Why Turkey Matters in the Middle East

Just as Iran has emerged as a more significant regional power after the Iraq war of 2003, Turkey in the past two years has emerged as a more dynamic, respected and powerful regional player, and the events of the past week off the Gaza coast have only accelerated this process.

The third non-Arab power in the Middle East – Israel – seems to be moving in the opposite direction, generating increasingly vocal international criticisms and demands for investigations into its behavior, while many of its leaders are cancelling trips abroad for fear of being indicted for war crimes.

Of these three countries, Turkey strikes me as the most interesting and important, because its growing prominence includes a combination of respect, credibility and democratic legitimacy that Iran and Israel do not fully share. Much international media and political analysis speaks incorrectly of Turkey and Iran as either hegemons or role models for the rest of the Middle East. They are neither, because non-Arab states, even Muslim-majority ones, cannot expect to define how power is exercised, relations configured, interests determined, or identity expressed in the Arab world.