Turkey, Israel and New War of Attrition in Eastern Mediterranean

The geopolitical turbulence in the Eastern Mediterranean extends far beyond maritime boundaries and hydrocarbon disputes. At its core, the rivalry manifests on land through the systematic dismantling of state structures along the region’s terrestrial fault lines. The current reality in the Levant—particularly across the Syrian-Lebanese borderlands—is the result of a calculated strategy rather than merely the residue of civil war.

This condition, best described as induced structural paralysis, emerges when the state’s monopoly on violence is deliberately hollowed out and replaced by a shifting terrain of warlords, smuggling networks, and armed sub-state actors. For the U.S.-Israeli axis, sustaining this paralysis in the Levant neutralizes conventional threats from neighboring capitals and creates a chaotic buffer that prevents rival powers from establishing their own continental and maritime routes.

Making sense of how a state such as Turkey navigates this terrain requires setting aside classical balance-of-power thinking in favor of Stephen Walt’s balance-of-threat theory. Walt’s insight is that states balance against the threats they perceive as most immediate, assessed through four factors: aggregate power, geographic proximity, offensive capability, and perceived intent.

Seen from Ankara, the emerging security architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean checks every one of Walt’s boxes. Anchored by Israel, Greece, and Cyprus; underwritten by expansive U.S. legislation—the Eastern Mediterranean Security Acts of 2019 and 2026; and reinforced by exclusionary economic frameworks such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, this architecture appears designed to seal Turkey off from its own geographic depth.

Faced with this tightening encirclement, Turkey has abandoned its old posture as NATO’s passive southeastern flank and assumed a new role: the assertive buffer. With its maritime sovereignty facing active strangulation, Ankara treats the manufactured chaos next door as the primary arena for its counter-maneuvering. The same structural paralysis used to shield Israel and isolate Turkey becomes the terrain on which Ankara recalibrates its deterrence—moving through, and at times quietly leveraging, the very non-state networks produced by that paralysis. The objective is to turn the weapon of state collapse against its architects, effectively answering the threat of maritime suffocation before the trap closes.

Strangulation

The plan to redraw the Eastern Mediterranean rests on two parallel tracks: geo-economic encirclement and territorial fragmentation. At the macro level, the encirclement operates through initiatives such as the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, or IMEC, reinforced by hard U.S. legislation—the Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act of 2019, followed by the 2026 Gateway Act. These frameworks function fundamentally as a strategic blockade intended to exclude Turkey, undermine its Blue Homeland, or Mavi Vatan, doctrine, and consolidate an energy and security order led by Israel, Greece, and Cyprus.

Maintaining maritime dominance requires neutralizing the adjacent land. The maritime blockade therefore intersects directly with Induced Structural Paralysis in the Levant. From the perspective of the U.S.-Israeli axis, a rebuilt and centralized state in Damascus or Beirut represents a serious strategic liability. A functioning state can monopolize force, assert sovereignty, and provide Turkey with a stable land route into the Arab interior.

Israel consequently prefers to keep the Syrian-Lebanese borderlands in a state of manageable chaos. Military strikes that disrupt state consolidation, combined with entrenched war economies, ensure that the region remains fractured. Authority is subsequently outsourced to warlords, sub-state militias, and the smuggling networks that transport arms, people, fuel, and Captagon across the border.

Although they appear to be symptoms of state collapse, these networks form a highly effective buffer zone. For Israel, this fluidity reduces the risk of conventional war on the northern front, while the rentier logic of the smuggling economy creates opportunities for intelligence penetration that would be far more difficult along a stable border. For Turkey, the same instability functions as a wall, severing supply lines and foreclosing logistical access to the Levant. The waters of the Eastern Mediterranean remain tightly policed by Western-backed coalitions, while the adjacent lands are locked in sub-state attrition. This asymmetry lies at the core of the strategy.

Fragility Paradox

Understanding the Levant’s structural paralysis requires examining the internal mechanics of what Douglass North described as a limited-access order: a state system built around restricted and fragile institutions. In the Syrian-Lebanese borderlands, the chronic failure of Damascus and Beirut to establish a Weberian monopoly on violence has produced a parallel order in which smuggling networks and armed entrepreneurs function as de facto sovereigns.

This is the fragility paradox at work: state weakness is institutionalized and converted into an asset. Syria’s restructured administration recognizes its military and financial limitations and chooses to tax these networks rather than confront them directly. By drawing revenue from Captagon, human smuggling, and fuel trafficking, the state incorporates sub-state lawlessness into its own survival strategy, converting chaos into leverage for regional bargaining.

Israeli planners consistently exploit this fluidity. From Tel Aviv’s perspective, a Syria too fragmented to rebuild a conventional army is preferable to a stable neighbor. Israel’s recurring strikes serve to keep Syria disabled, preventing Damascus from achieving the territorial integration and social “caging” described by Michael Mann.

Holding a chaotic buffer in place, however, carries inherent risks. Washington appears content to conduct its regional policy on autopilot, managing low-intensity chaos to keep its adversaries occupied. Yet the resulting vacuum places direct pressure on the maritime and continental security of neighboring powers, primarily Turkey.

In response, regional powers are developing more durable forms of hard-power military cooperation. Turkey, Egypt, and Azerbaijan recently demonstrated this shift through the “Three-Way Eagle” (Üçlü Kartal) joint air exercises. Integrating the air forces of Ankara, Cairo, and Baku signals a departure from Western-centric security architectures. This trilateral cooperation serves as a direct countermeasure to the exclusionary frameworks advanced by the U.S. Congress and the intelligence-sharing axis linking Israel, Greece, and Cyprus.

For Turkey and Egypt, Üçlü Kartal demonstrates that, despite the Levant’s induced paralysis, the region’s major powers are assembling the military tools necessary to prevent the Eastern Mediterranean from becoming a closed Western-Israeli lake.

Trading Hamas, Tolerating Hezbollah

Ankara’s application of balance-of-threat thinking is clearest in its treatment of the region’s armed non-state actors. Turkey pursues a bifurcated approach: it heavily pressures Hamas to disarm while quietly benefiting from the continued presence of an armed Hezbollah. This approach rests on a pragmatic assessment of which actor exposes Turkey to Western retaliation and which can be tolerated at little direct cost.

Hamas has shifted from an ally to a liability for Ankara. Following the wars in Gaza, Turkish strategists increasingly regard Hamas’s military wing as a spent force, preferring to redirect the organization toward humanitarian work, reconstruction, and legal advocacy. Because Turkey has hosted Hamas’s political leadership, Ankara remains highly exposed to Western pressure.

That exposure activates the Sèvres Syndrome—the deep-seated Turkish anxiety surrounding Western encirclement and containment. To mitigate this pressure, Ankara has pushed Hamas toward disarmament terms that align closely with recent U.S. stabilization plans.

Although this may appear to represent diplomatic alignment with Washington, it operates fundamentally as a strategic trade. By positioning itself as the indispensable actor capable of extracting disarmament concessions from Hamas, Turkey converts a depleted proxy into leverage over the United States. The recent dismissal of the decade-old Halkbank sanctions case removed a persistent burden on the Turkish economy, while the July NATO summit in Ankara reopened discussions concerning Turkey’s return to the F-35 program—talks that remain contested because of Israeli lobbying. The timing strongly suggests that Ankara is trading an exposed asset in Gaza for economic and military capital closer to home.

Hezbollah is evaluated through an entirely different strategic lens. Operating under Iran’s umbrella, Hezbollah requires no accountability from Ankara in Washington. A well-armed Hezbollah actively serves Turkish interests by sustaining the Levant’s structural paralysis and directing attrition toward Israel. As long as Israel remains tied down in an asymmetric confrontation along the Syrian-Lebanese border, it cannot fully consolidate its position across the Eastern Mediterranean.

Hezbollah’s presence also disrupts the smooth implementation of projects such as IMEC. Ultimately, Turkey trades its exposed position in Gaza for concrete gains from Washington while tacitly welcoming Iran’s role in keeping the Levant unsettled. The threat is balanced, and Turkey’s rivals remain trapped in a landscape structured for continuous attrition.

Limits of Manufactured Chaos

The Eastern Mediterranean rivalry fundamentally shapes the architecture of sovereignty in the Levant, extending far beyond disputes over gas pipelines and maritime zones. By employing Induced Structural Paralysis as an instrument of geopolitical containment, the U.S.-Israeli axis is gambling that managed chaos can indefinitely protect its maritime and continental ambitions. As Ankara’s maneuvers demonstrate, however, chaos is a highly volatile commodity that cannot be permanently monopolized.

Turkey’s transition into an Assertive Buffer—evidenced by its pragmatic recalibration toward non-state actors such as Hamas and Hezbollah, alongside its hard-power convergence with Egypt and Azerbaijan—demonstrates that a structural handicap can be weaponized in multiple directions. The more Washington and Tel Aviv rely on exclusionary geo-economic frameworks such as IMEC and the legislative encirclement represented by the 2026 Gateway Act, the more they incentivize the creation of an independent security matrix capable of bypassing Western dictates altogether.

The viability of Washington’s “autopilot” strategy is steadily deteriorating. The Levant cannot be held indefinitely in suspended animation without generating severe regional blowback. Failing to accommodate the core security imperatives of regional heavyweights such as Turkey and Egypt ensures that the region’s terrestrial fractures will eventually spill into its waters, transforming the entire Eastern Mediterranean into a theater of permanent, uncontainable attrition.