Turkey fuelling power game in eastern Mediterranean

Turkey’s increasingly muscular foreign policy vision pursued by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan over recent years has unsettled Turkey’s traditional allies and alarmed its regional foes, especially over competing claims to gas drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Financial Times reported on Sunday.

The discovery of huge natural gas deposits in the past decade has created the potential to transform energy supplies in the region, but the resources are subject to claims from at eight countries, and centre around Cyprus, divided since 1974 between a Greek Cypriot south, a European Union member, and the Turkish Cypriot north, only recognised by Ankara.

Ankara has adopted an increasingly assertive and aggressive approach to Turkey and Northern Cyprus being excluded from regional efforts by Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and Israel, as well as the UAE and France, to exploit eastern Mediterranean hydrocarbon resources.

Cyprus says that its drilling for hydrocarbons in the waters around the island is backed by international law, citing its exclusive economic zone, but Ankara claims Cyprus is both impinging on Turkey’s continental shelf and violating the rights of the northern side of the island. 

Erdoğan has recently sent the Turkish navy to intimidate drill ships belonging to international oil companies and has dispatched his own exploration vessels. The interventions threaten to stymie billions of dollars of investment.

“We are tearing up and throwing away the maps of the eastern Mediterranean that imprison us on the mainland,” Erdoğan’s deputy, Fuat Oktay, said in June.

What began as a dispute between Turkey and Cyprus is fuelling a regional power game, and causing deep unease in the EU and the United States, the FT said.

The latest flashpoint is the Libyan conflict, where Turkey intervened military to support the United Nations-recognised government after signing an agreement intended to shift maritime boundaries to enable Ankara to drill for oil and gas off the Libyan coast.

“It has built into a big strategic issue,” Dorothée Schmid, an expert on Turkey at the French Institute of International Relations, told the FT. She said Turkey is seen by many in Europe as being “a very aggressive player that is waging war in several parts of the region and is behaving very aggressively against the EU”.

Özlem Kaygusuz, an associate professor of international relations at Ankara University, told the FT that Erdoğan and his government believe they are restoring Turkey’s power and prestige on the international stage.

“They believe that the more Turkey plays an assertive role, the more it will become valuable and impossible to ignore for western interests in the region,” Kaygusuz said.

Anthony Skinner, director of Middle East research at Verisk Maplecroft consultancy firm, told the FT that Turkey would probably like to reach a negotiated deal with Cyprus, but he said that talks are likely years away and that “Erdoğan’s penchant for brinkmanship and pulling back just before it gets really dangerous means there’s always a risk of escalation.”

Some analysts see Turkey’s actions as a spoiling tactic rather than a genuine ambition to exploit resources.

“Turkey is in an ideal position to frustrate the further development of the eastern Mediterranean,” Richard Bronze, co-founder of the consultancy Energy Aspects, told the FT. “But its actions are being led at least as much by politics as economics.”

Some analysts see the potential for economics to eventually trump politics, even if any solution is a long way off.

“I hope that one day we will see some logic and Turkey will also become part of this development as it’s a huge market sitting right on the doorstep,” Mathios Rigas, chief executive of Energean, which is developing projects in the region, told the FT.

“Energy can become a solution rather than a problem and that's the way politicians should be looking at this.”