Erdogan’s Warning Exposes the Scale of Turkey’s Threat to the Middle East

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan woke even the most skeptical today (Wednesday) to the view that Turkey poses a threat to Israel, saying that “Israeli attacks in Syria and Lebanon have reached a point where they threaten Turkey.” But it is much more accurate to look at Ankara in a broader context: Turkey has become the biggest threat to the pro-Western states in the eastern Mediterranean, and not only to Israel.

Turkey under Erdogan is also a much greater and more strategic threat to Israel than Iran. The Islamic Republic has ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones, but Turkey has far greater capabilities: militarily, according to SIPRI, Turkey accounts for about 1.8% of all international arms trade, six times Iran’s share, and its defense budget is 5.5 times larger; diplomatically, Turkey uses states as proxies, such as Syria, Libya and Somalia, while Tehran relies on non-state actors; and economically, World Bank data show that Turkey’s per capita GDP, $15,892, is three times higher than Iran’s. The idea that Turkey should be viewed as a future threat is fundamentally mistaken. Why? Take one example: the Turkish parliament is expected to pass this month the “Blue Homeland” law, derived from the vision that Turkey should control all areas in the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea. In practice, that means imposing a Turkish 12-nautical-mile claim at the expense of Greek territories. Such a move would harm the Greeks’ legal rights to use the space, for example for fishing, energy, and undersea infrastructure for electricity transmission and communication cables. The cable intended to connect the three countries to the electricity grid, which the law is expected to restrict, is the interconnector project, centered on an approximately 1,200-kilometer undersea power cable from Greece through Cyprus to Israel. The cable, one of the longest of its kind in the world, is meant to connect the three countries to the European power grid, and the states involved are waiting for the cost-benefit analysis of the approximately 330-kilometer segment between Israel and Cyprus, which is expected soon.

If the law is approved, a naval military clash is not a question of “if,” but “when.” And the when is close. For Jerusalem, this is a strategic plan. Just as Israel is an island economy, it is also an island state in the energy sense. A connection from Greece to Israel would link the European power grid here. Thus, whether as a result of missile strikes or a technical malfunction, Israel would have electrical backup. However, already in April last year, Greece brought the Italian vessel NG Worker to lay cables in the area of the islands Kasos and Karpathos, between Rhodes and Crete, and backed down because of Ankara’s threats to cut them. Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman vision does not stop at land. The Turkish version of “Blue Homeland” stems from the fact that Turkey has not signed the Continental Shelf Convention or the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and contrary to international law claims that the Greek islands are an extension of Anatolia. That means that while international law sees each island as having its own continental shelf, and therefore entitled to 12 nautical miles of territorial waters, Ankara threatens that the space belongs to it. Therefore, through the law, it seeks to cancel the compromise under which each island is entitled to about six nautical miles, and to impose Turkish economic waters on the area. In this way, it would also directly affect Israel’s energy security. Blue Homeland also reflects the diplomatic threat posed by Turkey, which Israel is addressing through the historical recognition of Somaliland’s independence, although that initiative is also linked to the Houthi threat.

Ankara has taken Iran’s proxy strategy and upgraded it: while the Islamic Republic uses non-state actors, Turkey uses states. Why is that better? In any action Israel takes against a Turkish “puppet” entity, the state implications could be far more severe. In Syria, for example, Turkey’s puppet ruler, at the very least a former jihadist by Western standards, Ahmed al-Sharaa (Abu Mohammed al-Jolani), is in control. If he concentrates forces in the Suwayda area at a level that threatens Israel and forces it to respond, then the Syrian state can turn to the UN and take diplomatic action against us. The same situation is also occurring in Libya, where Turkey invented a maritime border out of thin air in 2019 at the expense of Greece, simply because Erdogan decided to, and of course in Somalia.

Somalia is a sensitive issue for Israel, much more than the way it is covered in Israel. Somalia and Somaliland are located south of Bab al-Mandab, the strategic shipping route through which, before the war, about 12% of global maritime trade passed. As Jerusalem has recognized the significance, Turkey recognized it long before, and exploited the fact that Somalia is the most backward country in Africa to buy it for a pittance. Today, the Turks operate their largest base outside the country there, and one of their first operational responses to Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, which stuck in their throat like a bone, was to divert F-16 aircraft to Somalia.

Turkey is also the most serious economic threat to Israel in the region. It is a NATO member that benefits from an American ambassador, Tom Barrack, who thinks about his business far more than the national interests of the United States, and according to many is more “Turkey’s ambassador in the US than the US ambassador in Turkey.” At the same time, Ankara’s diplomatic outlook creates a situation in which, while it is a NATO member, it also has observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

The solution to the Turkish threat is in the United States. Turkey’s strategic location is also useful in many economic matters, including control of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the only gateway in and out of the Black Sea, oil and natural gas transport from Azerbaijan to Europe, and freight movement by rail from China to Europe and vice versa. This gives Erdogan excellent room to maneuver, much more than the use of Syrian refugees in the previous decade to extort “protection money” from European countries.

In the end, the Turkish president’s statement that his country’s national security begins “in Aleppo, in Damascus, and in Beirut” is a hint at two objectives: exploiting Lebanon’s economic situation to turn it into another puppet state, and expanding the Turkish threat to additional areas. Today it is Israel, Cyprus and Greece, and tomorrow it will be moderate, pro-Western states such as the United Arab Emirates. That is not far off either, because Turkey is helping Sudan’s government in the civil war against the rebel forces of the Rapid Support Forces, which Abu Dhabi is assisting.

The solution to the Turkish threat is not in Israel, but in the United States. If the Trump administration does not wake up to the mistaken image of Turkey in Washington, encouraged by Barrack, then what we have seen in recent months in the form of Iran’s threat expanding from Israel alone to the entire region will also happen with Turkey. And with Turkey, it will be more aggressive, more intense, and far more threatening.