Ben-Gurion’s peripheral doctrine \u2014 leaning on the non-Arab periphery (Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia) against the Arab environment \u2014 has stopped functioning as a strategic frame for Israeli security. Two of its load-bearing states, Iran and Turkey, have become the cores of two axes of resistance to Israel: the Shiite and the Sunni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rout and radical weakening of the Shiite axis brought no relief; it cleared space. Jihadists seized Syria, and Turkey declared itself the alternative pole of the fight against Israel. Washington finished the shift, effectively handing the Kurds to the new jihadist government in Damascus and its Turkish patron. The military victory over Iran worsened Israel’s strategic position. In breaking the Shiite axis \u2014 Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas, Iran itself \u2014 Israel removed the very force that had restrained Sunni radicalism: it was Iran and Hezbollah that fought the Sunni jihadists in Syria and Iraq. A Sunni front is taking shape without unified command: Turkey at the center with Syria as proxy, Hamas relocated to Istanbul, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, which has signed a strategic pact with nuclear-armed Pakistan. Below the state tier sits a jihadist layer with no center at all: a reactivated ISIS in Syria and North Africa, al-Qaeda, and the Sahel groupings (Mali).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In routing Iran, Israel also signaled to Sunni players that it is situationally vulnerable and politically isolated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vulnerability is situational: Israel came out of simultaneous campaigns against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis depleted \u2014 interceptors spent, the army worn down, no reserve for a new northern front opened by an adversary of a different class, a NATO army with hypersonics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The isolation is synchronous: all three principal supports cooled at once \u2014 the military patron (the US), the main economic partner (the EU), and the Arab environment (Saudi Arabia). I take each of the three lines up below; what matters here is the coincidence in timing. Israel’s external contour sagged at precisely the moment a Sunni axis is assembling against it, while the Shiite one \u2014 bled but not finished \u2014 remains an open front.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Existential.<\/strong> The Turkish leadership calls Israel a threat to Turkey and the region outright. The latest instance \u2014 July 4, 2026: in Istanbul, Erdogan declared that a “war-crazed” Israel cannot be allowed to derail the US\u2013Iran deal and that no regional settlement is possible without the regional powers. This caps an escalation: on June 10 he told parliament that Israeli operations in Lebanon and Syria “threaten Turkey too,” tying Ankara’s security to Beirut and Damascus. Foreign Minister Fidan warned in December 2025 that “after Iran, Israel cannot live without an enemy” and that Turkey would be the next target.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Geopolitical.<\/strong> The neo-Ottoman and pan-Turkic project, the “Blue Homeland” doctrine with its claim to the maritime space of the Eastern Mediterranean. A significant threat to Israel is Ankara’s growing pull on Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan \u2014 two important Israeli partners (Azeri oil, the anti-Iran linkage, the Caspian rear) that pan-Turkism is gradually drawing into Ankara’s orbit. Telling: when Israel recognized the Armenian genocide on June 28, 2026, Baku \u2014 despite its status as a strategic partner \u2014 sided not with Jerusalem but with Ankara, calling the move a “distortion of historical facts” and demanding its reversal (while keeping the pragmatics intact: it cut neither oil through Ceyhan nor operations against Iran from Azeri territory).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Economic.<\/strong> Turkey and Syria aim to squeeze Israel out of the India\u2013EU corridor and are building out the counter-Turkic axis \u2014 the Middle Corridor via Zangezur (TRIPP), the overland link Turkey\u2013Azerbaijan\u2013Central Asia that bypasses Iran. The mechanics \u2014 ports, railways, operators \u2014 I take up in the corridor section; what matters here is the vector itself: Ankara is growing its transit centrality at Israel’s expense. The Zangezur link is not a duplicate of IMEC (it is a separate Central Asia\u2013Europe axis routing around Russia and Iran) but a second contour of the same centralization: it wires Caspian and Central Asian transit onto Ankara and sharpens the pan-Turkic pull on Baku and Astana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n None of the three dimensions is catastrophic on its own; their force lies in combination: existential rhetoric supplies political cover, geopolitical expansion builds the infrastructure of pressure, the economic challenge strips Israel of material leverage. In sum this is a coherent strategy of eviction, and it has to be assessed whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All of this against the backdrop of US rapprochement with Qatar, Turkey, and Syria. In this frame, Macron’s visit to Damascus and the fight over the IMEC corridor are not a standalone French storyline but a common anti-Israel vector \u2014 one that pushes Paris, and behind it the role of Europe, to the front of the stage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On July 5, the Syrian presidency’s press service (SANA) announced Macron’s visit to Damascus \u2014 the first by a Western head of state since Assad’s fall, with a delegation of investors and an agenda of “strengthening ties.” The visit is slotted into his itinerary for the NATO summit in Ankara and continues the line begun with al-Sharaa’s reception at the \u00c9lys\u00e9e in May 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On July 6\u20137 Macron is already in Damascus: he meets al-Sharaa, chairs a roundtable on postwar reconstruction, and brings a CMA CGM and TotalEnergies delegation, converting the political legitimation of the “new Syria” into access to infrastructure and contracts. It is a demonstrative bid by Paris for the role of Damascus’s chief Western advocate and operator of the corridor’s Syrian endpoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Behind the “strengthening ties” formula sits a concrete function: Paris became the political author of Syria’s exit from sanctions isolation. After Assad’s fall the European sanctions regime shifted from the logic of punishment to the logic of managing reconstruction. In May 2025 the EU lifted almost all economic sanctions (on the order of $15 billion in assets and trade restrictions), keeping bans only on weapons, dual-use goods, and repression technology; on November 6, UN Security Council Resolution 2799 delisted al-Sharaa himself and Interior Minister Anas Khattab from the counterterrorism lists (14 in favor, China abstaining); the US removed HTS’s terrorist designation in July, Britain in October. By lobbying for “swift” removal of the remaining restrictions, Macron locked in the role of post-Assad Syria’s chief Western advocate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The logic is compensatory. France is in a protracted fiscal crisis (rising debt, blocked reforms) and is losing to Israel across every line of its traditional Middle Eastern presence: the arms market, its reliance on the Christians and Druze of Lebanon and Syria, gas, venture capital. Hence the maneuver \u2014 to dig in at Damascus and Ankara where Israel is exposed, in exchange for gas licenses in Lebanon (TotalEnergies) and arms contracts. Public criticism of Israel serves as the entry ticket to Arab markets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The India\u2013Middle East\u2013Europe Corridor (IMEC), announced at the G20 in September 2023, was conceived to bypass Hormuz and Suez: rail and ports from India through the Gulf, Jordan, and Israel \u2014 to Haifa and onward to Europe, with savings of up to 30% in cost and 40% in time against Suez. Israel was handed the central slot \u2014 the gateway to Europe. Since then the map has been getting rewritten. Iran’s weakening let Turkey seize Syria, and now Ankara and Damascus are pressing to shift the route off the Israeli line onto a Turkish\u2013Syrian one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to Ankara’s patronage over Damascus, Turkey has already built control over the logistics axis along the Eastern Mediterranean: the Syrian ports (Latakia under CMA CGM, Tartus under DP World), the rail link through Syria and Jordan (the Hejaz Railway under a Turkish\u2013Saudi memorandum). Turkey gains dispositive control over the land-and-port transit by which the Levant connects to Europe and the Gulf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paris enters Syria not with a bid to participate but from an occupied bridgehead. On May 1, 2025, CMA CGM (Rodolphe Saad\u00e9) signed a 30-year concession on the Latakia container terminal \u2014 ~95% of Syria’s container throughput \u2014 with a \u20ac230 million commitment (in August the second phase was accelerated to \u20ac200 million; in November a 20% partner, AD Ports, was brought in). Any trans-Anatolian\u2013Syrian branch of IMEC runs into the Mediterranean endpoint \u2014 and that endpoint is already under a French company’s operational control. Paris’s commercial interest is not adjacent to Israel’s eviction from the logistics; it is built directly on it: the more freight through Latakia, the more valuable the asset. And the money is corporate, not sovereign: Macron’s treasury is strapped, CMA CGM is not \u2014 so the fiscal crisis constrains Paris politically without stopping a private firm from expanding its port business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paris here is neither the initiator nor “one of many” \u2014 nearly everyone wants the route to run past Israel: Turkey and Syria for their own branch, Saudi Arabia for independence from Israel, Iran by definition, and, probably, other regional capitals. The dispute is not whether to bypass Israel but which bypass wins \u2014 the trans-Anatolian\u2013Syrian one via Latakia or the Iraqi “Development Road” (Iraq\u2013Turkey); both skirt Israel. France is the only major European power to have taken the side of this near-region-wide front against the Israeli route.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Below are those able to operationalize that front: who holds concrete assets and levers behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turkey \u2014 the political motor.<\/strong> The NATO summit on July 7\u20138 in Ankara marks Erdogan’s status jump: Trump notified Congress of the sale of F-110 engines worth $700M+ over lawmakers’ objections and is hinting at F-35s; Netanyahu, who had asked for pressure on Ankara in Syria, was told to be “reasonable.” For Israel, ceding the region’s logistical spine to Syria under Turkish patronage is not a foregone gain but a security question.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Saudi Arabia \u2014 money and will.<\/strong> Riyadh is ready to pour billions into Syria precisely for independence from Israel: it has already rerouted fiber-optic projects through Syria and in June 2026 signed a memorandum with Turkey on rail through Jordan and Syria (reviving the Hejaz Railway). On this route Ankara and Riyadh are allies, not rivals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n France \u2014 and ports.<\/strong> French business is swapping Haifa for Latakia as IMEC’s endpoint; the CMA CGM concession turns the corridor’s Mediterranean outlet into an asset that appreciates exactly as the Israeli route is squeezed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The UAE \u2014 the exception.<\/strong> There is one more player in the Syrian ports: AD Ports holds 20% of Latakia, DP World took Tartus ($800 million). But it is Abu Dhabi hedging, not “the Gulf” writ large: the UAE is invested in the Syrian branch and in I2U2 with Israel, trades with India at $100B+, and is tied into Israeli technology. The Emirates are the only monarchy outside the anti-Israel coalition; they have an interest in routes coexisting, not in one replacing the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The US \u2014 turning away from Jerusalem.<\/strong> Over six months Washington has demonstratively turned its back on Israel, and almost every step raises the weight of Ankara and Damascus \u2014 the states behind the competing branch. The Iran\u2013US memorandum of June 17 was signed without Israel (which got a copy), marking the loss of the Israeli veto; on Syria Jerusalem was reined in, while Ankara is being armed with F-110 engines. Sharpest is the Lebanon storyline: at the G7 and in interviews Trump several times proposed handing Hezbollah to Syria, saying al-Sharaa “would do it better than Israel”; per Reuters, the administration had been probing since last year the entry of Syrian forces into Eastern Lebanon and gave a “green light” \u2014 though envoy Barrack called that a lie, and al-Sharaa himself rejects an intervention (as do Beirut and Jerusalem). Damascus fears repeating the 1976\u20132005 occupation, Iranian reprisals, and a reaction from its own Shiite community, and its security apparatus is not consolidated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trump’s intent here is not subversion but co-optation: by courting al-Sharaa (a White House visit on November 10, 2025, removal of the terrorist designation and the $10 million bounty, an invitation for American firms into Syrian oil and gas), he is pulling Damascus not into an anti-Israel coalition but into his own regional order \u2014 up to normalization via the Abraham Accords. He is building the same order in Gaza: Trump’s “Board of Peace” (charter signed at Davos in January 2026, mandate from UNSC Resolution 2803, permanent chair Trump himself) locks in Qatar and Turkey as ceasefire guarantors and seats them on the Gaza executive board \u2014 over Netanyahu’s direct objections, as he sought to bar both capitals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But intent and outcome diverge. The Comprehensive Plan (September 29, 2025, endorsed by UNSC Resolution 2803) prescribes a “conditional pathway” to Palestinian statehood: it opens only after PA reform and as Gaza reconstruction advances, so here Israel keeps an effective veto. But the principle of a Palestinian attachment, legalized at the UN Security Council level, is the same one the European configuration builds into IMEC; and where in Gaza governance it stays within Israel’s control, on the corridor that same conditionality turns into a precondition no government in Jerusalem will meet. A durable configuration sets in: Paris legitimizes the “new Syria”; Washington tries to use it as a cheap coercive instrument against Hezbollah while seating Ankara and Doha in Gaza’s administration; al-Sharaa banks the dividends while dodging the role of expeditionary corps. The upshot for Israel is one and the same regardless of Trump’s intentions: the US systematically raises the weight of exactly those players (Damascus, Ankara, Doha) that stand behind the anti-Israel front and the competing branch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The EU \u2014 a sanctions ladder over settlements.<\/strong> On July 3 von der Leyen announced a document restricting goods from the settlements and recalled that the proposal to suspend the Association Agreement’s trade preferences remains on the table (qualified majority); in May sanctions were imposed on settlement structures (Amana, Nahala, Regavim). Brussels’s political ceiling for handing Israel the terminal point is falling, and Palestinian statehood is built into the European capitals’ position. The mechanism is a project one, not merely a sanctions one, and it has a ready form \u2014 the “IMEC Peace Triangle” (Israel\u2013Palestine\u2013Jordan), promoted by EcoPeace Middle East: a humanitarian-trade frame Jordan\u2013West Bank\u2013Israel\u2013Gaza with Jordan as hub, transit nodes at Jericho, Hebron, and Gaza, and spurs to Haifa and Gaza as the corridor’s “two gateways,” pitched on the Rotterdam\u2013Hamburg model. This is not an EU program but a track model being taken up from above: CEPS folds it into Global Gateway under the banner of peace through connectivity, and G7-facing analysis calls for placing exactly the Israel\u2013Palestine\u2013Jordan triad at the center of the regional architecture. So the “Palestinian attachment” acquires a load-bearing structure: Europe is prepared to sign off on the Israeli endpoint not around the two-state solution but as its support \u2014 and that is precisely what makes the route domestically unbearable for Jerusalem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Iran \u2014 a return to the settlement.<\/strong> The June 17 memorandum, the 60-day countdown, technical talks in Doha, the reopening of Hormuz, Trump’s hint at its accession to the Abraham Accords. The effect is double-edged, and it has to be assessed precisely. Unblocking Hormuz removes the acute, cost-driven rationale for the overland bypass: if the strait works, the urgency of an expensive detour falls for all routes, the Syrian one included. But the structural rationale remains: Iran keeps its leverage to disrupt over the Levant and over the strait (a toll for passage), and it is that leverage which keeps the land bypass strategically in demand \u2014 no longer as savings but as insurance against the Iranian valve. The Iraqi “Development Road” becomes less toxic in the process. The construction is fragile: Ben-Gvir declares that “Trump’s deal does not bind Israel,” and strikes on Lebanon continue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The shift in the threat axis yields a measurable military consequence that political analysis usually omits. Israel’s layered air defense was built for Iran: Arrow-2 and Arrow-3, by their developers’ own admission, were created against the Iranian missile threat. Arrow-3 intercepts ballistic targets out to 3,000 km outside the atmosphere, on distant approaches; Arrow-2, out to 1,500 km inside the atmosphere. The whole geometry is calculated on an east\u2013west axis and an Iranian flight time on the order of 12\u201315 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The northern vector breaks that geometry. Ankara\u2013Tel Aviv is only ~890 km: within range of Turkey’s Tayfun (Block-1 \u2014 800 km, Block-4 \u2014 1,000\u20131,500 km, Mach 5+, serial production from 2026), and flight time from Turkish territory drops to 5\u20136 minutes. From southern Syria and the Golan, where Turkey is building up its presence, it is ~60 km to Haifa \u2014 already David’s Sling or Iron Dome territory, not Arrow, and the count runs in seconds. Arrow-3, with its exo-atmospheric intercept, is cost-excessive for such targets (~$2 million per launch) and suboptimal by angle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An anti-missile architecture honed for the Iranian vector requires, against the Syrian\u2013Turkish one, either a physical redeployment of batteries, or new tiers with a different geometry, or both \u2014 a separate line of cost and time, incommensurable with any corridor savings and not publicly discussed by Israel’s defense industry. The Turkish threat here is not “a second Iran” on the list but a qualitatively harder problem: a multitude of close, dispersed launch points collapses the attacker’s cost of saturating and punching through the air defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Turkish challenge is systemic and is becoming the first-order one. Existential rhetoric, geopolitical expansion, and economic eviction are a single Turkish strategy, and it has to be assessed whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Five pressures converge on the Israeli route, all wired to Ankara as the motor: the French operator of the Latakia endpoint, the Turkish\u2013Saudi rail link, the US pivot to Erdogan and Damascus, the EU sanctions ladder with its built-in Palestinian condition (the “IMEC Peace Triangle” model), and Turkey’s own control over the corridor’s port-and-rail infrastructure. Iran here is not a sixth pressure but a deflator: reopening Hormuz can deflate the urgency of the entire corridor race for every participant, but that does not rescue the Israeli route \u2014 it merely cheapens the prize the others are competing for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To the political economy is added a military-technical cost: the shift of the threat axis from east to north devalues the air defense built for Iran and demands separate outlays incommensurable with any corridor savings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The “Palestinian condition” for building such a corridor makes the Israeli route unrealizable on the EU’s terms and unexecutable domestically. Brussels and Riyadh need a Palestinian attachment that no Israeli government will grant amid the expansion of Israeli sovereignty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ben-Gurion’s peripheral doctrine \u2014 leaning on the non-Arab periphery (Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia) against the Arab environment \u2014 has stopped functioning as a strategic frame for Israeli security. Two of its load-bearing states, Iran and Turkey, have become the cores of two axes of resistance to Israel: the Shiite and the Sunni. The rout and radical weakening of the Shiite axis brought no relief; it cleared space. Jihadists seized Syria, and Turkey declared itself the alternative pole of the fight against Israel. Washington finished the shift, effectively handing the Kurds to the new jihadist government in Damascus and its Turkish patron…. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":8766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,37,55],"tags":[109,253,107,108,242],"class_list":["post-8768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-activity","category-articles-en","category-think-tank","tag-geopolitics","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-middle-east","tag-usa"],"yoast_head":"\nParis Legitimizes the “New Syria”<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
The India\u2013EU Corridor: Fighting Over the Route<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
The Widening Field of Pressure: US, EU, Iran<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
The Military-Technical Gap: Air Defense Built for the Iranian Vector<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Conclusions<\/h5>\n\n\n\n