Kaos Stratejisi

The book opens with a confession rather than a thesis. He is anxious too, he writes, and aware of operating inside uncertainty; the questions that begin it are the ones everyone is asking. Is what is happening to us a strategic method? Are we inside a simulation? Is there a trustworthy system in the world at all? What he refuses is to stop at the observation that there is chaos. Naming a condition is not describing it; the definition and the diagnosis have to be complete before any treatment follows.

His point of departure is Immanuel Wallerstein’s account of a world-system in structural crisis, whose defining feature is chaotic uncertainty and in which every major actor’s priorities are open to sudden reversal. Tokmakoğlu’s move is to take that condition and argue it has become a method. Someone, he suggests, may have concluded that since the chaos is already known, it might as well be put to deliberate use, more controlled and more productive of results. Whether or not it was ever decided, it can now be said: the strategy is chaotic.

The analysis rests on named cornerstones: a global-strategic view, the vision of global capitalism, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, climate change, geopolitical approach, and a dynamic atmosphere. Its method is borrowed from economics, which he takes to be chaotic in its essence: the 2008 crisis taught that even inside chaos the disciplined, neutral, rational work of the preceding period remains the guide. The book insists on being that kind of work rather than the document of a single period. The figures it names, Trump, Khamenei and Netanyahu, are examples, and passing ones.