From the get-go, it was clear that this was Israel’s war. The U.S. may suffer a dent to its prestige as a superpower, but to suggest that Israel has dragged America into the war is, at the very least, misguided. Israel functions as an American outpost in the region, while the U.S. remains its primary security guarantor. Whatever Israel undertakes carries American backing and, often, its strategic concurrence. The two share overlapping geopolitical interests.
But that is not the real point of contention.
Let us assume that Israel achieves most of what it set out to do, short of regime change. Iran is significantly weakened, its military and civilian infrastructure heavily degraded, and its capacity to pose a threat to Israel diminished for the foreseeable future, even if its state structure continues to function in a limited form. Let us further assume that Israel succeeds in establishing a so-called buffer zone in southern Lebanon, extending up to the Litani River, as it has long claimed.
Would this constitute a final war? Or would it, instead, open the floodgates to a far more dangerous phase, one in which the region is locked into cycles of destabilization and recurring conflict for decades to come?
The reason a clear military victory fails to yield a definitive peace is that the conflict has outgrown its own parameters. We are no longer watching a clash of states over lines on a map; we are watching a clash of definitions. To understand why "peace" remains elusive, we must look beyond the familiar language of strategy and statecraft.
The answer lies there. What has long been framed as a geopolitical dispute demands a more unsettling description. The language of borders, security and negotiated settlement, once central to understanding the conflict, no longer adequately explains its trajectory. These were the assumptions: that it was territorial, that it could be mediated, that it could be resolved within the familiar grammar of modern statecraft.
What is unfolding instead bears the marks of a civilizational assertion, where land is treated as a matter of inheritance. A much older claim rooted in sacred history and sustained across centuries of memory. In such a framework, territory ceases to become absolute.
Because once a conflict is framed in civilizational terms, compromise is no longer a rational endpoint. The dispute is not about where a border runs but about who holds an enduring, unquestionable right to the land itself. Power, then, is the instrument through which that claim is enforced and realized.
Geopolitics has simply moved to the back bench. It operates as a tool, not an explanation.
The collective Israeli thinking process is no longer basing its claims merely on a "right to exist" or the secular idea of a modern homeland. Instead, it draws its primary source of legitimacy from biblical history. This was made starkly evident by figures like Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador, who suggested that if the Bible bestows the entire region from the Nile to the Euphrates, then that is the ultimate claim.
Under this logic, Israel has transitioned its security doctrine away from stable borders and toward absolute hegemony. Its philosophy of existence is to assert control over everything in its surroundings. Consequently, it is a system that must continue to create and confront adversaries, even after subduing the present ones, to maintain that very hegemony.
The strategic horizon, therefore, does not end at the borders of Lebanon or the ruins of Gaza. It is already extending outward. Within Israel’s evolving calculus, the focus is turning toward a new frontier. With the "Shiite axis" framed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as significantly degraded, the question is one of succession.
In this emerging frame, attention is now turning toward Türkiye, since it is framed as the next frontier to be conquered. By framing Türkiye as the next inevitable adversary, the Israeli strategic doctrine ensures a permanent war footing. The "frontier" is moved toward the Anatolian heartland, signaling that in a quest for biblical hegemony, there is no such thing as a final victory, only changing targets in an endless cycle of regional dominance.
This expansionist logic places a profound burden of recognition on those currently in the crosshairs of this strategic imagination. Türkiye must recognize that it is increasingly being cast as a "next frontier" through a civilizational lens that recasts the modern republic into rigid, historical categories to justify a logic of anticipation. These framing risks manufacture a conflict based on imagination rather than immediate action, making it a matter of strategic necessity for Ankara to respond with institutional resilience and social cohesion.
True preparedness in this context is a sophisticated form of deterrence, signaling a level of internal stability and defensive resolve that effectively denies the conditions in which an external conflict could ever become inevitable.
