Hard-won Med alliances put to the test
Two recent events brought home to Greek officials the painful reality that even well-established bilateral relations can be destabilized and that this is even more true in the volatile Eastern Med.
The first event was the signature of the Turkish-Libyan memorandum giving Turkey the right to explore for oil and natural gas on Libyan soil and under that country’s sea. The second was the visit by Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister Benny Gantz to Turkey, having previously canceled his visit to Greece for “technical and security reasons.”
Greece has painstakingly built alliances with other Mediterranean countries, such as Egypt and Israel, and further afield, such as with the United Arab Emirates, on the shared assumption that Turkey was a factor of regional instability. With Turkey’s image undergoing a slow but steady normalization and rehabilitation, even with serious issues still outstanding, realpolitik takes over and declared shared “principles” recede into the background.
Greece sees the greatest danger coming from Libya, where the Tripoli government seems to be giving Turkey a blank check, with the latter increasing its military footprint in western Libya, still at loggerheads with the eastern part of the country, and increasingly viewing Tripoli as a protectorate.
Greece is aware of Libya’s intention to submit maps with its continental shelf to the UN on the basis of its contested 2019 agreement with Turkey. Then, it is likely that Libya will declare a continental shelf on its own west of Crete, on the basis of the Turkish claim that islands cannot have a continental shelf of their own. In that case, Libya’s shelf will extend to the midpoint between the African coast and Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula.
