Turkey: Seeking dominance in the Mediterranean
A deepening dispute over natural-gas reserves in the eastern Mediterranean has pushed NATO members Turkey and Greece to the “brink of armed confrontation,” said Eléa Pommiers in Le Monde (France). Over the past decade, several massive gas fields have been discovered in the region, and Athens and Ankara have made rival maritime claims to the hydrocarbon riches. The two powers nearly came to blows in August, when Turkey deployed the seismic prospecting vessel Oruc Reis, accompanied by military frigates, to probe waters between Cyprus and the Greek island of Crete. Greece sent warships to shadow the flotilla, and a Greek and a Turkish vessel were involved in a minor collision during a standoff. European mediation helped calm things temporarily, but the quarrel over these contested waters is sure to flare again. Athens says the gas fields lie within its maritime boundaries because its territorial waters extend out from the many Greek islands that dot the eastern Mediterranean—including Kastellorizo, a tiny rock just a mile off the coast of Turkey. But Ankara says its continental shelf extends out past some of those islands, and it also claims the waters around the Turkish portion of Cyprus, an island it partly annexed in 1974. In such disputes, “international law invites states to negotiate bilateral agreements” to mark their economic zones, but Greece and Turkey have been at odds over borders for a century.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to revive his nation’s past glory, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian (U.K.). He believes that the treaties forced on the defeated Ottoman
Empire by the allies at the end of World War I unfairly deprived his country of its rightful maritime claims. Earlier this month, Erdogan made it explicit, saying, “Turkey is strong enough politically, economically, and militarily to tear up immoral maps and documents.” The Turkish leader is trying to whip up nationalist fervor to improve his flagging domestic support, but he also truly believes his rhetoric. An increasingly alarmed French President Emmanuel Macron has rushed to the defense of Greece, a fellow member of the European Union, dispatching warships to the region and warning that Turkey is indulging in “fantasies of its own history.”
Erdogan’s “adventurism matches that of Xerxes,” the Persian king who tried to conquer Europe in the 5th century B.C., said Alexandros Mallias in Kathimerini (Greece). Greece is once again playing the role of defender of the West against a tyrant who insists that free peoples accept his terms or face war. Make no mistake: “2,500 years after the battles of Thermopylae and Salamis, Hellenes have the will and the capabilities to defend their homeland.” It’s not just Greece that is upset at Turkey’s “unchecked energy piracy coupled with gunboat diplomacy,” said Arnab Neil Sengupta in Arab News (Saudi Arabia). Erdogan’s “neo-Ottoman worldview has put Turkey on a collision course with Sunni Arab powers.” Turkey’s military is currently involved in Libya, Syria, and Iraq—all former Ottoman provinces. Erdogan once pursued a foreign policy known as “zero problems with neighbors”; his new strategy seems to be “zero neighbors without problems.”