiwan under the one-China policy, and if it did not send the warships of old colonial states (France, England, Holland, Germany) and its own to the region under the name of freedom of navigation (FON), these waters, through which 5 trillion dollars of trade pass every year, would not turn into risky areas. If it were not for the desire for revenge against Maduro, who challenged the US regime in Venezuela, and the ambition to possess the world's largest and highest-quality oil reserves, the situation would be different. Why does the US want these crises and wars? There are three reasons for this. It is based on geopolitical, financial, and thirdly, religious (eschatological) reasons. 

Geopolitical Reasons.When monotheistic religions emerged, humanity had not yet begun to struggle on the oceans. Before the 15th century, which we call the Age of Discovery, many cultures, for example, the Vikings, Arabs, and Chinese, had made transoceanic voyages, but these voyages did not turn into state policy. The global order was Eurasia-centered. For the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, this was the center until the 15th century.  Asia, Europe, and Africa, which are called the World Island, were connected via the Silk and Spice Roads. China, the Turkic World, and India were the centers of the global economy and economic history. Global balance was maintained through multi-centered land networks. The process that began with the transoceanic voyages and discoveries initiated by Columbus at the end of the 15th century disrupted this balance. In reality, there were not many places left in the world that had not been discovered, but for the first time, the European world was trying to reach the west to establish a systematic colonial order using state/church power. Thus, for the first time, different centers of the world island began to be surrounded from the sea by ocean powers. On the other hand, according to Mackinder, who lived in the 19th/20th century, these three continents, that is, the world island, had central importance from a geopolitical perspective because they contained the majority of the world's population, resources, and production power. The American continents and Australia, which surround the World Island, were defined as "outer islands" or "marginal islands." For this reason, Mackinder, in his strategic formula, defended the thesis that "whoever rules Eastern Europe commands the Heartland (roughly the area protected by natural defensive barriers stretching from the Volga to Siberia, from the Himalayas to the Arctic Ocean); whoever rules the Heartland commands the World Island (Eurasia and Africa), and thus the world." With the industrial revolutions and the transition of capitalism to the stage of imperialism, the thesis that "whoever controls the oceans controls the world" prevailed. In this way, England kept Europe fragmented for 150 years and managed an empire of 21 million square kilometers of colonies where the sun never set by controlling the world's seas and important maritime transport nodes. In this process, England clashed with Napoleonic France in the 19th century and Hitler's Germany in the 20th century, both of which wanted to advance to the east, that is, to the heartland. However, it generally fought wars at sea. Except for Waterloo (1815), the Royal Army did not win major wars in Europe. But it knew that if Eurasia united, the maritime empire would collapse. Because Eurasia's resources and depth had long-term resistance and power capacity. Throughout history, powers that formed in Europe and entered the interior of Asia have always been defeated for this reason. Napoleon and Hitler tried this and lost. The US took over England's rimland paradigm after 1945. By applying Spykman's rimland theory, that is, controlling the border where the World Island intersects with the sea, and Mahan's sea power theory to establish dominance in the oceans, it both prevented the unification of Eurasia and hindered the access of Asian powers to the sea. In this process, the US tried to divide Asia to maintain the 500-year maritime superiority of the West it represents, but this success only lasted 75 years. In other words, the US and the West triggered the unification of Asian powers today with the mistakes they made one after another. For example, the Ukraine war was encouraged through NATO expansion, triggering Russia's complete break from Europe, its turn to Asia and China, and thus the unification of Eurasia. Today, the Russia, China, India, Iran axis, along with BRICS and the SCO, are establishing a new Eurasian order in finance, energy, data, and logistics. In other words, the structure that has emerged today is a multi-centered continental partnership.  In this process, two important geopolitical factors acting as force multipliers, besides economic growth, are China's emergence as a rising sea power from the Western Pacific to the oceans, never to return, and Russia's taking full control of its Arctic coasts and putting the new Northern Sea Route at the service of international shipping. Thus, geopolitical superiority today no longer relies on the dominance of maritime superiority, but on the effectiveness and intensification of logistics cycles that connect the continent. China is both building communication networks on land and blocking power coming from the sea. The US triggered the rise of Asia during a period of constant wars. Now it is trying to do for China exactly what England did 100 years ago to prevent Germany's access to the sea. In this process, it is trying to wear Russia down so that it remains weak in the final reckoning with China. It is following a strategy of preventing China from gaining time. It is trying to achieve this by balancing China with proxies before it reaches a critical threshold and by using military, financial, and technological instruments, but most importantly, by creating perception through the media. Still, this time-gaining process is not enough to create its own future. The most interesting factor in this process is that both finance and media are under the command and control of Zionism. 

Finance Capital Factors. The London Stock Exchange (City of London) and Wall Street are the two main axes of global finance capital, the centers that determine world capital flows, investment norms, and the financial order. While the City of London established a historical hegemony over international banking, derivatives markets, insurance, offshore tax regimes, freight, and the global legal-financial architecture; Wall Street, thanks to the dollar's reserve currency status, produces a hegemonic power in the combination of giant investment funds, stock exchanges, credit rating agencies, and technology-finance (fintech) that determines the direction of global liquidity. Working together, these two centers regulate the cross-border mobility of capital, shape the borrowing costs of states, control global risk appetite, indirectly influence geopolitical decisions, and create an "upper institutional financial network" that transcends the economic sovereignty of nation-states. Thus, they maintain their status as the command-and-control centers of contemporary capitalism. The Vatican also has an important place and role in this structure as a major owner of finance capital. Although the Ukraine war and regional conflicts are ostensibly explained by geopolitical reasons, the real determining dynamic behind them is the interests of finance capital, which has stood by wars throughout history. Acting with the goal of continuous expansion and profit increase, this structure encourages wars for new markets, raw material sources, and countries that can be indebted, and uses war as an economic revitalization mechanism in crises. The overcoming of the 1929 Depression by the US through the Second World War is a typical example of this. Today, against the 110 trillion dollars of value produced by the real economy, a financial derivative volume of 730 trillion dollars has been formed, and this massive power has turned into an oligarchy largely controlled by American and British-based banks, funds, and technology-finance giants. This structure has the capacity to direct governments, elections, coups, and war decisions. Even though the need for security has decreased after the cold war, NATO has turned into a geopolitical execution tool for finance capital's demand for sustainable threats, constant armament, and increasing defense budgets; it has adopted war as its reason for existence. The "cheap blood" strategy that the Collective West is carrying out through Ukraine, the pressure to increase Europe's defense spending, and the line of attrition that the US is carrying out from the Pacific to the Middle East are part of the goal of maintaining finance capital's global hegemony. While the rise of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and some centers of resistance is changing the balances today, finance capital's war economy approach relies not on the closing of conflicts but on the constant opening of new fronts to protect the hegemonic order, and it is not states but this oligarchic structure that determines the end of wars.

Eschatological (Apocalyptic) Factors. When we look at today's geopolitics, we are faced with a picture that reminds us of the religion-centered power struggles of the pre-1648 Westphalia period. Today, different religious circles in the world, although they seem disconnected from each other, feed the same explosive fantasy. Evangelicals in the US and Latin America expect the second coming of Jesus Christ and the battle of Armageddon, Messianic Zionists in Israel expect a Messiah from the lineage of David along with the Third Temple, the Shia world expects the appearance of the Mahdi, and a significant part of the Sunni world expects the Mahdi–Jesus duo to fill the earth with justice in the "end times"; in short, millions of people in different geographies believe that history will be reset at some point with a great divine reckoning and a bloody finale. This expectation, especially in the Evangelical-Zionist bloc, ceases to be a matter of personal faith and, when it infiltrates state strategy and security doctrines, Armageddon ceases to be a symbolic prophecy and turns into an active mentality that shapes geopolitical target maps, war decisions, alliance relationships, and definitions of enemies. The danger of revelation texts, apocalypse scenarios, and hadith collections taking precedence over cool-headed reasoning, rational risk calculation, and international law begins exactly here. Since 2000, especially with the new period established after the neocons and September 11, 2001, the increasing influence of Evangelicals on the White House, the Pentagon, and Congress in the US, the theological partnership established with Israel, the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital, preparations for the Third Temple, the red heifer ritual, Armageddon rhetoric, and the West Asian wars legitimized with the emphasis on "God's plan" intertwine both faith and power-sharing struggles in a way that recalls the "sect or hegemony?" dilemma of the Thirty Years' War. Whatever the decrees of the pope or the emperor were before Westphalia, today the discourse coming from Washington, Israel–Evangelist lobbies, and technology companies turns the concepts of "God's calendar," "Armageddon (apocalyptic war)," "chosen nation," and "return of the Messiah" into the implicit justification for geopolitical decisions. In many crisis lines from Ukraine to Iran, from Gaza to the Taiwan Strait, theological images such as "good–evil" and "order–chaos" work together with geopolitical interest calculations. Global finance-capital, under the control of Zionism and the Anglo-Saxon structure, is instrumentalizing not only money, media, and technology today, but also religion. This oligarchic structure, which has close relations with US, British, and Israeli secret services, contributes to scenarios that will allow for geopolitical interventions through the petrodollar order, Gulf capital, foundations, and crypto-offshore networks. This structure also contributes to the creation of a climate of fear that legitimizes the technocratic surveillance order in the West. Thus, the obedience mechanism established by religious groups practicing radical violence through fatwas and the digital obedience established by technocracy through data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence codes can turn into two simultaneous forms of joint control fed by the same financial vein. Algorithmic invisibility, media monopolies, and the attention economy also keep the fear economy alive by masking the true intentions of this structure. In today's world, both war and peace are no longer waged on lands, but in mental spaces. Finance-capital uses both religion and technology together for consciousness management. The resulting picture uses the post-Westphalia nation-state system as its form and secular human rights and democracy discourse as its language. However, in content, just like before 1648, they are realizing this by dividing the world into "the chosen and the damned," "the believers and the heretics," "God's side and the devil's side," and by evolving toward a much more advanced "digital theocracy" by combining this with algorithms, big data, artificial intelligence, and global financial networks. Religion has returned to the center of geopolitics, but this time the pulpit is not just the church, but the screen; the sacred text is not just the Bible, but code; and the crusader army is not just soldiers, but capital flows, media networks, and platform economies. While humanity sits on top of thermonuclear weapons, ballistic missile systems, cyber warfare capacity, and artificial intelligence-supported targeting technologies, the fact that an eschatological (apocalyptic) state of mind such as "this order will collapse anyway, God's plan will be completed with war" takes root in the minds of decision-making elites or actors who drag the masses, turns every diplomatic crisis into a potential apocalypse threshold. Even though we are in the information age, this is why it is possible for deep ignorance, dogmatic stubbornness, and the one-dimensional, out-of-context reading of sacred texts to drag a civilization that has seen Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Cuban Missile Crisis back toward the abyss. In short, as the number of those waiting for the Messiah, the Mahdi, or Jesus increases, to the extent that we allow the absolute interpretation of revelation to take precedence over reason, science, and common human law, the nuclear weapons at our fingertips and widespread ignorance make the planet more fragile than at any time in history, dependent on a single wrong decision, a single fanatical move.

The Pope's Visit to Turkey. In light of what is emphasized above, we can speak of the existence of theological, geopolitical, eschatological, and psychological dimensions of the American Pope Leo XIV's visit to Nicaea. A theological message is given by returning to Nicaea, that is, the place where the first Christian dogma began; a geopolitical message is given by taking the Phanar Patriarchate with him as the representative of the East and legitimizing it as a completely politicized institution; and an eschatological message is given with the attempt to re-establish East-West church unity. In this framework, the message "just as we were one at the beginning, we will be one again" is given at the time of the Council of Nicaea (AD 325), which is one of the most important narratives of Christianity. Just as Evangelicalism made two religions (Jews and Christians) that had been enemies for 2000 years friends on American soil, why shouldn't Catholics and Orthodox be one again? According to this narrative, once unity is achieved, the era of the return of Jesus Christ begins. Thus, the narrative that history continues through the heritage they themselves established will be strengthened in a way that will provide psychological superiority to the Christian world. In other words, Pope Leo XIV's call to return to Nicaea is based on the idea of "reuniting the divided Christianity for the last time." The reunification of the East-West Church includes theological goals such as the confirmation of Jerusalem as the holy center and the acceleration of the doctrine of the second coming of Jesus Christ. For Evangelicals, this situation serves to unify the Church, make Jerusalem the center, and prepare for the eschatological finale. Evangelicalism is officially merged with the domestic politics of the US. There are 70 million Evangelical voters in the US. They are directly represented in the Senate and Congress. In his first term, Secretary of State Pompeo said the following for President Trump: "God sent Trump to build Israel." Pence, who was the vice president in the same period, also said: "We have placed Jerusalem on God's calendar." These words were said after Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in exchange for 120 million dollars he received as a donation from the American citizen Jewish Queen of Casinos, Miriam Adelson. In short, we are living in a period where religious structures have reached the highest stage in a complex geopolitical environment. The universalist-central authority emphasis of the Catholic world represented by the Pope, the ecumenical legitimacy claim of the Orthodox world, and the apocalyptic accelerator politics of the Protestant-Evangelical and Zionist world are interconnected today in many crisis lines from West Asia to Eastern Europe, from the Pacific to the Caucasus. Thus, the civilizational fault lines drawn by the American historian Samuel Huntington, which emerged at the time with the Clash of Civilizations thesis, combine with papal diplomacy, Orthodox ecumenism, and the political interventionism of Evangelical eschatology to push modern geopolitics back to the pre-1648 theopolitical order, rational state mind is replaced by sacred text interpretations, security is replaced by prophecies, and international law is replaced by eschatological vision, and humanity is entering the most dangerous period created by an irrational faith-politics combination in the shadow of nuclear weapons.

Lessons for Turkey. The rapid shift of the geopolitical equation in favor of Asia opens a unique but carefully managed window of opportunity for Turkey. Turkey must increase its strategic autonomy against Western pressures and establish balanced, long-term, and egalitarian partnerships with Asian powers by combining its unique position between the Heartland and the Rimland with its advantages in energy lines, logistics corridors, trade flows, defense industry capacity, and maritime geopolitics. However, this orientation should not mean a break with the West; as the crisis in the Atlantic system deepens, Turkey should follow a "doctrine of balance and flexibility" that prioritizes national interests but keeps bridges open, rather than completely burning and destroying relations. The right path for Turkey is to be one of the founding actors of the new world system with a geopolitical vision that benefits from the rise of Eurasia, does not get stuck in opposition to the West, and is focused on multilateral diplomacy, economic diversification, defense independence, and the Blue Homeland. On the other hand, in a period where the world is rapidly becoming theopolitical and faith-politics combinations that are contrary to reason and science determine global decision-making processes, Turkey must never compromise on secularism, which is the main pillar of its republican identity. Because secularism is not just a principle of governance, but the strongest shield that protects national sovereignty, social peace, and state mind in an age where religion combines with politics, technology, finance, and security apparatuses to produce eschatological tendencies. The weakening of secularism makes Turkey open to a geopolitical drift that draws it into both regional sectarian rivalries and global apocalypse scenarios. Therefore, what Turkey needs to do in the coming period is to carefully analyze the global atmosphere where religion is instrumentalized, to fortify state mind on the basis of science, rationality, and national interest, and to resolutely maintain a secular-public sphere that will keep the social fabric strong.

(As of October 29, 2025, I have established my own YouTube channel under the name "Cem Gürdeniz ile Mavi Vatan ve Ötesi" (Blue Homeland and Beyond with Cem Gürdeniz). The channel, which we continue with my valuable journalist friends Gökhun Göçmen and Emre Öztürk, offers new evaluations every Wednesday and Saturday at 17:00. I look forward to my readers and followers.)

The link to the channel is as follows. 

https://www.youtube.com/@CemGurdenizz