Doug Macgregor: It’s Time for the U.S. to Pu…...

Doug Macgregor: It’s Time for the U.S. to Pu…

Doug Macgregor: It’s Time for the U.S. to Pu…
WASHINGTON — For more than two decades, the American foreign policy establishment has operated under a singular, rigid dogma: that Iran is the undisputed, permanent epicenter of instability in the Middle East. From the smoke-filled briefing rooms of the Pentagon to the pristine corridors of Washington think tanks, the Islamic Republic has been cast as the ultimate existential menace to the rules-based order and the survival of Israel. Yet, an increasing number of independent military analysts—most notably retired U.S. Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor—are warning that our strategic class has spent twenty years staring in entirely the wrong direction. While the West remained myopically obsessed with containing an economically suffocating Tehran, a far more disciplined, patient, and methodically lethal power has been steadily building its military-industrial base, consolidating its regional influence, and preparing to emerge as the uncontested heavyweight of a new Middle East. That power is Turkey.

The current geopolitical friction exposes a deeper, uncomfortable reality that Washington planners are desperate to ignore: the long-term confrontation with Iran did not have to become an endless war. Years ago, Israel and the West possessed clear diplomatic openings to reach a durable, transactional accommodation with Tehran and the broader Shiite political architecture. That opening was squandered, pushed aside by a preference for tactical escalation over long-term statecraft. But while the West treated the region as a sandbox for endless counter-insurgency and punitive bombing campaigns, Ankara was playing a different game entirely. Under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey does not plan its geopolitical moves in four-year election cycles; it plans them in generations.
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