A conference in Ankara has called for a Turkey, Russia, China and Iran alliance to deter the US, yet the sharper argument is that the bloc already functions.

The gathering, held under the banner "Alliance to Prevent Great Wars" and organised with the participation of Turkey's Vatan Party, drew some 200 delegates, academics and non-governmental representatives from 17 countries to the Turkish capital. Its final declaration was unambiguous. The only way to prevent the United States from launching a great war to restore its global dominance, the document argued, is the creation of an international deterrent force, and the foundation of that force should be a Turkey, Russia, China and Iran axis. Shocking, but also not unexpected. 

On paper this is the sort of resolution that conference halls produce and chancelleries ignore. Vatan, the Eurasianist party led by veteran leftist-nationalist Dogu Perincek, holds no seats in the Grand National Assembly and has spent decades on the margins of Turkish politics arguing that Ankara's future lies east rather than west. Its proposals have historically travelled no further than the hotel lobby. Yet the timing, the venue and the reaction in Moscow all suggest this one deserves more than a shrug.

Start with the Russian response. Commentary in Russian media was quick to frame the proposal as symbolic rather than actionable, with political scientist Dmitry Matyushenkov telling Tsargrad.tv that the idea looks more like a political statement than a realistic near-term scenario. But his more interesting point was the qualifier that followed. The four states, he argued, do not actually need a formal union, because they have already built a dense system of interaction without any single founding document on the NATO model. Political contacts, growing trade turnover, and deepening cooperation on security, energy, logistics and finance have done the work that a treaty would otherwise formalise.

That assessment is difficult to dispute on the evidence. Russia and China have pushed bilateral trade past record levels for four consecutive years, settling the overwhelming majority of it outside the dollar. Moscow and Tehran signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty and have spent the past year wiring their banking systems together, linking payment networks and expanding the International North-South Transport Corridor as a sanctions-proof artery running from the Baltic to the Persian Gulf. Iran has acceded to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and BRICS. Turkey, still nominally anchored in NATO, operates Russian S-400 air defence systems, hosts the Rosatom-built Akkuyu nuclear plant, serves as the western terminus of TurkStream, and has applied for BRICS partnership. Whatever one calls this arrangement, it is not an aspiration. It is infrastructure.

The war has accelerated the logic. Thirteen months of open conflict between the United States and Iran, with its drone barrages, tanker seizures and the recurring spectre of a Strait of Hormuz closure, has clarified positions in a way that decades of summitry never managed. Beijing has kept buying Iranian crude throughout. Moscow has supplied diplomatic cover and, by most credible accounts, rather more than that. Ankara has refused to allow its territory or airspace to be used for strikes on Iran and has watched Washington's conduct in its neighbourhood with mounting alarm. Vatan itself demanded in June that Turkey halt all support for Kyiv following attacks on shipping, a demand that would have been unsayable in mainstream Ankara a decade ago and now barely registers as controversial.

Perincek's own formulation, that the four-power alliance is realistic and has in fact already been formed, is self-serving but not wrong. What he elides is why it remains informal, and here the answer is that informality suits all four capitals perfectly. Turkey cannot sign a mutual defence pact with Russia while it sits inside NATO, and has no intention of surrendering the leverage that comes from straddling both camps. China has spent seventy years avoiding entangling alliances as a matter of doctrine and sees no reason to accept treaty obligations towards Tehran's wars. Iran, burned by every great power it has ever trusted, prefers strategic partnerships it can exit. Russia values flexible alignments precisely because they impose no Article 5 discipline. The result is alignment without alliance, a bloc that coordinates where interests converge and disperses where they do not.

And they do not always converge. Turkey and Russia have backed opposing sides in Syria, Libya and the South Caucasus within living memory. China's largest trading relationship, for all the decoupling rhetoric, remains with the United States and the European Union. Iranian strategists privately complain that Moscow sells them out whenever a better offer appears. This is a coalition of grievances against American primacy, not a community of values, and coalitions of grievances have a habit of fracturing the moment the grievance is addressed or the pressure lifts.

But that caveat cuts both ways. As long as Washington continues to supply the grievance, through sanctions regimes covering three of the four members, through an open-ended war with one of them, and through a posture in Eurasia that treats all four as adversaries to be managed, the glue holds. The Ankara declaration matters not because it will produce a signing ceremony but because it says aloud, in a NATO capital, what the trade data, the pipeline maps and the payment systems have been saying quietly for years. The paperwork may never materialise. On present evidence, it does not need to.