Israel Should Not Treat Turkey as the Next Iran

The search for a new bogeyman in the Middle East began before the old one had even been fully dealt with. With American and Israeli strikes still raining down on Iran’s battered infrastructure, a chorus has risen in Israeli political circles and Washington think tanks: Watch out for Turkey.

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister positioning himself for a comeback, has declared that Ankara is forming an axis “similar to the Iranian one,” and that Israel must act “simultaneously” against threats from both Tehran and Ankara. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, never one to leave a good narrative on the table, announced plans for a new “hexagon” of alliances to counter what he called an “emerging radical Sunni axis.” This alliance conveniently includes Greece and Cyprus, two countries with long-standing grievances against Turkey.

The search for a new bogeyman in the Middle East began before the old one had even been fully dealt with. With American and Israeli strikes still raining down on Iran’s battered infrastructure, a chorus has risen in Israeli political circles and Washington think tanks: Watch out for Turkey.

Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli prime minister positioning himself for a comeback, has declared that Ankara is forming an axis “similar to the Iranian one,” and that Israel must act “simultaneously” against threats from both Tehran and Ankara. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, never one to leave a good narrative on the table, announced plans for a new “hexagon” of alliances to counter what he called an “emerging radical Sunni axis.” This alliance conveniently includes Greece and Cyprus, two countries with long-standing grievances against Turkey.

Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, writing with the measured authority of a soldier-statesman, was more nuanced but still framed Turkey as the power “best positioned” to fill the vacuum Iran leaves behind. “Turkey is no longer a partner on the periphery,” he wrote. “It is positioning itself as a central power.”

He is not wrong about that last part. But being a central power with ambitions is not the same as being an existential threat. Conflating the two is a category error with potentially dangerous consequences.

Let’s start with what Iran actually was, because the comparison only works if we ignore most of what made it uniquely dangerous.

For more than four decades, the Islamic Republic pursued a consistent, ideologically driven strategy of exporting instability—not as a byproduct of its foreign policy, but as the central instrument of it. Iran helped build Hezbollah from scratch into one of the world’s most formidable nonstate military forces. It armed Hamas. It funded Shiite militias across Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. And its Quds Force ran terrorist plots on multiple continents: Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, Khobar Towers in 1996, a foiled plot to kill a Saudi diplomat on American soil in 2011, and more recently, plots against American officials including a sitting president. Underneath all of that sat a nuclear program that was not a bargaining chip but a strategic objective—a slow, patient march toward a weapons capability that would have permanently altered the regional balance of power.

That is what Iran was: an ideologically zealous, theocratically governed state that treated proxy war and nuclear ambition as instruments of national purpose. Turkey is not that. Turkey has never been that.

What Turkey is, is complicated—and that complication is precisely why the “new Iran” label misleads.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a populist with Islamist roots who has steadily hollowed out Turkey’s democratic institutions, arrested his most credible political opponent, and turned anti-Israel rhetoric into a reliable instrument of domestic politics. His government has sheltered Hamas in Istanbul. His military has entrenched itself in northern Syria. His drones have changed warfare across multiple theaters. He is, by any reasonable measure, a genuine headache—for his NATO allies, for his neighbors, and especially for his own citizens.

But as scholar Karabekir Akkoyunlu, author of Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey, has observed, Erdogan is “a lot more pragmatic” and “a lot less ideological” than his Iranian counterparts. The Turkish president condemned the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran as a violation of sovereignty, then in the same breath called Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on Gulf states “unacceptable.” Erdogan met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in February and helped set up talks in Oman between U.S. President Donald Trump’s envoys and the Iranians the same week. He will host the NATO summit in Ankara in July.

As Gonul Tol, a leading expert on Turkish politics, has noted, Erdogan “picks and chooses different ideologies to match [his] political style, which is called populism.” That makes him frustrating and unreliable. It does not make him a theocrat with a civilizational mission.

A Center for Strategic and International Studies brief by Jeffrey Mankoff and Max Bergmann, two thoughtful NATO observers, offers a valuable corrective. They write that Erdogan’s foreign policy is designed to “give Ankara an advantage with countries seeking to remain on the sidelines amid mounting competition among the West, Russia, and China.” This is the behavior of a transactional operator, not a revolutionary ideologue.

Has Turkey been a difficult ally? Yes, and relentlessly so—the S-400 air defense system purchase from Russia, the repeated blocking of Nordic accession to NATO, the Syria incursions. The list is long and genuinely aggravating.

But “difficult ally” and “existential enemy” are not synonyms. Chatham House’s Yossi Mekelberg put it bluntly: Turkey is “so much noise” relative to Iran. The real risk, he warned, is that treating rhetorical friction as strategic threat could cause Israel to “mak[e] it a genuine opponent” through the sheer force of its own threat inflation.

It is worth asking who benefits from the “new Iran” narrative—because the answer tells you a great deal about its reliability as analysis.

Bennett benefits: He is running for prime minister and needs a threat to run against. Netanyahu benefits: A new Sunni bogeyman justifies the alliance architecture he is assembling. And certain Washington think tanks benefit, as the threat-inflation business has a long and profitable history in D.C.

Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli ambassador with few incentives to flatter anyone, explained: “Politicians like Naftali Bennett and Benjamin Netanyahu rely on the perpetual threat of war. If it wasn’t Turkey, it would be Iraq. If it wasn’t Iraq, it would be Hezbollah. … It doesn’t matter who. There just always needs to be a threat.” Pinkas also offered the comparison that should end the conversation: “Has the leadership in Turkey ever denied Israel’s right to exist, or threatened to wipe it from the map? No. It’s ridiculous.”

None of this is to say Turkey deserves a free pass for its misbehavior. Erdogan’s support for Hamas is a genuine problem. His democratic backsliding is alarming—the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu is only one of the most recent examples. His military presence in Syria creates real friction and will require careful management. These are legitimate concerns calling for sustained diplomatic engagement and clear red lines—not for treating Turkey as a civilizational adversary.

The history of this particular comparison is a history of recycled panic. As Akkoyunlu recounts in his book, a different kind of “Is Turkey becoming Iran?” anxiety swept through Turkish society with the Justice and Development Party’s rise in the early 2000s. Each time, the comparison proved, in his words, “equally problematic”—revealing more about the anxieties of those making it than about Turkey itself.

The real danger in the coming months is not that Turkey will replicate Iran’s model of proxy warfare and nuclear brinkmanship. It has no Hezbollah, no Quds Force, no ideology demanding it export revolution at gunpoint. The real danger is that the rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling. Meliha Altunisik, a Turkish international politics expert, has warned that “viewing Turkey as the ‘new Iran’ risks strategic miscalculation. It may accelerate confrontation rather than contain it.” A beleaguered leader facing economic pressure and an emboldened opposition has every incentive to cast himself as the champion of the Muslim world against a hostile West.

Alarmed at the “Turkey’s next” rhetoric from Israel and the United States, Ankara will accelerate its preemptive military buildup—which could mean anything from moving missile batteries into Syria to making common cause with other anti-Israel forces in the region. Such moves will in turn feed into the panic in Israel and the United States. The worse the relationship gets, the more that narrative writes itself.

Turkey is a problem, in spite of, and because of the fact that it is a NATO ally with the second-largest army in the alliance, a geographic linchpin between Europe and the Middle East, and a significant economic power. The goal should be to manage and constrain Turkish ambitions, not to conjure a new Ruhollah Khomeini out of a man who is, at root, a transactional populist who wants to host a NATO summit, cut an F-35 deal, and stay in power.

Erdogan is a headache, and not only for the U.S. and Israel. He has always been a headache; he will go on being a headache. But the Middle East has had genuine monsters. It is worth remembering the difference.