While everyone focuses on tankers transferring the Iranian oil, a massive financial valve remains open to Tehran on NATO’s eastern border. On paper, Iran is entering its most restrictive sanctions environment since 2012. United Nations snapback has reactivated global measures on Iran’s energy trade, but Western enforcement remains partial. And Iran continues to sell crude oil to China. Yet one of Tehran’s most strategically important export routes, the Tabriz–Ankara gas corridor, has expanded rather than contracted.
Under a long-term contract signed in 2001, Iran can ship up to 9.6 billion cubic meters of gas each year to Turkey, with the agreement set to expire in July 2026. Turkey’s energy minister recently described Iran as a “major” supplier and expressed hope that supplies would continue for “years and decades to come.” Despite the snapback, Ankara is still taking near-contract volumes, and negotiations over what follows after 2026 are already underway.
The timing matters. Turkey is approaching a critical renegotiation. Between late 2025 and mid-2026, Ankara will revisit most of its gas portfolio: long-term Russian contracts via Blue Stream and TurkStream, and the 9.6 billion cubic meters-per-year Iranian line, all come up for renewal or restructuring. In parallel, Turkey is signing new liquefied natural gas deals, anchored by massive new long-term agreements with Exxon Mobil and Shell. These deals signal Ankara’s structural pivot toward Western LNG; Iranian gas is no longer crucial to Turkey’s energy security.
In this environment, Ankara effectively has four options toward Iran: full renewal of the existing baseload contract; a reduced, more flexible swing-supply role; a short transitional extension while new sources ramp up; or a clean break. For Tehran, preserving something close to the status quo, steady volumes, long tenor, and minimal transparency over revenue flows, is the priority.
For Washington and its European partners, this situation creates a narrow but actionable window. The goal is clear: bring Iranian exports to zero. While Iranian gas historically covered winter heating spikes in eastern Anatolia, expanded connector pipelines and storage capacity now allow Ankara to decouple. The West should not be neutral; it must actively steer Ankara toward this full break.
The first step is to expose pipeline revenues and beneficiaries. Pipeline flows themselves are physically visible, but the financial structures around them are intentionally opaque. A combined U.S.-European Union effort should mandate Treasury and State, along with European counterparts, to publish a periodic report to legislatures detailing the scale of Iranian pipeline earnings by corridor, identifying the main recipient entities and any links to sanctioned actors. Existing sanctions authorities and financial-sector due diligence rules already provide a basis for such disclosures.
The second step is to push Turkey to diversify away from Iranian natural gas, which it is already doing. New LNG supply from U.S. terminals, possible flows from Turkmenistan via the Caspian Sea, expanded imports from existing Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline capacity, and modest growth in domestic production all point in the same direction: a portfolio less concentrated on any single pipeline supplier.
The third step is to extend enforcement to pipeline services and settlement systems with the explicit end state of no Iranian supply. Current sanctions frameworks are leaving pipeline-specific services largely untested. A calibrated extension could target future capacity expansion and non-essential upgrades on the Iran-Turkey line, while explicitly licensing safety-critical repairs on a strictly temporary basis.
Washington should make the pipeline unserviceable. This would mean signaling that new compressor stations, metering modernization, digital control systems, or major refurbishment projects that extend or enhance Iranian export capacity will expose vendors, insurers, and financiers to U.S. secondary sanctions and EU/U.K. penalties. Routine safety repairs may be licensed, but any enhancement that extends the pipeline’s commercial life must be blocked.
BONDI SAYS US-SEIZED TANKER WAS TRANSPORTING SANCTIONED OIL FROM VENEZUELA AND IRAN
None of these measures would, by themselves, terminate Turkish imports overnight. They would, however, change the cost-benefit calculation in Ankara and in Tehran. For Turkey, extending the contract on familiar terms would carry higher political, financial, and reputational costs relative to alternative supplies and would put it at odds with its own stated opposition to Iranian destabilizing activities. For Iran, the corridor would shift from being a protected, long-term hard-currency artery into NATO to a shrinking, unreliable, and ultimately disappearing revenue stream.
Turkey’s 2026 decision is thus more than a commercial renegotiation. It is an inflection point where Western policy can begin closing one of the Islamic Republic’s remaining sources of external leverage, tightening financial pressure on the regime without coercion, crisis, or military escalation.
Saeed Ghasseminejad holds a doctorate in finance and is an economist and senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Aidin Panahi holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering and is an energy and industrial policy expert.
