Since the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran on 28 February 2026, Türkiye has had to manage a war within its security environment. Ankara’s response has rested on one central reading: the current turmoil was not an inevitable regional eruption, but the product of a U.S.–Israel strategic choice, with Israel widely cast in Turkish official and public discourse as the principal driver of escalation. Yet Türkiye’s room for maneuver has remained constrained due to factors beyond its control: the degree of strategic divergence between Washington and Tel Aviv despite their operational partnership, Iran’s capacity to continue resisting, and the choices of third countries hosting the U.S. bases for absorbing the regional spillover. Even so, Ankara appears broadly satisfied that it has preserved its neutrality, avoided a direct entanglement, and cultivated a narrative of indispensability on the diplomatic front.  

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan condemned the opening strikes as a violation of Iran’s sovereignty and international law and called for an immediate return to diplomacy and a ceasefire. At the same time, Turkish response did not excuse Iranian retaliation when it expanded the war geographically. Erdoğan and senior officials criticized Iranian attacks on Gulf states as strategically misguided because they widened the war rather than containing it. Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan publicly described Iran’s strategy of striking Gulf countries as “incredibly wrong.” Together, these statements show that Ankara has tried to position itself as anti-war, sharply critical of Israel’s role in producing the crisis, and at the same time opposed to Iranian retaliatory methods that exacerbate regional tensions.  

This framing was sharpened further by intelligence chief İbrahim Kalın, who warned that the conflict risked producing a long “brotherly war” among Turks, Kurds, Arabs, and Persians. This captures a distinctly Turkish concern: the greater danger lies not only in missile exchanges or infrastructure damage, but also in the fragmentation of societies and political orders across the region. It also helps explain why Ankara has taken visible pride in resisting pressure to enter the war, keeping dialogue with Iran open, and pursuing active diplomacy across Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi, Ankara, Muscat, Cairo, and Islamabad. Together, these steps reinforce Ankara’s preferred self-image: active neutrality designed to preserve relevance. 

The war nonetheless reached Türkiye within days. Missile interceptions on 4, 9, 13, and 30 March made Türkiye the first NATO member physically affected by Iranian spillover. NATO confirmed that missiles targeting or entering Turkish airspace were intercepted, and raised its defensive posture after the March attacks, and publicly reaffirmed its readiness to defend Türkiye. This mattered because it left Türkiye simultaneously under allied protection and under pressure to preserve diplomatic space with Iran and the wider region. 

Policy Relevance 

Türkiye matters in this war not simply because it is exposed to it, but because it sits at the intersection of four policy arenas that will shape the conflict’s next phase: alliance management, crisis diplomacy, regional spillover, and economic resilience. The central question is how Ankara is managing the tension between its NATO commitments and its regional positioning as the war reshapes the Middle East security order, and what this means in practice for its relations with Iran, Israel, the United States, and the Alliance. Each direction carries costs. Moving too close to NATO’s security posture risks deeper friction with Iran and further narrows Ankara’s regional diplomatic space. Keeping too much distance from the U.S. and NATO preferences, however, could raise doubts about Türkiye’s reliability within the Alliance at a moment of heightened instability. A harder line against Israel may strengthen Ankara’s regional and domestic political positioning, but it can also complicate its ties with Washington and reduce space for de-escalatory engagement. 

Ankara’s immediate objective is not expansion through chaos, but avoidance of strategic marginalization in a regional order being increasingly reshaped through force. What is at stake, therefore, is Ankara’s room for maneuver in a deteriorating regional environment marked by major-power unpredictability, weakening institutional authority, and the growing importance of ad hoc alignments. 

This positioning matters not only descriptively, but also because it translates directly into four policy arenas that will shape Türkiye’s choices in the next phase of the conflict. 

First, as a southern-flank ally, Türkiye is a test case for how far NATO can reinforce defense without sliding into political or military entanglement in the war. NATO’s ballistic missile defense system exists to defend allied territory, populations, and Türkiye occupies a central place in this calculus through its location, infrastructure, and radar architecture, including the Kürecik and proximity to Incirlik. Yet this is not NATO’s war in the collective-defense sense. NATO has made it clear that it is not seeking participation in the U.S.–Israeli campaign against Iran. The alliance has remained prudent, strengthening its defensive posture while resisting the conversion of Turkish missile exposure into an alliance-wide war. This prudence reflects a political judgment that NATO should not risk direct overexposure in a conflict shaped as much by Trump’s unpredictability and U.S.–Israeli escalation as by Iranian retaliation. Türkiye has benefited from that prudence: it gets the shield without, so far, being trapped in a NATO–Iran confrontation.  

Second, Türkiye remains central to the diplomatic question of whether regional crisis management can survive even when formal mediation remains weak. It remains one of the few actors that has preserved dialogue with Iran while remaining in active coordination with Washington, the Gulf capitals, and Pakistan.  Ankara has coordinated with Gulf and Pakistani tracks working to contain escalation and preserve channels for de-escalation. Third, Türkiye is relevant to the regional management of spillover, particularly as Gulf states become more constrained by their own exposure. Doha made clear it was supporting Pakistan’s efforts but was not itself directly mediating, since it was focused on defending the country against Iranian attacks. This does not mean the Gulf states have withdrawn from diplomacy, but that their direct exposure limits how centrally they can stand in the mediation architecture. This also helps explain the attention given to the emerging four-country track. Türkiye partially fills that gap: angered by Iranian strikes, but not as strategically disillusioned with Iran as some Gulf capitals have become after years of engagement followed by direct targeting. 

Fourth, the war has tightened the link between external conflict and domestic vulnerability. Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar stated on 25 March that every $1 rise in oil prices adds about $400 million to Türkiye’s energy bill. By late March, war-driven energy prices had already worsened Türkiye’s inflation outlook.Iran supplied around 14% of Türkiye’s gas imports last year, while Azerbaijan and Russia remained larger suppliers, and so Ankara’s exposure is meaningful without being absolute. Even without being a direct party to the Strait of Hormuz confrontation, Türkiye is vulnerable through higher energy costs and broader market volatility. In that sense, the war is not only a security crisis for Türkiye, but also a test of its economic resilience.

These four arenas also come together in Ankara’s support for emerging minilateral diplomacy, which offers a useful window into how Türkiye is trying to preserve room for maneuver under conditions of war, institutional weakness, and uneven regional leadership. 

The minilateral diplomacy involving Türkiye, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt has become more meaningful than it first appeared, especially after the ceasefire and the dense round of diplomacy that followed. With the 14-day U.S.–Iran ceasefire announced on 8 April and subsequent efforts to turn it into a more durable arrangement, the format now looks more consequential: not as a coherent bloc with a shared grand strategy, but as a pragmatic coordination platform to contain escalation and shape the terms of post-crisis stabilization. Pakistan appears to have been the principal operational broker in this process, hosting the Islamabad track, transmitting proposals between Washington and Tehran, and helping move the parties toward a ceasefire framework, while Türkiye positioned itself more as a supportive diplomatic enabler than as the lead mediator. What emerged, then, was less a stable alignment than “a coalition of the constrained”: states bound not by a fully shared strategic vision, but by common exposure to energy and market disruption, regional spillover, and the risk of entrapment in a widening war. In that sense, the format served several purposes at once: buying time, signaling that the war was not politically or economically cost-free for the wider region, and preserving some degree of regional agency at a moment when formal multilateral mechanisms remained weak. The Antalya Diplomacy Forum on 17–19 April gave this diplomacy a wider performance arena as well as a coordinating venue, hosting the third meeting of the foreign ministers of Türkiye, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia under an explicitly “regional ownership” framework focused on producing regional solutions to regional challenges.  

But the political meaning of Antalya lies less in any immediate diplomatic triumph than in its function as a staging ground for post-ceasefire consolidation. The meetings suggested that regional actors are trying to institutionalize consultation after the first ceasefire window, even if the durability of that effort remains uncertain and the real test will be whether this loose format can evolve from crisis management into sustained influence over the next round of negotiations. Even if such efforts stall, they still reveal a broader search for regional agency under institutional erosion. 

Risks, Opportunities, and Trajectories 

The outcome Turkey prefers is neither a stronger Iran nor an imploded one. A stronger Iran preserves rivalry on unfavorable terms in Iraq and Syria; a collapsed Iran raises the danger of refugee flows, border insecurity, militant reactivation, and inter-communal fragmentation. Kalın’s warning about a war among Turks, Kurds, Arabs, and Persians is useful here because it captures a specifically Turkish fear: that the real strategic danger lies less in Iranian state power than in the social and political breakdown that could follow attempts to reengineer Iran violently.  

This is also where the Kurdish issue enters. Türkiye sits at the center of the Kurdish geopolitical space, which intersects with all major theaters affected by the war. Developments in Kurdish-populated areas across Syria, Iraq, and Iran directly shape Türkiye’s domestic security, border management, and regional influence. 

Turkish sources and outside analysts alike have pointed to Ankara’s concern that PJAK (Kurdistan Free Life Party) or adjacent Kurdish armed formations could be drawn into the war, complicating Türkiye’s own peace track and border security. Ankara tried to prevent the conflict from acquiring an easy Kurdish ground dimension, in part by keeping its domestic Kurdish process alive and in part by opposing and preventing (so far) any regional strategy by the United States and Israel that instrumentalizes ethnic and sectarian lines inside Iran. But from Ankara’s perspective, the important point has been deterrence: keeping the war from mutating into a broader Kurdish-ground-force scenario that would reverberate across Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Türkiye simultaneously.  

Relations with Israel create a different constraint. Amid a sharp recent escalation in bilateral rhetoric, Ankara’s political line has hardened further: Turkish officials now explicitly accuse Israel of seeking to designate Turkey as its ‘new enemy’ after Iran, with Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan stating that ‘after Iran, Israel cannot live without an enemy’ and that both the Netanyahu government and parts of the opposition are working to portray Turkey as such. Turkish official discourse continues to cast Israel as the main source of current regional turmoil. No one in Ankara expects Netanyahu-era Israel to be responsive to Turkish pressure alone.  

At the same time, Ankara had previously preserved limited and low-profile technical channels with Israel where risk management required them, though maintaining such channels must have become significantly more difficult under the current conditions. 

Also, the spillover into Syria and Iraq remains central, though in different ways. In Syria, the war can still weaken its fragile government, complicate post-Assad integration, and reopen tensions around Kurdish-administered or contested areas, even if Ankara no longer faces the same proxy threat as in earlier years. In Iraq, the risk lies in the combination of militia attacks, Kurdish-region tensions, corridor politics, and a growing fault line between formal state institutions and semi-autonomous armed actors, especially the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) factions that do not fully follow Baghdad’s central command.  

Public opinion and domestic politics further constrain Ankara’s choices. The war has given Erdoğan a political boost by reinforcing the image of steady leadership under external danger, even as the economy remains fragile. At the same time, that boost comes with a requirement: the government must continue balancing public hostility to Israel, public fear of wider war, economic anxiety, and the opposition’s criticism of security exposure, including unease about visible NATO expansion or new allied military structures on Turkish soil. A March survey by MetroPOLL suggests a strong majority favor neutrality or mediation rather than joining either camp.  

Forecasting 

The most likely near-term outlook remains neither stable de-escalation nor automatic regional war, but prolonged strategic uncertainty. Trump’s own messaging has remained erratic and coercive, threatening broader strikes. Coordination with the Gulf and Pakistani-led diplomacy continues, but without a decisive breakthrough. Military activity, diplomacy, and threats are all unfolding in parallel. That compresses warning time for countries like Türkiye, which must keep air defenses ready, diplomacy moving, and the domestic front calm and intact – all at once.  

If the war escalates further, Türkiye would gain in some respects. It would become more important to NATO, more relevant to Gulf crisis management, and possibly more indispensable as one of the last actors still talking across camps. But the costs would likely outweigh those benefits. Energy cost and overall inflation would worsen, border security pressure would rise, and Kurdish and Iraqi spillover would become harder to manage, while Ankara’s freedom to remain both protected and semi-detached would narrow.  

If the conflict instead moves toward partial de-escalation, Türkiye stands to benefit more sustainably. It would preserve NATO credibility without deeper entanglement, keep its image as a serious regional actor, reduce energy and inflation shocks, and strengthen the claim that it helped keep diplomacy alive when others were either parties to the conflict or too distant from it.  

Ankara has so far done much of what a de-escalatory state can realistically do: refused offensive participation, preserved dialogue with Iran, relied on NATO for defense rather than war-making, coordinated with the Gulf and Pakistani-led tracks, and tried to prevent the war from acquiring an ethnic dimension.  

Ankara is really looking for a survivable regional order in which it emerges more necessary, not more trapped. Whatever the scenario, Türkiye has positioned itself relatively well from its own perspective. It has added a new case to its broader middle-power hedging story: protected by an alliance, critical of the war’s main drivers, still talking to adversaries, and trying to turn exposure into diplomatic value.  

Recommendations 

Türkiye should preserve the strategic discipline that has so far served it reasonably well: separating defense from over-commitment, separating necessary backchannels from public rhetoric, and resisting the idea that the only alternatives are war participation or irrelevance. Türkiye cannot force the belligerents to compromise, but it can still shape the environment around the conflict: helping prevent a total diplomatic collapse, limiting spillover into its own security space, and protecting its room for maneuver in a crisis largely shaped by forces beyond its control. But it also means going beyond crisis management and working to ensure that the post-war Middle East is shaped less by external military imposition than by regional political consensus. Ankara should therefore seek to formalize the emerging mini-lateral track with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt into a more durable regional stabilization format. The purpose would not be to create a rigid bloc, but to establish a credible regional platform for regional ownership at a time when formal multilateral channels remain weak and external actors still default to coercive ordering.  

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum has already provided an initial political stage for this approach, including the third meeting of the foreign ministers of Türkiye, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, explicitly framed around producing regional solutions to regional challenges. Ankara should now seek to institutionalize that momentum through regular consultations, coordinated crisis messaging, and a shared agenda on ceasefire consolidation, maritime security, and regional spillover management. 

A second, more specific priority is to continue translating what Türkiye is already doing on connectivity and energy into a more explicit strategic-resilience doctrine. The Iraq Development Road, the Middle Corridor, energy diversification through Azerbaijan and other suppliers, and even quiet technical engagement on Syria-linked infrastructure should be framed not simply as economic projects, but as safeguards against a more fragmented regional order. The lesson of the past weeks is clear: even when Türkiye is not a direct belligerent, it remains highly vulnerable to conflict through energy prices, shipping routes, and wider market volatility. Ankara should therefore present infrastructure, logistics, and diversification not as secondary economic files, but as core components of national and regional security. If pursued coherently, this would allow Türkiye to convert geography into influence, and resilience into strategic leverage.   

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This Situation Assessment is written by Özge Genç, a visiting fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs. 

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs.