Par Roger EDDE
What Turkey has achieved in Syria and the wider Levant over the past decade is without historical precedent in the modern Middle East.
In 2018, Turkey faced a uniquely hostile strategic environment. Its southern border was effectively encircled: on one side by the Russia–Iran–Assad axis expanding through Idlib and the central Syrian desert, and on the other by a Western-backed PKK/YPG entity enjoying full political, military, and intelligence support from CENTCOM. Few states in similar conditions have avoided strategic defeat, let alone reversed the balance of power.
Yet Ankara managed to turn this near-encirclement into a comprehensive geopolitical success. Through a rare level of coordination between diplomacy, intelligence services, and military command, Turkey gradually dismantled both threats without triggering a direct war with any major power. Moscow and Tehran were contained through calibrated diplomacy and limited force; Washington’s Kurdish project was neutralized through sustained military pressure and political isolation.
The most remarkable outcome is that Turkey did not merely secure its borders, it produced a legitimate governing force inside Syria. The opposition groups trained, armed, and structured by Ankara evolved from fragmented militias into the dominant political-military authority of the country. This is an extraordinary achievement: no regional power not Iran, not Israel, not the Gulf has succeeded in transforming a proxy into the sovereign core of a neighboring state.
In strategic terms, Turkey has accomplished something unique in the Levant: it reshaped a collapsed state not through occupation or annexation, but through controlled state-building by local actors aligned with its security doctrine. Syria today is no longer a threat vector but a buffer and a strategic extension of Turkish influence.
This level of success achieved simultaneously against Russia, Iran, and the United States’ regional architecture places Turkey in a category of its own. It is not merely a regional power operating in the Levant; it has become one of the few states in modern history capable of redesigning the political order of its neighborhood without direct imperial rule.