Foreignpolicy.com | By Michaël Tanchum

The region’s powers and the West are facing off against Turkey—and Turkey is not going down without a fight.

In mid-August, a Turkish and a Greek warship collided in the Eastern Mediterranean, raising tensions in the most combustible naval stand-off the region has witnessed in 20 years. The crisis had started two days before, when Turkey deployed an energy exploration ship along with its naval escort to search for oil and natural gas in waters near the Greek island of Kastellorizo—waters Athens claims as its own maritime territory.

More than ever before, the latest cycle of escalation risks spiraling into a multinational conflict.  Making a show of staunch support for Greece against Turkey, France dispatched warships to the contested waters and promised more. Egypt and Israel, which hold regular joint military exercises with Greece, have also expressed their solidarity with Athens. With France and Egypt already in open conflict with Turkey in Libya, observers around the world fear that any further escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean could set off a Euro-Middle Eastern maelstrom.

How did the Eastern Mediterranean become the eye of a geopolitical storm?

For decades, Eastern Mediterranean maritime boundary disputes were a local affair, confined to sovereignty claims and counterclaims among Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. But over the past five years, the region’s offshore natural gas resources have turned the Eastern Mediterranean into a key strategic arena through which larger geopolitical fault-lines involving the EU and the MENA region converge. Italy and France have played integral roles in driving that change, which has placed the EU and Turkey’s already complicated relationship onto more adversarial terms.

The game changer was the August 2015 discovery of the massive Zohr natural gas field in Egyptian maritime territory by the Italian energy major Eni. The largest Eastern Mediterranean gas find to date, Zohr’s advent meant the region suddenly collectively had marketable volumes of natural gas. Eni, which is also the lead operator in Cyprus’s natural gas development, began promoting a plan to pool Cypriot, Egyptian, and Israeli gas and use Egypt’s liquefaction plants to cost-effectively market the region’s gas to Europe as liquified natural gas (LNG). The Italian company also happens to be a lead stake holder in one of Egypt’s two LNG plants.

Although commercially sensible, there was a geopolitical glitch to the Egypt-based LNG marketing scheme: It left no role for Turkey and its pipeline infrastructure to Europe, dashing Ankara’s in-progress plans to become a regional energy hub. In 2018, French energy giant Total, the EU’s third largest company by revenue, dealt another blow to Turkey by partnering with Eni in all of the Italian firm’s gas development operations in Cyprus, placing France in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean energy morass. Around the same time, Cyprus officially agreed to supply Egypt’s LNG plants for export. After Cyprus inked that deal, Israel, which had previously been considering building an Israel-Turkey undersea gas pipeline, followed suit and contracted to sell its gas to Egypt as well.

The country continues to refuse to recognize Cyprus’s maritime boundaries, which Ankara maintains were drawn illegally at Turkey’s expense.

Turkey expressed its displeasure at these developments by engaging in a series of measured exercises of gunboat diplomacy, sending exploration and drillships into Cypriot waters, each with naval escort. The country continues to refuse to recognize Cyprus’s maritime boundaries, which Ankara maintains were drawn illegally at Turkey’s expense. In doing so, it claims to be defending the rights of Turkish Cypriots in the northern half of the ethnically divided island, who have been left out of the development of Cyprus’s offshore natural gas reserves despite being the legal co-owners of Cyprus’s natural resources.

With each Turkish action, the Egypt-Israel-Cyprus-Greece front increasingly gained military support from France, Italy, and the United States, each of which has significant economic investments in Eastern Mediterranean gas. For Turkey, its NATO allies’ support of this group is a betrayal, and tantamount to a policy of containment, which it cannot tolerate.

How did Libya enter the Eastern Mediterranean Morass?

In a bid to break out of its regional isolation, in November 2019 Turkey signed its own maritime demarcation agreement with the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) in war-torn Libya. The deal was an attempt to gain greater legal standing to challenge the maritime borders Greece had established with Cyprus and Egypt, upon which their eastern Mediterranean natural gas development plans depend. The Ankara-Tripoli maritime boundary agreement was accompanied by a military cooperation pact providing the GNA a security guarantee against the efforts of General Khalifa Haftar’s forces, backed by France and Egypt, to topple the Tripoli-based government.  The GNA formally activated its military pact with Ankara in December, linking the already tense maritime stand-off in the Eastern Mediterranean to the Libyan civil war.