On 14 September at 10:00 AM, the Moscow venue of the Valdai Club will host the presentation of a new Valdai Paper titled “Turkey and Iran: The Limits of Regional Influence”.
The armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas that broke out in 2023, and its subsequent escalation, have altered the balance of power in the Middle East.
The key factor in the region’s further transformation remains the confrontation between Iran, on the one hand, and the United States and Israel, on the other. The scale and intensity of this confrontation will determine not only Tehran’s own standing, but also the conduct of the other regional players, including Turkey and the Gulf monarchies.
As the participants in the “Axis of Resistance”—above all Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and Lebanon’s Hezbollah—have seen their positions weaken, Iran has faced a considerable erosion of the system of regional influence it had spent years building. Turkey, meanwhile, has gained the opportunity to consolidate the status quo that Ankara has been working to shape for more than fifteen years since the start of the Arab Spring, above all in Syria and Iraq.
“The 2010s brought rapid change to the Middle Eastern subsystem of international relations, marked by a diminishing role for global powers and a growing one for regional powers. Among the latter, Turkey and Iran took up key positions. Whereas Turkey’s rise was accompanied by a revision of its regional strategy and the conceptual foundations of its foreign policy as a whole, Iran relied on mechanisms of regional influence that were already in place, and its geopolitical weight grew more by inertia than by design” notes the author of the paper, Nubara Kulieva, Junior Research Fellow at HSE University.
How exactly has the balance of power in the region changed, and what place do Turkey and Iran occupy within it? Can Tehran make up for the losses it has sustained since 2023? Will Ankara be able to capitalise on the weakening of Iran’s regional positions? What are the main points of convergence and the lines of division in Turkish–Iranian regional interaction? What will the new status quo of Turkish–Iranian relations look like?
One of the authors of the Valdai Paper and the participants in the presentation will attempt to answer these and other questions.
Speakers:
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Nubara Kulieva, Junior Research Fellow, Centre for Comprehensive European and International Studies (CCEIS), HSE University
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Pavel Shlykov, Head of the Oriental Studies Programme, Institute for International Studies, MGIMO University; Associate Professor, Department of Middle Eastern Studies, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University.
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Taha Özhan, Research Director, Ankara Institute (Turkey)
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Alexander Maryasov, Russian diplomat; Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia to Thailand and Permanent Representative to ESCAP (2010–2014); Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Russia to Iran (2001–2005)
Moderator:
Working languages: Russian, English.
Information for the media: To register for the event, please fill out the form on our website. For any inquiries, contact press@valdaiclub.com or call +79269307763.
The discussion will be live-streamed across all Valdai Club platforms: the website, X (formerly Twitter), VK, Telegram and Dzen.
The Valdai Discussion Club was established in 2004. It is named after Lake Valdai, which is located close to Veliky Novgorod, where the Club’s first meeting took place.
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