The Eastern Mediterranean has become a flash-point for
the meshing of geopolitics, the struggle for regional hegemony, battles for
control of resources, religious soft power rivalry, and blatant interference in
the politics of others.
The complex and dangerous juxtaposition of multiple
conflicting interests broadens the focus beyond Russia, when it comes to
meddling in elections, to include countries like Turkey, the UAE, and Saudi
Arabia. It blurs the lines between multiple conflicts such as the wars in Syria
and Libya and the struggle for control of the Eastern Mediterranean’s newly
found gas deposits. And it positions contested waters as the latest venue in
which Russia and the West battle for influence.
Laying bare the multiple disputes being fought on the
back of the Eastern Mediterranean with its natural gas reserves of
122 trillion cubic feet resembles peeling an onion.
Lining up on opposing sides are Middle Eastern, North African,
and Eastern Mediterranean nations, Gulf states, Turkey, Russia, and Europe.
Perhaps, most fundamental is the degree to which
Europe going forward will be able to reduce its dependence on Russian gas
imports. Russia currently satisfies approximately 40 percent of the European Union’s gas needs.
The ability to reduce Russian imports with gas from
the Eastern Mediterranean potentially would allow Europe to adopt a more
forceful stand in the struggle between Western liberalism and Russian
civilisationalism that is likely to shape a new world order.
EU dependence has so far prompted European nations to
temper their defense of Western values against Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s civilizationalist* policies that include territory grabs in the Caucasus and Ukraine, intimidation of Central Asian nations, and support for Western far-right, neo-Nazi, and
anti-immigration forces designed to weaken liberal democracy and
strengthen groups more empathetic to the Russian leader’s worldview.
“The bad news is that the Moscow-Washington
confrontation will continue; the good news is that there will be some
guardrails built around it. . . .The Eastern Mediterranean, however, is
emerging as an area where Russia, again, is competing with the West,” said Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow
Center.
Mr. Trenin argued that it was the Eastern
Mediterranean rather than Ukraine, Crimea, the Baltics, the Arctic, or
south-eastern Europe where tension could flare the most.
If for some nations like Greece, Cyprus, and Lebanon
the struggle to control the Eastern Mediterranean’s resources is primarily
about economics, for others, including Egypt and Israel it’s about projecting
power. That is no truer than for Russia and Turkey, even if their interests
against the backdrop of recently diverging positions on the battlefields
of Libya
and Syria, may differ rather than
converge.
Turkey raised the stakes with its military backing of
Libya’s internationally recognized Tripoli-based Government of National Accord
(GNA) against United Arab Emirates, Saudi, Egyptian, and Russian-backed rebel
leader Khalifa Haftar and his Libyan National Army (LNA).
A GNA-Turkish maritime agreement that created
an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the Eastern Mediterranean favoring expansive Turkish
claims and the building of relations between Khalifa Haftar and Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad link the war in Syria to the Eastern Mediterranean
and the fighting in Libya. All at a time when Turkey and Russia maneuver to
avoid a direct military clash in Idlib, the last stronghold of the
Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (SNA) rebels against Russian-backed Syrian
government forces.
The economic zone, or EEZ, would block a planned
pipeline that would link the EU to Israeli and Cypriot gas supplies.
If successfully enforced, the zone, coupled with
Turkey’s military performance in Syria with the downing of three Syrian
warplanes in as many days, would signal to regional hegemonic hopefuls, namely
Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that financial muscle may not be enough to impose
their will.
Ironically, one key to accommodation that could have
reduced the risk of the ideological and geopolitical fuse blowing up and may
have contributed to creating an environment of cooperation rather than
confrontation lies on the divided island of Cyprus.
Turkey, beyond insisting that Turkish participation is
a sine-qua-non for any successful exploitation of Eastern Mediterranean gas,
has opposed a role for predominantly Greek-Cypriot Cyprus without the inclusion of the island’s self-declared independent
Turkish Cypriot north.
Turkey, which has troops in the north ever since it
invaded the island in 1974, is the only country to have recognized the region
as an independent state.
The idea of including northern Cyprus may be a pie in
the sky in an environment in which geopolitics is a zero-sum game with
civilizationalists, nationalists, and autocrats leaving little space for power
sharing. And Europe is too preoccupied with internal problems, and most
recently with a new looming Syrian refugee crisis, to project a cohesive and inclusive
policy approach.
Scholar and commentator Hussein Ibish cautioned that “all the elements that have compelled the
parties to the eastern Mediterranean natural gas competition to develop local
alliances that are increasingly melding with other strategic, diplomatic, and
political contests appears likely to continue.”
Mr. Ibish blamed tension in the Eastern Mediterranean
on the “strongly pro-Islamist orientation” of Turkey as “a budding would-be
regional economic and political hegemon” rather than on multiple would-be
hegemons.
Nonetheless, his conclusion stands that in the Eastern Mediterranean “disputes
arising over narrow issues such as natural gas reserves will continue to take
on far broader significance.”
