Who will Fill the Vacuum After Assad? (Iran-Turkey‪)‬

In 1639 the Ottoman Empire and the Safavid empire of Persia signed the Treaty of Zuhab, bringing to a close over a century of confrontation between the two empires. The treaty finally granted Mesopotamia to the Ottomans, more or less establishing the border which divides modern-day Iraq from Iran. The Shiite Safavids were thus kept out of Arab territory - and the coveted Shiite holy cities of Najaf and Karbala - while the Sunni Ottomans gained complete sway over the Arab heartlands of what are now Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Today Turkey - the rump of the Ottoman Empire, dismantled in the aftermath of the First World War - is again seeking to assert its influence in the Arab world. Since Turkey's moderately Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, Turkey has sought a more active role in regional affairs, a strategy that has accelerated under Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his "Zero Problems" foreign policy. Some have dubbed his approach "neo-Ottomanism". At the same time, Iran has been trying to strengthen its brand of revolutionary Shiism, exploiting fissures in the Arab world in an attempt to regain its historical position as a major regional power. This process accelerated with the "rise of the new right" and the election of Iranian Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005, which led to a new "mixture of Islamist ideology and ultranationalism" in Iran's foreign policy, as Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, noted in his recent book on Iranian foreign policy, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (Oxford, 2009).