The war that the United States and Israel launched against Iran in February has left a great many consequences in its wake. It greatly damaged Iran’s infrastructure, shook the Gulf monarchies whose economic models rest on the promise of stability, and it opened, as the exchanges over recent weeks have shown, a visible gap between Washington and the Israeli government. Above all, it left a deep scar across the region, and it brought home, much as the war in Ukraine did for Europe in 2022, the danger of staking too much on a single point in the supply chain. That may yet prove the war’s most lasting legacy, that of a catalyst for diversification and for the search for new partners that opens the field to alignments that would until recently have seemed improbable, none more so than the axis now drawing Turkey, Syria, and Ukraine together as their interests converge.
No country illustrates the lesson more starkly than Iraq, where oil accounts for roughly nine of every ten dollars the government spends, and almost all of it leaves through the southern terminals at Basra. When the Strait of Hormuz closed, Iraqi exports collapsed by close to 90% in a single month, producing an immediate and grave fiscal emergency. Saudi Arabia weathered the same shock through its pipeline across the peninsula to the Red Sea and the UAE through its outlet at Fujairah beyond the strait, but Iraq had built no equivalent redundancy and found itself with nowhere to send its crude. Lacking the capital and the time to build a bypass of its own, Baghdad turned west to Syria and began trucking fuel oil across the desert to the Mediterranean port of Baniyas, with crude and naphtha to follow and the Syrian government already expanding the terminal to receive them. The route that finishes in Baniyas is, by every conventional measure, a poor substitute for the one it seeks to offset. It carries a fraction of a pipeline’s volume, costs more, moves slower, and runs through territory where the sectarian fault lines are raw, with Shia Iraqi operators crossing a Syria now governed by men whose past is marred by Sunni jihadism. What gives the arrangement its weight is that Iraqi officials have said it will remain in place even after Hormuz fully reopens. This is significant as it signals clearly that the calculus of Middle Eastern energy exporters is shifting from optimizing for cost toward insuring against catastrophe, toward diversification. And not even a permanent peace deal with Iran will erase this traumatic experience for Gulf leaders, much less reverse the drive toward diversification.
Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new leader who has proven himself to be a savvy political operator, has read the opening well. The Syria he inherited from the collapse of the Assad regime is broken, carrying a reconstruction bill running into the hundreds of billions, yet it still holds what has historically been its most valuable asset, which is its position at the hinge between the Gulf, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Caspian Sea. Al-Sharaa has spent his first months in power selling precisely that geography, pitching Syria at a European summit in Cyprus as a secure artery connecting Central Asia and the Gulf to Europe and reviving the long-dormant Four Seas project, a network of railways, roads, and pipelines that would route a share of regional trade overland, away from the Strait.
The scheme could absorb at most a fifth of Hormuz volumes and would take a decade of investment Syria cannot presently finance (older proposals like reviving the Kirkuk-Baniyas pipeline run into the same roadblocks of cost and ruined infrastructure), but its significance matters beyond its full realization. Capital is already moving toward it, with Saudi Arabia backing the SilkLink connectivity project, the Emirati operator DP World investing heavily into the port of Tartus, and Turkey, Jordan, and Syria forming a trilateral committee to build new rail corridors that Saudi Arabia is preparing to join.
The country that gains most from this reorganization is Turkey, and, in a non-trivial sense, at the expense of Russia. For over two decades Moscow’s claim to global, as opposed to merely regional, reach rested heavily on its presence in exactly these spaces (at Tartus and at Khmeimim, for example) that allowed it to project force into the eastern Mediterranean and on its role as the indispensable patron in conflicts from the Caucasus to the Levant. But that edifice has been crumbling in plain sight, a decline accelerated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The conflict has shown Russia’s inability to sustain the image of a global power broker, which it had spent years trying to project. Moscow could not save Assad, who now lives in exile in the Russian capital. It could not come to Armenia’s aid when Azerbaijan completed its conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh, with Russian peacekeepers merely looking on. It could offer Tehran no effective cover during the strikes. Across its wider network of nominal allies, from a Venezuela it could not protect to a Cuba sliding toward collapse, the same reality repeats itself: that of a power so consumed by its war in Ukraine that it can no longer honor the commitments on which its influence was built.
And as Russia’s influence dwindles, Ankara moves in, and it does so through Syria. The government in Damascus owes its existence in large measure to Turkish support, as Ankara was the main sponsor of the Syrian opposition through almost the entire civil war and sheltered al-Sharaa and his cadres for years. The Turkish approach has the peculiarity of advancing against Russia’s regional position while leaving Turkey’s own relationship with Russia relatively warm. Erdogan has on various occasions declined to join European sanctions, has kept diplomatic channels to Putin open while maintaining heavy trade flows, all the while seizing on the openings that Russian overextension has created. The war with Iran has been a true catalyst, widening every one of those openings at once, leaving Erdogan as an important mediator in both the Gulf and Ukraine, as well as positioning Turkey’s domestic defense industry as a supplier of choice for Gulf states that learned during the Iranian strikes how exposed their reliance on American protection had left them and, increasingly, European states alike.
Ukraine has entered the same emerging regional architecture, albeit from a different direction. Four years of fighting the largest drone war in history have given Kyiv a counter-drone industry that no other state in the world can presently match, and that industry has matured at precisely the moment when the Gulf monarchies have learned, at considerable expense, that the American Patriot batteries, which they had relied on to take down Iranian drones, cost several million dollars apiece to intercept munitions whose production costs run into the low thousands. Zelensky has read the convergence and acted on it, signing long-term military cooperation agreements with Saudi Arabia and Qatar this spring, dispatching more than two hundred Ukrainian specialists to help regional partners counter Iranian drones and arriving in Damascus alongside the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, to meet al-Sharaa in a setting that, until 18 months ago, would have been remarkable for a Ukrainian head of state. The Damascus visit is the part of the tour that gives the alignment its weight, since it makes visible that Ukraine is no longer trading exclusively with established Western partners but has been admitted, through Turkish mediation, into the same emerging Middle Eastern circuit that increasingly runs through Ankara and the new Syria. This alignment also rests on a commercial substrate of its own. Ukraine’s chernozem belt, which covers large swathes of the country’s central and eastern regions, makes the country one of the most coveted agricultural producers in the world and the “breadbasket of Europe.” This makes it a valuable partner for a country like Syria, which, after being ravaged for over a decade by a brutal civil war, still struggles with chronic food insecurity. This deepening partnership only reveals itself as even more mutually beneficial when we take into account that Syria holds some of the largest phosphate reserves in the Middle East (amounting to 1.7 billion tons), a critical element in agricultural production, especially given the phosphate deficits in Ukrainian soil.
The full consequences of this shift will take years to emerge. Corridors of trade and energy are not built overnight, and many of the projects now being discussed may never move beyond ambition. But the macro matters more than the micro in this case; that is, the broader movement matters more than the individual projects. These powers have learned to occupy the ground American hegemony no longer seems interested in holding and that Russia has shown itself unable to defend. Each of them is acting under the same conviction that no single patron and no single route can be relied on any longer. The axis taking shape between Ankara, Damascus, and Kyiv is the clearest expression of that conviction.
