The Encirclement

In April, Joe Kent wrote a sentence on X that nobody officially answered: the United States would leave NATO to side with Israel against Türkiye. What looks like a single tweet is the compression of fifty-two days, five escalation steps, and an alliance standing at a breaking point that nobody is willing to name.

by Michael Hollister in interview with Deniz Karabağ
Published at GlobalBridge on May 21, 2026

4.821 words * 25 minutes readingtime

How a rhetorical warning became an operational logic – and why NATO stands at a breaking point no one wants to name

On April 9, 2026, Joe Kent posted a sentence on X that no one has officially answered. Viewed 3.89 million times, seventy-two thousand likes – and from the White House, the State Department, the Pentagon: silence. The sentence reads: the United States would not leave NATO to withdraw from foreign entanglements, but to be able to stand alongside Israel when a clash between Israel and Turkey in Syria occurs. The man who wrote this was not a frustrated outsider. He was the man Donald Trump made his counterterrorism adviser in 2020, who was appointed director of the National Counterterrorism Center in 2025, who completed eleven combat deployments as a Green Beret, whose wife Shannon was killed in a suicide bombing by ISIS in Manbij in 2019 – and who resigned from his director position on March 17, 2026 in protest against the Iran war, on the grounds that this war had been “fabricated by Israel and its lobby.”

And what he is saying is not day-to-day politics. It is a description of a process spanning multiple US presidencies – and the question that arises from his sentence is no longer whether, but when, and under which president.

Five Steps in Fifty-Two Days

Bennett came first. On February 17, 2026, the former Israeli prime minister spoke at the Conference of Presidents in Jerusalem the sentence that has since been rolling through Washington’s strategic discourses: Turkey is the new Iran. Erdogan is attempting to flip Saudi Arabia, to build a hostile Sunni axis with nuclear-armed Pakistan, and Israel must understand that the next existential threat will come not from Tehran but from Ankara. What Bennett said was not merely a foreign policy assessment. It was a frame shift. Until that February day, “Turkey as the new Iran” was a footnote in Foundation for Defense of Democracies papers, a minority view in Brookings Institution memos, a borderline statement in AIPAC briefings. Bennett brought it onto a stage from which it leapt into the American discourse. Within weeks, Israel-affiliated organizations began reallocating their resources – what had run for years as anti-Iran lobbying was converting at accelerated pace into anti-Turkey positioning. It is the same dynamic observable before the Iraq War in 2002 and functional before the Iran sanctions in 2012: a political position that has been circulating in foreign policy elites for years is made public by a prominent voice, and the apparatus sets itself in motion. Bennett’s hexagon concept – Israel as center, Greece, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as vertices – was already a procurement architecture at the time of his speech, no longer a theoretical model. What he articulated was not the diagnosis of a threat but the delivery of a justification. I addressed Bennett’s background, his political profile, and the strategic architecture of his hexagon concept in detail in the analysis of March 15. Here it suffices to note: Bennett’s speech was no improvisation. It was the public condensation of what had been circulating in Israel-affiliated think tank circles for months – and it crossed the boundary between fringe opinion and mainstream discourse.

Fifteen days later came the first missile. On March 4, 2026, NATO air defense systems intercepted a ballistic missile that had flown from Iranian territory over Syria and Iraq toward Turkey. Debris fell in Dörtyol, Hatay Province – forty-five miles east of Incirlik Air Base, where US nuclear weapons are stored. Turkish authorities suspected the actual target had been a British base on Cyprus; the Foundation for Defense of Democracies titled its analysis with the question of whether this incident would shift Ankara’s stance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made clear that same day that this was not an Article 5 case. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte confirmed to Reuters in the following week that there was no discussion of invoking Article 5. Iran denied any deliberate targeting.

On March 9, the second missile, intercepted over Şahinbey in Gaziantep district. On March 13, the third – residents of Adana, the city immediately adjacent to Incirlik, were awakened by sirens at 3:25 in the morning and filmed burning debris in the sky. On March 30, the fourth. Four missiles in twenty-six days, each from Iranian airspace, each without an Article 5 response. NATO stationed an additional Patriot battery in Malatya. Erdogan opened his own intelligence investigation. Turkey reserved the right to retaliation.

On March 21, Süleyman Soylu took the floor – former Interior Minister of Turkey, AKP member of parliament from Istanbul, chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Internal Affairs. At the AKP’s Bayramlaşma gathering in the Gaziosmanpaşa district, he spoke a sentence that Cumhuriyet, VeryansınTV, and Halk TV broadcast that evening, and the international press the next morning: “Belki farkında değil ama biz İsrail’e komşuyuz. Hatay’dan İsrail toplam 5 saattir. 300-400 bin şehit veririz ama Allah’ın izniyle İsrail diye bir memleket kalmaz.” Perhaps you are not aware, but we border Israel. From Hatay to Israel is five hours in total. We might give three to four hundred thousand martyrs, but God willing, there would be no country called Israel left. This is not the language of a backbencher. This is the language of a man who bore responsibility for Turkey’s internal security for three and a half years, who today chairs the Interior Committee, and who places a sentence on an official AKP platform – at an event where the message is also tolerated by party leadership, otherwise Soylu would not have been there.

On March 30, the Israeli daily Ynet reported what had been discussed in the back rooms of Washington, Jerusalem, and Erbil days earlier: Israel and the United States had planned to send Kurdish groups from Iraq as ground troops into Iran. CNN confirmed at the same time that the CIA had begun arming them months before the war started. Approximately five hundred Kurdish fighters were already moving from Iraqi Kurdistan toward the Iranian border when Erdogan picked up the phone in Ankara and called Trump directly. In a direct conversation with Trump, according to Ynet, he made the red line unmistakable. Turkey would not stand by while an armed Kurdish operation was being created on a third battlefield on its southeastern flank. The jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan explicitly called on his structures not to participate. Turkish intelligence chief İbrahim Kalin publicly warned that the war threatened to develop into a “ring of fire,” a fratricidal war between Turks, Kurds, Arabs, and Persians. The Kurdish operation came to a halt. The five hundred fighters turned back. Trump himself had said on Fox News on April 7: “We sent them a lot of guns. We sent them through the Kurds. And I think the Kurds kept them.” From his own mouth. The sentence was not even a week old when the next step came.

On April 8, Mark Rutte flew to Washington. Behind closed doors, a European diplomat described it to Politico, the meeting had devolved into a “tirade of insults.” “It went shit.” Trump had threatened to “do pretty much anything.” Bloomberg added that the president had issued an ultimatum: European NATO states must contribute to securing the Strait of Hormuz “within days.” The Wall Street Journal reported simultaneously that Trump was considering alternatively withdrawing US troops from NATO countries that had not cooperated in the Iran war. On the evening of that same day, Trump wrote on Truth Social in capitals: NATO had not been there when it was needed and would not be there when it was needed again. On the morning of April 9, Joe Kent replied.

Greece: The Proof That It Has Begun

If Kent’s sentence is the theory, then Greece is the proof that the theory has long since become practice. Between 2020 and 2024, Greek defense spending rose from $5.5 billion to $8.9 billion – an increase of 62 percent in four years, a share of over 3 percent of gross domestic product, well above the NATO target and above the German level. The modernization program, running through 2035/2036, has a volume of 25 to 30 billion euros. In extended scenarios, total procurement of over 50 billion euros is being discussed. This is not a crisis state that has just crept out of the eurozone crisis. This is a front-line state equipping itself for a specific scenario – against Turkey.

The shopping list reads like a cross-section of modern warfare. Eighteen Rafale combat aircraft from France, already delivered. Twenty F-35 stealth jets from the United States, contract signed. Four next-generation Belharra frigates from France. MH-60R helicopters for the navy. Ten M346 trainers from Italy. Development of its own drone production. A multilayer missile defense shield – and here the picture becomes geopolitically unambiguous. In 2023, Greece purchased Spike-NLOS missiles from Israel worth roughly $400 million. In 2025, PULS rocket systems followed for 650 to 700 million euros, also from Israel. Parallel negotiations are running on the Achilles Shield project, an Iron Dome-style multilayer air defense system with a volume of roughly 3 billion euros.

Israel is not merely selling weapons. Israel is building a security policy axis. In the eastern Mediterranean, a triangular cooperation between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus has existed for approximately ten to fifteen years, and has gained considerably in depth over the last three years. It is not an officially declared alliance with mutual defense obligations – it is a functional alliance. Joint military exercises, intelligence sharing, cooperation on air defense and drone defense. Israel contributes high technology; Greece and Cyprus offer geography and infrastructure. What binds these three states is a dual set of interests: energy and containment. Off the coasts of Israel and Cyprus lie the gas fields of the eastern Mediterranean. Greece can become a transit corridor to Europe. Turkey disputes parts of these maritime borders and pursues its own expansive line in the Mediterranean with the Mavi Vatan doctrine. With that, the constellation is complete.

Behind this constellation stand the United States. In May and June 2025, the largest NATO exercise of the year took place in Southern Europe: Defender Europe 25, in its second phase Immediate Response 25, with twelve thousand soldiers distributed across eight host countries and nineteen participating nations. Greece was one of the central venues – and for the first time, a Spanish Mechanized Tactical Subgroup Command operated under Greek brigade leadership. That is the strategic upgrade. Souda Bay in Crete has become one of the most important US naval bases in the eastern Mediterranean in recent years – a hub replacing what Incirlik once was. Added to this is the political superstructure: Prime Minister Mitsotakis has publicly confirmed close security coordination with Netanyahu in Tel Aviv. Bennett’s hexagon – Israel, Greece, Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates – is no longer a diagram in a PowerPoint presentation. It is a procurement list with a timeline.

Karabağ formulates the Turkish reading of this development with the sobriety of a man who contextualizes it from the inside perspective. Greece is deliberately strengthening its position through rearmament and close cooperation with the United States, France, and Israel; in practice, Athens is increasingly being used as a strategic anchor in the eastern Mediterranean. From the Turkish perspective, however, this holds: lasting security in the region cannot be organized against Turkey. Every containment logic creates more tension than stability. Greek armed forces stand at rank 30 in the 2026 Global Firepower Index, Turkish forces at rank 9. The rearmament closes a gap that cannot be closed in absolute categories. It is therefore not preparation for a first strike, but part of an architecture. An architecture that draws its effect not from Greece’s standalone capability but from the system into which Greece is embedded.

Trump’s NATO Frustration and the Process Behind the Process

What happened in the White House in April was not the rage of an impulsive president. It was the strategic inventory of an alliance that had not functioned in the most important war of the Trump administration. Not a single NATO country had come on board with the United States for Operation Epic Fury against Iran. No overflight rights. No use of air bases. No troop participation. Britain stood aside. France kept its distance. Germany held entirely back. Turkey, NATO’s second-largest army, closed its airspace completely – which forced US operations on a detour of several hundred miles, an additional aerial refueling, longer mission times, and reduced time on target. The operational effect of this closure was not symbolic. US bomber formations that launched operations against Iran from bases in southern Italy, Britain, or Diego Garcia Atoll had to avoid the direct corridor over Turkey and instead approach via the eastern Mediterranean, through Saudi airspace, and over the Arabian Peninsula. Eight to nine hours of additional flight time per mission. At least one additional aerial refueling. Reduced munitions load because more fuel had to be carried. And this in an operation where Washington was already dependent on every hour of response time. What Ankara demonstrated through the closure was not mere defiance. It was a strategic stress test – the recognition that Turkey, as host of Incirlik, as NATO’s front-line state, and as the alliance’s second-largest army, possesses a lever whose effect it had rarely previously exercised. Erdogan exercised it now. He exercised it without regard for the damage NATO’s internal relationships would sustain, because he calculated that those relationships were not salvageable in any case. Whoever once understands that an alliance needs you more than you need it stops treating it as an alliance and begins using it as a lever. Precisely that step was completed in April. Trump publicly called NATO a “paper tiger.” He described British Prime Minister Keir Starmer as “no Winston Churchill” and British naval vessels as “toys.” The WSJ scenario of a partial troop withdrawal from uncooperative NATO states is not part of a screenplay. It is a memo.

Here the matter becomes structural. Trump cannot unilaterally leave NATO – a complete withdrawal requires Congressional approval. But he can initiate the process. He can redeploy troops. He can hollow out defense commitments. He can leave the next administration a shell. And precisely this is what Kent describes. His sentence is not a daily forecast – it is a structural analysis. The United States has enough to do in the coming years. Stabilizing Israel in the Middle East by removing Iran as a major power actor. Preparing the containment of China. Slowing the de-dollarization that hangs over the petrodollar like a sword of Damocles through initiatives such as the Unit. These tasks will bind the full attention of the United States in 2026, 2027, and probably 2028 as well. Geopolitics, however, does not run in quarters. It runs in decades. And on this longer timeline, the NATO exit – or its functional variant – fits precisely into the gap that lies after China containment and before the next strategic conflict.

Karabağ confirms this logic from the Turkish perspective. Israel evaluates rising regional powers according to their interests. Turkey is therefore a central factor in every strategic plan. Ankara is militarily strong, economically relevant, and geographically present at several key spaces. Those who want to limit Turkish influence attempt to create counterweights – precisely because Turkey can no longer be ignored. The US exit from NATO is, from this perspective, not a rupture – it is the consequence. A NATO with Turkey as its second-largest army binds the United States to Article 5 obligations toward Ankara. Whoever wishes to reserve the right to act militarily against Turkey – whether directly or in the framework of an Israeli operation – cannot do so within NATO. That is the operational logic behind Kent’s sentence. And it is the operational logic behind the Politico observer who, independently of Kent, noted that a NATO exit would spare Washington “one more geopolitical hurdle” – the growing Turkish-Israeli rivalry.

The coincidence of decision-makers is remarkable. Trump remains in office presumably until January 2029. His potential successor J. D. Vance belongs to the generation that no longer views NATO as a non-negotiable inheritance but as a negotiable structure. If the process is initiated during Trump’s term – through troop redeployment, through hollowed-out defense commitments, through sustained political pressure – then completion under a subsequent administration is not an abrupt break but a logical continuation. Precisely what Kent describes. Precisely what the WSJ scenarios sketch. Precisely what Trump’s own Truth Social posts prepare.

The Two Axes

While a containment architecture is taking shape in the western part of this story, Turkey is building its own in the eastern part. The terminology varies – some call it a Sunni axis, others a NATO Light, still others a flexible security network – but the building blocks are clear. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia concluded a mutual defense agreement with mutual assistance obligations in September 2025. In April 2026, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Sharif traveled to Riyadh, Doha, and Ankara. Turkey and Pakistan deepened their military cooperation in the areas of drones, satellite technology, and joint exercises. The defense agreement between Riyadh and Islamabad of September 17, 2025, signed at the Al-Yamamah Palace by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, is more than a bilateral arrangement. It contains a mutual assistance clause that describes in the sober language of treaties what in practice can mean a geopolitical detonation: any attack against one of the two states is considered an attack against both. With this, the only nuclear power of the Islamic world is for the first time formally interlocked with a Gulf state – concluded eight days after the Israeli airstrikes against Hamas targets in Doha on September 9, 2025, which shattered across the Gulf states the belief in the US security guarantee. Already on January 30, 2026, Field Marshal Asim Munir, chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, received General Selçuk Bayraktaroğlu, chief of the Turkish General Staff, in Rawalpindi – a meeting at the highest military level at which both sides discussed deepening defense cooperation through training, joint exercises, and capacity building. In the same month, Bloomberg had reported that Turkey would “likely” join the Saudi-Pakistan pact; Pakistan’s Minister for Defense Production confirmed to Reuters that a draft of a three-country pact existed. Even if the formal trilateralization was not subsequently completed – the architecture was already in the exploratory phase at that point. Sharif’s tour from April 15 to 18, 2026 to Riyadh, Doha, and Antalya was the political execution of the new architecture. At the 5th Antalya Diplomacy Forum he met Erdogan on April 17; on the sidelines of the forum, the foreign ministers of Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia discussed regional crises, primarily the US-Israel-Iran war and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. What is taking shape here has no formal name, no Brussels address, and no treaty structure in the style of the North Atlantic Treaty. But it has substance. Turkey contributes with Bayraktar drones, ASELSAN electronic warfare, and ROKETSAN missiles – three industrial branches battle-tested in Syria, Libya, and Nagorno-Karabakh. Pakistan provides nuclear second-strike capability, JF-17 production, and decades of experience with hybrid military integration. Saudi Arabia finances the industrial ramp-up through Saudi Arabian Military Industries. Qatar contributes with the Al Udeid base – ironically the largest US base in the Middle East – a logistics infrastructure whose strategic significance should not be underestimated. Four actors, four complementary functions, one architecture. It is not a copy of NATO. It is its structural countermodel – flexible, multipolar, not Western-controlled. Saudi Arabia is diversifying its foreign policy away from Washington. Qatar is bringing its own industrial base with the TOLGA air defense system, produced jointly with Turkey.

It is not a NATO clone. It is a flexible structure in which each actor retains its own interests while simultaneously building shared capabilities. Saudi Arabia continues working with the United States, opens toward China, speaks with Iran. Pakistan balances between China, the United States, and the Gulf states. Turkey, in turn, plays on multiple boards simultaneously – NATO member, BRICS applicant, energy hub for Russia through TurkStream and Akkuyu, key node of the Belt and Road Initiative, in dialogue with Moscow and Beijing. This multiple attachment is not a contradiction but a strategy. It is what foreign policy theory calls hedging – the deliberate cultivation of multiple options to avoid dependence on any single power.

The central fault line for Turkey lies not in the east but in the west. The European Union has kept Turkey at arm’s length for decades. Ursula von der Leyen has in recent days made unambiguously clear that Europe must insulate itself against “Russian, Chinese, or Turkish influence” through internal alliances. With this, the door to Brussels is not merely closed – it has been defined as a threat perimeter. A Turkey that definitively closes that door behind it, however, has options that other states do not have. It controls through the Montreux Convention the Bosphorus and thereby the maritime traffic between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It is the junction between Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. It has the second-largest NATO army with over four hundred and eighty thousand active soldiers and a defense industry that achieved exports of $7.1 billion in 2024. A Turkey that detaches from NATO thereby weakens not only itself – it weakens NATO as well. That is precisely why the alliance becomes structurally unstable the moment one of its two largest armies calls the logic of the alliance into question.

This is where Karabağ’s methodical qualifier comes in. A direct war between Turkey and Israel is currently unlikely. More realistic are cyber operations, intelligence competition, or proxy conflicts. Looking at the fundamentals, Turkey possesses strategic depth, large armed forces, its own industry, drone competence, and staying power. High technology alone does not win long conflicts – size, resilience, and productive capacity count equally. This sentence is not a contradiction of Kent. It is his temporal specification. Kent describes a process, not an event. Karabağ grounds the short-term expectation horizon. Together they produce the complete picture: the process is running, the event lies in the future, and the question is at which phase which player draws which cards.

What Ismay Said and What Kent Has Described

Lord Ismay, NATO’s first Secretary General, summarized the purpose of the alliance in 1949 in his famous three-pronged formulation: keep the Russians out, keep the Americans in, keep the Germans down. Seventy-eight years later, the second pillar is wobbling. The Russians are no longer the primary reference point – the war that is splitting NATO in spring 2026 is not the Ukraine war but the Iran war. The Germans are so far down they no longer even register as a factor. And the Americans – Trump’s own administration says this in the form of its former NCTC director – the Americans are considering whether they want to remain in. Not because they want to disentangle from foreign commitments. But because they want to keep themselves free for a specific commitment.

That is the point at which a rhetorical warning has become an operational logic. Bennett proclaimed in February what Soylu answered in March, what the missiles prepared in March, what the PKK question sharpened in April, what the Trump-Rutte confrontation made public in April, what Kent condensed on April 9 into a single sentence. Five steps. Fifty-two days. An alliance at a breaking point that no one officially wants to name – because naming it would accelerate the process.

Karabağ closes with the perspective that puts everything else in proportion. Turkey will experience both external pressure and gain influence over the coming ten years. Insignificant states are ignored – relevant states are challenged. If Ankara continues to invest in technology, defense, energy, and strategic autonomy, the country will belong to the formative actors of its region. The question is not whether Turkey plays a role, but how much it shapes the game.

Kent’s sentence did not describe what happens tomorrow. It described where the process that is being initiated today leads. Trump is initiating it. A successor will complete it. Turkey is not the new Iran – it is something for which the old categories do not suffice. A NATO member that is blowing apart the logic of the alliance because it has grown larger than the role assigned to it. Bennett formulated that in February as a threat. Kent described it in April as a consequence. The question that now stands open is no longer whether a clash between Israel and Turkey will come. The question is which alliance then stands, which breaks, and who ends up on which side of the fracture.

NATO has not yet asked the question. The answer is already there.

Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com, at Substack and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.

Deniz Karabağ
is a former Bundeswehr paratrooper, political content creator, and interviewer of Turkish-Azerbaijani descent. His focus areas include internal and external security, migration, geopolitics, and social developments in Germany and Europe. Through interviews with politicians, diplomats, military figures, and public personalities, he has established himself as an independent, outspoken, and provocative voice in the German-speaking world. Written interview, conducted in April 2026, exclusive to this analysis.

Sources

© Michael Hollister – All rights reserved. Redistribution, publication or reuse of this text requires express written permission from the author. For licensing inquiries, please contact the author via www.michael-hollister.com.

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