Why the Iran War Has Made Turkey's Erdoğan More Influential, Not Less

Turkey's leader was already walking diplomatic tightropes. The Iran war has made him more valuable to every side simultaneously. Here is the strategic logic of Erdoğan's moment.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's relationship with the West has been in various states of managed crisis for most of the past decade. Turkey's purchase of Russian S-400 missiles, its domestic democratic backsliding, its complex relationship with Kurdish groups, its role in Syrian military operations, and its persistent flirtation with Russian diplomatic alignment have all strained its relationship with NATO allies and with the European Union. None of this has changed in the past month.

What has changed is the strategic value of Turkey's particular combination of relationships. Turkey has functioning diplomatic channels to Iran — channels that it maintained through years of sanctions and confrontation while Western governments were freezing their bilateral relationships with Tehran. Turkey has functioning channels to Russia, which remains relevant to any Middle Eastern diplomatic constellation given Russian influence over Syrian airspace, Iranian weapons supply, and Central Asian diplomatic positioning. Turkey has functioning channels to the Gulf states, the Muslim Brotherhood-adjacent movements that influence politics across the Arab world, and Hamas — through Ankara's long-standing hosting of Hamas political leadership.

In a conflict where the parties most directly involved cannot communicate with each other without intermediaries, Turkey's address book is disproportionately valuable. Erdoğan is using this moment to rehabilitate Turkey's relationship with the United States without making any concessions that would cost him domestically, to demonstrate Turkey's indispensability to NATO at a moment when it has been making noises about alternative alignments, and to present himself as the Muslim world's most credible voice in conversations about a conflict that the entire Muslim world is watching with alarm.

European governments that have spent years pushing Turkey toward democratic reform and away from Russian influence are watching this with a mixture of relief — Turkey's engagement is genuinely useful — and concern that Turkey's enhanced leverage will be deployed to resist rather than accelerate the democratic accountability that its EU relationship nominally requires.