The coming Turkish-Israeli struggle for supremacy

That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict has been apparent for a while. Nothing is inevitable in history, but the dynamic leading towards conflict has been gathering momentum at a pace that is startling. Israel is clearly a shark that cannot stop swimming, and the collapse of Iranian forward-positioned proxies is setting the region up for the ultimate showdown between the only two actors with hegemonic ambitions. ‘As Iran weakens, that vacuum will be filled by the natural candidate with imperial ambitions in the Middle East, and that is Turkey’, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said recently. He isn’t the only one. The sentiment now shapes Israeli strategic doctrines, from the Netanyahu government to opposition leaders such as Naftali Bennett. In sum, the potential for conflict remains, regardless of who is in power in Israel. And Turkey isn’t the only actor with hegemonic aspirations in the region.

Turkey is, however, the other remarkable actor in this tango: the only power and former imperial entity in the entire Eurasian landmass (with the exception of, possibly, China) that appears to simultaneously possess a sense of a residual imperial greatness, a vision of an overarching historical longue durée (unlike contemporary Europeans) and a cold, calculated grand-strategy unimpeded by democratic processes. Turkey isn’t affluent by most western measures, and yet, for a country that was strategically isolated a decade ago, Turkey has since positioned itself as the most influential actor in the region.

During the long Syrian Civil War, Ankara played the opposition forces like a fiddle, installing a friendly regime in Damascus. The final collapse of Ba’athism in the region, and the decisive rout of Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh, has created a strategic advantage that stretches from the Aegean to the Red Sea. Meanwhile, by closing the Turkish Straits to military vessels on 28 February 2022, it dealt a major blow to Russian revanchism in Ukraine during the early stages of Putin’s full-scale invasion.

Every act of aggression by Israel in the region has also compelled local actors to rush towards Ankara’s protective embrace. The Turkish president has found an unusually receptive partner in the White House, who has rightly recognised the importance of a country of around 90 million people, strategically located on the crossroads of two continents, with an advanced military-tech manufacturing sector and an extremely inexpensive but educated workforce.

In his final Foreign Affairs essay, Kenneth Waltz theorised the central ‘security dilemma’ of the region, where Israel’s overwhelming power, ability to use it, and its habit of striking any country without any punitive pushback, combined with its not so secret nuclear deterrence, would consistently keep pushing the region to search for a balancing actor: ‘power begs to be balanced’, as per realist doctrines. Waltz was, however, wrong about Iran being that actor. The Obama administration, for example, wanted to reduce direct American interference in the region after the horrific bloodshed of Iraqi counterinsurgency campaigns by integrating Iran in the regional balance of power and mellowing its revolutionary fervour.

Both Waltz’s theory and Obama’s strategy suffered from two disadvantages. Iran’s Shia identity placed it in structural opposition to much of the predominantly Sunni Middle East, while Tehran lacked the economic, military and demographic capabilities necessary to translate its influence into a sustainable regional hegemony. Its reliance on forward-positioned proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis, also compounded the headache of the local powers wary of Tehran’s hounds. The utter destruction of these proxies by Israel also demonstrated the limitations of extended Iranian influence. A battered Iran still remains a formidable middle power in the region, and with the help of advanced yet cheap drones, it is capable of deterring the bulk of the American navy from local seaways. But the threat of an Iranian regional hegemony is all but over.

Turkey is not Iran. It westernised itself over three centuries: first as a historic balancer to Russia in the Black Sea, and then as a cornerstone of NATO; it has the alliance’s second-largest army, after the United States, and the largest military in Europe. It is economically far stronger than Iran and entwined with Europe. It has comparable demographic weight and much more potent technological platforms that are also battle tested from combat operations in Armenia, Ukraine and Syria. Beyond its hard power, Turkey also enjoys Sunni confidence in countries across the Middle East and Central and South Asia, from Egypt to Pakistan, including previously suspicious Arab monarchies, such as the Gulf kingdoms and Jordan.

As Israel becomes embroiled in conflicts stretching from Lebanon to Yemen, Ankara only has to portray itself as the calm, hegemonic alternative to an increasingly paranoid, aggressive and insecure rival power, rapidly losing the diplomatic immunity it long enjoyed in Europe and America. The Turkish government is also the beneficiary of a recent rapprochement with the Kurds and Armenians, further mitigating the risk of internal instability.

In any potential conflict with Israel, Turkey enjoys the advantages of geography. In the event of a declaration of hostility, a million Turkish men under arms would be one well-coordinated thrust away from the gates of Nazareth and Haifa. Unlike the situation in Iran, if such a war were to break out, the United States would not go to war with Turkey.

This potential return of Turkish imperial power is existential for both Israel and Europe, and the choices are increasingly adaptation or conflict. Israeli and Turkish interests will continue to collide in the Mediterranean, Aegean and Red Sea, given that both powers have expansionist aims. And yet, as discussed, Turkey possesses an advantage that Iran never enjoyed: substantial political, economic and strategic acceptance in both the United States and Europe, particularly in Germany, as an actor deeply embedded within the western strategic institutions such as NATO, enjoying economic interdependence with the European Union, and able to rely on longstanding diplomatic relationships across the world.

A recent addition has further empowered the Turkish hand: an emerging Saudi-Pakistani security relationship that potentially brings Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence into the wider strategic matrix. From the American strategic perspective (even without considering the steadily declining support for Israel among both younger generations of Democrats and Republicans), it is understandable why this coalition might appeal. The Americans have been unable to extricate themselves from the region, partly due to their internal strategic incoherence and an absurd democratic system that alters US grand strategy every eight years or so. A Saudi-Pakistani bloc under Ankara’s hegemony, on the other hand, could contain both Russia and Iran in the region.

A similar logic applies to Europe. Turkey has become indispensable to several major European powers, courted by both Britain and Germany. Europeans, despite the presence of some Christian-civilisational political parties and candidates, increasingly will have to recognise and accommodate Turkish power, regional ambitions and geopolitical influence. Hard power creates its own reality.

Greece and Cyprus have already recognised the implications of this transformation and have responded by deepening their security relationships with Israel. But that alignment may prove less durable, with Israel facing growing European isolation and the scenario of a future Democratic administration in Washington that might substantially reshape American policy towards the region. Most importantly, the outbreak of an active Turkish-Israeli hostility, or more likely, an Israeli unilateral attack on any parts of Turkey or nearby that kills Turkish soldiers or civilians, could change the character of a potential crisis from empty posturing to an active hot war involving a NATO ally. The consequence is that large parts of Europe could increasingly become theatres for a confrontation between two external hegemonic aspirants pursuing competing expansionist agendas, the consequences of which reach beyond just carving up Syria and Lebanon.

The profound second-order consequences of the Iran War continue to play out across Eurasia. Iran has effectively demonstrated that relatively weak states can impose effective land-based blockades on seapowers. Ankara (and also Beijing) will have taken note. Cheap offence, exemplified by drones, for the first time since the development of tanks, is now overwhelmingly influential, placing great strain on expensive defensive platforms. The traditional Anglo-American conception of the sea as a deep strategic domain to project power over a large area of land by either invasion or blockade is increasingly challenged. The decline of such sea-based power projection naturally leads to the rise of localised land powers, especially the ones with a cheap workforce, large reserves of educated manpower and access to advanced technology.

The United States will, of course, continue to be immensely powerful and splendidly isolated in the Western hemisphere. But, inevitably, American retrenchment, either due to imperial exhaustion, debt, generational change or strategic defeat, will translate into a mad dash for localised regional hegemony and space for imperial powers with capacity and ambition. An Israeli attack on Turkey, or an all-out Turkish-Israeli war over expansionism in Syria or Cyprus, therefore has the potential to destroy NATO as we know it. But from a strictly historical perspective, it will be a new hegemonic cycle in a region that has seen many such cycles before, with an older imperial entity returning to form.