The art of winning without firing a shot

Posted on: 10 March 2026

There is an elementary principle in game theory worth recalling before analysing Turkey's position in this war: the value of an actor in a conflict is determined not only by what it does, but by what other actors need it not to do. Turkey has not fired a shot, deployed troops, or opened its airspace for offensive operations. That is precisely why it has more geopolitical leverage than any other actor in the theatre.

The evidence for this began accumulating on the first day of the war. Iran struck Israel, all six Gulf states, American bases in Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, and British installations in Cyprus. It carefully avoided Turkey, where the United States maintains Incirlik air base, the NATO radar installation at Kürecik that detects Iranian missile launches and transmits the data in real time to Israel via Washington, and dozens of other allied military facilities. Then on 4 March an Iranian missile transited Iraqi and Syrian airspace and was intercepted by NATO air defences over Hatay province. Tehran immediately declared a "technical anomaly." Nobody believed the official version, but nobody had an interest in contradicting it publicly.

The structural explanation is precise. Striking Turkey would have been a catastrophic strategic error for Iran. Not out of neighbourly sentiment, but because Ankara is the only credible diplomatic channel Tehran still has open to the West. As one analyst at Ankara University put it, Iran's choice not to strike Turkey "is not a matter of goodwill but the outcome of a highly layered strategic calculation." Eliminating that channel would push Erdogan into the opposing camp, remove the one interlocutor Washington is willing to listen to on Tehran, and transform an already difficult conflict into one with no diplomatic exits.

British readers will find the underlying architecture recognisable, if not the specific geography. The art of maintaining influence by refusing to commit fully to either side is not an exclusively Turkish invention. What is specific to Erdogan is the consistency and explicitness with which he has institutionalised it as a declared foreign policy rather than a temporary expedient. He condemned the American and Israeli strikes on Iran. He expressed "sadness" at Khamenei's death. He refused to open Turkish airspace for offensive operations. He simultaneously condemned Iran's missiles on the Gulf, kept his lines to Washington open, avoided formally breaking with NATO, and continued hosting American bases without obstructing their defensive function. Ideologically, the position is incoherent. Strategically, it is close to optimal.

The incoherence is the point. An actor clearly aligned with one belligerent loses its value as an intermediary. An actor that maintains open channels with all sides, that both belligerents have an interest in not striking and not alienating, that sits inside NATO without behaving as a disciplined ally, is worth considerably more than its direct military weight would suggest. Erdogan has understood this for fifteen years and has applied it consistently across Syria, Libya, Ukraine and the successive rounds of NATO enlargement, extracting concessions each time in exchange for eventually delivering what Washington needed.

Yesterday we examined how MBS built a position of maximum influence and minimum exposure that collapsed the moment the conflict demanded clear positions. Turkey has constructed the same architecture with one crucial additional element: Erdogan has never concealed his ambiguity. He has declared it as policy, institutionalised it as strategic autonomy, and used it systematically as leverage. MBS operated in ambiguity without admitting it: when the war exposed him, the domestic political cost was immediate. Erdogan operates in ambiguity as an explicit method: when the war tests it, his credibility as a mediator increases rather than diminishes.

There is a second structural advantage that this crisis has made visible. With Iran militarily degraded, Hezbollah weakened by the previous year's campaign, Assad's Syria already fallen, and Hamas diminished, the vacuum of influence across the arc from the Levant to the Caucasus is expanding rapidly. Turkey is the only regional power with the military projection, the diplomatic relationships and the geographic position to fill significant parts of that vacuum. Not through direct occupation but through what former Foreign Minister Davutoglu theorised as strategic depth: economic presence, intelligence networks, bilateral agreements, and influence over Sunni Islamist political movements that, in a weakened Iran, will seek new patrons.

The risk for Ankara, which some analysts are beginning to name, is symmetrical to the advantage. An Iran that collapses completely is not necessarily an Iran favourable to Turkish interests. A power vacuum in Persia produces Kurdish instability, refugee flows, possible Israeli expansion into Syria, and a strengthening of direct American influence in a theatre where Turkey prefers Washington to operate through intermediaries. The Iranian Kurdish groups already described as on standby for cross-border operations are a direct security problem for Ankara regardless of who governs in Tehran.

Erdogan is therefore optimising on a different time horizon from the principal belligerents. Trump wants a rapid, measurable victory, sellable to the American public. Netanyahu wants to eliminate the existential threat before someone stops the bombing. Both operate with short-term logic. Turkey operates with the logic of an actor who knows that the Middle Eastern theatre will exist long after this war ends, and that the position acquired now determines the opportunities available for the next twenty years.

This does not mean the Turkish position is without risk. The missile intercepted over Hatay demonstrated that ambiguity has a physical limit: ballistic trajectories do not respect diplomatic calculations. If another missile were to strike Turkish territory with casualties, Erdogan would face pressure from a nationalist domestic audience that would compromise the neutrality on which his leverage depends. The margin between "acceptable technical anomaly" and "casus belli I cannot ignore" is thinner than any strategic calculation can guarantee.

But within that limit, Turkey remains the actor that wins without firing: too useful to Iran to be struck, too embedded in NATO to be ignored by Washington, too autonomous to be commanded by either. In a conflict where MBS obtained the war he wanted and is paying the consequences, where Europe dispatches frigates without a strategy, where the United States bombs without a plan for the day after, Erdogan has done nothing. That is precisely why he matters more than anyone else.