While Iranian protesters are being beaten, imprisoned, and killed by the Islamic Republic, Turkey’s government is busy running diplomatic interference for the mullahs. Ankara’s effort, marshaled by Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, is not an aberration or a miscalculation. Rather, it is a revealing confirmation of Turkey’s long-standing ideological sympathy for Islamist regimes and movements across the Middle East.
Turkish officials cloak their defense of Tehran in warnings about “regional instability,” arguing that the collapse of the Islamic Republic could create a dangerous power vacuum. But beneath this familiar talking point lies a simpler truth: President Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not want to see Iran fall — especially if its downfall would weaken a fellow Islamist regime and strengthen Israel’s strategic position.
An Iran free of nuclear ambition and terrorist proxies would be a major victory for Israel and the broader Western security order. For Erdogan, that outcome is unacceptable.
To be sure, concerns about the risks of military confrontation with Iran are not illegitimate. Even Turkey’s opposition Republican People’s Party has expressed unease about escalation. Yet, Fidan’s public statements go far beyond mere caution. They amount to both a wholesale absolution of Tehran’s crimes and a betrayal of the Iranian people.
In comments published by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency, Fidan denied that Iran’s protests reflect a popular demand for regime change, dismissing them as economically driven and therefore ambiguous. This is demonstrably false. Iranians are risking their lives not for marginal economic relief, but to reject a system that has crushed their freedoms for more than four decades. What began as protests over hardship has unmistakably evolved into a nationwide repudiation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Republic itself.
Fidan compounds this deception by blaming international sanctions, instead of Iran’s own catastrophic governance, for the suffering of ordinary Iranians. But this argument collapses under even minimal scrutiny. Tehran has repeatedly been offered off-ramps: reduce repression, abandon nuclear brinkmanship, and stop exporting terrorism. Instead, it has poured billions into Hezbollah, Hamas, and regional militias while resuming its nuclear ambitions. Iran’s misery is self-inflicted. It is not imposed by the outside world.
If Erdogan were genuinely concerned about the destabilizing effects of Iran’s collapse, he would not have spent years helping prop up the regime economically. In 2019, U.S. prosecutors charged Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank with fraud, money laundering, and sanctions evasion, alleging that it helped Iran move roughly $20 billion in restricted funds, some of it through the U.S. financial system. Ankara’s record shows not restraint, but complicity.
Yet, the Turkey-Iran relationship is about more than money. It is also rooted in ideological affinity. During the latest wave of Iranian protests, Fidan emphasized Iran’s “importance” to Turkey, while Erdogan invoked “Muslim unity” against Israel during the recent regional conflict. This rhetoric echoes the worldview of Erdogan’s Islamist mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, who openly embraced Tehran’s clerical leadership decades ago. The affinity between Ankara and Tehran is neither tactical nor temporary. In fact, it is doctrinal.
What truly unsettles Erdogan, however, is not Iran’s regional role, but what Iran’s protests might inspire at home. If an entrenched Islamist regime can be challenged in Tehran, why not in Ankara? Indeed, Turkey’s own opposition has begun drawing the connection. In Cumhuriyet, Turkey’s leading opposition newspaper, voices from the CHP have condemned Iran’s repression and expressed solidarity with its protesters.
Turkey’s domestic unrest is no abstraction. Since March 2025, the country has witnessed some of the largest demonstrations in its republican history. In January, CHP leader Ozgur Ozel led tens of thousands in Istanbul to protest the continued detention of the city’s mayor and presidential contender, Ekrem Imamoglu. What began as outrage over a single arrest has grown into a broader movement against Erdogan’s erosion of the rule of law.
ENDING IRAN’S REGIME WON’T BE EASY
Turkey is not Iran. It still holds elections, maintains a viable opposition, and lacks a tradition of revolutionary upheaval. But those distinctions are narrowing. Should Erdogan manipulate the 2028 presidential race by permanently sidelining Imamoglu, he may push Turkish society past a breaking point.
Ankara’s eagerness to smother Iran’s democratic aspirations is nothing short of an act of regime self-preservation. A free Iran would embolden Turks to challenge the Islamist kleptocracy hollowing out their own institutions. That is why the United States and its democratic allies must stand unequivocally with the Iranian people. They should do so, and not only for Iran’s future, but to ensure that the hope of democracy does not disappear across the region.
