Transcription
There is a question that rarely gets asked in Western strategic circles, and it is this: What happens when three regional powers with deep historical grievances against each other suddenly discover that their grievances against outside powers matter more than their grievances against one another?
Most observers treat Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey as three separate stories. A nuclear-armed South Asian state, a sanctioned theocracy, and a NATO member with imperial nostalgia. What is often missed is that all three are converging, slowly and unevenly, towards something that has not existed in this exact configuration for over a century. An attempt by regional Muslim-majority powers to construct a security and economic framework that does not depend on Washington, Brussels, or even fully on Beijing.
To understand why this convergence is happening now and whether it can actually hold together, you have to look past the diplomatic photo opportunities and into the incentives, the geography, and the historical patterns that keep reasserting themselves. Start with geography, because geography explains almost everything that ideology later gets credit for.
Turkey controls the Bosphorus and sits at the hinge between Europe, the Caucasus, and the Middle East. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and the entire eastern flank of the Persian Gulf. Pakistan controls the land bridge between South Asia, Central Asia, and the Arabian Sea, including the deep-water port of Gwadar that China has spent over a decade building into a strategic asset. Individually, each of these three states occupies a choke point. Collectively, if they ever coordinated seriously, they would control nearly every viable overland and maritime route connecting Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia simultaneously.
This is not a minor detail. This is the kind of geographic convergence that historically has only happened a handful of times, and each time it happened, it reshaped global trade and power for generations.
History offers a useful parallel here, and it comes from the late Ottoman and Safavid periods, when Turkish, Persian, and various regional powers spent centuries locked in rivalry precisely because their territories overlapped along contested frontiers in Iraq and the Caucasus. That rivalry was not accidental. It was structural, built into the geography of competing empires sharing indefensible borders.
What is fascinating about the current moment is that modern nation-state boundaries have hardened those old frontiers into fixed lines, removing much of the territorial incentive for conflict that drove Ottoman-Safavid wars for 300 years. Turkey and Iran today compete for influence in Syria, Iraq, and the Caucasus. But neither seriously threatens the other's core territory anymore. This is a crucial shift because it means the oldest source of Turkish-Persian conflict has been substantially neutralized by the modern state system, freeing both powers to redirect their strategic energy outward rather than against each other.
Iran has spent over four decades under Western sanctions, forcing it to build an entirely parallel economic and military ecosystem that no longer assumes access to Western markets or technology. Turkey, under Erdogan, has spent two decades pivoting away from a purely NATO-aligned identity towards something more independent, more assertive, and more explicitly tied to a narrative of restored Ottoman-era regional leadership. Each of these trajectories, driven by completely different domestic pressures, happens to point in the same general direction: toward reduced dependence on Western frameworks and toward deeper regional coordination among neighbors who share an interest in reducing external leverage over their affairs.
Turkey, despite its NATO membership, has watched its currency lose most of its value over the past decade, largely because Erdogan's own unorthodox monetary policy collided with the reality of a globally interconnected financial system that punishes deviation from conventional central banking. All three governments have independently concluded that reducing exposure to dollar-denominated trade and Western financial institutions is not an ideological preference but a survival strategy. And survival strategies are far more durable than ideological alignments because they respond to material incentives rather than shifting political sentiment.
History offers another useful parallel. This one from the Non-Aligned Movement of the mid-20th century, when Nehru, Nasser, and Tito attempted to construct a third path between American and Soviet blocs during the Cold War. That movement ultimately failed to become a coherent power bloc, not because the underlying grievance against superpower domination was wrong, but because the participating states had too little economic interdependence to translate political solidarity into durable structure.
What is different and potentially more significant about the current Pakistan-Iran-Turkey dynamic is that it is emerging alongside genuine infrastructure investment, energy pipelines, transit corridors, and trade agreements backed by Chinese capital through the Belt and Road Initiative, giving this convergence a material foundation that the Non-Aligned Movement never had. Ideology alone rarely builds lasting alliances. Infrastructure and trade dependency, once established, are extraordinarily difficult to unwind precisely because they create constituencies, contractors, workers, and financial institutions with a direct stake in the relationship continuing, regardless of political mood swings.
Turkey possesses NATO's second-largest standing army and an increasingly capable domestic defense industry that now exports armed drones to dozens of countries. None of these three states needs the others for direct military defense in the way NATO members theoretically need each other against a Soviet invasion. What they need from each other is something more subtle and, frankly, more sustainable: mutual non-interference, diplomatic cover at the United Nations, intelligence coordination on shared threats like Kurdish separatism and Baloch insurgency, and a collective refusal to let outside powers play them against one another the way they have been played for the past century.
The deeper strategic issue here concerns what happens to American and European leverage once this coordination solidifies. Washington's traditional approach to the Middle East and South Asia has always relied on a divide-and-manage strategy: cultivating Pakistan against India, Turkey against Iran, Gulf Arab states against both Iran and Turkey, ensuring no single regional coalition could ever accumulate enough combined weight to resist American preferences on any major issue. This strategy worked brilliantly for decades precisely because these states genuinely distrusted each other more than they distrusted Washington.
If that calculation flips, if Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey begin to see coordinated regional autonomy as more valuable than competing for individual favor from external patrons, the entire architecture of American, Middle Eastern, and South Asian influence built since the 1950s becomes structurally harder to sustain. Not because American military power has diminished, but because the underlying incentive structure that made regional actors receptive to American leverage has quietly shifted.
Think about Rome's experience managing its eastern frontier for another instructive parallel. Roman strategy in Mesopotamia and Anatolia depended heavily on maintaining rivalries between Parthian client states and regional tribal confederations, preventing any single coalition from consolidating enough strength to challenge Roman positions directly. This worked for centuries until the Sasanian Persian Empire emerged as a unified, centralized power capable of coordinating resistance across a broader front than Rome's traditional divide-and-rule approach had ever anticipated. The lesson is not that unified regional coalitions always defeat external hegemons, because they frequently do not, but that external powers accustomed to managing fragmented regional rivals fail to recognize consolidation happening until it has already altered the strategic balance in ways that are extremely costly to reverse.
What is rarely discussed in mainstream coverage of these trilateral dialogues is the China factor, sitting quietly underneath almost every agreement being signed. China does not need Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey to form a formal alliance. China needs stable transit corridors, reliable energy partners, and diplomatic cover at international forums where Beijing increasingly finds itself outnumbered by Western-aligned voting blocs. A coordinated Pakistan-Iran-Turkey framework, even a loose one built primarily around economic cooperation and mutual non-interference, serves Chinese interests almost perfectly without requiring China to spend a single yuan on formal defense commitments or risk entanglement in any of these countries' regional conflicts.
This is where the story becomes genuinely interesting from a grand strategy perspective, because China is essentially outsourcing regional order-building to local actors whose interests happen to align with reduced American influence, achieving strategic depth across a critical swath of Eurasia without the costs that direct military alliance would impose.
Demographics add another layer that deserves far more attention than it typically receives. Pakistan's population is projected to exceed 400 million by mid-century, overwhelmingly young, overwhelmingly urban, and increasingly disconnected from the older generation's reflexive deference to American and Saudi patronage. Iran's population, despite decades of sanctions, remains highly educated relative to regional peers, producing engineers and scientists who have built an indigenous missile and nuclear program specifically because external technology access was denied. Turkey's population combines a large domestic market with an increasingly self-sufficient defense industrial base that now rivals mid-tier European producers in drone and armored vehicle exports.
Individually, each demographic profile suggests a country with growing indigenous capacity and declining tolerance for external constraint. Collectively, this represents a shift in the underlying material basis of regional power that no amount of Western diplomatic pressure can easily reverse, because you cannot sanction away a population's education, growth, or accumulated industrial capability once it has been built.
The real question then is not whether Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey will form some grand unified bloc rivaling NATO or the European Union in institutional coherence, because deep historical, sectarian, and territorial differences between these three states make that level of integration unlikely for the foreseeable future. The real question is whether their looser, more pragmatic coordination, built on shared economic necessity, mutual non-interference, and quiet Chinese infrastructure support, is sufficient to meaningfully constrain American and European leverage across an enormous swath of Eurasia stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea.
History suggests that formal alliance structures are not actually necessary for this kind of constraint to work. What matters is whether external powers can still reliably play regional actors against each other. And every indication over the past several years suggests that calculation is becoming considerably less reliable than it used to be.
This brings us to the larger implication that extends well beyond these three countries specifically. What we are witnessing is not simply a regional realignment but an early signal of what a genuinely multipolar world actually looks like in practice. Not a clean division into competing blocs the way Cold War analysts imagined, but a messier, more fluid landscape where regional powers hedge simultaneously across multiple external patrons while quietly building the infrastructure and institutional relationships to reduce their dependence on all of them over time.
The international order that emerged after 1945, and that many Western policymakers still instinctively assume is permanent, was never actually a natural or inevitable state of the world. It was a specific historical arrangement built on American economic dominance, European institutional coordination, and regional powers too fragmented or too dependent to coordinate independently. That last condition, regional fragmentation, is the one quietly eroding beneath Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey's post-war dialogues. And if it continues eroding at its current pace, the strategic map that future historians draw of this decade may look considerably less like the unipolar moment of the 1990s and considerably more like the multipolar, choke-point-driven world that existed before any single power managed to dominate the entire Eurasian landmass at once.