While Iranian protesters are being crushed, imprisoned, and killed by the Islamic Republic, Turkey’s authorities is busy operating diplomatic interference for the mullahs. Ankara’s effort, marshaled by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, shouldn’t be an aberration or a miscalculation. Rather, it’s a revealing affirmation of Turkey’s long-standing ideological sympathy for Islamist regimes and actions throughout the Middle East.
Turkish officers cloak their protection of Tehran in warnings about “regional instability,” arguing that the collapse of the Islamic Republic may create a harmful energy vacuum. But beneath this acquainted speaking level lies an easier reality: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan doesn’t need to see Iran fall — particularly if its downfall would weaken a fellow Islamist regime and strengthen Israel’s strategic place.
An Iran freed from nuclear ambition and terrorist proxies can be a significant victory for Israel and the broader Western safety order. For Erdogan, that consequence is unacceptable.
To make certain, issues about the dangers of navy confrontation with Iran aren’t illegitimate. Even Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party has expressed unease about escalation. Yet, Fidan’s public statements go far past mere warning. They quantity to each a wholesale absolution of Tehran’s crimes and a betrayal of the Iranian people.
In feedback printed by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency, Fidan denied that Iran’s protests replicate a preferred demand for regime change, dismissing them as economically pushed and due to this fact ambiguous. This is demonstrably false. Iranians are risking their lives not for marginal financial aid, however to reject a system that has crushed their freedoms for greater than 4 many years. What started as protests over hardship has unmistakably developed right into a nationwide repudiation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic itself.
Fidan compounds this deception by blaming worldwide sanctions, as a substitute of Iran’s personal catastrophic governance, for the struggling of peculiar Iranians. But this argument collapses below even minimal scrutiny. Tehran has repeatedly been supplied off-ramps: cut back repression, abandon nuclear brinkmanship, and cease exporting terrorism. Instead, it has poured billions into Hezbollah, Hamas, and regional militias whereas resuming its nuclear ambitions. Iran’s distress is self-inflicted. It shouldn’t be imposed by the outdoors world.
If Erdogan had been genuinely involved about the destabilizing results of Iran’s collapse, he wouldn’t have spent years serving to prop up the regime economically. In 2019, U.S. prosecutors charged Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank with fraud, cash laundering, and sanctions evasion, alleging that it helped Iran transfer roughly $20 billion in restricted funds, a few of it by means of the U.S. monetary system. Ankara’s report exhibits not restraint, however complicity.
Yet, the Turkey-Iran relationship is about greater than cash. It can be rooted in ideological affinity. During the newest wave of Iranian protests, Fidan emphasised Iran’s “importance” to Turkey, whereas Erdogan invoked “Muslim unity” in opposition to Israel throughout the current regional battle. This rhetoric echoes the worldview of Erdogan’s Islamist mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, who overtly embraced Tehran’s clerical management many years in the past. The affinity between Ankara and Tehran is neither tactical nor non permanent. In reality, it’s doctrinal.
What actually unsettles Erdogan, nevertheless, shouldn’t be Iran’s regional position, however what Iran’s protests would possibly encourage at dwelling. If an entrenched Islamist regime may be challenged in Tehran, why not in Ankara? Indeed, Turkey’s personal opposition has begun drawing the connection. In Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s main opposition newspaper, voices from the CHP have condemned Iran’s repression and expressed solidarity with its protesters.
Turkey’s home unrest isn’t any abstraction. Since March 2025, the nation has witnessed a few of the largest demonstrations in its republican historical past. In January, CHP chief Ozgur Ozel led tens of hundreds in Istanbul to protest the continued detention of the metropolis’s mayor and presidential contender, Ekrem Imamoglu. What started as outrage over a single arrest has grown right into a broader motion in opposition to Erdogan’s erosion of the rule of legislation.
ENDING IRAN’S REGIME WON’T BE EASY
Turkey shouldn’t be Iran. It nonetheless holds elections, maintains a viable opposition, and lacks a practice of revolutionary upheaval. But these distinctions are narrowing. Should Erdogan manipulate the 2028 presidential race by completely sidelining Imamoglu, he might push Turkish society previous a breaking level.
Ankara’s eagerness to smother Iran’s democratic aspirations is nothing wanting an act of regime self-preservation. A free Iran would embolden Turks to problem the Islamist kleptocracy hollowing out their very own establishments. That is why the United States and its democratic allies should stand unequivocally with the Iranian people. They ought to achieve this, and never just for Iran’s future, however to make sure that the hope of democracy doesn’t disappear throughout the area.
