In the southern part of Iraq, the situation is just the opposite. There, a Shiite Arab buffer state, buttressed by Iran as a bulwark against Turkish, American or Saudi encroachments, is being created. The last two weeks’ events have removed any doubt that Maliki is “Iran’s man” in Baghdad. Yet despite this de facto partitioning of Iraq over the last month, Turkey and Iran are not challenging each other’s spheres of influence.

In post-Arab Spring North Africa, too, Turkey and Iran have essentially partitioned the resurgent Islamist movements between themselves. The Turks support the victorious “moderate” Islamists from Tunisia to Egypt. Iran backs the Salafist spoilers, even though they are Sunni. In the Egyptian and Tunisian elections, and in Libya’s inter-militia civil strife, both wings of Islamist opinion have supported each other against Western-backed secularists and neo-liberals.

Since North Africa lacks indigenous Shiite populations and the “moderate” Islamists have now emerged as the main players in the region, it is Sunni Turkey, along with Qatar, that appears to be the rising political and commercial patron in North Africa.

Turkey’s approach to the problem of Israel/Palestine has also been converging with that of Iran. From the 1950s until 2002, secular military elites in Ankara enjoyed a privileged political and economic relationship with the West. They also developed intimate defense ties with Israel and NATO.

Since then, however, Turkey has drifted out of the Western security orbit. First it opposed the 2003 Iraq war; next, after the 2010 Gaza flotilla resulted in the death of nine Turks in international waters, it increasingly switched to the Palestinian side of the conflict.

Only in Syria are Turkey and Iran seemingly on opposite sides of a military conflict. Whereas Iran and its client Hezbollah back the Assad regime, the Turks arm, train and provide safe haven to the Syrian rebels. However, this conflict may be more apparent than real. In a fragmented post-Assad Syria, Turkey will support the Sunnis, while Iran will remain the patron of the Alawites. Moreover, both will surely find a way to protect their strategic and financial interests in whatever regime emerges.

Throughout 2011, the continued Western obsession with the Iranian nuclear menace prevented policy makers from grasping the most salient dynamic at play in the new Middle East. Those who, like Mohammed Ayoob of Michigan State University, have warned that “beyond the Arab democratic wave” lies a “Turko-Persian future” have been mostly ignored.