As Ankara hosts NATO’s 2026 summit this week, Western governments are indulging a dangerous fantasy: that Iran’s battered proxy network has eased the main threat facing NATO and Israel. But they are wrong.

The Iranian regime remains dangerous, but Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now more durable, better resourced, and much more ideologically ambitious than Tehran has ever been. Indeed, NATO is meeting in the capital of a member state increasingly determined to reshape the Middle East through a Neo-Ottoman approach, undermine Western interests, and weaken the Jewish state’s regional leverage.

Erdoğan’s language is unequivocal. He has described Zionism as a “genocidal, occupying, expansionist” ideology threatening Turkey’s “survival” and has branded Prime Minister Netanyahu as a “psychopath” and a “vampire who feeds on blood.” These are not tantrums; they are the vocabulary of a leader constructing a Muslim Brotherhood-Pan-Sunni axis through Hamas’s infrastructure in Istanbul and proxy forces from Libya to Syria. Iran appealed to sectarian terrorism and coercion. Erdoğan exports a genocidal model that once again can reorder the Middle East against Israel.

With Iranian power broken, Ankara is racing to seize the vacuum. Turkish-backed forces are pushing air defenses and garrisons toward Syria’s Palmyra and the T-4 air base—positions that could deny Israeli aircraft freedom of action over southern Syria. Jerusalem has already struck to stop them, yet Turkish drones have tested Israel’s vulnerable airspace. Erdoğan is exploiting NATO membership not to defend the alliance, but to build a forward military position on Israel’s northern border.

Turkey’s human cost is written across Afrin and Ras al-Ain. Turkish-backed Syrian National Army........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)