Erdogan Plans for Turkey to Replace Iran as Leader of Gulf Muslims

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has long harbored dreams of glory. A few years ago, he predicted that in the future there could be a war between “the Crescent and the Cross,” and he clearly saw himself as leading the forces of the Crescent — the world’s Muslims — against the world’s Christians. In another vision, he presented Turkey as the leader of a pan-Islamic army that would be strong enough to take on, and defeat, the Jewish state. Now, as he watches the American and Israeli militaries batter the Islamic Republic of Iran, he is planning to replace Iran as the major Muslim power in the Middle East and North Africa. More on Erdogan’s view of Turkey’s future role in the region can be found here: “Israel’s next test: Turkey positions itself to lead a post-Islamic Iran Middle East – opinion,” by Amine Ayoub, Jerusalem Post, March 14, 2026:

As the regional architecture of the Middle East undergoes a violent transformation, observers are beginning to realize that the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran is not the end of the story but the beginning of a far more complex chapter.

The conflict, dubbed Operation Roaring Lion, has entered a phase where the systemic deterrence of the mullahs is effectively finished. However, history teaches us that the moment of greatest victory is often the moment of greatest danger.

We have reached what historians now call a 1919 Moment, a juncture where the primary threats of the past decade ⁠– Sunni jihadism and the Iranian proxy network ⁠– have been beaten, but the victorious alliance is already beginning to fracture.

The most significant and dangerous crack in this new order is the rising ambition of Islamist Turkey. For months, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has adopted a strategy that prioritized the survival of the clerical regime in Tehran as a counterweight to Western influence.

Now that the Iranian regime is in its death throes, Ankara is shifting its messaging to prepare for a direct confrontation with the new regional reality. Pro-government Turkish columnists have begun to frame Israel as the last obstacle to regional stability, with some explicitly claiming that after Iran, it will be Turkey’s turn.

Despite the fears of those columnists, Israel has no intention of attacking Turkey. Turkey is much less of a threat to the Jewish state; it does not possess a nuclear weapons program; it has not rushed headlong to produce thousands of ballistic missiles. Turkish crowds do not scream “Death to Israel,” even if hostility to the Jewish state is widespread. Unlike the Islamic Republic, Turkey does not see destroying Israel as central to its being. Unlike Iran, Turkey is a member of the Western alliance, NATO, and its military leaders have over almost 80 years fostered close ties with the American generals.

This rhetoric is not accidental; it is a calculated effort to position Turkey as the sole remaining champion of political Islam in a vacuum left by the IRGC. Ankara fears that a Western-aligned or Israel-friendly government in Tehran would permanently shift the balance of power, leaving Erdogan as a regional outlier.

Would not Sunni Turkey be much more successful as a regional power than was Shi’a Iran, given that the Sunni Arabs of the Gulf are hostile to the Shi’a, with some of those Sunnis even considering the Shi’a to be “rafidite dogs” to be mistrusted and scorned as little better than Infidels?

The signs of this shift are most visible in Syria, which has become the epicenter of the new power struggle. The recent appointment of Kurdish commander Sipan Hemo as Syria’s Assistant Defense Minister for the Eastern Region is a watershed moment.

While on the surface this appears to be a local administrative move by the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa, it is actually a signal that Turkey and its regional partners are moving faster than the West to consolidate the spaces once held by Iran….

By appointing a Kurdish commander to a high post in the Ministry of Defense, the Syrian leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is hoping to co-opt the Kurds in Syria who might be tempted to revolt against Damascus in order to obtain greater autonomy, or even gain, with the help of Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, an independent Kurdish state. Instead, al-Sharaa is giving high-profile positions to a handful of Kurds, in an attempt to persuade the Kurdish population that they will play important roles in the new government. That might lessen Kurdish resentment of rule from Damascus.

Erdogan, meanwhile, knows that Israel and the U.S. will be victorious against Iran, but doesn’t want the victory to be too overwhelming, leaving Israel to be perceived as the strongest military power in the region. He would like Iran to continue to be a threat to the Jewish state, not through its greatly diminished store of ballistic missiles and its nuclear program which is about to be wiped out, but through the huge size of its various military groups. Iran’s armed forces consist of 150,000 active personnel in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, 350,000 in the regular army, and between one and five million men in the Basij militia.

Israel and the United States are performing a spectacular and indispensable service to the region and the world by destroying Iran’s military threat — its ballistic missiles and its nuclear program. But the ideology of these fanatical Shia could be replaced by the aggressive Sunni expansionism that has taken hold in Turkey ever since Erdogan became a national figure..

The Americans and Israelis, and those Gulf Arab states that have joined the Abraham Accords, constitute a coalition that could contain any Turkish moves to become the hegemonic power in the region. Turkish designs on Syria, where Istanbul has established military outposts to keep the Syrian Kurds in check, should be opposed by the Americans. Washington does have considerable leverage over Turkey; it supplies almost all of the country’s weaponry; the American military hold joint training sessions and maneuvers with the Turkish military. Some NATO members, alarmed at the re-Islamization and de-Kemalization of Turkey, as Turkey becomes ever more “Islamic,” have even spoken about Turkey no longer being fit for NATO membership — especially as it has threatened violence against another NATO member, Greece.

After the definitive military defeat of the Iranian regime — though not necessarily its replacement by a democracy — President Erdogan’s ambitions in the region should be swiftly shot down. Israel will need no convincing. Nor will the Gulf Arab states, whose people are well aware of how the Ottoman Turks mistreated their Arab subjects during four hundred years of imperial rule. Erdogan doesn’t dare attack Turkey’s hereditary enemy, Greece, because it is a member of NATO and could invoke Article 5; nor can the Turks expand their foothold on Cyprus without earning the ire of the other NATO members. And always there will be the threat hanging over Ankara if it tries to expand the territory of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or if it tries to create, on the Iranian model, proxies in the region, chiefly by sending money and weapons to Hamas in Gaza or to the Muslim Brotherhood in any of a half-dozen Gulf countries. That threat is twofold: Washington will cut off all weapons sales to Ankara and may even call for expelling Turkey from NATO. That should keep the Padishah in check.