The US-Israeli war against Iran has done more than redraw military balances in the Middle East — it has forced a reckoning with the very conceptual frameworks through which the region is understood. So argues Turkish political commentator Yasin Aktay in a wide-ranging piece published Saturday, which draws on recent academic literature to make the case that Iran's strategic behavior cannot be reduced to ideology, and that Turkey stands at a pivotal crossroads as a result.
Iran Is a State, Not Just a Revolution
The central intellectual move in Aktay's analysis is a turn away from purely ideological readings of Iranian foreign policy. He highlights a recent article by political scientist M. Hakan Yavuz, published on atlasthink.org under the title "Iran's Strategic Logic: Fuller, Nasr, and the Consequences of the 2026 War," which synthesizes the work of scholars Graham Fuller and Vali Nasr to argue that Iran behaves above all as a geopolitically constrained state rather than as a revolutionary ideological project.
The "revolutionary rupture" narrative — the idea that the 1979 Islamic Revolution fundamentally remade Iranian foreign policy — is, on this reading, overstated. Iran sits at one of the world's most critical geopolitical crossroads, where Central Asia, the Caucasus, South Asia, and the Middle East converge. That position has conferred a sense of strategic centrality on Iranian elites across regimes: the Shah, too, sought to make Iran the dominant power in the Gulf. The Islamic Republic did not invent Iranian regional ambition — it inherited and repackaged it.
Aktay also foregrounds the formative trauma of the Iran-Iraq War. Nasr's analysis, as relayed through Yavuz, identifies two lessons Tehran drew from that conflict: first, that Iran could be left entirely isolated in the international system; second, that it could not compete with major powers through conventional military means. The result was the doctrine of proxy networks, asymmetric warfare, and "strategic patience" — Hezbollah, the Iraqi militia web, Yemeni connections — which Western analysts habitually misread as ideological expansionism but which is, in Iranian strategic logic, a deterrence architecture built around the country's structural vulnerabilities.
Aktay does not offer this framework to exonerate Tehran. He is notably critical of Iran's support for the Assad regime, which he describes as having waged genocide against its own population while positioning itself as an "axis of resistance" against Israel — a contradiction that, in his view, exposed the cynicism at the heart of that framing. The analytic task, he insists, is comprehension rather than absolution.
To sharpen the ideological dimension, Aktay also recommends a recent 482-page study by Abdülkadir Şen, "Constructing a Myth: The Shia Crescent and Iran's Theopolitics," which he praises as essential reading on the roots of Iranian contestation within the Islamic world — while insisting that even this rich theological account cannot fully explain Iranian state behavior on its own.
Weakening Iran Will Not Stabilize the Region
Aktay's geopolitical prognosis is cautionary. Drawing a parallel with the 2003 destruction of Iraq — which produced not stability but the disintegration of state structures, the empowerment of militia networks, and deepening regional rivalry — he argues that a weakened Iran could generate analogous dynamics. The more likely outcome of regime fragmentation, he contends, is not a pro-Western Iran but a more nationalist, more militarized Iran dominated by security elites. Ideology would change its form, not disappear: revolutionary Shia politics could give way to muscular Iranian nationalism, but regional competition would continue under new colors.
He also identifies a structural risk in American strategy. Washington has shifted from large-scale occupation — the Iraq and Afghanistan model — toward drone strikes, cyber operations, and targeted military interventions: what Aktay calls "remote warfare." This may reduce costs for the United States, but it dismantles states without constructing replacement order, accelerating regional fragmentation and opening space for China and Russia.
Turkey in the Crosshairs
The section of the piece most directly relevant to Ankara concerns a discussion reportedly circulating in Israeli strategic circles: that with Iran weakened, Turkey could emerge as the next primary strategic rival. Aktay identifies three reasons this framing has gained traction. Turkey has dramatically expanded its regional footprint over the past two decades, projecting influence from the Balkans and the Caucasus to Africa and the Gulf. It pursues strategic autonomy within NATO rather than simple alignment. And its consistently outspoken position on Palestine has kept relations with Israel in a state of long-term tension.
For Aktay, this means Turkey faces a sharpened strategic choice. On one hand, its policy of strategic autonomy becomes more valuable, not less, as great-power competition intensifies. On the other, its diplomatic capacity will be tested: the unraveling of Iran's regional networks could create new conflict lines that Turkey might help manage as a balancing power. The concluding question he poses is pointed — will Turkey be the equilibrium-builder of the new Middle East, or will it accept the role others have scripted for it?
About the Author
Yasin Aktay is a prominent, conservative Turkish academic and commentator with deep institutional ties to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). A former deputy chairman of the AKP and a longtime member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly representing Konya, he served for years as a close adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and remains one of the party's most visible intellectual voices. He is also a former chairman of the Union of International Democrats (UID), an AKP-aligned diaspora network. His analyses, while engaging seriously with academic literature, consistently align with Ankara's official foreign policy framing — making his pieces valuable as a window into how the Turkish government's inner circle conceptualizes regional developments, even as they should be read with that proximity to power in mind.