Dr. Ahmed Moustafa, Director & Founder, Asia Center for Studies & Translation, Egypt

In a city that has spent centuries translating the language of one civilization to another, the first East-West Forum arrived at a moment when the world itself seemed to have lost the vocabulary for talking across its divisions.

Held in Istanbul on Sept. 26–27 and preceded by meetings around the event, the forum brought together diplomats, academics, journalists, strategists and political thinkers from a wide range of countries. Hosted by Harici Media in partnership with the Berlin-based European Transcontinental Initiative, the gathering was conceived as an attempt to examine a world increasingly defined by competing power centers, regional wars, economic fragmentation, artificial intelligence and the erosion of confidence in institutions created after the Second World War. Harici reported that participants came from roughly 30 countries.

For us, the significance of Istanbul was not simply a matter of the speakers on the panel or the structure of the programme. Its deeper importance lay in the willingness to put difficult — and sometimes uncomfortable — questions on the table.

We would like to extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to my friend and brother, Mr. Tunç Akkoç, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Harici Media, for his gracious invitation to a representative of the Asia Center for Studies & Translation, Egypt, to participate in the Forum as a speaker and commentator. His initiative in creating a platform where competing geopolitical narratives could meet directly deserves recognition.

In his opening remarks, Akkos stressed that the initiative was intended to establish a permanent platform where people representing different political and intellectual traditions and perspectives could meet and engage in direct dialogue.

This vision is particularly significant because the traditional language used in international relations has increasingly struggled to explain the realities of a rapidly changing world.

The Problem of Proxy Wars

During the session that discussed proxy wars in the region and ways to reach solutions to their crises, the Center put forward the view that the Middle East cannot simply be understood through the traditional map that divides the parties into “good” and “evil,” or into “responsible states” and “rogue states.”

Such terms, in our assessment, often reflect the perspective of powers that possess extensive influence over international media and financial and security institutions.

The Center particularly criticised what we see as political bias within important sectors of the Western media and some non-governmental organisations that receive Western funding. From our perspective, these institutions can, in some cases, move from being mere observers of geopolitical conflicts to becoming influential parties in the battle over the narrative and the story.

However, this view should remain open to debate and should not automatically be accepted as an absolute truth.

The more important question is not whether every Western journalist, every NGO, or every Western institution works to serve a single geopolitical agenda clearly, this is not the case, but whether the information environment itself has become so highly polarised that the public is now receiving radically different interpretations of the very same war.

In our assessment, the answer is increasingly approaching “yes.”

The problem becomes particularly clear when searching for the term “proxy wars” in the Middle East. Some of the first results focus on groups associated with Iran, including Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as Hamas, whereas the history of regional conflicts is far more complex.

Al-Qaeda and ISIS emerged through different historical trajectories, with Anglo-Saxon support that was “created by Britain and the United States.” In environments dominated by the United States and Britain, Al-Qaeda emerged from the environment associated with Osama bin Laden and the Afghan jihad, while ISIS developed largely from Al-Qaeda in Iraq, under American sponsorship, to pursue a certain agenda in the region and advance the scenario of “creative chaos” promoted by Condoleezza Rice, the radical US Secretary of State.

At the same time, US policy toward Afghanistan during the Cold War contributed to shaping the broader environment from which some militant jihadist movements later emerged.

These distinctions matter.

Because propaganda often begins where complex historical details end.

Who Has the Right to Define a “Rogue State”?

The same problem appears in the vocabulary used to describe states.

Countries such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are frequently portrayed in Western strategic discourse as states challenging the existing international order.

Egypt, despite the different nature of its relationship with Washington, can also become the subject of criticism when its foreign policy does not conform to certain Western expectations.

The question is not whether these governments should be exempt from criticism. Of course not.

The deeper question is this: can the international system remain sustainable when one geopolitical camp increasingly assumes the authority to define which governments are legitimate, which movements are terrorist, which wars are defensive and which forms of resistance are acceptable?

That was one of the central questions behind our intervention in Istanbul.

The Middle East has repeatedly been presented through the lens of the “Iranian threat” as the principal strategic danger.

There is no question that Iran possesses significant military and regional capabilities, and that its policies are deeply contested by many neighbouring states. At the same time, reducing virtually every regional security problem to Tehran can obscure the interests and roles of other actors, including Israel, the United States, Gulf states, armed groups and local political forces.

The region has repeatedly paid a heavy price for simplistic interpretations of complex conflicts.

The Economics of Fear

The discussions in Istanbul also led us to a broader American question: to what extent can fear itself become a source of political and economic power?

Historically, the United States has experienced intense political campaigns shaped by perceived racial, ideological and security threats.

One does not need to accept every interpretation of this history to recognise that fear can become a factor with tangible economic consequences.

A 2020 study by Citi estimated that racial discrimination against Black Americans had cost the US economy approximately $16 trillion in lost economic output since 2000, based on an analysis of disparities in wages, education, housing and investment.

This figure demonstrates the extent of the economic losses associated with racial discrimination and exclusion. It also raises questions about the relationship between fear-based narratives concerning Black Americans, media influence, the political power of the gun lobby and the broader economic consequences of insecurity.

More importantly, however, the study highlights a fundamental point: bias and insecurity carry substantial and measurable economic costs.

The broader lesson has direct relevance to foreign policy.

When societies are continually presented with existential enemies, military spending and the expansion of security institutions become politically easier to justify.

America After Iran

In Istanbul, we also advanced the view that the United States after its confrontation with Iran in 2026 should not simply be understood through the traditional image of unlimited American power.

The conflict exposed economic and strategic vulnerabilities.

The Strait of Hormuz emerged as a major strategic pressure point for global energy markets, amid disruptions to international trade that forced governments and companies to search for alternative routes and supplies.

The consequences were reflected in oil prices and energy costs in Europe and elsewhere.

This does not mean that American power has disappeared. Rather, it suggests that military power is no longer synonymous with strategic control.

The rise of China, Russia, ASEAN, Iran and other centres of economic and diplomatic influence has made the international order increasingly complex and dispersed.

The East-West Forum itself reflected this reality, bringing together voices from Europe, Asia, the Middle East and North America while explicitly addressing multipolarity and the ongoing transformation of the global order.

America Is Changing From Within

The domestic dimension of American politics also deserves attention.

The emergence of figures such as Zohran Mamdani in New York and Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan reflects changes in the American political debate over inequality, foreign policy, healthcare, identity and the influence of established political and economic interests.

Their political trajectories should not be treated as evidence of a predetermined future for the United States.

They do, however, illustrate how issues that were once treated as peripheral including the costs of war, US policy toward Israel, economic inequality and the political influence of younger and more diverse generations have moved closer to the centre of American political debate.

This is another reason why East-West dialogue cannot remain confined to foreign ministries and military institutions.

A Dinner for Dialogue

One of the most memorable moments on the margins of the Forum was the private dinner held on the evening of Friday, September 25, hosted by H.E. Mr. Hasan Capan, Chairman of the Turkish-Chinese Friendship Foundation, and H.E. Ambassador Ersin Erçin, Vice Chairman of the Foundation, in honour of the speakers and participants.

We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to both of them for their generosity, friendship and support.

The gathering was more than simply a dinner. It provided an opportunity for personal interaction, an exchange of ideas and the building of relationships among participants — precisely the kind of human diplomacy that formal conferences sometimes lack.

Real dialogue does not always begin behind conference podiums.

Very often, it begins around a single table.

Istanbul’s Larger Message

The first East-West Forum should be regarded as the beginning of a dialogue, not the end of a debate.

The organisers have already articulated a vision of transforming the initiative into an annual gathering in Istanbul, developing expert working groups, establishing an East-West Forum network and potentially creating a business council capable of connecting intellectual dialogue with economic cooperation.

This may ultimately prove to be one of its most important contributions.

The world that emerges from the current conflicts including the crisis surrounding the Strait of Hormuz will require more than ceasefire agreements.

It will require a new conversation about security, energy, sovereignty, development, technology and coexistence.

Istanbul is an exceptional setting for such a dialogue. One participant even proposed moving the headquarters of international organisations, including the United Nations, to Istanbul.

For centuries, the city has stood between two continents without belonging exclusively to either.

The East-West Forum can follow the same principle: not choosing one civilisation against another, but creating a space in which East and West can confront their differences without turning disagreement into permanent conflict.

For this reason, we see the Istanbul gathering as an announcement of intent.

It was not an attempt to erase differences.

It was an attempt to make dialogue possible despite them.

At a time when proxy conflicts increasingly risk evolving into direct confrontations, this may be among the most important political conversations the world can undertake today.

At the NATO summit held in Ankara last month, US President Donald Trump made promising remarks to Türkiye regarding the lifting of CAATSA sanctions, clearing the path for the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Türkiye, and supplying the engines required for the domestic Kaan aircraft. He has yet to keep his word.

This is quintessential Trump. He is neither a reliable nor a predictable leader. He approaches diplomacy like a merchant. In bargaining, he opens with the highest possible bid. Rather than institutional consultations, negotiations, formal diplomatic channels, and classical statecraft, he favours personal ties, bilateral encounters, and leader-to-leader diplomacy. He is notoriously erratic. A figure he praises one day, he drags through the mud the next, humiliating, scolding, and even insulting them.

US moves in the Mediterranean

Failing to honour the promises made to Türkiye, the US eased and partially lifted the arms embargo it had enforced on the Greek Cypriot Administration (GCA) since 1987 in 2020, before abolishing it entirely in 2022. Not content with this, the US signed a military cooperation agreement with the GCA in 2024 and hosted its leader at the White House. The GCA, whose path to acquiring weaponry from the US was cleared in 2024, has also recently been deepening its relations with France. Even though two British sovereign bases already exist in the southern part of Cyprus, with the US utilizing them whenever necessary, both the US and France signed separate basing agreements with the GCA. The GCA’s relations with Israel are also remarkably sound, as are those with Qatar. Meanwhile, relations between Greece and France have been exceptionally warm in recent years.

Amid all these tangible developments, Türkiye has largely relinquished its vigilance regarding the Blue Homeland. Drilling vessels and seismic survey ships have been withdrawn from the eastern Mediterranean.

The most distressing of these developments has been that four Turkic states in Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan), none of which officially recognize the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) as a state, expanded their ties with the GCA and opened embassies in exchange for European Union financial assistance. Through this recognition, by acknowledging the Greek Cypriot Administration as the sole representative of the entire island under the name of the Republic of Cyprus, they effectively rejected the existence of the TRNC, whatever they might claim to the contrary.

Whatever anyone may say, and from whichever angle one evaluates it, the conduct of these four friendly and brotherly states cannot be explained merely by their lack of loyalty or their disregard for Türkiye’s sensitivities on this matter. Alongside this, one must acknowledge the failure of Turkish foreign policy. If Türkiye cannot convince even fellow Turkic states, let alone others, on an issue where its position is most legitimate and justified, such as Cyprus; if, far from persuading them, it cannot prevent them from cultivating relations with the GCA and opening embassies, this represents a monumental failure on the part of Turkish foreign policy.

Moreover, the failure in the Mediterranean is not confined to Cyprus. There is more.

Who is sidelining Türkiye in Syria?

Türkiye is persistently excluded from European-organized meetings on Syria. Türkiye’s views are not sought. So much so that even Qatar, our closest ally in the Arab world, on whose soil we established a military base and to whom we sold major assets, does not hesitate to take part in initiatives that exclude Türkiye from energy projects in the Eastern Mediterranean, or to cooperate with Greece and the Greek Cypriot Administration.

Much has changed in Syria since the days when Ahmet Davutoğlu, former prime minister, former foreign minister, former AKP chairman, and leader of the now-dissolved Future Party, carried away by his own momentum, declared: “Not a bird can fly in the Middle East without our knowledge”, “We know the Middle East street by street, inch by inch”, and “We are the masters, pioneers, and spokesmen of the emerging Middle East”, all while eagerly seeking to act as a subcontractor on behalf of the US. The regime has changed. The government has changed.

So let us ask: did we get what we wanted?

Israel, which most recently struck Abu al-Duhur Military Airbase east of Idlib in northern Syria; Israel, a backer of the PKK-PYD-YPG terrorist organization; Israel, which usurped Syrian land in the Golan Heights, attacking Syria and rolling in its tanks whenever it pleases; Israel, which seeks to partition Syria into four entities (Kurdish, Alawite, Arab, and Druze): Israel got what it wanted. And it continues to do so.

Does Israel, which directs scathing rhetoric at Türkiye, fortified by immense US backing and sustained by Europe’s three major powers (Germany, Britain, and France), draw this audacity solely from the imperialist powers standing behind it? Or does Türkiye’s inefficacy in the Turkic world and across the Arab sphere, alongside that backing, also embolden Israel?

In answering this question, we will arrive at a far more accurate assessment if we take into account the depth of Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan.

Thomas Karat, behavior analyst

Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv spent years building to control the Bab el-Mandeb and the Horn. The chokepoint has now passed to the one actor the plan was meant to exclude, and the states it pressed have drawn together against it.

For a decade the southern approaches to the Red Sea were ordered around one assumption, that the states which counted on this water were those with the deepest treasuries and the closest ties to Washington. In September that assumption failed. Fighters of the Houthi movement, under Iranian direction, took the island of Mayun in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb and with it working control of a strait through which roughly 12 percent of world trade passes. The power that had spent eight years assembling the architecture to hold this chokepoint, the United Arab Emirates, was no longer on the coast to contest it.

The Gulf press reads the episode as a new Iranian front against the United States. It is that. It is also the clearest sign to date that the design Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv pursued across the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa has yielded the reverse of what it promised, and that the actors now setting terms in the region are those who plan around national interest rather than around the guarantees of a fading order.

The Emirati doctrine

To read the collapse only as a Gulf quarrel is to miss the method behind it. Since the counter-revolutionary turn that followed the Arab uprisings, Abu Dhabi has pursued a consistent strategy across three theatres. In Libya it backed Khalifa Haftar against the internationally recognised government in Tripoli, where Türkiye emerged as the principal external patron of the other side, the sharpest earlier collision between the two projects. In Yemen it built and armed the Southern Transitional Council against the government it had nominally joined the war to restore, and it worked to root out the Islah party, the Yemeni movement linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leaders had found refuge in Türkiye. On the Horn it cultivated Somaliland and other regional administrations rather than the federal centre in Mogadishu. The through-line, as one Italian analysis put it, is that the UAE prefers sub-national clients because they let it weaken rivals and carve out platforms for maritime power at the same time. The two aims reinforced one another. Every client that undercut a central government also delivered a port, a runway or an island, so the map of Emirati proxies became, over time, a map of Emirati bases.

Those rivals are named plainly in the record. The Saudi-Emirati axis that formed after 2011 defined itself against Iran, Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood and Türkiye, and for years Riyadh and Abu Dhabi moved together against all four. Türkiye read the doctrine from the receiving end. Ankara accused the UAE of financing the 2016 coup attempt against President Erdoğan, and only later, when it set about repairing Gulf ties, did it curtail the activities of Islah figures on its own soil. What separates Ankara and Riyadh from Abu Dhabi is not tactics alone. Both Türkiye and Saudi Arabia, whatever their other differences, treat strong central states as the basis of a stable order, while the Emirati approach has repeatedly favoured the actors that hollow those states out. The Red Sea is where that difference became a fault line.

The design on the water

The maritime side of the project was never hidden. From 2018 Abu Dhabi built what one analysis called a circle of bases around the Gulf of Aden: Socotra, administered by some accounts as something close to an overseas territory; runways on the smaller islands of Abd al-Kuri and Samhah; a base on Mayun itself; and on the African shore, Berbera in Somaliland and Bosaso in Puntland. The stated aim was to watch the water and interdict Iranian weapons bound for the Houthis. Israeli strategy converged on the same map. According to reporting attributed to the Middle East Monitor, Israel had long been weighing a base in Somaliland to monitor Yemen and the Bab el-Mandeb, and on 26 December it became the first state to recognise the breakaway republic, in language its prime minister tied to the Abraham Accords.

The Horn divides

For Ankara the recognition was a direct challenge. Türkiye has treated Somalia as a pillar of its Africa policy since 2011. It operates its largest overseas base, Camp TURKSOM, in Mogadishu, trains Somali forces, and casts itself as the guarantor of Somalia’s unity against the secession of Somaliland. Israel’s move placed it, in the reading of regional analysts, on a collision course with Türkiye. President Erdoğan called the recognition illegitimate and unacceptable and set out to rally Arab and Muslim governments against it, issuing a joint declaration with the Saudi crown prince in early February.

Egypt arrived at the same position by a different road. Cairo regards the Bab el-Mandeb as a strategic extension of the Suez Canal, and a senior Egyptian strategist has called securing the strait a national security priority, because canal revenue depends on the traffic that passes through it. When Ethiopia signed a memorandum with Somaliland in January 2024 to lease coastline for a naval base, Egypt read it as an attempt to redraw the Horn against its interests, and in August 2024 it signed a defence pact with Mogadishu and began sending troops and materiel, with plans that envisaged as many as ten thousand personnel for Somalia. Cairo’s interest runs past the canal. Its long confrontation with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has taught it to treat the Horn as an extension of its own water security, and the Somaliland question folded neatly into that older anxiety.

The pattern was consistent across the capitals. The UAE cultivated Somaliland and the sub-state administrations, while Egypt, Türkiye and Saudi Arabia placed their weight behind Somalia’s federal government. Warning that Israel intended a base on its soil, Mogadishu signed defence pacts with Qatar and with Saudi Arabia, and its president said an Israeli base would never be allowed. More than fifty states condemned the recognition, and the African Union and the European Union restated Somalia’s territorial integrity. What had been sold as a low-cost foothold hardened a counter-alignment, running from Cairo through Riyadh and Doha to Ankara, that stood behind the very central state the design was meant to erode.

The collapse in Yemen

On the Yemeni shore the design came apart faster still. In December the Emirati-backed Southern Transitional Council pushed into Hadramaut and al-Mahra, the provinces that run along Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Riyadh read the advance as an attempt to complete a separatist state on its frontier, and on 30 December it bombed the port of Mukalla, striking what the coalition described as an Emirati weapons shipment landed from Fujairah. The internationally recognised government gave the UAE 24 hours to withdraw, and Abu Dhabi complied. Within about eight days it lost Socotra, Mayun and the coastal outposts it had taken eight years to build, dismantling its own island infrastructure as it left. The coalition’s spokesman later accused Abu Dhabi of running a covert operation to move the STC leader by sea to Berbera and onward to the Emirates, a charge the UAE did not answer. By 9 January the council had dissolved itself.

The rupture between the two Gulf capitals was strategic before it was personal, and it left the anti-Houthi front without its principal paymaster and without the coastal positions that front had relied on. The consequences of that vacuum arrived within months.

The strait changes hands

The timing was decisive. Iran had been at war with the United States and Israel since late February, and traffic through the Strait of Hormuz was already disrupted. Saudi Arabia, the largest oil exporter, had rerouted much of its crude through the Red Sea, which raised the value of the far end of the same route at the very moment its Yemeni shore stood undefended. The Houthis advanced through the summer and took the coast in September. They seized Mokha on the tenth, Perim the following day, the strait by the twelfth, and the Hanish islands within the week, ground the UAE had abandoned months earlier. The coastal forces that gave way were those of the National Resistance Front, part of the fractured camp the Gulf rupture had left without a patron.

That the operation served Iran as much as the Houthis is not seriously disputed. The Institute for the Study of War assessed that the advance advanced Iranian aims, with United States officials describing IRGC personnel on the ground. The Abu Dhabi-owned National reported that the Quds Force commander Abdul Reza Shahlai was directing operations in person and that fighters had arrived on a flight from Tehran. Iran’s object, on the Institute’s reading, is to establish the Houthis as the guarantor of passage through the Bab el-Mandeb, the posture Tehran has adopted at Hormuz. The provenance of that reporting warrants a note of its own, since the Emirati press has an evident interest in foregrounding Iran’s hand and passing over the vacuum Abu Dhabi’s own withdrawal created.

The geography compounds the point. The Houthi advance has carried the movement to within twenty miles of Djibouti, the state across the water that hosts American, French, Chinese and other bases, the densest concentration of foreign force on the Red Sea. None of it moved to hold the island in the middle of the strait. For Riyadh the effect is measurable. The Houthis have declared an embargo on Saudi shipping while letting other vessels pass, and Saudi crude loadings through the strait fell by more than a third in two weeks. Analysts reckon that a full closure of a waterway carrying close to a quarter of the world’s container traffic would place a comparable share of global oil and gas at risk. Iran’s allies now hold the Yemeni bank of the Bab el-Mandeb; the UAE and its partners retain the African bank at Berbera and Bosaso. The chokepoint has, in practice, been partitioned between two rival camps.

What Ankara reads in it

The lesson taken in the region is not obscure. A strategy built on the fragmentation of states and the purchase of coastlines, underwritten by an order that assumed American guarantees would hold, has left its chief author without the prize it sought and has driven the states it pressed into a common front. The clearest statement of how this looks from Ankara came in Harici’s own pages, where the former Israeli negotiator Daniel Levy described an Israeli vision of regional primacy that depends on weakening and collapsing surrounding states, and named Türkiye as the country Israeli officials now discuss in the terms they once reserved for Iran. Levy was careful to add that Israel was neither the sole nor always the primary agent of state collapse, and that qualifier is worth keeping. The claim that Türkiye is a designated target is a characterisation, advanced by an interested party and serving Ankara’s own purposes, and it should be weighed as such.

What does not depend on characterisation is the record of the past year. The doctrine of backing sub-state clients against central authorities reached its furthest extent, in Yemen and on the Horn, and then it broke. The states that were meant to be fragmented drew closer together, from Cairo to Ankara. The power that built the ring of bases lost half of it in a week. And the chokepoint at the centre of the whole enterprise passed to the actor the enterprise had been built to exclude. For a region long instructed that security flowed from alignment with Washington and its partners, the year offered a different instruction, that presence without the will to hold ground decides nothing, and that the order which promised to keep the strait open no longer commands the coast. The powers that gained were those that never staked their security on that promise, and the map they are now redrawing runs from the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden without waiting on a guarantee from abroad.