Turkey’s Rise and the Collapse of U.S. Middle East Strategy. [1]
professor Mearsheimer.
For decades, Washington believed it could shape the Middle East according to its own image, install allies, deter adversaries, and preserve a fragile order through force and diplomacy. But history has a way of humbling hubris. Today, that carefully constructed order is unraveling. And standing at the center of this transformation is Turkey. A state once treated as a loyal NATO outpost, now emerging as a self- assured regional power with ambitions far beyond the alliance's script. Ankara no longer takes orders. It writes them. From Syria to the Caucasus, from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, Turkish influence is expanding where American power is receding. This is not a story of betrayal. It is the logic of shifting power, the essence of Real Politic. What we are witnessing is the collapse of US strategy in a region it once dominated and the ascent of a state that has learned how to exploit the cracks in the American led order.
Let us examine how and why this tectonic shift is unfolding for much of the 20th century. Turkey lived in the shadow of its own imperial memory. The Ottoman Empire had once been the pivot of Eurasian power, commanding roots between Europe, Asia, and the Arab world. Its fall after the First World War was not only the collapse of a dynasty, it was the strategic diminishment of a civilization. The new Turkish Republic born from the wreckage turned inward. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's revolution sought to modernize and westernize to build a secular nation state in place of a fallen empire. For decades, Ankara accepted a subordinate role in the western order, joining NATO, hosting US bases and serving as a frontline bull work against Soviet expansion. Washington saw Turkey as a convenient buffer, not as a peer. That assumption worked as long as Turkey remained weak, isolated, and dependent. It no longer is. The end of the cold war fundamentally altered the strategic map.
As American unipolarity deepened in the 1990’s, Turkey’s geopolitical importance was acknowledged but rarely respected. Washington expected loyalty without reciprocity. The 2003 Iraq invasion became the first major rupture when the Turkish Parliament refused to allow US troops to invade Iraq from its territory. It was more than a policy disagreement. It was an assertion of sovereignty. Ankara was signaling that it would no longer act as an instrument of American strategy. The Iraq war destabilized Turkey’s borders, empowered Kurdish nationalism, and undermined regional stability.
For Turkish policymakers, this was proof that US actions could directly endanger their national security. That realization marked the beginning of Turkey’s strategic awakening. By the 2010’s, under Recep Tayyip Erdogan's leadership, Turkey began to re-imagine itself not as a junior NATO member, but as a central power in its own right. The Arab Spring accelerated this transformation. While Washington vacillated between cautious support and strategic confusion, Ankara acted decisively. It sought to shape events in Syria, Libya, and Egypt according to its own interests, often at odds with the United States. In Syria, American support for Kurdish militias enraged Ankara, convincing Turkish leaders that Washington was willing to sacrifice Turkish security for short-term tactical gains. The result was a deep erosion of trust and the beginning of an independent Turkish foreign policy that no longer assumed alignment with the United States as its default condition.
At the same time, Turkey leveraged its geography with remarkable precision. It sits astride critical energy corridors, maritime choke points, and cultural intersections. Erdogan's government exploited these advantages to carve out influence in multiple theaters simultaneously. In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkish naval assertiveness challenged Greek and Cypriot claims backed by the European Union. In the South Caucasus Turkish support for Azerbaijan in the 2020 to Nagorno Karabagh war demonstrated how quickly Ankara could project power beyond its borders. In North Africa, Turkish drones and advisors helped turn the tide of war in Libya. Each of these interventions was a signal, Turkey was reclaiming agency in a region long dominated by others.
Economically, Ankara sought strategic autonomy. It diversified defense production, reducing dependence on US and European suppliers. The Bayraktar drones developed domestically became a symbol of this independence, deployed effectively from Ukraine to Ethiopia, altering battlefields and redefining Turkey’s image as a producer of technology rather than a consumer of Western hardware. This defense revolution is not just a matter of pride. It reflects a calculated recognition that in an age of great power rivalry, reliance on foreign weapons means subordination.
Turkey’s pivot toward self-sufficiency is therefore an extension of realist logic, not nationalist sentiment alone. The West's repeated misreading of Turkey's ambitions compounded the estrangement. Washington treated Turkish assertiveness as a temporary deviation, assuming Ankara would eventually fall back in line. That was a fundamental analytical mistake. Turkey’s trajectory reflects structural forces, demographics, geography, and historical identity that cannot be reversed by diplomatic persuasion or economic pressure.
The 2016 coup attempt and Ankara's perception that Western capitals were slow to condemn it hardened Turkish suspicion. In its aftermath, Turkey purged pro-western officers from its military, consolidated power under a presidential system, and deepened ties with Russia through the S400 missile deal. From a realist perspective, this was a rational move. Ankara was balancing against a superpower it no longer trusted.
The Turkish - Russian relationship illustrates how fluid alliances become in a multipolar world. Despite centuries of rivalry and conflicting interests in Syria, the Black Sea and the Caucasus, Ankara and Moscow have managed to maintain a transactional partnership based on mutual need. Russia provides energy and leverage against the West. Turkey offers access, mediation, and unpredictability. Their cooperation is not built on trust but on strategic calculation.
In a sense, Turkey has mastered the art of playing both sides, engaging NATO when useful, defying it when necessary. This is the behavior of a state that understands its position in the emerging balance of power and refuses to be confined by old hierarchies. Domestically, Erdogan's appeal to Ottoman nostalgia is not mere political theater. It serves a deeper strategic purpose to redefine Turkish identity in a post-western world by reviving the language of empire, of guardianship over Muslim lands, of leadership within the Islamic world. Ankara is constructing a narrative that justifies its geopolitical ambitions. This ideological project aligns with tangible power politics. Turkey now deploys military bases from Qatar to Somalia, sends drones to Central Asia, and engages diplomatically in Africa and Latin America. This is soft power backed by hard capability, not idealism. It is a deliberate expansion of influence consistent with the state seeking to translate regional dominance into global relevance.
The consequence is a reconfiguration of regional alignments. States once dependent on Washington are hedging their bets, recognizing that American power no longer guarantees stability. The Gulf monarchies are talking to Tehran. Egypt coordinates with Moscow and Israel quietly manages its differences with Ankara. In each of these shifts, Turkey's assertiveness is a factor. The Middle East is no longer a US- centric system. It is a contested multi-polar arena where Turkey operates as one of several autonomous poles. For the United States, this represents a profound strategic failure. Decades of investment in shaping regional order have produced a landscape where even its allies no longer defer to its leadership.
Yet Turkey’s rise is not without risk. Its economy remains vulnerable to inflation, debt, and energy dependency. Its military engagements stretch its resources thin, and its assertive diplomacy generates as many enemies as admirers. But from a realist standpoint, these are the inevitable costs of ambition. What matters is that Ankara now acts on its own strategic logic, not Washington's. It calibrates its choices based on interest, not ideology. Whether negotiating with Moscow, striking deals with Beijing, or mediating in Ukraine, Turkey behaves like a power aware of its leverage.
The deeper question, however, is how far this trajectory can go before it collides with the limits of geography and economics or triggers a counterbalancing response from other great powers. As the United States retreats from the region and focuses on China, Turkey finds a vacuum it is eager to fill. But vacuums invite competition. Russia, Iran, and even India will contest this space in different ways. The Middle East fragmentation creates opportunity, but also volatility. Ankara's challenge will be to sustain expansion without overextension, to consolidate influence without provoking a coalition against it. What makes this moment historically significant is that Turkey’s reemergence is not a return to empire, but an adaptation to the logic of the new world order. It embodies the shift from US dominated unipolarity to regional multipolarity.
The rules are no longer written in Washington. They are negotiated among capitals that once merely complied. In this sense, Turkey’s ascent is both a symptom and a driver of the collapse of America's Middle East strategy. It proves that when a hegemon misreads the balance of power, others will inevitably step into the breach and reshape the order according to their own interests.
The wreckage of empire, it seems, can also be the foundation of new power, the collapse of us. Strategy in the Middle East is not the product of a single decision or administration. It is the inevitable result of decades of overreach, arrogance, and strategic myopia. Washington believed it could impose liberal order on a region defined by ancient rivalries, religious divides, and unrelenting geopolitics. It imagined that democracy could be engineered through intervention, that markets could substitute for security, and that American power was immune to decline.
That illusion sustained US policy for 30 years after the Cold War. Today, it lies in ruins. From Baghdad to Kabul, from Tripoli to Damascus, the evidence is overwhelming. The United States has exhausted its capacity to shape outcomes in a region that has learned how to resist its influence. The roots of this unraveling trace back to the moment of unipolar triumph in 1991. With the Soviet Union gone, Washington assumed that its dominance was permanent and that the balance of power logic no longer applied.
The Gulf War seemed to confirm American omnipotence, yet victory bred complacency. The United States mistook tactical success for strategic mastery. It failed to recognize that the very act of projecting overwhelming force into the Middle East would awaken deep resentment and resistance, the dual containment of Iran and Iraq during the 1990s trapped Washington in an unsustainable posture, policing two adversaries while alienating every partner. Instead of producing stability, it guaranteed endless entanglement. The September 11th attacks pushed this overextension into catastrophe. The invasion of Afghanistan might have been defensible as a punitive action, but the subsequent decision to transform the Middle East through regime change was pure hubris.
The Iraq War of 2003 marked the decisive break between US ambition and geopolitical reality. Washington toppled Saddam Hussein without a coherent plan for what would follow, assuming democracy would naturally take root in a society fractured by sectarianism and decades of dictatorship. The result was strategic disaster. Iran gained unprecedented influence in Iraq. The Sunni - Shia divide exploded across the
Region, and US Credibility collapsed. For Ankara, Tehran, and Moscow this was the moment when the limits of American power became visible.
The consequences rippled outward by destroying Iraq as a balancing power. The United States inadvertently cleared the path for Iran's regional ascendancy. From Lebanon to Yemen, Tehran expanded its network of influence through militias and proxies, exploiting the vacuum left by US failures. Washington's response oscillated between half-hearted containment and reckless escalation. It armed the Saudis to the teeth, backed disastrous interventions in Yemen and continued to sanction Iran without a clear endgame. This erratic behavior alienated allies and emboldened rivals.
For many in the region, the United States no longer looked like a rational hegemon, but a blundering empire incapable of understanding its own limits. Turkey’s defiance during this period was emblematic of a broader regional shift. When Ankara refused to support the Iraq invasion, Washington dismissed it as an anomaly. Yet, it was the first clear sign that even core allies were beginning to calculate their interests independently. The failure to grasp this change was a fundamental analytical mistake rooted in liberal idealism, the belief that alliances rest on shared values rather than strategic necessity. In reality, alliances endure only when they serve mutual interests. Once US policy ceased to provide security and began to produce instability, the logic of alignment collapsed.
The 2011 Arab Spring accelerated Washington's unraveling. What began as a wave of popular revolts quickly became a regional conflagration. The Obama administration's inconsistent responses supporting regime change in Libya, hesitating in Syria, tolerating counterrevolution in Egypt revealed a government without strategic coherence. In Libya, the overthrow of Gaddafi led to state collapse, jihadist resurgence, and a refugee crisis that destabilized Europe. In Syria, the US demand that Bashar al-Assad must go turned into an empty slogan as Russia intervened decisively and Washington's proxies faltered. The war empowered Iran, invited Turkish intervention and drew in every major power except the United States, which found itself sidelined in a conflict it helped ignite.
Each misstep eroded credibility. Allies no longer trusted US commitments. Adversaries no longer feared US threats. When Obama declared a red line on chemical weapons in Syria and then refused to enforce it, the entire region absorbed the message: American deterrence was hollow. That moment symbolized a broader truth. The United States had lost the political will to sustain hegemony in a region that no longer obeyed its rules.
By the time Russia entered the Syrian war in 2015, the strategic balance had irreversibly shifted. Moscow demonstrated that limited focused force could achieve what two decades of US intervention could not. Durable influence at manageable cost. Meanwhile, Washington's obsession with Iran became a strategic trap. The nuclear deal of 2015 briefly promised a diplomatic reset, but its abrogation under the Trump administration restored confrontation without purpose. Sanctions hurt Iran's economy but failed to curtail its regional reach. Tehran adapted deepened ties with China and Russia and became even more entrenched across the Levant.
The United States found itself stuck in a cycle of coercion that produced neither deterrence nor stability. Worse, this fixation on Iran blinded policymakers to the emergence of new power centers. Most notably, Turkey’s assertive rise and the gradual realignment of Gulf states toward multipolar diplomacy. The American reliance on military instruments further compounded the decline, decades of intervention left behind shattered societies, discredited elites, and a generation that associates US presence with chaos rather than order.
Iraq's parliament demanded US withdrawal. Afghanistan's government collapsed into the arms of the Taliban and Libya remains a fractured wasteland. Trillions of dollars were spent not to build influence, but to erode it. Each operation created more instability, more anti-American sentiment, and more space for regional powers to maneuver. From a realist standpoint, this is the classic pattern of imperial overreach. Where the pursuit of dominance produces its own undoing.
Domestically, the political cost of these failures has been immense. War fatigue, economic strain, and public disillusionment have narrowed the space for sustained engagement abroad. The American public no longer supports large scale deployments in distant lands. The Pentagon understands this, as does the foreign policy establishment. But bureaucratic inertia and ideological blindness prevent a coherent retrenchment. The rhetoric of leadership persists, but the material basis for it has eroded. The United States is trying to act as a global hegemon with the mindset of the 1990s, but the resources and legitimacy of a declining power.
The vacuum left by American retreat is being filled not by a single successor, but by multiple actors pursuing overlapping ambitions. Russia reasserts itself militarily, China invests economically, Iran entrenches ideologically, and Turkey maneuvers pragmatically. The Middle East, once the centerpiece of US strategy, has become an arena of competing mid-level powers, operating without fear of American retribution. Even Washington's closest allies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel are diversifying their partnerships, engaging with Moscow, and Beijing, and hedging against American unpredictability.
The Abraham Accords, initially celebrated as a diplomatic triumph, have failed to conceal the reality that the region is drifting beyond US control. The structural problem is clear. Washington built its Middle East policy on the assumption of unipolar stability. It believed it could dictate terms indefinitely, because no peer competitor would challenge it. That world no longer exists. The return of great power, competition coupled with regional realignments has exposed the fragility of American influence. Efforts to pivot to Asia, while strategically sensible, only accelerate the perception of withdrawal. The more the United States declares its focus on China, the more Middle Eastern actors conclude that Washington no longer has the will or the attention span to shape their destiny.
The irony is that the United States still possesses overwhelming power by any absolute measure. Its economy, military reach, and technological base remain formidable. What it lacks is strategic discipline. Instead of aligning means with ends, it continues to chase illusions of global leadership, without understanding that power projection without legitimacy leads to resistance, not order. The realist insight that all states pursue their own interests is something Washington preached during the Cold War, but forgot during its moment of unipolar arrogance.
The Middle East is now teaching it that lesson again at great cost. As the balance of power shifts, the United States faces a dilemma to accept a reduced role and adapt to multipolar realities or to cling to the fading illusion of hegemony and risk further decline. The first path demands humility and restraint, qualities rare in empires accustomed to dominance. The second path ensures continued erosion of influence through overextension and miscalculation.
In either case, the strategic landscape has changed irreversibly. The Middle East that once served as the proving ground of American primacy has become the stage on which its decline is most visible. The rise of Turkey, the resilience of Iran and the reassertion of Russia are not isolated phenomena. They are the cumulative price of decades of overreach of a superpower that mistook its momentary supremacy for permanent control, of a strategy that failed to recognize that even hegemons must one day reckon with the limits of their power and the consequences of their choices. History does not forgive great powers that mistake dominance for permanence. The United States believed it could engineer order in the Middle East through force and ideology. Instead, it dismantled the very balance that sustained its influence
Turkey’s rise is not an anomaly. It is the logical outcome of American overreach and strategic neglect. As Washington retreats and Ankara advances, the region adjusts to new realities forged not by ideals, but by power. Policymakers must understand that every withdrawal creates a vacuum and every vacuum invites a new contender. The Middle East is no longer America's chessboard. It is a contest among actors who no longer fear the hand that once moved the pieces. The consequences of this transition are already unfolding, and they cannot be reversed. Power once lost through arrogance and miscalculation does not return. It is claimed by those prepared to wield it.
[1] Prof. John Mearsheimer. Turkey’s Rise and the Collapse of U.S. Middle East Strategy
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