The Impact of the Iran War on Turkey

The Iran war has forced a reassessment of Turkey’s security environment. It exposed how quickly regional conflict can spill onto Turkey’s doorstep, highlighted the continued importance of NATO cooperation at a time when Ankara has often emphasized strategic autonomy, and underscored new challenges such as protecting critical infrastructure and responding to threats from low-cost drones. At the same time, the war may accelerate Turkey’s push to deepen defense ties with regional partners, particularly Gulf countries seeking stronger security arrangements and more diversified partnerships. Please join us for a timely discussion of how the conflict is reshaping Turkey’s defense posture, relationship with the North Atlantic Alliance, and growing role as a regional security actor.

The expert panel will feature Serhat Güvenç, Dean of Faculty of Economics, Administrative, and Social Sciences at Kadir Has University, in Istanbul, along with MEI Senior Fellow Jason Campbell. MEI Senior Fellow Gönül Top will moderate the conversation.

Speaker Biographies

Serhat Güvenç
Head of Faculty of Economics, Administrative, and Social Sciences at Kadir Has University

Jason Campbell
Senior Fellow, Middle East Institute

Gönül Tol
Senior Fellow, Middle East Institute

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Serhat Güvenç is the Head of Faculty of Economics, Administrative, and Social Sciences at Kadir Has University. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Strategy, Turkish Foreign and Security Policy and Turkey-EU Relations. Recently his research focus has shifted onto Maritime Security in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. He, therefore, currently supervises masters’ thesis and doctoral dissertations mostly on maritime security and related topics.

Jason Campbell is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute, where he focuses on international security, geopolitics, and foreign policy. Prior to joining MEI, he was a Senior Policy Researcher at RAND, where his work concentrated on strategic competition, the resourcing of US combatant commands, the evaluation of security cooperation programs, and the future of irregular warfare. From June 2016 through September 2018, he served as country director for Afghanistan in the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy.

Gönül Tol (moderator) is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute (MEI), where she focuses on Turkish politics, US-Turkey relations and regional dynamics in the Middle East. She is the author of Erdogan’s War: A Strongman’s Struggle at Home and in Syria (Oxford University Press, 2023). A frequent commentator, Dr. Tol has written extensively on Turkish domestic and foreign policy for publications such as Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, Foreign Policy, and The Financial Times.