The New Fault Line: Israel and Turkey on a Collision Course

On March 25, 2025, Israeli aircraft struck a set of Syrian airfields. The targets were not Syrian assets, instead they were the sites Turkey had surveyed for planned forward military bases. Ankara quietly shelved the deployment.That is what the Israel-Turkey rivalry looks like when it is working as designed: a NATO member and a US major non-NATO ally maneuvering against each other in a third country, close enough to require a deconfliction hotline, disciplined enough that neither has yet acknowledged the confrontation for what it is. The two governments have run a channel through Azerbaijani mediation to prevent accidents. Turkish officials describe it as, "strictly technical," signaling neither normalization nor any convergence.The conditions that made the channel necessary are getting worse, and the outside power that has historically kept this rivalry from becoming a rupture is changing.Trump's Gift to ErdoganWhen Donald Trump landed in Ankara on July 7, 2026 for the NATO summit he became the first sitting US president to visit Turkey in over a decade. He arrived with what aides openly called a "gift bag" for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. On CAATSA sanctions, imposed in 2020 o...