In the final years of his life, Dwight D. Eisenhower privately reassessed a defining decision of his presidency. What he once defended as principled restraint, he later came to regard as a strategic error.
In recollections shared by his vice president and eventual successor Richard Nixon, Eisenhower reflected on the 1956 Suez Crisis – when he forced Britain, France, and Israel to halt their campaign to topple Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and withdraw from the Sinai – muttering with frustration, “Why couldn’t the British and French have done it more quickly?”
Eisenhower’s reasoning was strategic, not naïve. By siding against the old colonial powers, he hoped to recast the United States as the Middle East’s honest broker, win Arab goodwill, and block Soviet penetration. Nasser, in this view, was a nationalist strongman whose ambitions might be moderated if he would be treated as indispensable rather than humiliated.
The outcome was the opposite. Nasser pocketed American restraint and Israel’s retreat, tightened his grip at home, aligned more firmly with Moscow, and used US accommodation as leverage. The Western alliance fractured, Israel was weakened, and the Soviet Union gained its most consequential foothold in the Arab world. Eisenhower grasped the lesson too late: restraining allies to court a strongman produces leverage for the strongman, not moderation.
Trump's choice
Today, President Donald Trump stands before a decision of similar consequence. Trump is the architect of a new populist politics – transactional, personalized, skeptical of inherited orthodoxies. Like Eisenhower, he is not merely making policy; he is setting precedent. That precedent is now being tested in Syria.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Trump have met six times at Mar-a-Lago, projecting strategic alignment. Yet a dangerous fault line remains in post-Assad Syria, where Trump appears increasingly receptive to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision, even as the Turkish leader works methodically to draw Syria into Turkey’s political and military sphere.
The warning signs are stark. On January 2, 2026, Turkey inaugurated construction of the MUGEM, its first national aircraft carrier. At 300 meters long, it is built for sustained power projection rather than coastal defense. Anchoring a naval buildup that includes the TF-2000 destroyer and new indigenous submarines, it is the “Blue Homeland” doctrine rendered in steel – a force designed to contest the Eastern Mediterranean and pressure the Israel-Greece-Cyprus energy axis.
Even as Washington seeks to broker a regional settlement, Erdogan is maneuvering to entrench Turkey as a permanent presence in Syria – not to stabilize it, but to dominate it. Trump’s calculus mirrors Eisenhower’s: a belief that accommodating Ankara will preserve NATO cohesion and erect a Sunni counterweight to Iran.
Turkey not a conventional NATO actor
But Erdogan is no Cold War client, and Turkey is no longer a conventional NATO actor. He represents a repudiation of the Ataturk tradition, rooted not in balance or restraint but in leverage. From hosting Hamas operatives and purchasing Russian air-defense systems to advancing Blue Homeland expansionism, alliances are treated as shields for revisionism rather than frameworks for mutual obligation.
Erdogan’s vision for Syria is not that of a stable neighbor for Israel, but of a satellite anchoring an Islamist land bridge stretching from Ankara toward Gaza. Such a bridge is no longer theoretical. This month, the White House unveiled an international body tasked with overseeing postwar Gaza, prominently including Turkey and Qatar. Framed as stabilization, it risks normalizing Turkish political and military presence across the Levant under the language of mediation.
Syria, in this sense, is Erdogan’s Sinai: the arena in which accommodation is again being mistaken for influence. Erdogan casts Israel as the region’s destabilizer and Turkey – cloaked in Ottoman memory – as its historic guarantor of order, a narrative designed to legitimize expansion rather than describe reality.
In the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey actively obstructs the energy architecture linking Israel, Greece, and Cyprus. For Nasser, control of the Suez Canal was both a symbol and an instrument of power; for Erdogan, dominance over Mediterranean energy routes serves the same function. These projects embody the Abraham Accords’ logic of integration – prosperity over coercion, alignment over perpetual conflict – a logic the Turkish leader’s doctrine is designed to defeat.
The debate over Turkey’s return to the F-35 program fits squarely into this parallel. Capabilities are not abstractions; they create options. Even a brief window of air superiority can allow a revisionist leader to reshape facts on the ground. Once Erdogan possesses both advanced aircraft and carrier-based reach, the transactional assurances offered to Washington will fade, as they did before, when restraint was mistaken for control.
Will Trump learn from history?
In 1956, Israel was restrained in service of an American gamble that failed. Today, Israel is again being asked to absorb risk – in Syria and in Gaza – for a theory of stability built on accommodating a regional strongman.
The choice before Trump is therefore not merely tactical: It is historical. Eisenhower’s Suez decision shaped decades of American restraint while empowering forces hostile to the West. Trump now has the opportunity to set a different precedent – one that distinguishes accommodation from endorsement, and allies who constrain instability from strongmen who monetize it.
Eisenhower eventually understood his mistake. Trump does not have to repeat it.
The writer is the co-founder of Jewish National Initiative.