The United States, Turkey, and Israel have seen threats to their interests in Syria, Iraq, and Azerbaijan emerging from the Iranian footprint in those areas. Most Arab states that remain antagonistic are being so because they are aligned with Iran and not because they are Arab. In fact, today, Israel collaborates openly or tacitly with the Sunni Arab world in a joint effort to contain Iran. Over the past two decades, Israel’s prime threat has pivoted from the Arab world to Iran and its proxies. Iran’s direct and indirect lines of operation threaten to undermine the United States’ regional partners. Iran represents a threat to US interests in the Gulf, to the flow of oil, and to US freedom of access. A nuclear Iran would threaten the United States, Israel, and Turkey, although in varying degrees of severity. Turkish-Israeli relations rebounded as the two countries’ intelligence communities collaborated in thwarting an Iranian attempt to attack Israeli nationals on Turkish soil.Īll three actors are, or at least should be, concerned about the challenges posed by Iran. Following earlier tensions, Turkey has recently made significant rapprochement attempts vis-à-vis the United States, Israel, and other regional actors such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Indeed, Turkey supplied killer unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to Ukraine, while simultaneously helping Russia mitigate the impact of sanctions. Its multifaceted relations with Russia, which saw direct or indirect kinetic conflicts in Syria, Libya, and the Caucasus, are a showcase for this skill. Turkey seems to have mastered the art of the “frenemy”-collaborating with actors with whom it also competes or even militarily clashes. Perhaps a pragmatic definition would be the protection of its territorial integrity, mainly from the threat of Kurdish separatism, while attempting to increase its regional and even global strategic footprint-at tolerable cost and risk.
They have ranged from far-reaching neo-Ottomanism, Blue Homeland ambition, and expeditionary interventions in such places as Libya to a “Zero Problems” policy and an attempt to maintain a Western orientation through NATO membership and, possibly, integration with the European Union as well. Turkey’s regional objectives under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also defy simple characterization. While Israel has transactional relationships with its regional partners, it cannot contend for regional hegemony in a theater where such contentions are influenced significantly by ethnic or religious dynamics. Israeli regional objectives are not well articulated, but focus on preserving the status quo while attempting to prevent the emergence of severe military threats (from the development of an Iranian nuclear bomb to the positioning of Iranian high-impact weapons in Lebanon and Syria). Israel and Turkey’s interests are partially aligned with those of the United States, and they are not in a zero-sum game with one another. US priorities are the uninterrupted supply of energy and goods from and through the region, the prevention of local problems from turning into global ones, and the stability and capabilities of its partners in the region. US objectives in the Middle East begin with preventing global and regional powers from threatening freedom of navigation through the region’s waterways. It may be that different partnerships and different rationales could be useful for each challenge. These challenges are intertwined, as Iranian strategy is, or at least was, based on distracting its adversaries away from Iran to secondary theaters where it commands soft power and handles proxies, and then pinning them down and attritting them in those secondary theaters (Israel in Lebanon and the United States in Iraq, to name but two obvious examples). And third, as a political competitor for regional hegemony. Second, as a conventional and proxy-based military threat across the Middle East, as demonstrated from attacks on cargo vessels in the Strait of Hormuz to drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities to attacks on US troops in the Middle East to its attempted deployment of weapons in Syria to its sub-state armed organizations in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. First, in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. It should be noted that Iran represents several distinct challenges. Is a US-Israeli-Turkish partnership to contain Iran feasible?
At least from some perspectives, Israel and Turkey share such interests. Understandably, the United States is searching for partners with whom it can share the burden of defending common interests in the Middle East Iran’s containment included. In recent years, the United States has shifted priorities away from the Middle East, first with a pivot to China and then to Russia and Ukraine.
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