Victory without a single shot fired Asia Times on Türkiye’s rising power amid regional war

The Asia Times published an article by journalist Leon Hadar on Türkiye’s strengthening position in the Middle East. Caliber.Az presents the most significant excerpts from the piece.

Editor's note: Leon Hadar is a journalist and political scientist who has taught international relations, Middle Eastern politics and communications at American University and the University of Maryland in College Park. He has also served as Director of International Studies at Mount Vernon College in Washington.

"When US and Israeli aircraft struck Iran on February 28, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and decapitating much of the senior Iranian leadership, Türkiye’s reaction was striking for what it withheld.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described the US-Israeli attacks on Iran as a blatant violation of international law, closed Turkish airspace to US forces and personally conveyed his condolences following the assassination of Khamenei.

At the same time, Ankara took care to distance itself from Tehran, openly criticising Iran’s retaliatory strikes on Gulf states and blaming Iranian intransigence for the collapse of pre-war negotiations. The message was deliberate, and it has aged well: Türkiye was against the war and was no one’s ally in it.

That posture, what Turkish officials privately describe as “active neutrality”, is now paying compounding strategic dividends. Two months in, with a Pakistani-mediated ceasefire fragile but holding since early April, the most consequential second-order effect of the war may be the elevation of Türkiye to a regional position.

Begin with the most visible gain: diplomatic centrality. The quartet of Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan that convened in Islamabad on March 29 to coordinate de-escalation is, in substance, a Turkish-driven format.

Reuters reported on March 25 that Ankara had been a go-between for messages between Iran and the US, probing US positions while warning Tehran against widening the war. Ursula von der Leyen publicly endorsed Türkiye’s mediation efforts on March 1, and the personal rapport between Erdoğan and Donald Trump, whatever its limits, has lent the role a credibility that Doha or Muscat alone cannot match.

Mediation matters not because Ankara expects to broker a comprehensive settlement (it does not) but because the role itself confers what diplomats call right of access: a permanent seat in the conversations that will shape whatever post-war regional order emerges.

A vacuum at Iran’s expense

The deeper structural shift is geographic. For four decades, Iran functioned as the institutional anchor of a “resistance” axis running through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Gulf. Israel’s gradual dismantling of that network from 2023 onward, capped now by the joint US-Israeli decapitation strikes, has eviscerated it.

Combined with Russia’s weakened position after years of attrition in Ukraine and Iran’s degradation, the Russia-Türkiye-Iran triangle that governed Syrian diplomacy through the Astana process has effectively collapsed, leaving Türkiye as the sole functional broker in that format, a significant elevation of Ankara’s diplomatic weight.

The consequences are already visible on the ground. In Syria, Turkish-aligned actors sit at the centre of the post-war settlement, and Ankara’s quiet deconfliction channel with Israel is now the principal mechanism preventing direct collisions.

In Iraq, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has signalled that the “Syrian dossier” will expand to address the Qamishli–Sinjar corridor, where Iran-backed militias have lost the political cover Tehran once provided.

The $17 billion “Development Road” through Iraq, designed to link Europe and Türkiye to the Persian Gulf, is suddenly viable in a way it was not a year ago. So is the Zangezur Corridor through the South Caucasus, which would connect Türkiye to Central Asia while bypassing Iranian territory altogether.

Taken together, these corridors would re-route a meaningful share of East-West trade through Turkish-controlled space. That is not a tactical windfall.

The defense-industrial dividend

The war is also accelerating a transformation in Gulf security thinking that began long before February 28. After watching Iranian missiles strike civilian infrastructure in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, Gulf monarchies are quietly diversifying their security partnerships away from sole reliance on Washington.

Türkiye is the obvious regional alternative. Over the past decade, Türkiye has evolved from a major arms importer into a self-reliant global exporter, with domestic production surpassing 80% by 2026, anchored by platforms such as the Bayraktar TB2 UAVs, the TAI KAAN fifth-generation fighter and an expanding naval fleet under the MILGEM program.

Defence agreements quietly concluded throughout March suggest that Ankara is converting Gulf anxiety into long-term contracts and embedded political relationships. Add to this Türkiye’s role as host of the July NATO summit, and the picture sharpens further.

Erdoğan’s task is to lock in the structural advantages, including defense ties to the Gulf, transit corridors through Iraq and the Caucasus and mediation prerogatives in a leaderless Tehran, before the variables he cannot control reassert themselves.

The country that loudly opposed this war, refused to fight in it and worked to prevent it is the one most clearly emerging from it stronger," Leon Hadar wrote.