ISTANBUL — For most of the last decade, Middle Eastern security was, in one way or another, a Washington responsibility. U.S. forces patrolled the region, U.S. diplomacy brokered its alliances and U.S. aid packages kept partners solvent. Now, as the United States signals that its regional footprint will shrink, a different capital is angling to take on a bigger role: Ankara.
NPR analysis by correspondent Hadeel Al-Shalchi, published Sept. 29 and part of NPR's special series on the Middle East conflict, argues that Turkey is moving into an opening created by two years of relentless crisis — and doing so with the confidence of a government that has spent a decade expanding both its diplomatic range and its military-industrial reach.
The clearest sign of that ambition came on Aug. 7, when the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan met at a palace overlooking the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Sitting side by side at hardwood desks backed by silk drapery, the three signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement — a formal pact whose very setting was a statement. The document formalizes a security axis among three states that, until recently, rarely acted in concert, and it positions Ankara alongside Riyadh as a co-architect rather than a competitor of Middle Eastern order.
The timing is not accidental. The region has absorbed profound shocks in quick succession: the Hamas-led attack on Israel in 2023 that triggered a sweeping war, and a stalemated conflict with Iran that, as of this reporting, has run seven months without a decisive outcome. Analysts who study the region say such a combination of prolonged war and diplomatic paralysis tends to create vacuums that larger or more assertive powers rush to fill.
The war with Iran has made the stakes visible in a way few diplomatic cables can. The remains of an Iranian ballistic missile have been recovered in the open countryside near Qatzrin, a community in the Golan Heights, where Israeli security forces have been pictured examining debris. The image is a compact illustration of the new reality: missiles and their remnants crossing borders, with neighbors forced to absorb the fallout while distant powers negotiate their next move.
That reality is forcing Ankara to answer a question many capitals are asking: if Washington reduces its presence, who fills the gap? Turkey's answer has been layered — diplomacy, defense partnerships and the quiet leverage of geography. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's address to the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 22 was one recent installment of a sustained effort to keep Ankara visible in every room where Middle Eastern futures are discussed.
Several factors make Turkey a plausible candidate for expanded influence. It is a NATO member with an industrial base capable of producing military hardware at scale, it sits astride the Black Sea and borders Syria, Iraq and Iran, and it has spent years developing defense ties well beyond its traditional Western partners. It also has relationships — commercial, humanitarian and security-related — that few other states share with both Europe and the Gulf.
Economically, Ankara is courting the same capital pools that fund Gulf megaprojects, and its defense exports have become a diplomatic instrument in their own right. Under Erdoğan, Turkey has pursued a posture that analysts often describe as simultaneously Western-aligned and independent of it — buying into European and American systems while refusing to accept the political constraints those alliances are sometimes said to carry.
The Mecca agreement complicates the picture further. A trilateral defense pact among Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan suggests the emergence of a security bloc that does not route its decisions through Washington or Brussels, and it gives Ankara a claim to a seat at tables where it was once a guest. It also deepens ties between states that have spent the past decade in varying degrees of competition — a development few would have predicted in 2015.
Analysts caution, however, that such frameworks carry practical limits. A defense agreement is not the same as an integrated command structure; questions of financing, chain of command and the willingness to commit troops in a crisis remain unresolved on any outside reading. Ankara's own bandwidth is also contested, given persistent economic strain at home, a long-running conflict in neighboring Syria and unresolved questions about Kurdish armed groups.
There are reasons for restraint in reading too much into the moment. Regional powers have announced grand designs before, only to find that domestic politics and thin treasuries limit follow-through. And Turkey's mediation efforts, though well publicized, have not prevented the two wars now reshaping the region.
Still, the direction of travel is hard to miss. If U.S. engagement in the Middle East continues to contract, the map of influence drawn in Ankara, Riyadh and Islamabad will matter more than the one drawn in Washington — and the next major crisis may arrive before that map is fully drawn.
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