Ankara’s ideal outcome remains a unitary Syrian state. But as the region shifts, influential nationalist voices close to the MHP are openly sketching a fallback: if Syria fractures, how does Turkey shape—rather than absorb—the shock?

Turkey has planned around multiple Syrian endgames for years. The preferred scenario is straightforward: Syria remains unified under a central authority. Yet officials and policy-adjacent thinkers also acknowledge a less controllable path—driven by Damascus’s failures and Israel’s regional engineering—in which Syria de facto breaks apart that already exists on the ground. In that contingency, Ankara’s question turns from prevention to positioning: if partition happens, what is Turkey’s stake and leverage? Because states, unlike charities, do not live on sentiment.

From the beginning, this is why Ankara has toyed with reconciliation with the Kurds of Syria. If Syria does fragment, Turkey cannot afford a hostile Kurdish state or federal entity on its border. What makes this moment different, however, is that the new peace process was not launched by Erdoğan but by Bahçeli and the MHP months before Assad’s fall in December 2024—as if the nationalists anticipated the coming storm unleashed after October 7. Erdoğan appeared hesitant, more a passenger than the driver. That inversion matters. It places the state-nationalists, rather than the Islamists, at the centre of strategic thinking on Syria. Which is why the interventions of intellectuals close to Bahçeli, such as Mümtaz’er Türköne, matter: they are not abstract musings but signals of how Ankara’s Syria policy is being recalibrated.

Mümtaz’er Türköne is not a party official but a well-known intellectual in nationalist circles: a writer, academic, and former advisor to Prime Minister Tansu Çiller. For years he was a columnist, and he spent time in prison over his past column in a Gülenist media. But he remains close to Devlet Bahçeli, the leader of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). It was Bahçeli, in fact, who intervened to secure Türköne’s release from prison. When Türköne speaks, he often gives voice to the kind of thinking Bahçeli himself prefers to leave between the lines.

In a recent article titled “Islamists’ Two Faces, the State of the Turkish Nationalists, and the Kurdish Question,” Türköne spelled out why the Kurdish track in Syria matters. He argued that the real obstacle to peace is not the Kurds but the AKP’s Islamist reflexes, which he described as “two-faced.” Islamism, he said, drives Ankara to push Kurds back under Damascus—either to stretch the Syrian front and block a settlement inside Turkey, or out of a nostalgia that imagines the Kurdish question can be dissolved in the wider Arab world. This, Türköne wrote, is a dead end. Islamists, in his words, “cannot properly judge whether a Syrian nation-state can be established.”

By contrast, Türköne casts Turkish nationalism—Türkçülük—as a far more pragmatic tool. Historically, he notes, it has always bent to the state’s needs, shifting from pan-Turanist dreams to racial doctrines to statist patriotism. In that flexibility lies its usefulness today. Reframed as a state project, nationalism can empathise with Kurdish grievances without conceding federalism or the unitary state. “Türkçülük… has been shaped from the outset by the needs of the state,” he wrote.

From this angle, the logic is blunt. Strong states prefer weaker or divided neighbours, so long as the division gives them leverage. Ankara should not shepherd the SDF back under Damascus—an authority it cannot reliably influence. Instead, keep the SDF anchored in northeast Syria, shift the protector role from Washington to Ankara, and route the political choreography through Abdullah Öcalan, their ideological reference point. In this reading, if Turkey settles its Kurdish problem, a fractured Syria might actually benefit Turkey more than a centralized one.

This way of thinking exposes a tension at the heart of Ankara. Türköne presents reconciliation with the Kurds as a state project; Erdoğan, however, sees it as a threat to his rule. A genuine opening would strip away the “terror” card that has shaped Turkish politics for forty years. It would force an expansion of freedoms and democratic space that could put Erdoğan’s incumbency at risk. That, Türköne implies, is why the process stalls: because palace politics fears the democratic preconditions of peace.

Meanwhile, the region itself is moving fast. Türköne places today’s choices in the context of the October 7 Hamas attack, Israel’s vow to redraw the regional map, the dismantling of Iran’s regional networks, and the prospect of Arab–Israeli peace. In such a reordering, Turkey and Iran risk being sidelined. And if the Kurds throw in their lot with Israel and the Gulf, then, as Türköne warns, “goodbye Turkey, goodbye Iran.” That is why, he argues, it is in Ankara’s interest to bring the Kurds onto its side now.

Here lies the nationalist Plan B. If Syria breaks apart, Ankara must not watch passively. The northeast corridor—the strip linking the old Ottoman provinces of Mosul and Aleppo—must not slip into others’ hands. Nationalists see it as Turkey’s natural lever in any redrawing of borders. Erdoğan may smile alongside Bahçeli in public, but behind closed doors the struggle is real: whether Turkey’s share of a partitioned Syria will be lost to hesitation, or seized through a hard-nosed settlement with the Kurds.

For Erdoğan, the dilemma is stark. He does not want to lose the nationalists who keep him in power. He fears a democratic opening that could cost him an election. Yet he cannot ignore the pressure—from Bahçeli’s camp, from the Americans, and from Kurdish leaders like Mazloum Abdi and Ilham Ahmed, with whom quiet channels are already open. Documents circulating earlier this year, proposing Abdi’s possible role in a new Syrian framework, now look less like fantasy and more like trial balloons from Ankara’s own bureaucracy.

Politics, as Türköne reminds his readers, is not about brotherhood or charity. It is about wolves and lambs. For Turkey’s nationalists, the wolves must eat. And in their view, if Syria is going to be divided, Ankara should not just guard its borders—it should claim its share of the map.