But the invasion was more than a gruesome slaughter that led to years of open war between Israel and the Islamic Republic and its minions. It may also mark the high-water mark of the Iranian regime.

Israel began the war surrounded by Iranian-backed terrorist groups. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other groups to its south and Hezbollah, the de facto ruler of Lebanon, to its north. Iranian proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and the West Bank also had the means to attack. Hezbollah alone possessed more advanced ballistic missiles than most European countries.

Nearly three years later, all have been severely degraded. And for the first time, the head of the snake, Iran, hasn’t been able to escape unscathed. Joint military actions by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic were tactical successes.

Iran’s defense industrial base has been severely damaged, its means to project power severely degraded. Its navy, War Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly said, “lies at the bottom of the ocean.”

In one fell swoop, Jerusalem and Washington carried out the most successful decapitation strike in modern military history, eliminating the upper echelons of Iran’s military and political leadership.

These are significant achievements that took place in a matter of weeks, not months. Never in modern history has a country achieved so much in war in such a short period of time and at so little cost.

Yet Iran’s ability to take and hold the Strait of Hormuz has provided Tehran the leverage it has skillfully used. As President Donald Trump observed in a January 2020 tweet: “Iran has never won a war, but never lost a negotiation.”

Iran now knows what it has long suspected: It can take and hold the strait and use economic coercion to bring a far more powerful country to the negotiating table. It believes it can outlast its more fickle democratic opponents, who are, rightfully, prone to public whims.

Iran’s patrons, Beijing foremost among them, are almost certainly taking notes.

For its part, the U.S. has expended precious munitions in a war and demonstrated, yet again, that tactical victories on battlefields do not always translate into political success.

This has been the case for American warfighting for more than half a century. And it has become a calling card of U.S. wars in the Middle East, where political victory has often remained elusive. If, as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously said, “war is politics by other means,” the U.S. faces a perennially difficult situation in a part of the world whose politics and culture are very different from our own.

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Israel has also demonstrated great tactical and operational acumen. Jerusalem has restored the deterrence that it lost on Oct. 7. Against all odds, the Jewish state has faced multiple entrenched opponents on multiple fronts and won. This, of course, isn’t the first time that Israel has done so, and is part of a pattern of Israeli warfighting that dates back to the country’s rebirth in 1948.

Notably, Israeli success predated American military involvement in the summer of 2025. In fact, it seems likely to have helped encourage it. Israel’s stunning intelligence capabilities, fully on display with Operation Grim Beeper in Lebanon, will be studied for years to come.

Yet nearly three years of grueling war on the homefront, with routine missile barrages, depleted munitions, and battlefield casualties, are not without effect.

Iran, Israel, and the U.S. have all lost precious men and material. No war is fought without cost.

Turkey, by contrast, has only achieved gains. And Ankara didn’t even have to fight a war to achieve them. Its land isn’t pockmarked, its people do not bear the scars of battle, and its treasury hasn’t taken a hit.

Syria has long been a battlefield for regional power competition. Under Bashar Assad, the country transformed into a veritable Iranian satrapy. Tehran’s grip was only strengthened by the bloody Syrian civil war that began in March 2011, and the subsequent Obama-brokered Iran deal that filled the regime’s coffers.

But Iran’s hold on Syria was fatally weakened by the decision of its Gaza proxy, Hamas, to launch the Oct. 7 attack. With Assad’s ouster, Iran lost its imperial holdings in Syria.

Iran’s loss has been Turkey’s gain. Ahmed al Sharaa now controls the remnants of the country. Prior to seizing power, al Sharaa was the emir of Hay’at Tahrir al Sham, an al Qaeda offshoot that counts Turkey as one of its boosters.

Sharaa is new to power. And it’s fair to say that both his grip and his independence remain tenuous in a country that experienced 10 coups and 16 political transitions from 1946 until 1970, when Assad’s father, Hafez, carried out his own coup.

Turkey’s influence in the country is unlikely to diminish anytime soon.

Turkey has other assets that will enable it to fill the vacuum left by a weakened Iran. Its military and intelligence capabilities are superior to those of most other countries in the region, except Israel’s. Its economy is also more diversified, and it boasts a manufacturing sector that many of its Arab neighbors lack.

Indeed, purely by dint of geography, Turkey will always be of chief geostrategic importance, straddling the East and West and overseeing waterways and transit points whose significance to the global economy stretches back to ancient times. Wars were fought over Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, for reasons that extend beyond the religious.

Turkey has the means. And it also has the motive.

Turkey’s longtime president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants to reconstitute the Ottoman Empire of old. Erdogan fashions himself a sultan and has changed Turkey’s orientation in significant ways. He has presided over a period of time in which Turkish power has grown, and he both knows it and clearly means to use it.

Under Erdogan, the country has shifted away from the West and away from Israel. To be sure, Turkey was never part of the West, its membership in NATO and other U.S.-backed military pacts notwithstanding.

But under Erdogan, Turkey has become more Islamist, breaking with a tradition set by its founder, Mustafa Kemal, or Ataturk, the “father of the Turks.” Turkey has supported, in very real and substantial ways, Islamist movements such as Hamas. This pivot has led to increased tensions with not only Israel, but with many of its Arab neighbors, who haven’t forgotten Turkey’s historic imperial ambitions and also have concerns about terrorists within their own borders.

In the wake of Operation Epic Fury, many of these neighbors have seen their own territories damaged by Iranian missiles. They’ve seen impressive U.S. and Israeli military might, but are likely left nonplussed that the Iranian regime has been left standing.

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The void left by a weakened Iran will be filled. In key respects, Turkey is the only candidate to fill it. Turkey’s fortunes are rising, and the U.S. and its allies will have to reckon with the consequences for years to come.

While this trend predates the latest war in the Middle East, Turkey has, if unintentionally, been strengthened by the war. As Winston Churchill, a statesman whose political fortunes were once tied to the country’s Gallipoli peninsula, observed, “The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”