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Turkey's Cynical Game: Fueling Middle East Chaos While Preaching Peace

by Martin Aslan

In the volatile geopolitics of March 2026, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan remains the region's most destabilizing force—master of loud moral outrage and quiet strategic opportunism.

The Azerbaijan-Israel axis perfectly exposes Ankara's hypocrisy. Azerbaijan supplies Israel with roughly 46% of its crude oil imports, flowing through Turkey's Ceyhan port via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. In return, Israeli drones and advanced weaponry helped Baku decisively defeat Armenia in recent conflicts. This partnership directly counters Iran, providing Israel intelligence access near Tehran's borders and stoking fears of unrest among Iran's large ethnic Azeri population.

Turkey vociferously backs Azerbaijan as “one nation, two states,” supplying political cover and military aid. Simultaneously, Erdoğan unleashes blistering anti-Israel rhetoric—especially over Gaza—imposing partial trade bans to rally domestic and Islamic support. Yet reality betrays the bluster: even after the 2024 embargo, indirect trade persisted, with Israel importing nearly $924 million in Turkish goods in 2025. More critically, Turkey continues earning substantial transit fees from Azerbaijani oil shipments to Israel, volumes that rose sharply last year.

This double-dealing isolates and provokes Iran, pushing Tehran to bolster Armenia as a counterweight and intensify surveillance of Azerbaijani-Israeli cooperation. The outcome is heightened regional tension: proxy flare-ups, ethnic anxieties, and the ever-present risk of escalation.

The pattern repeats across the Middle East. In Syria, Turkey backs favored factions to expand influence; in Libya, it arms proxies to secure maritime claims; in the Eastern Mediterranean, assertive posturing exploits power vacuums. Ankara's neo-Ottoman ambitions—cloaked in pan-Islamic rhetoric—exploit instability rather than resolve it.

Realpolitik should prioritize energy security, shared threats, and ethnic ties over bombast. Instead, Turkey deliberately blurs lines, using fiery condemnations to mask its enabling role in alliances that keep Iran paranoid and the region fractious.

Erdoğan’s Turkey is no stabilizer or honest broker—it is the wildcard that thrives on controlled chaos, securing leverage while neighbors remain off-balance. Until Ankara chooses consistency over calculated duplicity, it will remain a primary driver of instability—one provocative statement or quiet tanker away from tipping an already fragile region into deeper conflict.

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