Iran and Turkey want the Middle East – One country stands in their way

Israel is the barrier preventing this rivalry from dividing the region between competing localized Islamic empires.

By Jose Lev Alvarez, Middle East Forum

Revisionist powers and Islamist networks have long viewed Israel not as a neighbor but as the central obstacle to reordering the Middle East.

Arab states tried and failed in conventional wars. Broader rejectionist forces now pin their hopes on attrition and narrative victory.

Turkey sees Israel’s removal as the final step toward restoring strategic depth across the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean.

Iran treats it as the prerequisite for consolidating its land corridor to proxies and eliminating the chief barrier to its nuclear threshold and hegemonic claims.

Turkey’s neo-Ottoman project requires a weakened Jewish state to expand influence without resistance.

Ankara has established a military presence in Syria and Libya and seeks leverage over trade and energy routes. Israel’s removal lowers the cost of expansion.

Iran’s ambition is more direct: a surviving regime — forcing concessions while retaining capabilities — would claim the narrative victory that Sunni powers never achieved.

Tehran would weaponize that triumph across the West, bankrolling mosques, nongovernmental organizations, and radical networks to recruit young Sunnis into its global intifada.

This inverts Israel’s historic periphery doctrine. Once, the Jewish state cultivated ties with non-Arab powers and regional minorities to balance the Arab core.

Now, former periphery powers treat Israel itself as the keystone blocking their restoration.

Iran and Turkey now wage the Middle East’s defining Islamic power struggle. Tehran leads the revolutionary Shiite model: missiles, terrorist groups, nuclear brinkmanship, and permanent disorder.

Ankara offers a Sunni imperial alternative: drones, bases, commercial corridors, political Islam, and the restoration of nostalgic Ottoman strategic depth.

They cooperate when useful, but from Syria and Iraq to the Caucasus, each seeks the space the other occupies.

Qatar and Saudi Arabia remain quieter contestants. Doha uses money, media, mediation, and Islamist relationships to purchase influence disproportionate to its size.

Riyadh uses oil, religious prestige, reconstruction capital, and access to Washington.

Both would prefer to replace Turkey as the organizing center of Sunni power, but neither yet matches Ankara’s combination of military reach, ideological machinery, and geographic position.

Israel is the barrier preventing this rivalry from dividing the region between competing localized Islamic empires.

Jerusalem severs Iran’s corridor to the Mediterranean, frustrates Turkish dominance of Syria and the eastern Mediterranean, and gives Greece, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and the moderate Persian Gulf monarchies an alternative security pole.

Destroy or strategically paralyze Israel, and Tehran and Ankara no longer compete beneath an American ceiling. They compete over America’s ruins.

That contest will not remain overseas. Iran already treats information warfare, cyber operations, campus agitation, and anti-Israel mobilization as instruments of state power.

Turkey has cultivated lobbying operations, diaspora institutions, religious networks, and political relationships abroad while pursuing critics across borders.

In America, a small but vocal ecosystem of Erdogan-friendly activists, Turkish nationalist operatives, and far-left agitators increasingly launders Ankara’s ambitions through the language of “Palestine” and social justice.

They are not representative of Turkish Americans, many of whom fled Erdoganism. They are political entrepreneurs helping foreign revisionism masquerade as domestic dissent.

Their purpose is to fracture the American coalition that sustains Israel, NATO’s eastern flank, and resistance to political Islam.

Washington must therefore stop treating Iran as the only revisionist threat and Turkey as an automatically reliable ally.

It should build an Israel-centered security architecture linking Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Azerbaijan, and the Abraham Accords states; condition Turkish access to advanced weapons on measurable conduct; expose foreign-funded influence networks; and deny Iran any sanctions relief without abandoning the regional genocidal behavior.

Tehran needs survival. Ankara needs succession. Doha and Riyadh want the crown. The State of Israel prevents all four from deciding America’s future before their contest reshapes our republic from within itself.