Global Geopolitics in 2025: A Strategic Assessment, “Harsh Birth of the Multipolar Order”
By Retired Admiral Cem Gurdeniz
§ The year 2025 has marked a period of geopolitical tectonic shifts unprecedented not only in recent decades but arguably in centuries.
§ The multipolar world has now fully emerged.
§ The era of American Peace has officially ended.
§ The central question is no longer whether this transition will occur, but how the world will be reshaped.
Will the transition be managed, or will it harden uncontrollably?
2025 has demonstrated that multipolarity was not born through a “soft transition,” but rather through a conflictual, irregular, and dangerous process. Instead of managing this transition, the United States has attempted to prevent it—thereby generating deeper and more frequent crises. The war in Ukraine, rising tensions over Taiwan, and increasing vulnerabilities in maritime trade routes are all manifestations of this process.
The new order has not yet been institutionalized; however, it is evident that the old order has entirely lost its legitimacy. 2025 stands as the harshest year of this interim period. It has gone down in history as the year in which Western dominance—and its latest incarnation, Pax Americana—declined de facto, not rhetorically, collapsing across multiple domains. Pax Americana can no longer make credible promises about the future.
Historically, a power that has lost its capacity to establish order, manage crises, and maintain legitimacy cannot be associated with the concept of “peace.” From this point onward, the world no longer speaks of an American-centered peace order. Instead, it confronts a polycentric, harsh, uncertain, and transitional era of power struggle. In this age, seas, trade routes, energy corridors, and legal frameworks are being redefined. New balances are emerging amid the wreckage of the old order. This is why 2025 represents not only the end of American Peace but also the year in which the naked truth of the global order was fully exposed.
The Harsh Birth of the Multipolar Order
Historically, power transitions have never been calm or stable. Declining hegemons have always attempted to delay or prevent transition. Today, rather than accepting its diminishing position and seeking a framework for shared influence with emerging power centres, the United States remains trapped in the reflex of preserving the status quo through force. This approach has not slowed multipolarity; on the contrary, it has rendered the transition more brittle, volatile, and uncontrolled. In this context, the war in Ukraine is not merely a regional conflict; it is the laboratory of the old order’s self-defence. NATO enlargement, the containment of Russia, and the reliance on proxy warfare represent the essence of Washington’s response to multipolarity. Contrary to expectations, however, the war has not demonstrated absolute Western superiority. Instead, it has revealed the limits of sanctions, disparities in military-industrial capacity, and the fragmentation of global support. The Ukrainian front has laid bare the boundaries of hegemonic deterrence.
With the publication of the National Security Strategy (NSS 2025) in early December 2025, the United States openly signaled its retreat from European security, effectively leaving Europe alone with the Ukraine crisis. This maneuver, which triggered a revolutionary shift across the continent, pushed Europe—still loyal to the paradigm of endless wars driven by global finance capital—toward astronomically increased defense expenditures and the intensification of its long-standing hostility toward Russia. The leaders of this bloc, particularly in France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, have demonstrated a troubling willingness to encourage confrontation with Russia despite widespread public opposition.
Similarly, tensions surrounding Taiwan reveal the fragility of the power transition in the Asia-Pacific. What is unfolding is not a classical sovereignty dispute over an island. Taiwan has been transformed into a forward outpost of the U.S. containment strategy against China, ceasing to function as a regional balance element. While this perpetuates military tension, it also turns the Western Pacific—the heart of global maritime trade—into a permanent risk zone for the world economy. Vulnerabilities in maritime trade routes constitute one of the most concrete and dangerous reflections of the multipolar transition. Strategic chokepoints such as the Red Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea, and Strait of Malacca are no longer the secure backbone of the global system. They have become zones of geopolitical pressure and military challenge. In this context, the year-round operationalization of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) under Russian control in the Arctic has revealed, for the first time in 500 years, the existence of a major maritime corridor beyond the collective control of the Western world. During this period, the seas have begun to play a separating rather than unifying role.
Multipolarity remains fluid, ambiguous, and often contradictory. Permanent norms, binding rules, and crisis-management mechanisms have yet to emerge among the new centers of power. Meanwhile, the legitimacy of the old order has fully collapsed. The discourse of a “rules-based international order” has lost meaning due to the growing gap between rhetoric and practice; rules are invoked only when they serve the interests of the powerful. Thus, 2025 can be defined as an “intermediate period”—but not an ordinary one. It has been the harshest, riskiest, and most instructive year of transition. As the old order collapses and the new one struggles to be born, the resulting vacuum is filled with crises, conflicts, and abrupt ruptures. Historically, such periods are those in which the gravest mistakes are made—and the most enduring outcomes are produced.
The United States Cannot Chart a Course
America’s decline did not come from a singular, dramatic military defeat. Rather, it emerged from a layered and irreversible process of disintegration, as long-standing structural weaknesses became visible simultaneously. The erosion of moral legitimacy, declining naval deterrence, the unsustainability of a debt-driven financial order, and deepening distrust among allies constitute the core pillars of this breakdown. Israeli geopolitics and Anglo-Zionist strategic dynamics played a significant role in accelerating this collapse. The United States no longer functions as a hegemon that establishes order, produces norms, or provides stability. Instead, Washington increasingly relies on threats, sanctions, secondary sanctions, and coercive pressure. These instruments do not generate order; they deepen crises, intensify conflicts, and accelerate the formation of counter-blocs. “Leadership by consent,” the defining essence of Pax Americana, has been replaced by open coercion and fear production. This is not hegemony, but post-hegemonic drift. Events in Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, and Lebanon have marked a historical rupture in which the United States effectively invalidated its long-standing discourse on a “rules-based international order.”
Israel’s attack on Iran during ongoing U.S.-Iran negotiations in Oman, and the collapse of indirect talks involving Hamas under Western protection, severely damaged American credibility. Similarly, the U.S. Navy’s sinking of Venezuelan and Colombian vessels in the Caribbean—outside the frameworks of international maritime law and the law of armed conflict—and the application of wartime-style blockades under the pretext of counterterrorism further eroded legitimacy. Throughout 2025, Washington’s disregard for international law, civilian protection, and proportionality revealed to the global majority that U.S. legal discourse functions as a selective, instrumental tool rather than a universal norm. At this point, even the concept of “double standards” proves insufficient; what has occurred is direct norm destruction.
By 2025, the United States had effectively lost its capacity to serve as a mediator. It became a party to conflicts—and often their architect. The claim of moral superiority collapsed, and the narratives of democracy, human rights, and freedom lost credibility due to their stark divergence from reality. This represents not merely an image problem, but the complete breakdown of the hegemonic consent-production mechanism.
Deviation from Hegemony to Empire and Strategic Blindness
As we complete 2025, the world stands at the intersection of geopolitical change and the neo-liberal capitalist system’s transition toward a new order. From a geopolitical perspective, the dissolution of the Soviet Union created, in Washington, the illusion of the “end of history.” This illusion rested on the assumption that hegemonic borders were no longer necessary, that military power alone could establish order, and that no actor remained capable of meaningful resistance. At that point, the United States abandoned the strategic patience and restraint required of a hegemon and began to act with imperial reflexes. Hegemony functions through persuasion, attraction, and indirect influence. Empire, by contrast, relies on direct force, coercion, and military imposition. After the Cold War, the United States ignored this distinction and—particularly in the period after September 11, 2001—entered an era of endless wars through a neocon–Zionist strategic partnership. The fronts of Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Georgia, and Ukraine have shown that the United States substituted military power and “color revolutions” for strategic judgment. These choices generated short-term gains; in the long run, however, they produced naval-power erosion, budget deficits, and domestic political fragmentation.
As of 2025, the United States presents the image of an ungovernable superpower. Across these fronts, the recurring pattern is clear: political goals are ambiguous, exit strategies are absent, and military intervention is treated as the only solution. This approach may have yielded substantial gains for the defense industry, private security firms, and financial networks in the short term. Yet from the standpoint of statecraft, all of these wars amount to strategic losses. A permanent condition of war has pushed the U.S. budget into chronic deficits; borrowing, monetary expansion, and financial manipulation have become routine instruments of state policy. It must be remembered that hegemony requires fiscal sustainability, whereas empire lives on debt. The United States chose the latter path—and has begun paying its price through internal political fragmentation, class tension, and institutional decay.
Polarization in domestic politics is the natural outcome of this strategic blindness. A state that continuously manufactures external threats and operates under a permanent war psychology cannot generate unity at home. Today, the United States remains militarily strong, yet appears politically divided, economically fragile, and strategically directionless. The picture that emerges in 2025 is a classic illustration of “ungovernable power.”
At the same time, migrations, pandemics, inflation, energy crises, and wars over the past decade are often presented as random shocks. Read together, however, these developments point to a form of controlled liquidation of 20th-century industrial capitalism based on a productive middle class. The aim is to move away from a production-centered economic order toward a new model of sovereignty based on digital ownership and platform dominance—centered on financial rent, digital infrastructure, algorithms, repositories, licenses, and user agreements. The rescue of the financial system during the pandemic, the deliberate weakening of German-centered European industry, the sustained energy crisis in Europe, and the framing of defense expenditures as an engine of growth are all components of this structural transition. In this emerging order, a permanent state of emergency, digital control, and tools of social discipline become normalized, while human labor, the social state, and life itself are gradually redefined as cost items. This process profoundly destabilizes social contracts in the United States and Europe, as well as across much of the world, creating conditions conducive to social explosions.
Debt, Finance, and Imperial Decay
In the analysis of 2025, debt should be defined not as a conventional economic problem, but as a systemic cancer with direct geopolitical consequences. U.S. public debt—exceeding $33 trillion—is no longer an abstract balance-sheet figure. With billions of dollars in interest payments every day, it has become a tangible burden that erodes military capacity, diplomatic maneuver, and strategic flexibility. This dynamic is central to understanding the historical fate of empires and constitutes a direct confirmation of historian Paul Kennedy’s “imperial overstretch” thesis. As Kennedy argued, when the balance between military and geopolitical obligations and an economy’s productive capacity breaks down, great powers inevitably enter a process of decline. The United States has crossed precisely this threshold.
Hundreds of overseas bases, permanent war, enormous defense budgets, and declining productive capacity have rendered debt increasingly unmanageable. Debt is no longer a tool for financing growth; it has become a mechanism that consumes power. Here, the fundamental weakness of financial capitalism is exposed. Financial dominance that is not anchored in production, industry, shipyard capacity, and maritime trade cannot be sustained. Historically, global powers have maintained confidence in their currencies to the extent that they dominated the seas. Today, the United States has, to a large degree, transferred its industrial infrastructure and shipbuilding capacity to China. America’s share across the spectrum—from global container transport and shipbuilding tonnage to port management and logistics chains—has declined sharply. This also signifies a structural weakening of dollar hegemony.
Reserve-currency status cannot be maintained solely through financial maneuvers and interventions; it ultimately rests on productive power, trade volume, and maritime dominance. The U.S. Navy remains strong; however, it no longer possesses the attributes of a maritime empire capable of guaranteeing the global circulation and reliability of the dollar on its own. The historical link between naval power and financial power has reached a breaking point. As a natural consequence, Washington increasingly turns to sanctions, blockade threats, secondary sanctions, and financial coercion. Yet these instruments no longer deter as they once did; on the contrary, they generate a repulsive effect. Rather than aligning target countries, sanctions encourage the creation of alternative payment systems, local-currency trade, and regional financial networks. The financial weapons of the United States are dismantling the global system rather than controlling it.
As the debt spiral deepens, U.S. strategic options narrow. The cost of a new great-power war has become unaffordable, while current conflicts further strain the budget. This marks the classic final phase of empires: the need to use force grows, while the economic base required to sustain that force steadily erodes. The result is greater pressure, diminished legitimacy, and accelerated dissolution.
Naval Power Decline
One of the most striking indicators of 2025 has been the simultaneous decline of the Anglo-Saxon naval powers (the United States and the United Kingdom) that historically dominated the seas. The U.S. Navy’s decline from roughly 600 ships in the 1990s to around 290 in 2025; the Royal Navy’s inability even to adequately protect its aircraft carriers; and persistent shipyard and manpower crises all represent irreversible signs of lost maritime hegemony. From this perspective, the structural and parallel decline of U.S. and UK naval power is not accidental weakness; it is a clear indication that the historical cycle of Anglo-Saxon maritime hegemony has entered its final phase.
By contrast, China has built a maritime–industry–logistics integration by expanding its navy, shipbuilding industry and merchant fleet simultaneously. Meanwhile, American maritime dominance—once justified by the claim of securing global maritime trade routes—is no longer absolute or undisputed. U.S. naval presence along the arc stretching from the Red Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Black Sea to the Indo-Pacific increasingly functions as a source of risk rather than security. The seas, as during the Pax Americana, no longer unify; they become fault lines where fragmented spheres of influence collide.
In 2025, no power can establish simultaneous and uncontested naval superiority across all oceans. Disruptions to trade routes in the Red Sea, America’s constant crisis management in the Western Pacific, and intensifying competition over emerging Arctic Ocean routes are concrete manifestations of this reality. The seas have ceased to be “open and safe” spaces as in the Pax Americana period; they have become multi-actor, high-risk, and fragmented spheres of influence. This development is not merely military; it produces geopolitical consequences. When maritime superiority weakens, trade security erodes, energy flows become fragile, and the capacity to generate global norms collapses. The U.S. problem today is not the total weakening of its navy; it is that naval power can no longer perform a global order-building function. This distinction marks the line between hegemony and mere great-power status.
Moreover, maritime dominance is not measured solely by the number of ships. Shipyard capacity gains meaning only when integrated with human capital, logistical continuity, merchant fleets, port networks, and allied access. Today, this integrity is dissolving in the Anglo-Saxon world, while being rebuilt within a new maritime ecosystem centered in Asia. In the United States and the United Kingdom, warship construction timelines are lengthening, costs are multiplying, and skilled labor is steadily declining. Naval power cannot be sustained if it is not continuously fed by industry. Anglo-Saxon navies increasingly survive by consuming their own inherited legacy, while their capacity to produce renewed maritime dominance steadily shrinks.
China, by contrast, is building naval power not as an isolated military tool, but as a system integrated with industry, logistics, and trade. The expansion of China’s navy and the growth of its merchant fleet proceed in parallel; shipyards, ports, and global logistics networks are combined within a single strategic architecture. This systemic integration constitutes a basic condition for the historical success of classical maritime empires. China is not merely deploying warships; it is producing a domain of influence. In conclusion, developments in naval power reveal clearly why 2025 is a threshold year. Anglo-Saxon maritime hegemony is not ending through a dramatic collapse; it is being exhausted through a silent, gradual, and irreversible wear. The seas are no longer the center of a single power; they are the arena of competition among multiple powers. Those who read this transformation correctly will build the future.
Israeli Geopolitics and the Anglo-Zionist Impasse
The greatest weakness of U.S. foreign policy in 2025 is that it has become hostage to Israeli security geopolitics. Israel’s raid-style attack on Iran on June 13, 2025, was presented to the United States as a fait accompli. During the final four days of the twelve-day war—which was initially intended to end in victory—Israel suffered serious damage and was forced to request a U.S.-led ceasefire. What has unfolded in Gaza since October 7, 2023—marking the beginning of a period of unrestrained aggression and genocidal practices driven by Israeli geopolitics in West Asia—is not merely a regional tragedy; it represents the moral suicide of U.S. hegemony. This is not a tactical alliance choice; it is a condition of structural dependency in which strategic judgment has been rendered inoperative. Washington is no longer a center that defines its own interests in the Middle East; it has become an approval authority acting in line with Israel’s threat perceptions, priorities, and security reflexes.
or a regional war. Gaza is also the stage on which the moral collapse of U.S. hegemony has been fully exposed. For decades, Washington produced global legitimacy through the discourses of “human rights,” “international law,” “protection of civilians,” and “proportionate use of force.” In Gaza, all of these discourses were negated in real time, under global broadcast. From this point onward, the United States’ claim to norm production has collapsed, leaving only brute force. Israel’s unlimited military violence, combined with unconditional American support, has irreversibly damaged the global image of the United States. This damage is not confined to the so-called Global South. A profound legitimacy crisis has emerged against Washington within European public opinion, universities, civil society, and even among state elites. For the first time, at this scale and with this speed, the United States has lost its moral defensibility in the eyes of its allies’ public opinion. This represents the most dangerous rupture for hegemonic orders.
This process has also exposed the structural impasse of the Anglo-Zionist strategic framework. An approach that absolutizes Israel’s security and places it above regional balances creates a clear contradiction with the global interests of the United States. Every military and diplomatic move undertaken on Israel’s behalf narrows Washington’s room for maneuver in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America. In effect, the United States is exhausting its claim to leadership in the global system in order to protect Tel Aviv.
Accordingly, the post-Gaza period represents not only a moral rupture, but also one that generates profound geoeconomic and geopolitical consequences. The expansion of BRICS, the acceleration of de-dollarization trends, and the intensification of the search for a multipolar order are directly linked to this loss of legitimacy. The financial and political pressure instruments of the United States are no longer perceived as “protectors of order,” but increasingly as “destroyers of order.” This shift in perception fuels alternative blocs and new cooperation architectures. From the perspective of the Global South in particular, Gaza has become a symbol. It symbolizes the bankruptcy of the West’s claim to universality, the selective application of law, and the naked reality of power relations. By placing itself at the center of this symbol, the United States has historically locked itself into a fundamentally flawed position. This is not a temporary diplomatic error; it is a long-term strategic cost.
Multipolarity and Türkiye
Türkiye experienced three major geopolitical ruptures in 2025. The first stemmed from our own miscalculation in Syria, which pushed Türkiye out of the gray zone vis-à-vis Israel and into a phase of open geopolitical competition. In this confrontation, Israel’s decision to bring Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration into its orbit played a significant role in the southern encirclement of Türkiye. Beyond the fact that Greece and the Greek Cypriots have aligned themselves with Israel—a state widely condemned as a war criminal and deeply discredited globally in moral and ethical terms—it is particularly noteworthy that Israel has positioned both actors as voluntary proxies to exert pressure on Türkiye.
In addition to Israel’s open hostility, the U.S. Congress’s declaration of support for Greece, Israel, and the Greek Cypriot Administration through the Eastern Mediterranean Maritime Security Initiative, together with France’s signing of strategic defense cooperation agreements with both Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration, constitute concrete indicators that Türkiye is being encircled by NATO partners on the Blue Homeland and Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus fronts. Furthermore, reports in the Israeli press suggesting that the establishment of a Kurdish state in southern Türkiye, with access to Latakia, constitutes an Israeli objective provide insight into the future trajectory of Türkiye–Israel relations. Under these circumstances, it is beyond dispute that Türkiye will face not only Tel Aviv but also Washington in any strategic competition with Israel.
The second rupture emerged from the expansion of the Russia–Ukraine war—now in its fourth year—to Türkiye’s northern maritime and territorial environment in the Black Sea, through the use of UAVs, UAS platforms, and unmanned surface vessels operating within maritime jurisdiction areas. NATO’s hawkish anti-Russian wing holds Türkiye responsible for the strict implementation of the Montreux Convention, while expressing dissatisfaction with Ankara’s refusal to participate in sanctions against Russia and its policy of active neutrality. At a time when the United States has effectively withdrawn from European security commitments, the European Union seeks to draw Türkiye into an explicitly anti-Russian front.
For this reason, a political and ideological front has emerged against Türkiye that does not hesitate to employ pressure, manipulation, and even false-flag operations to inflame anti-Russian sentiment. When this front is evaluated together with the southern front, the broader objective becomes evident: Türkiye is expected to safeguard the interests of the collective West during the transition to the new world order, while simultaneously abandoning its own geopolitical objectives—ultimately surrendering its positions in the Blue Homeland, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Syria, and Southeastern Anatolia to Western interests.
The third rupture manifested itself through the Kurdish Initiative (Açılım Süreci) launched under the slogan “Türkiye Without Terrorism.” This process damaged national unity and social cohesion disregarded the sensitivities of the families of martyrs and veterans and generated negative consequences at a moment when society most urgently required solidarity. Moreover, despite the fact that Türkiye—particularly after 2015—had publicly declared that the state had achieved a decisive victory in the fight against terrorism and had conveyed the impression that it continued to combat the PKK and its extensions in Syria, the new political atmosphere that emerged failed to gain broad public support. Despite all these adverse developments, as the global order dissolves in 2025, Türkiye—having achieved a significant level of self-sufficiency, particularly in the defense industry through the synthesis of “blood and iron”—is not a secondary actor that can be blindly attached to a collapsing Western hegemony. The path ahead for Türkiye is not a matter of choosing a direction; it is a matter of restoring balance, expanding strategic space, and re-strengthening the mind of the state.
Türkiye’s greatest asset is not a single revolutionary weapons system, but the freedom of maneuver afforded by its unique geography. Whether aligned with the West through NATO and the EU or drawn into blocs with Asian powers, rigid bloc politics would confine Türkiye to a single axis, reduce its maneuverability, and transform it into a reactive actor within frameworks designed by others. Türkiye does not need new blocs; it requires a multi-layered, sensitive, rational, and sea-centered balance policy. Its geography offers extraordinary opportunities not to “choose sides,” but to establish equilibrium. For this reason, interpreting Türkiye’s relations with China, Iran, Russia, or other actors as the construction of a “new bloc” is a fundamental misreading. Balance politics, a geopolitical perspective grounded in maritime power, strategic autonomy, and the Kemalist state tradition emerge here not as ideological preferences, but as necessities imposed by Türkiye’s geography, history, and geopolitical imperatives.
It should not be forgotten that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself established security zones to the east and west through the Balkan Entente and the Sadabad Pact, initiated strategic relations with the Soviet Union through his letter to Lenin dated April 26, 1920—without binding Türkiye to rigid blocs—and, with Soviet ammunition support, dismantled the Caucasian barrier and expelled Greek forces from Anatolia within three years. Historically, Türkiye weakened whenever it was tossed between great-power blocs; it gained strength during periods when it successfully maintained balance, placed the sea at the center of strategy, and kept state institutions insulated from politics. The Kemalist vision centered on the Blue Homeland—that is, maritime geopolitics—should not be reduced to a military defense doctrine. On the contrary, it must be conceived as a comprehensive state project capable of transforming Türkiye into a geoeconomic and geopolitical founding actor across a vast geography stretching from the Black Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Aegean to the Red Sea and Libya.
Naval power is one of the rare strategic instruments that simultaneously expands energy security, trade routes, logistics networks, and diplomatic maneuver space. For Türkiye, the sea is not a boundary; it is a realm of potential opportunity. Yet the greatest obstacle to realizing this potential lies not outside the country, but within. Mandate mentality, strategic blindness, and religious–ethnic polarization consume Türkiye’s most valuable geopolitical capital. The illusion that security can be achieved by attaching oneself to global power centers has been disproven repeatedly by history. Likewise, fragmenting the state’s strategic mind through identity and religious politics leaves Türkiye exposed in the fiercely competitive environment of the multipolar world.
The state must serve the interests of the nation and the region, not ideological camps. Türkiye is not in search of a direction, but in a process of return—a return that is not nostalgic, but historical and geopolitical. Türkiye must return to where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stood: to the foundations of independence, balance politics, sea-centered strategy, and a national, secular state mind. This is not a matter of political preference; it is the minimum condition for survival in an era in which the world is hardening once again, law is increasingly suspended, and the balance of power speaks in its rawest form.
Türkiye can be a playmaker to the extent that it adheres to this path; to the extent that it deviates, it risks becoming a mere extra in the games of others. History is unforgiving in this regard. The message that Türkiye—pressed from both north and south—must convey is clear: “Türkiye is not alone and cannot be confined to a single line. As pressure on Türkiye increases, the space for balance does not narrow; it expands.”
This is precisely the scenario the siege paradigm seeks to avoid. The architecture of containment rests on the assumption that Türkiye can be isolated, rendered indecisive, and eventually compelled to retreat. This assumption collapses the moment Türkiye demonstrates its capacity to develop alternative partnerships and broaden its crisis geography through the opportunities provided by its history and geography.
The objective here is not reconciliation or a maneuver to buy time, but a firm counter-move against containment mechanisms designed to confine Türkiye geographically and control its behavior. The aim is not symmetrical escalation, but to raise the cost of containment, widen its scope, and erode the other side’s capacity for control.
In this context, Ankara’s statement that “Iran’s security is our security,” delivered after Netanyahu’s presumptuous remarks following December 22, 2025—made alongside Greek leaders—should not be read as conciliatory language. It represents a declaration of strategic will that shatters the assumptions underpinning the containment. It rejects Israel’s belief that the Iranian front can be managed in a “controllable” manner while Türkiye is simultaneously squeezed in the Eastern Mediterranean. Türkiye does not rely on threats; it targets the logic of the siege by demonstrating its capacity to expand the geography of crisis and distribute costs.
Those who criticized my previous statement—“If Iran falls, Türkiye falls”—made after Israel’s surprise attack on Iran on June 13, 2025, must now recognize the gravity of the situation and understand that the state acted correctly in accordance with the instinct of self-preservation.
The message to Israel going forward must be unequivocal. The pressure architecture built through Israel’s voluntary vassal, Greece, will ultimately render Greece—not Türkiye—vulnerable. For Israel, Greece is not a partner in destiny; it is a cyclical, functional, and expendable instrument when necessary. Türkiye’s task is to frustrate the siege from both north and south with strategic composure. This can only be achieved through military capability and strategic resolve.
Rather than acting as an overzealous NATO member in the north, Türkiye can draw lessons from Hungary’s posture. The process can be managed by signaling “we will not retreat from our areas of interest,” rather than declaring “we will fight” in the south and west. In parallel, restoring unity, solidarity, and trust in the state—across law, economy, anti-corruption efforts, and the struggle against lawlessness—must be pursued while consciously avoiding neo-Ottoman rhetoric in all domains.
Once Türkiye consistently demonstrates this determination, the containment strategy collapses mentally rather than militarily. Such strategies are not designed to fight, but to wait until the targeted state grows weary. Türkiye must demonstrate that it is neither tired nor capable of becoming tired.
In conclusion, the fundamental lesson of 2025 is clear: the world is not undergoing a “smooth transition” to multipolarity; it is hardening. In this environment, Türkiye’s survival does not depend on leaning into blocs. It depends on maintaining balance, cultivating a geopolitical mindset centered on maritime power, and placing the strategic rationality of the state above ideology. Türkiye’s course, as drawn by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, remains full independence, balance politics, and sea-centered strategic autonomy. If this course is sustained, Türkiye can shape the game; if abandoned, Türkiye risks becoming an extra in the games of others.
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This article was originally published on Mavi Vatan.
Ret Admiral Cem Gürdeniz, Writer, Geopolitical Expert, Theorist and creator of the Turkish Bluehomeland (Mavi Vatan) doctrine. He served as the Chief of Strategy Department and then the head of Plans and Policy Division in Turkish Naval Forces Headquarters. As his combat duties, he has served as the commander of Amphibious Ships Group and Mine Fleet between 2007 and 2009. He retired in 2012. He established Hamit Naci Blue Homeland Foundation in 2021. He has published numerous books on geopolitics, maritime strategy, maritime history and maritime culture. He is also a honorary member of ATASAM.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-geopolitics-2025-strategic-assessment/5910491
