In 2020, with the strong presence of American, Russian, French, Greek, Turkish, Egyptian, Italian, and even German warships, the Eastern Mediterranean has become one of the most militarized seas in the world.
It’s all about geography. In the Eastern Mediterranean there are two of the three gates to and from the Mediterranean: the Bosphorus and the Suez. It touches the Middle East coast where the interests of many powerful countries are at stake, it has energy resources, and it lies on the New Silk Road. It is important for international navigation, the European Union, and it serves the interests of countries such as the United States, China, Russia, the UK, and France.
Even though the U.S. was a dominant power in the region during and after the Cold War, today its presence has declined significantly, because its attention has turned to the Persian Gulf against Iran, as well as the South China Sea in order to halt China.
This decline has left room for revisionist actors to fill the power vacuum: Russia, Turkey, Iran, and China. The first three are heavily involved in Syria and the latter is moving steadily to occupy the lion’s share to maritime transfer, infrastructure, 5G networks, etc.
All of them are developing a new geopolitical scheme of a Eurasian Multi-Power of a loose but functional grouping of many Eurasian states, whose core is the China-Russia axis. They form an informal Eurasian NATO, but with a much greater geopolitical depth, dynamics, and solid raison d’être than the real NATO.
The recent escalation in the region started when Turkey dictated a Memorandum of Agreement to the Libyan Government of National Accord that parcels out the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the eastern Mediterranean in a way that denies Egypt, Israel, and Cyprus access to Greece and to the European market, without Turkish approval. From the point of view of International Law, this agreement is profoundly illegal, mainly because it denies huge Greek islands such as Crete and Rhodes of their own EEZ.
Then Turkey defied Greece’s and Cyprus’ rights on their EEZs and gas fields, by sending drilling ships and frigates into the region.
It is interesting to note that apart from the unfounded legal basis of its claim, Turkey adopted the same aggressive rhetoric as China in its illegal claims in the South China Sea. China, exactly like Turkey, threatens U.S. allies like Australia, Taiwan, Japan, etc. Of course, in the South China Sea, the United States has naval and air forces to back up its allies, reminding China that she is not allowed to harm Western interests.
The same is not happening in the Mediterranean. The U.S. eclipse forces France, Israel, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, and the UAE to form multilateral and bilateral schemes to control Turkey’s aggression.
In the West, media outlets are mischaracterizing the true source of disruption in the Eastern Mediterranean, portraying it as a mere dispute over energy sources. Given that it is unclear whether these deposits are large enough to be drilled and that their future exploitation is unlikely to be profitable, does this dispute deserve a military conflict? Furthermore, there are big exploitable deposits of rare earth elements in northern Greece, something that could lessen the United States’ dependence on imports from China. Instead, at the core of the recent crisis between Greece and Turkey is a dangerous ideological divide.
Turkey has attributed to itself a role that goes beyond that of just a considerable regional power. It maintains that it deserves the status of a global power, thus gaining an equal footing with the rest of the earlier enumerated Eurasian NATO countries. To achieve this, it needs an ideology, a theoretical starting point. And this is Neo-Ottomanism. This is actually the reason Turkey sides with Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood and questions international treaties like the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Ottoman Empire. Apart from being verbally or militarily aggressive to almost all of its neighboring countries, Turkey has military bases in Albania, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Libya, in occupied Cyprus, Qatar, Somalia, and Syria. From 2015 on, it claims rights on exploiting Arctica and Antarctica, labeling itself a “Polar Power.” Its Public Diplomacy institutions are extremely active in the Balkans, in Central Asia, even in Central Africa. Last July, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Cavusoglu visited Central African countries, among them Niger, where remarkable uranium deposits exist, vital for Turkey’s nuclear program. This is one of the reasons for French annoyance over Turkey’s actions in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, areas of historical interest for French foreign policy.
At the same time, Turkey’s extremely sharp animosity against Israel brought it closer to Egypt and other more hardcore Arab countries such as the UAE, with more to follow. Even the Arab League was alarmed by Turkey’s revisionism, its Secretary General stating that Turkey’s active role in tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean and in the Caucasus will not end well for it.
Turkey is lost for the West. The Cold War mentality is outdated and the roles have changed. NATO is becoming a castrated organization like the EU, without a footprint in international politics. America’s absence from the Mediterranean gives space to revisionist countries to serve their interests, which don’t match with those of the West. It is characteristic that the first U.S. intervention in the Greek-Turkish military stand-off took place only when it became known that the Turks had activated their S-400 radars.
ZAFIRIS ROSSIDIS is the former Head of Public Diplomacy Directorate at the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has worked for the Greek Government as a Press Attache in Albania, Israel, Finland, Croatia, and Denmark. He holds university degrees in Physics, in History, and a M.A. in Modern European History from the University of Athens, a postgraduate degree in Public Diplomacy from the National School of Public Administration of Greece, and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics, University of Thessaly. His doctoral dissertation is titled: "Public Diplomacy as a promoter of Economic Diplomacy. The cases of USIA, China and Israel." Rossidis graduated from the Hellenic National Defense College and also from the Joint School of Information Warfare of the Hellenic National Defense General Staff, where he is now an instructor. He served as a NCO in the Hellenic Navy Special Forces.
