Structural Dependency, Transit Leverage, and Strategic Ordering from the Caspian to the Levant
1. Regional Events as a System, Not Episodes
Middle Eastern geopolitics is often interpreted through isolated frames: Türkiye’s domestic security debates, Syria’s post-war settlement, Gulf-Egyptian rivalries, and the Israeli-Palestinian arena. Treated separately, these files distort the strategic architecture now emerging. The region behaves less like a set of parallel crises and more like an interdependent strategic system in which energy flows, security guarantees, political settlements, and alliance constraints continuously condition one another. Power is no longer exercised primarily through territorial claims, but through control of transit, sequencing of diplomacy, and management of strategic dependency chains.
This analysis applies structural dependency theory combined with corridor geopolitics as its primary analytical lens, prioritizing transit leverage and alignment pressure over unit-level political agency as the core drivers of regional ordering.
2. Coerced Peace as Strategic Design
The evolving order is best conceptualized as Coerced Peace — a stability model in which conflict is not resolved through mutual settlement or strategic parity, but managed through asymmetric guarantees, economically embedded compliance incentives, and restricted escalation corridors. Unlike Deterrence Stability, which depends on balanced retaliatory capacity, coerced peace functions through dependency engineering: cost imbalance, alignment pressure, and limited autonomy for exit.
The United States’ approach in the Middle East increasingly resembles conflict regulation through conditional integration rather than conflict resolution through settlement.
3. The Caspian–Mediterranean Alignment: From Energy Map to Strategic Spine
At the 2025 Manama Dialogue in Bahrain, U.S. financier and diplomat Tom Barrack argued that, should the Gaza ceasefire stabilize, Türkiye and Israel could enter an era of structured economic cooperation, enabling a broader strategic alignment extending from the Caspian basin to the Eastern Mediterranean. He described a future in which Azerbaijan, Türkiye, and Israel form an integrated economic and security horizon, functionally bypassing Russian and Iranian leverage in regional energy architecture.
This vision signals more than an energy proposal — it reflects an emerging corridor logic:
- Azerbaijan → upstream supply and source legitimacy
- Türkiye → indispensable land transit and logistical switching state
- Israel → downstream market integration and Mediterranean maritime extension
The Caucasus in this model is not a neighboring region; it is the northern gateway of a restructured Middle Eastern power configuration.
4. Why This Corridor is Global, Not Regional
This axis must also be read through a global power lens:
- U.S.–China competition: China’s Belt and Road infrastructure footprint in Central Asia and port investments in the Eastern Mediterranean create strategic pre-emption pressure. The Caspian-Mediterranean axis functions as an alignment-based alternative corridor, limiting China’s ability to convert commercial infrastructure into long-term geopolitical leverage.
- U.S. bandwidth constraints: With Indo-Pacific priorities absorbing military and industrial capacity (AUKUS, Taiwan Strait deterrence, South China Sea), Washington seeks a self-stabilizing Middle Eastern order that requires fewer crisis interventions and locks partners into predictable dependency loops.
- EU energy security imperatives: Europe’s post-Ukraine shift has not eliminated gas dependency — it has redistributed it. What Brussels requires now is non-Russian, non-Gulf, and politically alignable supply chains. Caspian-origin gas through Türkiye fulfills this condition more reliably than any alternative pathway.
5. Military Infrastructure: Managing Conflict Without Triggering War
The emerging security order is scaffolded by logistics dominance rather than active force projection, including:
- Eastern Mediterranean maritime triangle: Crete → Cyprus → Haifa logistics arc
- Air mobility chain: Incirlik → Muwaffaq Salti → Nevatim → Souda Bay interoperability
- Missile defense layering: Arrow, THAAD, and sensor-integration networks
- Chokepoint stability sequencing: Turkish Straits, Suez, and Bab-al-Mandab governance rhythms
These positions are optimized for conflict containment, not escalation dominance.
6. Egypt, the Gulf, and Managed Competitive Containment
Cairo’s posture — especially regarding Gaza — is driven less by ideology and more by sovereignty over gateways. The Gulf states, meanwhile, project influence via capital allocation, reconstruction financing, and statecraft rather than military balancing. Their competition is real, but it unfolds inside the broader U.S.-anchored alignment structure rather than against it.
7. Türkiye’s Real Strategic Variable: Indispensability
The emerging order rewards states not for visibility, activism, or rhetoric, but for non-removability from transactional pathways. Türkiye’s long-term leverage will depend on:
- Remaining the least substitutable transit link between producers and off-takers
- Participating in security coordination without being operationally subordinated
- Embedding itself in alignment architecture while avoiding absolute alignment capture
- Maintaining corridor indispensability without appearing as an obstruction point
8. The Risk of Over-Illumination Without Structural Weight
Diplomatic brightness can mask structural constraints. A state may appear central while functionally peripheral if it occupies conversations without controlling the sequencing of outcomes. The key strategic threshold is not being engaged, but being unbypassable.
9. The Underlying Variable: Managed Societal Exhaustion
No coerced peace model produces immediate reconciliation. It produces regulated political fatigue. In regions where populations experience prolonged economic attrition, agency shifts from ideological alignment to survival calculus, lowering the volatility ceiling while delaying political resolution.
10. Strategic Conclusion
The region is not moving toward conflict resolution.
It is moving toward conflict metabolism through engineered dependency.
The actors that will shape outcomes are not those with maximal autonomy, but those whose exclusion makes the system collapse.
“Power has transitioned from commanding results to designing the routes through which results must travel.“
Muhammet Ali Zurnacı
Three Corporate
November 8, 2025__ Istanbul