There are few places between Tehran and Tel Aviv that have remained unchanged in the past decade. Regimes have fallen and fault lines have shifted. In Syria, the long, dictatorial rule of the Assad family came to a sudden end in December; in Lebanon and Gaza respectively, Hezbollah and Hamas have been decimated; and in the Caucasus, Russian influence has waned following the fall of the contested Nagorno Karabakh region to Azerbaijan. Now, Iran and Israel are also being reshaped by the war that has broken out between them.

One place that has not changed, at least in terms of its leadership, is Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not only entrenched his position domestically by changing the constitution and wiping out rivals both within his own party and the opposition. He has also secured a measure of international acceptability. By offering Turkey as a table for talks between Ukraine and Russia, and also as a back-channel between the US and Iran, he has diverted diplomatic attention away from the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem Imamoglu – a move that would have drawn sharp criticism from Europe and the US a decade ago. Earlier this year, Erdogan spoke of Turkey becoming a ‘hub of peace diplomacy’. Whereas once he was studiously ignored by Western leaders at international summits, he is now greeted as an equal. It seems unlikely that he will retire from power in the foreseeable future; a proposed new round of constitutional changes could give him a get-out from the two-term limit. Erdogan is already on his third term, having used the last set of constitutional reforms to set his counter back to zero.

This staying power in a region in flux is particularly unusual for an elected president of a republic; one of the cleavages of the Arab Spring was the durability of the region’s monarchies, while the dictators of republics toppled. Neither has Erdogan ever won a landslide at the ballot box, and in the past two presidential elections he has faced opponents who could feasibly have beaten him. The fact that they didn’t is partly down to Erdogan’s now almost total control of the media and electoral institutions, which he has used to tilt fine margins in his favour. But it is also down to political skill.

Erdogan is an arch-pragmatist, who has an instinct for reading the public mood in Turkey, and a willingness to partner with anyone who can help him to stay in power. In the first years of his rule, he presented himself as a liberaliser able to quell the power of the military, end the decades-long oppression of the Kurdish minority, and take Turkey into the EU. Post-2011, as Muslim grievance rose around his neighbourhood, he became more overtly Islamist, supporting the Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups that had risen to the fore of the Arab Spring movements. In 2015 he entered into a parliamentary coalition with the ultra-nationalists in order to keep his party’s working majority, and since then he has cracked down again on Kurdish militancy, politics and social movements.

This year, having brokered a new ceasefire with the PKK, a violent Kurdish separatist organisation, he has turned his attention to the secularist opposition, launching a crackdown that resulted in Imamoglu’s arrest. Despite the decade of hostility that came before, the main Kurdish party now appears ready to support him as he pushes for constitutional change.

Much of his success internationally is the work of his skilled diplomats, particularly Hakan Fidan, the former spy chief and now foreign minister, who worked at both NATO and the Australian embassy in Ankara early in his career and is well respected in both Middle Eastern and Western capitals. Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s former spokesman, took over as the head of intelligence from Fidan, and is similarly urbane, US-educated, well-known and respected in diplomatic circles. Between them, Fidan and Kalin have brokered both backroom and open dialogue between Russia and Ukraine, as well as playing key roles in the Black Sea grain deal – an achievement that Erdogan took credit for. They have also secured Turkey a highly influential place in post-Assad Syria, meaning that for many European governments, Ankara is now a useful line to Damascus.

Above all, however, is his luck. When Erdogan’s domestic popularity and international reputation began floundering in the early 2010s, he was a populist and anti-democratic outlier in the West. When he began his flirtation with Putin in 2016, it seemed to drive a wedge into the heart of NATO. Instead, his manoeuvres have installed him as one of the Middle East’s most durable leaders, and, as the region slips deeper into the danger zone, a more important ally than ever for Europe and the US.