By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Turkey has tried its best to stay out of the Iran war, studiously maintaining its neutrality. In this effort, it can point to precedent from its own history. Generations of Turkish policymakers cite the high-stakes balancing act Ankara performed during World War II as one of the golden chapters of Turkish diplomacy. At the time, Turkey’s leaders were acutely aware of the young republic’s geopolitical isolation and military vulnerability - and determined not to repeat the error of their Ottoman predecessors, who picked the wrong side in the previous world war, bringing about the collapse of the empire. As war raged at its borders, Turkey negotiated with both the Allies and Germany, and its ultimate achievement was preserving its neutrality despite the pressure of surrounding belligerents.

The war in Iran has required a similar calculation. Unlike in the 1930s and 1940s, Turkey today has sought a larger role on the world stage. The fall of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the hands of Turkish-backed militant groups and other factions in late 2024 seemed to leave Ankara confident that it was becoming a more influential regional power. But Turkey does not yet possess the economic or military muscle to shape events on its own terms. Its relationships with major players in the region are delicate at best; it is still in the early stages of a reset with the United States, and its relations with Israel have soured considerably in recent years. Turkey remains dependent on others to defend its territory, too. Its 2019 purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system, which triggered U.S. sanctions and resulted in Turkey’s exclusion from critical NATO programs, made it harder for Turkey to maintain some of its sophisticated military hardware; it has not activated the S-400 system and lacks the air defense capabilities to shield itself fully from the Iranian ballistic missiles that began entering Turkish airspace in March. NATO interceptors, not Turkish weapons, took down the four Iranian missiles that targeted a NATO radar system and the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, where U.S. forces are stationed.

Nonetheless, Turkey has been keen to stay out of the fray. It hasn’t supported the U.S.-Israeli campaign, as some Gulf Arab states have, and it has not allowed the United States or Israel to use its airspace for strikes against Iran. That is because Turkey has a complicated but stable relationship with Iran that spans centuries. Although Iran is a historic rival, Ankara never wanted this war to start and spent the first months of 2026 helping lead regional efforts to persuade Tehran and the Trump administration to give nuclear talks one more chance. After all, a war across the border in Iran could send refugees flooding into Turkey, disrupt the country’s economy, and roil its domestic politics.

But much to Turkey’s chagrin, the United States and Israel did end up attacking Iran. Ankara is now doing its best to avoid getting sucked into the war’s vortex. But its posture of neutrality is unlikely to insulate Turkey from the unfavorable outcomes of the war. The conflict threatens Ankara in several ways: it could upset the uneasy balance in its relationship with Tehran, disrupt the Kurdish peace process underway at home, and leave Israel, Turkey’s top strategic rival, more dominant in the region than before. Ankara cannot control the course of the war, but merely avoiding conflict is no longer its best means of advancing its interests in a volatile neighborhood. It need not enter the war, but it should move proactively in several areas to ensure that it emerges from the current maelstrom not just unscathed but also in a stronger position.

Protesting the arrest of Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu in Istanbul, September 2025

 

Historic Frenemies

Turkey has long chosen to manage frictions with an assertive Iran rather than confront its neighbor. The relationship between the two countries is one of neither friendship nor outright enmity, but a kind of competitive coexistence. This dynamic predated the founding of the modern republics. For centuries, the Ottoman and Safavid empires - the former the historic seat of Sunni imperial power, the latter the preeminent Shiite polity - competed for regional influence. After more than a century of on-and-off warfare, they established a modus vivendi through the 1639 Qasr-e Shirin agreement, delineating a frontier along the Zagros Mountains and codifying an understanding that still shapes Iranian-Turkish relations: no direct war and no interference in each other’s internal affairs.

Today, Turkey and Iran mistrust each other deeply and have backed opposing camps in wars and political disputes in Iraq, Syria, and the South Caucasus. Yet unlike some of the United States’ Gulf partners, Turkey does not want to see a resounding Iranian defeat. Although it has long been concerned about Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and certainly does not want Iran to become stronger, Turkey also fears an Iran that splinters or falls into disorder. A shattered Iran could send refugees into Turkey, fuel calls for separatism among Kurdish groups across the region, and generally make Turkey’s eastern neighborhood far more combustible. That chaos is more dangerous in Ankara’s eyes than the survival of an antagonistic Iranian regime.

Turkey has thus been wary of supporting the war or getting involved in recent upheavals in Iran. When street protests shook Iran in January, Turkish leaders pointedly withheld criticism of the regime’s crackdown and did not publicly support the aspirations of the demonstrators. Once the war began at the end of February, Turkish officials urged the United States to find an off-ramp before the Iranian state imploded.

At this stage, Turkey is likely glad that its worst fear - state collapse in Iran - has not materialized. It will not be lamenting the battering of Iran’s nuclear program, missile capabilities, and proxy network under sustained U.S.-Israeli bombardment. But Ankara still has great reason for concern: the surviving regime of the Islamic Republic has hardened and moved further into the grip of the Revolutionary Guards, with even less room for clerical pragmatism and political flexibility than before.

What it would prefer at this stage is a stable but constrained Iran boxed in by a durable agreement of the sort Turkey has long favored - an arrangement closer in spirit and substance to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal than to U.S. President Donald Trump’s improvisational and inconsistent diplomacy - with verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program and regional reach. Such an outcome would better serve Turkey’s own priorities: preventing renewed war, limiting Iranian influence in the Caucasus, and opening more space for trade through the South Caucasus and into Central Asia. Any gradual easing of sanctions on Tehran would also position Turkey as a leading trading partner for Iran and as the region’s economic powerhouse.

Below the historical Istanbul

 

The Kurdish Front

The war in Iran has also underscored the fragility of Ankara’s peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group that fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. That process, which received a boost in 2025 after the imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan called for a cease-fire, would result in the eventual dissolution of the PKK. But it is hardly a sure thing, with Ankara slow-walking necessary legal reforms and the region in the grip of turbulence. All sides remain at the negotiating table to prevent renewed open-ended conflict between the PKK and the Turkish state. For Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, calm on the Kurdish front is also a political necessity: he has reached his constitutional term limit and needs the support of the pro-Kurdish party in parliament if he is to change the law to allow him to run again in Turkey’s next elections.

War on Turkey’s eastern border, however, could torpedo the entire endeavor. Ankara was alarmed when, soon after the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes, Trump briefly floated the idea of using Iranian Kurdish forces to help ignite an uprising inside Iran. Turkey saw that as a possible step toward Kurdish self-rule and a move that could drag U.S.-Turkish relations back to the period of bitter contention, roughly a decade ago, when Washington armed Syrian Kurdish forces linked to the PKK and dispatched U.S. troops to fight alongside them against the Islamic State in Syria. Behind closed doors, Turkish officials worried that any outside attempt to arm Iranian Kurds, including those with ties to the PKK, would make the entire movement less willing to lay down arms and strike a grand bargain with Turkey. A new U.S.-Kurdish alliance would encourage Kurds throughout the region to dream of independence, derailing the fragile peace track with the PKK and complicating the tricky process of integrating the Syrian Kurds into the new Syrian regime. In a nightmare scenario, it could lead to a U.S.-backed PKK statelet on Turkey’s border.

For the time being, those fears have abated. Trump backed away from the idea of opening a Kurdish front inside Iran. A senior Turkish official told me that “the Kurds have made a strategic choice” not to enter the war. A PKK affiliate in Iran that also happened to be the strongest Kurdish faction inside the country opted not to take up arms or accept U.S. and Israeli backing. Yet the episode still revealed Turkey’s vulnerability: forces beyond Ankara’s control can quickly reopen the Kurdish question. The only reliable hedge against that risk is a durable settlement with the PKK.

A poster of Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, Istanbul, March 2026

 

Imbalance of Power

Ankara is also worried about Israel’s expanding regional role and influence in Washington. Turkey and Israel were close partners in the 1990s and early 2000s, when they shared intelligence and conducted joint military exercises, and when Turkey bought Israeli arms to upgrade its military. Now, they clash openly and increasingly see each other as threats. The war in Gaza, which Turkey opposed volubly, produced an undeniable rupture and led to the suspension of trade ties. But Turkey grew especially uneasy as Israel made repeated shows of force in Lebanon and in Syria after the fall of the Assad regime, establishing itself as a dominant military power in the region.

From Ankara’s perspective, Israel’s war against Iran is not an isolated military campaign but part of a broader effort to reshape the region by force. Many commentators and politicians in Turkey now see that strategy, at least in part, as an effort to encircle and contain Turkey. Israel has struck air bases in Syria that Turkey was considering for use. It has deepened defense cooperation with Greece and Cyprus in ways explicitly meant to challenge Turkey. Israeli commentators have also increasingly cast Turkey as a long-term threat, irking Turkish observers. Turkish officials fear that if the war ends with Israel stronger and emboldened and Iran badly weakened, Turkey could find itself encircled, with less room to shape the new order in Syria; less leverage in the eastern Mediterranean, where competition for hydrocarbons is heating up; and fewer ways to reboot relations with Washington.

All of this has left Erdogan in a difficult position. Ankara does not want Iran to dominate the region, but neither does it want a postwar order defined by Israeli preeminence and American unpredictability. Staying out of the war buys Turkey some time to use diplomacy to try to persuade Washington to commit to a negotiated settlement that would constrain Iran’s nuclear and missile programs without collapsing the Iranian state. Ankara is also trying to persuade the United States that Israel’s more assertive regional agenda in Syria and Lebanon is potentially inimical to U.S. interests and risks dragging the United States into longer-term conflicts. Turkey has backed the Pakistani mediation of negotiations between Iran and the United States.

Turkey and Israel have now established a communications channel in Syria, brokered by the United States, to reduce the risk of accidental clashes as both sides expand their military footprints there. But those talks are explicitly technical and don’t mark a step toward normalization. Under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Erdogan, such a reset is highly unlikely, especially in an election year in Israel. Even if the Iran war subsides, the Israeli-Turkish rivalry will not. A longer-term strategic hostility will persist.

In the past, the Turkish state has been redefined by major wars among great powers and their regional clients. World War I destroyed the Ottoman Empire, stripped it of much of its Middle Eastern territory, and gave birth to the modern Turkish Republic. Turkish neutrality in World War II helped sustain an authoritarian government at home, but the war ultimately hitched Turkey to the victorious West, setting it on the path to membership in NATO and the transatlantic community. The latest war might prove similarly consequential: it could produce a regional order in which Turkey is either more secure or more exposed than before.

In this light, standing still could lead to disaster: to navigate the current period of turbulen#ce, Ankara can’t just rely on tactical hedging. It may not be able to control regional turmoil, but it can minimize the risks to itself. First, it will need to advance the peace process with the Kurds, negotiations that have ramifications for conflict zones in Turkey as well as in Iraq and Syria. Settling the Kurdish issue will mean that no external conflict can reopen Turkey’s most dangerous internal fault line. Turkey’s parliament could begin by passing a long-debated law that would allow PKK members to lay down arms and return to Turkey. Ankara could widen the space for Kurds by allowing Ocalan to enter Turkish political life as a legitimate actor, devolving power and certain responsibilities to Kurdish municipalities, and releasing political prisoners. All of this would signal that the peace process will continue regardless of what happens in the region.

Turkey must also work to bring stability to places where it holds sway and perform diplomatic outreach where it can. It should do everything possible to help the governments of Iraq and Syria weather the current storms. In Syria, that means supporting the effort to reintegrate the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces into the new state, helping Damascus in postwar governance, and keeping open the communications channel with Israel so that Syria does not become the site of direct clashes between Turkish and Israeli forces. In Iraq, it means deepening security coordination with Baghdad against the Islamic State (or ISIS), competing with Iran for political influence in the country, and protecting the trade, energy, and transit routes that connect Turkey to the Gulf. A more stable Iraq and Syria would calm Turkey’s borderlands and strengthen Ankara’s hand in whatever postwar regional order emerges. Eventually, Ankara will need to open a dialogue with Israel to discuss regional security and negotiate the future of Syria.

Opening the border with Armenia can strengthen the so-called Middle Corridor through the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Such a move would reduce Ankara’s dependence on more volatile southern trade routes at a time of acute energy and shipping disruption in the region. Creating stability on its immediate borders can help make Turkey an important commercial hub and give it a greater stake in a postwar order defined by trade and connections, not permanent crisis.

Resolving Turkey’s remaining disputes with the United States would, in theory, also help by easing sanctions and reopening access to defense cooperation. The core disputes are well known: U.S. sanctions over Turkey’s S-400 purchase from Russia, particularly Turkey’s exclusion from the NATO F-35 fighter program, and the growing Turkish hostility toward Israel, a key U.S. ally. But given Trump’s penchant for making grand promises and then neglecting the sustained, painstaking work required to see them through, a full normalization with the United States may not be in the cards for the time being. The more prudent course would be for Turkey to lean more on NATO and Europe while bolstering its own air and missile defenses. In the long run, Turkey has no other option but to become self-reliant in defense industrial policy.

In short, Turkey needs a coherent strategy that will enable it to preserve domestic stability with the Kurds, secure its borders, and emerge as a hub for regional connectivity in energy and trade. This means maneuvering through the ups and downs of war and great-power rivalry - but not settling for better relations with Washington alone. Declaring neutrality in a conflict may seem the right decision for a country in Turkey’s position. But if Turkey is to emerge from a period of regional turmoil more secure rather than more vulnerable, it cannot remain entirely on the sidelines.

 

 

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