Peloni: Turkey is ever waiting to fill the next power vacuum…and this should be understood to be true in both Iran and Lebanon.
by Nils A. Haug • Gatestone Institute • March 18, 2026
Now, just as Israel is overcoming its primary enemy, the Iranian regime, which seeks to wipe Israel off the map and then establish a Caliphate under Sharia law in the region — along comes yet another Muslim extremist of a similar kind, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Pictured: Turkey’s Pres. Erdogan meets Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Screengrab via Youtube.
- Erdogan, from his comments, seems to consider himself the rightful leader of the entire Muslim world. In the interim, he evidently sees himself as “the Middle East’s next great power broker, claiming leadership while chaos reigns.”
- Now, just as Israel is overcoming its primary enemy, the Iranian regime, which seeks to wipe Israel off the map and then establish a Caliphate under Sharia law in the region — along comes yet another Muslim extremist of a similar kind, Turkey’s Erdogan.
- In March 2025, Erdogan doubled down on his anti-Israel rhetoric: “[I]n Turkey’s largest mosque, he reportedly told a crowd of worshippers: ‘May Allah, for the sake of his name, Al-Qahhar’—the Vanquisher—’destroy and devastate Israel.'”
- Turkey, it seems, will become Iran’s successor in continuing venomous anti-Israel threats in the Muslim sphere, with “Death to Israel” voiced even in the Turkish parliament.
- Perhaps only when Turkey’s leader openly declares, “Death to America” will the US realize that the Islamist monster it has naively supported has simply been stringing the West along.
Tehran’s infamous “doomsday clock” was designed to count down to the annihilation of Israel in the year 2040. Instead, it appears finally to have ceased operating at the 2026 mark, along with many leaders of Iran’s extremist Islamic regime.
The irony of Iran’s rout by its two most-hated enemies — the “Great Satan” United States and the “Little Satan” Israel — must be seismic in Iran’s major centers, where much of the civilian population openly celebrates, not the end of Israel as intended by Shia clerics, but, instead, the hoped-for final days of an apparently much-hated regime.
Israel long sought to destroy the clock’s prominence in Tehran’s Palestine Square, and has now succeeded in eliminating most of Iran’s military and propaganda infrastructure.
At least this will enable the €U and NATO to rid themselves of the Turkish anomaly at some opportunity and further shake down Europe West of Russia into a more systematically coherent bloc.
If religious nit picking is to be revived as pertinent to their politics then like many swords it has two edges. Warlord Mohammed’s religion may have been spread by the sword as their mobs bay, BUT it was also rolled back by force – as much by The Enlightenment as Western armies.