Turkey is pursuing an increasingly dangerous bid to reshape the balance of power in the Middle Easter. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Ankara has combined support for Islamists, military intervention and economic leverage to expand Turkish influence across the region and beyond, challenging the existing geopolitical order.

Turkey’s dramatic departure from its “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine began around 2011, when the Arab Spring opened a new geopolitical opportunity for Erdogan. Ankara increasingly backed Islamist movements, including Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, then an al-Qaida affiliate led by Ahmed al-Sharaa. Erdogan’s support helped propel al-Sharaa from an al-Qaida commander into Syria’s president, making Turkey one of his most important external backers.

In 2012, while working for CNN in Egypt, I witnessed Erdogan’s arrival in Cairo as he exited the airport, where he was greeted by hundreds of ecstatic Muslim Brotherhood supporters carrying banners and chanting, “Erdogan and the Brotherhood are one hand.” At the time, the question was whether Erdogan was simply courting the Brotherhood, which had just come to power in Egypt, or whether Turkey was embarking on a far more ambitious strategy: using Islamist movements as instruments of Turkish influence and expanding Ankara’s political and strategic reach across the region. The events that followed suggest it was the latter.

After recognizing Libya’s National Transitional Council following Moammar Gadhafi’s ouster in 2011, Erdogan’s government provided it with $300 million in credit and, along with Qatar, backed several Islamist factions in that country’s civil war.

During my reporting in Libya, I met Islamist political figures and fighters who had been funded and trained by Turkish forces, giving me a firsthand view of Ankara’s growing role in the conflict. In 2012, Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood established the Justice and Construction Party, which has been supported by Ankara — illustrating Turkey’s emerging strategy of using Islamist partnerships to expand its regional influence

When Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization in 2013-14, Turkey continued providing political and financial support, hosting Brotherhood-affiliated media and members wanted by Arab governments. This cemented Turkey’s role as a key Brotherhood hub and further strained ties with its Arab neighbours.

A recent Foundation for Defense of Democracies research memo — titled, “Islamist Turkey: A Forward Base for Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Jihadism” — argues that under Erdogan, Turkey has moved further from its traditional western alignment toward Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Since 2011, Hamas has expanded its presence in Turkey, establishing offices and networks that have allowed it to operate from Turkish territory.

Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood also extends into Syria, where Ankara has backed Brotherhood-linked political and Islamist forces while expanding its strategic footprint. The two countries share a roughly 900-kilometre border, and Turkey’s estimated 49 army bases and more than 100 military sites and observation posts in Syria, backed by over 10,000 troops, give Ankara a powerful platform to project influence into Iraq, Lebanon and the wider region.

Erdogan’s strategy extends beyond Islamist alliances, combining political influence, military power, economic leverage and diplomatic reach. The clearest recent example is the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, a trilateral mutual-defence pact signed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan on Aug. 7. The agreement establishes a collective-security framework similar to NATO’s Article 5, treating an armed attack on any one member as an attack on all three. Its inaugural committee meeting began in Istanbul on Monday.

I spoke this week with Sinan Ciddi, a senior fellow and Turkey program director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy. He believes Erdogan will seek to expand the pact’s membership.

“Turkey’s alliance-building initiatives should not be viewed in isolation. The Mecca Pact is one component of Erdogan’s broader vision of positioning Turkey as a ‘global actor.’ The pact with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan is a significant building block in his effort to co-ordinate the trade, energy and diplomatic interests of Sunni powers. Over time, he will seek to expand its membership,” Ciddi said.

“At the same time, Ankara is building robust bilateral partnerships across Africa while positioning itself to the European Union as a security bulwark against Russia. In the Mediterranean, Turkey is pushing to redefine maritime boundaries to its advantage, in concert with partners such as Libya, raising alarm in Greece, Israel and Cyprus. None of Erdogan’s initiatives is short-term or isolated; they are part of a broader strategy to increase Turkey’s geopolitical visibility and influence.”

Turkey’s relationship with Israel is perhaps best described as a dramatic strategic reversal. The two countries were once close security partners, sharing intelligence and co-operating militarily. Today, relations have reached a historic low, with Ankara and Jerusalem increasingly treating each other as regional rivals. The question is no longer whether their relationship can return to the way it was, but how far this confrontation will go.

Erdogan has increasingly positioned Israel as a strategic adversary. Addressing the Turkish parliament in 2023, he issued an unusually direct warning to Israel, targeting both its leadership and nuclear capabilities: “Hey Israel, you have an atomic bomb, a nuclear bomb. And you are making threats with this. We know this. And your end is near,” he declared , adding, “you’re on your way out.”

Such rhetoric reflects the broader deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations and Erdogan’s effort to position Turkey as a leading political and strategic counterweight to Israel in the region.

On Aug. 18, Israel sent a direct warning to Turkey by striking the Abu al-Duhur airbase in Idlib, near the Turkish border, as Turkey was reportedly preparing to deploy troops and reactivate the base. The message to Ankara was clear: Israel will not tolerate a Turkish military presence that threatens its strategic interests. The strikes signal a growing contest between Ankara and Jerusalem over who will shape the emerging regional order in Syria.

“Ankara’s rebuttal is that its presence in Syria is lawful because Damascus consents, while Israel’s is not, but Turkey has seldom waited for permission when it entered Syria. It launched three major cross-border operations — Euphrates Shield in 2016, Olive Branch against Afrin in 2018 and Peace Spring across Ras al-Ain and Tell Abyad in 2019 — each justified by Ankara as self-defence against terrorism, each conducted over Damascus’s explicit objection,” said Ciddi.

“It armed and paid Islamist and jihadist militias throughout the war. It still effectively controls swaths of the north and continues paying the salaries of former Syrian National Army factions now folded into the new Syrian military — factions documented as detaining, extorting and abusing civilians.”

Turkey’s expanding military footprint and its growing ties to Islamist and Iran-aligned actors are increasingly bringing Ankara into direct competition with Israel. What was once a largely co-operative relationship has evolved into a broader struggle over influence and security across the Middle East. When Turkey offered troops for a postwar International Stabilization Force in Gaza, Israel rejected the proposal.

During my current reporting from Lebanon, I have seen that Iran-backed Hezbollah militants continue fighting against Israeli forces despite ongoing peace talks, underscoring the importance of UNIFIL as its mandate nears expiration. Erdogan’s bid for a security role in southern Lebanon is therefore likely to face Israeli resistance, as Jerusalem increasingly views a Turkish military presence on its northern border as a strategic threat.

Turkey’s ambitions are bringing Ankara into increasingly direct conflict with Israel. As both sides strengthen their military positions and enforce competing red lines, the risk is no longer merely diplomatic — it’s the possibility of a direct military confrontation between two increasingly assertive regional powers.

National Post

Mohamed Fahmy is an award-winning journalist who has covered the Middle East for numerous outlets, including CNN, Al-Jazeera, the Los Angeles Times and Foreign Policy.

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Things that divide us cannot possibly unite us. That much would seem obvious, but as Étienne-Alexandre Beauregard tells Brian Lilley, society has for decades prioritized hyper-individualism and promoted multiculturalism over communitarianism. And that has been eroding western civilization. Beauregard discusses his new book, “Anti-Civilization: The Collapse of Society and the Case for the Common Good.” He explains how the desocialization of younger generations and the fetishization of immigration, among other things, are leading to a backlash from people who crave a more collective meaning and identity. And surprisingly, it’s generation Z that seems most determined to rescue us from our decline. (Recorded Aug. 19, 2026.)

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Attempts to paint antisemitism as a form of political expression rather than racism is far from a recent phenomenon. The clearest example of where this idea fermented on the world stage was the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, which was held 25 years ago.

WCAR was billed as a global gathering to combat racism, xenophobia and intolerance. Governments, international organizations and civil society representatives assembled with the stated purpose of building a shared framework against racism in all its forms. There was a sense that history would be made.

I was there to witness it unfold first-hand. I had not travelled to Durban as an advocate or as someone looking to advance Jewish community concerns. In preparation for the conference, I had been commissioned to produce a report for the Government of Canada’s anti-racism secretariat that examined previous reports and recommendations on racism, racial discrimination and related intolerance. In effect, I arrived in Durban expecting conversations about combating racism in all its forms. Instead, what I encountered there was almost the opposite. And therein lies one of the bitter irony of the experience.

At the parallel NGO Forum, where civil society leaders from around the world were meant to give expression to the victims of racism and discrimination, the proceedings were transformed — or more accurately hijacked — into something much uglier. What should have been a universal anti-racism gathering became, in too many instances, an effort to remove Jew-hatred from the world’s anti-racism agenda. The spectacle was marked by manipulation, propaganda and a stunning willingness to excuse hostility toward Jews and dress it up as anti-Zionism or anti-Israel politics.

Jewish participants from across the political spectrum arrived expecting solidarity. Instead, many of us found ourselves asking whether antisemitism still counted as racism. Some participants described being harassed because they were visibly Jewish. Copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the notorious antisemitic forgery, were circulated. Posters equated Israel with Nazi Germany. Leaflets and slogans blurred, sometimes deliberately, any distinction between criticism of Israeli government policy and hostility toward Jews as a people. Conduct that would have been immediately condemned had it targeted virtually any other minority was tolerated, rationalized or ignored when directed at Jews.

That was the disturbing innovation of Durban. It helped globalize the effort to recast the hatred of Jews as political opinion. The very language of anti-racism was used to launder antisemitic expression. Jews were not denied the right to be protected in theory; rather, they were told that the hostility directed at them was not really hatred at all, but solidarity with the oppressed, anti-colonial activism or resistance to imperialism.

Rest assured that what happened at Durban wasn’t about Israeli government policy. It placed Israel, alone among the nations of the world, at the centre of the racism agenda. It treated Jewish self-determination as singularly suspect. It transformed Jews from a historically persecuted minority into the symbolic embodiment of oppression. Once that shift occurred, antisemitism could be dismissed as merely a political complaint.

At a spontaneous gathering of Jewish conference delegates, Irwin Cotler, who would go on to become Canada’s justice minister, warned against what he called the “partitioning of prejudice.” The phrase has stayed with me since. Racism cannot be opposed selectively. Human rights lose their moral authority when they are applied conditionally. The moment hatred against a particular people is deemed understandable, fashionable or politically useful, the universalism on which anti-racism depends starts to collapse. Durban revealed that collapse in real time.

To be sure, there was a difference between the official governmental conference and the NGO Forum. The final United Nations declaration did not adopt the most extreme language advanced by activists, and thankfully it did acknowledge that antisemitism is a form of intolerance. But history remembers Durban at least as much for what unfolded in the civil society forum as for what appeared in the official diplomatic text. The NGO Forum exposed a fault line that has widened over the past quarter century: antisemitism is increasingly treated as debatable, contextual or somehow less apparent when conveniently associated with criticism of Israel.

That legacy is now visible everywhere. Jews are often required to prove that what they experience as antisemitism is indeed antisemitism. Expressions that would be condemned instantly if directed at other minorities are parsed endlessly when Jews are the target. The same people who insist that minorities must be trusted to define their own experience of racism suddenly demand footnotes, qualifications and geopolitical context when Jews describe hatred directed toward them.

That is one of the enduring legacies of Durban. It showed how easily anti-racism can be inverted when ideology overtakes principle. A movement that begins by defending the vulnerable can end up deciding which vulnerable people are inconvenient. A discourse built to expose hatred can become a vehicle for excusing it. A gathering convened to fight racism can, in the name of fighting racism, make room for one of its oldest forms.

Twenty-five years later, the deeper lesson arising from Durban is that universality is fragile. Anti-racism cannot survive if it becomes selective. Human rights cannot retain their force if some forms of hatred are condemned while others are rationalized because they fit a preferred political narrative.

That is why the irony of my presence in Durban still troubles me. I arrived having just contributed to Canada’s efforts to take stock of how governments and communities had tried to combat discrimination in all its forms. I left having seen how quickly the global language of anti-racism could be manipulated to exclude antisemitism.

Durban’s anniversary should therefore not be treated as a historical footnote. It should be remembered as a warning. When hatred of Jews is rebranded as politics, when antisemitism is carved out of the anti-racism agenda, the result is not justice, it’s the partitioning of prejudice — and it leaves a badly needed anti-racism project morally compromised.

National Post

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