The informal summit of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) held in Turkistan on May 15, 2026, was more than another meeting of a regional club. It demonstrated that the Turkic states are learning to convert shared language, transport corridors, and new technological agendas into political weight. Kazakhstan hosted the summit under the theme of “Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development.” Yet its importance went beyond digital policy: it showed that the OTS is becoming a platform where Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and Turkey can coordinate positions on connectivity, security, cyber infrastructure, and regional status. The Turkish Anadolu news agency’s report described the meeting as an informal summit attended by the leaders of Kazakhstan, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan, with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus present as an observer. It noted Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev’s statement that “the Turkic world, which is our family, must transform into one of the effective geopolitical power centers of the 21st century.” However, Turkish reports remained silent about the fact that the summit took place at Azerbaijan’s initiative, not Turkey’s.
For Tehran, the OTS summit, set against the backdrop of the war, paints a deeply uncomfortable picture. Iran has long regarded Central Asia and the South Caucasus not only as neighboring regions but also as part and parcel of an Iranian civilizational geography, in which Persianate culture and Iran’s transit location should confer influence on the Islamic Republic. The Organization of Turkic States challenges this expectation by offering the same region a competing identity and infrastructure map. Iranian concern is therefore not just ethnic or ideological. It is also geopolitical: the Middle Corridor, the Caspian route, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, the Alat port, digital customs, fiber-optic cables, and eventually the Zangezur route all reduce Central Asian states’ dependence on Iranian territory. Euronews Turkey described the Zangezur Corridor as a strategic priority for the OTS. It noted that the route is expected to become a key segment of the Middle Corridor, further diminishing Iran’s geographic leverage. This remark cannot go unnoticed by Iran, given that the Islamist regime views the Zangezur Corridor as a major threat.
Iran’s Fears: The OTS as Civilizational and Geopolitical Challenge
Iranian discourse has been unusually explicit about these anxieties, and the accumulated body of Iranian commentary on the OTS reveals a persistent strategic preoccupation that predates — and outlasts — the current regional turmoil.
The Civilizational Threat
A Persian-language study published in 2022 by Rasanah (a Saudi-funded research center for Iran Studies) framed Central Asia as a competitive arena and described Turkey’s use of cultural, linguistic, religious, and transport instruments in the region as a direct challenge to Iran’s position. The study acknowledged Iran’s own tools — geography, energy swaps, the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and cultural ties — but characterized them largely as potential rather than operational.
An IRNA article from July 2024, reviewing a book published by University of Tehran Press titled “The Organization of Turkic States: Goals, Capacities, and Challenges for the Islamic Republic of Iran,” was even more direct. The title suggests that Iranian institutions view the OTS as a problem rather than a distant cultural phenomenon. IRNA’s review highlighted concerns about the Zangezur Corridor, the weakening of Iran’s transit role, the possibility of a “Turan Army” (a hypothetical military bloc of Turkic-speaking countries), the spread of pan-Turkic narratives, the marginalization of the Persian language, and the rewriting of regional history — including the appropriation of cultural and scientific figures such as Nizami, Avicenna, and Biruni. The review identified Tajikistan as the natural focus of Iranian cultural diplomacy and Turkmenistan as the remaining link whose full OTS membership would complete a Turkic belt encircling Iran from the north.
The Iranian Young Journalists Club (YJC) went further, arguing that pan-Turanism and pan-Turkism threaten Iran by eroding Persian civilizational assets in Central Asia, destabilizing Tajikistan, and expanding the sphere of influence of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Israel.
The Geopolitical-Military Horizon
“Iranian Diplomacy” (an analytical website dedicated to foreign policy issues, often presenting a pragmatist-reformist point of view) framed the OTS summit in Gabala (Qabala) as a turning point toward what it called a “Turkish NATO” — a military-political bloc with Turkey at its center, allegedly supported by the West and Israel against Iran, Russia, and China. The analysis noted that Azerbaijan’s president, Aliyev, referenced 25 joint Azerbaijani-Turkish military exercises in a single year. It warned that the symbolic choice of the Gabala venue, where a former Russian radar station once stood, carried its own message. The article concluded that the OTS, while formally an economic-cultural union, is progressively acquiring the characteristics of a directed military alliance: “The OTS can be called the operational arm of the political, economic, and even military operations of Britain and the Zionist regime.” Mehr News echoed this alarm, linking the corridor projects to geopolitical control rather than economic development.
It is noteworthy that, in this case, the Iranian readout of Azerbaijan’s behavior is not paranoid or conspiracy-driven. Iranians, like all other actors in the region, can read nonverbal communication perfectly well. No gesture or statement is made in any country without premeditation. Thus, President Aliyev’s decision to give a speech at the former Russian radar station cannot be accidental. In addition, the growing assertiveness of Azerbaijan and other Central Asian countries is a clear indicator of Iran’s decline. Iranians see it as a sign of their own weakness, and rightly so.
This is why Tehran’s discourse on the OTS oscillates between fear and tactical curiosity. Some Iranian analysts recognize that a country isolated by sanctions cannot afford to ignore a regional organization of 160 to 170 million people with growing interests and energy. A DiplomacyPlus article by Hamidreza Akbarpour, a researcher at the Iran and Eurasia Studies Institute (IRAS), treated the recurring invitation to Iran to join the OTS as both an opportunity and a danger. The article proposed that Iran first build its own civilizational counterweight — based on the “Nowruz Crescent” and the “Ashura Crescent” — and only then consider an observer role rather than full membership. Akbarpour argued that the OTS had shifted from a softer linguistic identity toward a harder state-ethnic identity, noting that the very renaming of the organization from the “Cooperation Council of Turkic-Speaking States” to the “Organization of Turkic States” signals a move from language-based solidarity to ethnic and political solidarity — a framework Iran cannot join without compromising its civilizational standing.
The Turkish Lens and What It Misses
However, Tehran’s response to the OTS contains a significant analytical blind spot. Iranian commentary overwhelmingly portrays the organization as a Turkish project, as if the OTS were simply an extension of Ankara’s eastward regional ambitions. This interpretation is partly understandable: Turkey supplies the institutional language, military technology (drones, communications systems), media ecosystem, and pan-Turkic vocabulary that most alarms Tehran. The International Peace Studies Center (IPSC), an Iranian analytical think tank, reinforced this Turkey-centric reading, describing the OTS as a new geopolitical reality in Eurasia driven primarily by Turkey’s strategic aims.
But this Turkish-centered reading overlooks the growing, increasingly independent role of Azerbaijan. This omission is no accident; it reflects a deeper Iranian reluctance to recognize Baku as an autonomous actor.
Azerbaijan Initiated the Informal Summit Format
A close reading of the foundational documents shows that Pakistan, not Turkey, posed a threat to the informal summit mechanism within the OTS. The official Karabakh Declaration, issued after the informal OTS summit in Shusha on July 6, 2024, explicitly states that the meeting was held “upon the initiative of the Republic of Azerbaijan” and welcomes President Ilham Aliyev’s proposal to hold annual informal meetings of the OTS Council of Heads of State alongside regular summits. Aliyev confirmed this in his Shusha speech, thanking the leaders for supporting his initiative to hold annual informal OTS summits and for accepting Azerbaijan’s invitation to Shusha.
This point is not technical. It fundamentally alters the interpretation of the Turkistan summit. Iranian commentary has systematically avoided engaging with this fact. Tehran prefers to read the Turkistan meeting as another Turkish initiative, with Azerbaijan serving as a corridor state and a junior partner. This allows Iranian analysts to maintain their preferred mental map, in which Turkey is the threatening center of gravity in the post-Soviet Turkic space. But it does so at the expense of analytical accuracy.
Shusha as Diplomatic Symbol
The choice of Shusha as the venue for the first informal summit was itself an act of Azerbaijani statecraft. Shusha was the symbolic capital of Karabakh before its 1992 fall and its 2020 recapture by Azerbaijan. By hosting the OTS informal summit there, Aliyev placed Karabakh, and indeed Azerbaijan’s postwar identity, at the center of the Turkic world’s diplomatic imagination. This was not Turkish agenda-setting. It was Azerbaijani agenda-setting, using the OTS framework as a vehicle.
Azerbaijan as an Independent Actor
Baku’s Own Strategic Vision
Aliyev’s Shusha speech presented the OTS and strengthening the Turkic world as foreign-policy priorities for Azerbaijan in their own right, not merely as loyalty to Ankara. It also listed concrete Azerbaijani assets: the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, the Caspian fleet, Alat port, the Digital Silk Road, and Azerbaijan’s 2-million-dollar financial contribution to the OTS secretariat. This is the language of an independent stakeholder investing in an institution, not of a proxy managing its sponsor’s interests.
Azerbaijani sources make this point openly. The Modern.az website described Azerbaijan as a strategic key country and “locomotive” of the OTS, repeating Aliyev’s points about its role as a bridge between Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Europe via the Middle Corridor, the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway, the Alat port, and the Caspian merchant fleet. AzerNews, citing expert analysis after the Turkistan summit, assigned distinct functional roles to the major Turkic states: Turkey as the industrial and military center, Kazakhstan as the resource and transit giant, and Azerbaijan as the bridge between Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Europe.
The Middle Corridor as Azerbaijani Leverage
The Middle Corridor is the central arena where Azerbaijan’s independence from Turkey is most evident and consequential for Iran. The Xalq Qazeti (People’s Newspaper) daily described the corridor as “the common road of the Turkic world” and as a value chain linking China, Central Asia, the Caspian, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, and Europe. The article noted Azerbaijan’s port and railway expansion, the digitalization of customs, and its action plan to increase transit potential for 2024-2026. These are Azerbaijani assets, built with Azerbaijani investment, and leveraged in line with Azerbaijani strategic priorities.
Baku does not merely transmit Turkish influence on Central Asia. It sells access to geography, ports, railways, Caspian shipping, energy routes, and postwar legitimacy. The 13 bilateral agreements signed between Turkey and Kazakhstan — covering investment, culture, education, airports, healthcare, media, energy, finance, and the defense industry, including an ANKA UAV joint venture — demonstrate the bilateral infrastructure underpinning broader Turkic cooperation. Still, they are the fruit of the wider connectivity environment that Azerbaijan has been instrumental in building.
Not a Proxy, but an Alliance of Equals
This is precisely what Iran does not want to acknowledge. In Tehran’s political imagination, Azerbaijan is often reduced to an Israeli partner, a Turkish proxy, or a problematic northern neighbor with ethnic implications for Iran’s Azerbaijani population. This reduction is analytically convenient but increasingly inaccurate. Baku has its own interests: securing Karabakh’s postwar symbolism, turning the Middle Corridor into a source of rent and leverage, increasing the strategic value of Azerbaijani infrastructure, and using the OTS to gain independent weight among Central Asian states. Azerbaijan is allied with Turkey but retains its own strategic agency.
The vision of Azerbaijan as an extension of Turkey in the Caucasus is not only incorrect, but also strategically misleading for Iran. By attributing all Turkic institutional dynamism to Ankara, Tehran avoids confronting a more uncomfortable reality: that a neighboring state with a shared border, ethnic demographics, and geography has become a capable independent actor that successfully advances its own agenda at the regional level.
Aliyev’s proposal for joint OTS military exercises, which he framed not as the creation of a formal military alliance but as a legitimate security coordination mechanism, illustrates this independence. When he said that “in a period when the fundamental principles of international law are being flagrantly violated, military cooperation between our countries is important,” he was making an Azerbaijani argument rooted in Azerbaijan’s postwar experience, not merely reciting a Turkish foreign-policy script.
Iran cannot offer a Competing Alternative.
Iran cannot presently offer a convincing alternative to the OTS initiative. It can name alternatives: the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), Chabahar, the North-South Corridor, bilateral relations with Tajikistan, Persian-language diplomacy, and a possible Nowruz-Ashura civilizational platform. But naming instruments is not the same as organizing a bloc.
The IRNA-reviewed University of Tehran book recommended strengthening ECO, developing Chabahar, completing the North-South Corridor, emphasizing Persian language and Nowruz, and engaging the OTS from within when useful. These are, in principle, sensible recommendations. The problem is structural: sanctions, underinvestment, and regional mistrust drain the credibility of these promises. Chabahar has been under discussion as an alternative transit hub for decades, yet its capacity remains a fraction of that of competing routes. The North-South Corridor is incomplete. The cultural organization linking Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan “has remained on paper for years,” as Iranian Diplomacy itself admitted in a rare moment of self-critique that acknowledged Iranian passivity, even relative to Russia’s more active response.
Tehran can speak to Persian civilization, but it cannot easily mobilize Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Iran into an effective institutional pole. Central Asian governments often prefer a flexible Turkic platform that does not require them to submit to Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran. The Rasanah analysis acknowledged this competition, noting that Turkey’s instruments—language identity, TIKA, Diyanet, transport routes, and soft power—are actively deployed and consistently used, whereas Iran’s tools remain passive.
The DiplomacyPlus prescription, to first build a Nowruz-Ashura civilizational bloc, then seek OTS observer status from a position of strength, is strategically coherent but practically remote. Building such a bloc requires political will, resources, and a functioning diplomatic apparatus. Under current conditions, Iran has none of these available for the northern periphery at the required scale. As IRAS researcher Hamidreza Akbarpour wrote, without this civilizational foundation, joining the OTS would mean being “absorbed” rather than participating. This is a dignified way of expressing a deeper fear that Iran has already been marginalized.
The Tasnim Russian-language commentary, published by Iran’s semi-official Tasnim News Agency, framed the Turkic states’ coordinated diplomatic presence as serving hidden objectives beyond Central Asia, including possible security arrangements linked to the Gaza conflict. It characterized the alignment of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey as a flexible regional diplomatic configuration that can be deployed against Iranian interests at multiple points simultaneously. This fear of the OTS projecting power well beyond the Central Asian corridor illustrates why Iran has difficulty formulating a targeted counter-strategy.
The Iranian Expert Community’s Continued Strategic Engagement
The war and its consequences have not eliminated Iranian experts’ interest in the northern regional architecture. On the contrary, the persistence and quality of Iranian commentary on the OTS reveal a strategic instinct within the Iranian analytical community that endures even when war, sanctions, internal pressure, and regional confrontation overload the regime.
In 2024, IRNA reviewed a full Tehran University monograph on the OTS. In 2024, the YJC published a detailed threat analysis. Iranian Diplomacy and Mehr framed the Gabala summit as a potential turning point toward a “Turkish NATO” in 2025. Fars covered the 2026 Turkistan summit’s technological agenda through Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov’s remarks, evidence that Iranian media attention to OTS meetings continues even amid wider crises.
This sustained engagement matters. It shows that the Iranian analytical community recognizes that developments in Central Asia and the Caucasus do not remain confined to those regions. They affect Iran’s northern border security, its relationship with Armenia, its role as a transit hub, its ethnic discourse on the Azerbaijani population within Iran, its civilizational self-image, and its ability to prevent the emergence of hostile or semi-hostile coalitions. The range of venues — state media (IRNA, Fars), ideologically aligned agencies (YJC), academic-adjacent publications (DiplomacyPlus, Rasanah), and semi-independent outlets (Iranian Diplomacy, Mehr) — also demonstrates that the concern cuts across different segments of Iran’s intellectual and media establishment.
Notably, this community also produces self-critical assessments. The admission in Iranian Diplomacy that Russia has been more active than Iran in responding to the OTS threat, and that Iran’s cultural diplomacy has been declarative rather than operational, reflects a level of candor unusual in Iranian state-adjacent media. This suggests that at least part of the Iranian expert community is genuinely alarmed by the gap between Iran’s stated civilizational ambitions and its actual organizational capacity.
The Limits of Iranian Alarmism
Exaggeration, however, should not replace analysis. The OTS is not a military alliance, and its members do not share identical strategic priorities. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan remain cautious in their relations with Russia and China. Uzbekistan guards its sovereignty vigilantly. Turkmenistan remains outside full membership. Turkey itself must balance NATO obligations, relations with Russia, its Middle Eastern posture, and severe domestic economic constraints. Even Aliyev, while proposing joint military exercises, rejected the claim that the OTS is being transformed into a formal military organization. Tehran’s alarmist language about a “Turkish NATO” reflects a genuine fear. Still, it overstates the institutional cohesion and political unity of an organization whose member states have competing bilateral interests with Russia, China, and the West.
The more serious development is less dramatic but more consequential: the OTS is becoming a coordination platform, an infrastructure framework, and a diplomatic imagination. Azerbaijan is showing that a non-Turkish member can shape this platform’s agenda, not merely join it.
Conclusion: Architecture Without a Counter-Architecture
The Turkistan summit should worry Tehran not because it has instantly created a new bloc against Iran, but because it showed that others are building a regional architecture. At the same time, Iran is busy explaining why that architecture is dangerous. The Islamic Republic can still disrupt, warn, complain, and mobilize ideological language. It can still rely on its geography, its border with Armenia, and its cultural depth. But it has failed to develop a northern strategy that keeps pace with Azerbaijani and Turkic institutional experimentation.
The more the Iranian expert community writes about the OTS, the more clearly it acknowledges the structural disadvantage: Iran’s northern periphery is being organized without Iran, and to some extent against it, by states that are moving faster, spending more, and coordinating better. The OTS may remain loose, pragmatic, and internally diverse, but it is moving. Iran’s alternative remains largely declarative. Azerbaijan, meanwhile, has turned postwar symbolism into diplomacy, logistics into influence, and geography into a bargaining asset. That is the real lesson of Turkistan — not that a new NATO has been born, but that Baku has proved it can run a regional agenda on its own terms.
Overall, it is a beneficial development because the strengthening of Azerbaijan’s strategic autonomy sets clear limits on Iran’s capacity to project power and disrupts that capacity. The point cannot be overstated because recent events clearly show that the military weakening of the Iranian regime does not diminish its attempts at disruption abroad but may hamper its ability to succeed in these attempts.
JISS Policy Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family.
