August 18, 2026: Consigliere is an ancient term describing a counselor or someone who provides expert advice. For nearly half a century, it has been seeking to arrange or maintain peace throughout the Middle East. At the same time, Turkey has some serious problems at home. Last year there was some good news: the PKK/Kurdistan Workers Party disbanded after half a century of fighting to establish a Kurdish state out of Kurdish-occupied areas in Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

Since the 1990s, Turkey has become more of a problem for itself and many other nations in the region. This interference remains a problem. President Erdogan survived the 2023 national elections despite having been in office for more than 20 years. Still, his political opposition grew stronger. Erdogan remains in office for another five years. Even when out of office, Erdogan will remain a political kingmaker and major factor in Turkish politics. The Turks quietly supported the HTS takeover of neighboring Syria and appear to have provided help to HTS in planning their offensive from bases on the Turkish border. The payoff is supposed to be a more cooperative HTS government, especially when it comes to dealing with the Kurds who occupy 40 percent of Syria in the northeast along the Turkish border.

During the 1980s, Erdogan established contacts between Iran and Iraq during their eight-year war. Erdogan's focus on mediation as a diplomatic tool grew alongside the rise of his Justice and Development Party over the last quarter-century. During his first years in power, Erdogan promoted discussions between Israel and Syria, as well as between Sunni and Shia groups in Iraq, and similar efforts with Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah.

What has been remarkable about these Turkish efforts is the long history of mayhem, betrayal and violence in the Middle East. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations are common in the Middle East, which is one reason it has been such a violent region for so long. There was an example of that when anti-Semites throughout the Arab world were outraged as details emerged about the April 2016 deal that had Egypt give Saudi Arabia two uninhabited islands (Tiran and Sanafir) at the entrance to the Red Sea. What upset so many anti-Israeli Arabs was the fact that those two islands were mentioned in the 1978 peace deal between Egypt and Israel. While the Saudis were not a party to that treaty, they quietly agreed to honor any agreements between Egypt and the international community. This applied to the 1978 treaty involving Israel. Since then, the Saudis and Israelis have grown visibly closer. In the case of Tiran and Sanafir, the Saudis made it clear that Israel would continue to be guaranteed free passage in and out of the Red Sea. For decades, Egypt and Saudi Arabia kept naval forces in the Red Sea to confront Israel. But since the 1978 treaty, Egypt has stopped doing so, and it has now been noted that the Saudis have as well.

This openness about links between Israel and the Gulf Arabs became obvious in mid-2015 when Saudi Arabia came out and publicly agreed with Israel about what was wrong with the Iran treaty. Up until then, it was widely known in the region that Israel had developed more than casual relationships with many Arab states. At the time, the issue was the new treaty that removed most sanctions from Iran. The Israelis, Saudis, and other Gulf Arabs agree that Iran is more likely to behave like North Korea or Saddam-ruled Iraq rather than comply with the treaty and pull back on getting nukes before the end of the No-Nukes period. Inside Iran, the new treaty was seen as a great victory, and on the streets (and on the Internet) the average Iranian sees this as their well-deserved opportunity to get their nukes. Senior American military leaders were also not happy with the new treaty, some of them going so far as to point out that Iran-backed Islamic terrorists killed over 500 American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. Israelis and Saudis can also point to citizens killed by Iranian terrorism. Gulf Arabs in particular are reminded regularly that Iranian propaganda still praises and encourages that sort of thing. Israel reminds everyone that Iran still holds national holidays where millions of Iranians are urged to gather and chant their hatred for the United States and Israel and call for the destruction of these two enemy states. Many Gulf Arabs still call for the destruction of Israel, but their leaders now openly speak of Israel as a valued ally in the struggle against Iranian aggression.

The civil war in Syria and the growth of ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) also led Turkey to repair relations with Israel. Because of the ISIL threat, Egypt and the Gulf Arabs substantially improved their existing relations with Israel. Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf Arabs all had developed links with Islamic terror groups over the years but by 2015 realized that Israel was a better ally and certainly less dangerous than Islamic radicals (like al Qaeda and ISIL) that called for all governments in Muslim-majority countries to be replaced by a religious dictatorship. By early 2016, the GCC openly agreed with Israel that Hezbollah was indeed a terrorist organization.

Even before 2015, unofficial diplomatic and intelligence-sharing ties with Gulf Arab states were becoming better known. By late 2015, even Turkey was working to improve its relationships with Israel. This was a major turnaround by the Turks. Turkey had expelled the Israeli ambassador in 2011, and relations between the two countries had been going downhill since 2007. That was when the AKP (Islamic Justice and Development Party) won reelection, and party leader (and Turkish president) Recep Tayyip Erdoğan decided to turn on Israel in order to increase influence in Arab countries. It soon became clear this was not working well, but AKP leaders were unwilling to back down. By 2011, Turkey had cut most of its extensive diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Israel. It took four more years of Islamic terrorist violence inside Turkey and isolation from Israeli economic and military cooperation to change enough minds in the AKP (which is still Islamic).

After the Arab Spring uprisings in Syria turned violent in 2011, Turkey tolerated Islamic terrorists traveling to Syria via Turkish territory as long as this was to fight the Syrian government (Assad) forces. The Turks and the Assads had never gotten along well, and since the AKP came to power, Turkey has been trying to support efforts by Muslims to defend Islam against heretics like the Shia Iranians, Syrians and Lebanese, Israel and the West. But this backfired, and now Turkey is trying to mend relations with Israel, Russia, Egypt and the West. At the same time, Turkey still considers whoever is running Syria a similar threat, along with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In the Middle East, the oil may eventually run out, but the disagreements worth killing and dying for are most definitely renewable.