Comparative lessons from Turkey-Israel and Syria relations: a neorealist and game theory approach

This article examines Türkiye’s bilateral relations with Israel and Syria through an integrated neorealist and game-theoretic framework, offering a comparative analysis of divergent outcomes under shared systemic constraints. Neorealism highlights anarchy-driven security dilemmas and great-power penetration in the multipolar Middle East, while game theory models micro-strategic interactions via the repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (iterated cooperation/defection cycles in Türkiye–Israel relations) and the Stag Hunt (trust-dependent coordination collapse in Türkiye–Syria ties). Period-specific ordinal payoff matrices illustrate how structural pressures and domestic political shifts revalue incentives, yielding resilient but cyclical equilibria with Israel and fragile, irreversible breakdowns with Syria – from 2000s rapprochement to post-Arab Spring conflict and the 2025 Suwayda crisis. Engaging structural-realist and identity-centric literatures, the study advances a structural-strategic synthesis: anarchy endogenously shapes payoff structures, with ideological mediation explaining variation. This contributes testable heuristics for understanding cooperation fragility in penetrated regional subsystems.