The difference in how Turkey treats Greece and Israel illustrates its diplomatic and military strategy.

At the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey presented itself to its allies as a mediator, stabilizer, and regional peacemaker. But Ankara’s grand strategy is more complicated. Its conduct toward its neighbors reveals a two-tiered approach. Understanding that dual strategy is key to understanding what Turkey wants from the region: “Turkey’s security does not begin in Hatay, but rather in Aleppo, Damascus, and Beirut,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared. “We will not allow a fait accompli in our brotherly countries, and we will not turn a blind eye to any attacks targeting them.” 

The statement was aimed in part at Israel, and it carried Erdogan’s familiar mix of warning and regional ambition. But it should not be dismissed as rhetoric alone. Read alongside Turkey’s broader posture, it points to Ankara’s attempt to expand its involvement in the region following the war in Iran.

Turkey’s regional strategy operates on two levels. The first is coercive, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean, where Ankara has increased pressure on Greece and Cyprus through military posturing and maritime claims. The second is less forceful. Turkey’s approach towards Israel and the neighboring Arab states combines both hard-edged rhetoric with diplomacy and ideological competition with economic projects to expand Ankara’s influence without necessarily forcing an open clash. 

That makes Turkey’s current posture difficult to reduce to familiar labels. It is not yet a neo-Ottoman project, nor is it only an anti-Israel campaign. Turkey seeks to become an indispensable actor across the region, in what Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan dubs “regional ownership,” arguing that regional states should determine the fate of regional events.

Since the onset of hostilities between the United States and Iran, Ankara publicly presented itself as a mediator. Fidan cast Turkey as a state capable of helping bring the conflict to a swift conclusion, and Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, publicly thanked Turkey for its role in supporting diplomacy. That diplomatic posture is not meaningless. Turkey does have channels to multiple regional actors, and Ankara often sees itself as better positioned than Western powers to mediate Middle Eastern crises. But mediation is only one layer of Turkish strategy.

That layer is blurred when we look at Turkey’s relationship with its eastern Mediterranean neighbors, Greece and Cyprus.

Ankara portrays both states as failing to recognize Turkey’s sovereign maritime borders in the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas. Disputed claims over the three states’ maritime borders, exclusive economic zones (EEZ’s), and airspace have been contested for decades.  What is different now is Turkey’s increasing use of lawfare and threats of military force to enforce its claims.

The Turkish government is preparing to pass legislation to establish sovereignty over 152 islands and islets that had hitherto had no defined ownership in the Aegean Sea. Greece and Cyprus fear that Turkey would use domestic law as a pretext to enforce its claims militarily. Additionally, Ankara has followed up threats to seize Greek islands by stepping up its naval exercises, harassing Greek and Cypriot vessels, and even deploying F-16 fighter jets onto the occupied parts of northern Cyprus.

These moves have pushed Greece and Cyprus to seek stronger external backing. Cyprus has signed a status-of-forces agreement with France, and Greece has similarly deepened defense cooperation with the United States and Israel to offset Turkish pressure. All these tensions illustrate the first tier of Turkish regional strategy, in which it believes its coercion can shift the status quo in its favor.

But Turkey’s approach becomes more complicated beyond the Eastern Mediterranean. Israel is the clearest example. Since Hamas’ October 7 attack and the war in Gaza, Erdogan has tried to place Turkey at the front of the anti-Israel camp. He has defended Hamas as a resistance movement, turned the Palestinian issue into a claim for regional leadership, and allowed Hamas figures to remain on Turkish soil, including operatives Israel accuses of directing attacks in the West Bank. The relationship has deteriorated so sharply that even President Donald Trump claimed Erdogan was a “prime candidate” to enter the Middle East war on Iran’s side because of “their problems with Israel.” 

Yet the rupture has limits. Turkey has recalled envoys, halted direct trade, joined legal pressure against Israel, and blocked Israel’s cooperation with NATO. Still, when Turkish and Israeli interests have collided on the ground, the two sides have looked for escape valves rather than a fight. In Syria, Turkish and Israeli officials opened deconfliction talks to avoid unwanted clashes. Azerbaijani oil continued to reach Israel through Turkey’s Ceyhan port despite Ankara’s trade ban. And even in the defense sector, the U.S. subsidiary of Turkish manufacturer Repkon was listed as a contractor in an American bomb sale to Israel. 

None of this makes Ankara’s hostility performative. Erdogan has raised the cost of Israel’s regional diplomacy, but he has done so without crossing into a war that Turkey does not appear to want.

Erdogan’s warning to Jerusalem came amid expanded Israeli military activity in Lebanon and Syria. Israel continues to hold territory in southern Lebanon and southern Syria for the strategic purpose of preventing attacks from being launched from those territories into Israel. Rhetorically, Turkey has seized on that presence to cast itself as a defender of the Levant against Israeli expansion. In Syria, Turkish outrage has been visible repeatedly over the past year and a half, especially after Israel intervened to protect the Druze community in the south. Fidan at that time even warned that Israel’s actions could bring the two countries closer to war. 

Now, Turkish officials are returning to the same language about Lebanon. The strategy is not just to denounce Israel but to give Ankara a claim to strategic relevance beyond its borders. It also seeks to narrow Israel’s freedom of action in areas where Israel believes military access is essential to its security. But this strategy is not devoid of contradictions.

​President Trump’s approach to Lebanon captures this tension. In one week, he floated the idea four times that Syria should conduct a military incursion into Lebanon to confront Hezbollah. The proposal was rejected in Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem, each for different reasons but all with the same fear that such an operation could produce more chaos than control. On paper, Ankara might have been expected to welcome the idea. A Syrian move into Lebanon would expand the reach of a friendly government in Damascus and give Turkey an indirect role in shaping Lebanon’s security file. 

Yet the opposite appears to have happened. Erdogan reportedly pressed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa not to enter Lebanon or fight Hezbollah, fearing that such a campaign would weaken one of Israel’s remaining armed adversaries and strengthen Israel’s regional position over time. The contradiction here is that Turkey’s regional behavior is often viewed through an expansionist lens, yet its ambitions do not always align with that view. In Lebanon, the impulse to extend influence through Damascus collided with Ankara’s broader desire to restrain Israel. Each objective serves a different purpose, and in this case, they pulled Turkish policy in opposite directions.

Taken together, these episodes suggest that Turkey’s ambitions are less a coherent grand strategy than a set of overlapping calculations, each pursued with whatever mix of pressure and accommodation the moment allows. 

Ankara is willing to risk confrontation with Greece and Cyprus because it judges the costs manageable. Still, it has shown no comparable appetite for a direct clash with Israel, preferring instead to contest Israeli power through rhetoric, legal pressure, and proxies while quietly preserving the channels that limited escalation requires. 

The Lebanon episode shows the limits of treating Turkey as a simple expansionist actor: Ankara’s restraint in Syria reveals that its rivalry with Israel can outweigh its interest in extending influence through Syria. The result is a Turkey that is neither as singularly anti-Israel nor as expansionist as either its rhetoric or its critics suggest, but one that, on a case-by-case basis, is testing how far “regional ownership” can take it before the contradictions catch up with its ambitions.

About the Authors: Sinan Ciddi and Ahmad Sharawi

Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow on Turkey at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, DC. Sinan has over two decades of research experience focused on Turkish domestic politics and foreign policy, with bylines in Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Politico, Newsweek, The National Interest, and 19FortyFive. He frequently provides commentary on various media outlets, including BBC, CNN International, DW News, France 24, the Greek Current Podcast, and CBS’s John Batchelor Show. Sinan is also an associate professor of national security studies at Marine Corps University and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Ahmad Sharawi is a research analyst at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on Middle East affairs, specifically the Levant, Iraq, and Iranian intervention in Arab affairs, as well as US foreign policy toward the region. Previously, Sharawi worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He created a map visualizing the border clashes on the Israeli-Lebanese frontier and authored articles on Jordan and Morocco. Ahmad previously worked at the International Finance Corporation and S&P Global. He holds a BA in international relations from King’s College London and an MA from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

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