The relationship between Turkey and Greece is once again marked by tension, and Ankara's tough statements have made some observers wonder if this time there will be military confrontations. However, the current crisis seems to be related to the efforts made by the regime in Ankara to divert attention from domestic problems rather than to the old rivalry between the two countries.
A bilateral relation marked by discord
The Aegean Sea has been troubled for several weeks by the storm in Turkey's relationship with Greece. Ankara, primarily through President Erdoğan, launches almost daily bellicose diatribes against Athens, despite relations appearing to be relatively calm in March, when the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had a cordial meeting with the Turkish president in Istanbul. Insiders were optimistic but relatively reserved given the long history of discord between the two countries and the fact that they had come close to conflict in 1996 and in 2020. In the last such situation, Turkey had sent a ship to explore for natural gas deposits in an area contested by both sides in the Mediterranean Sea. Dialogue only resumed in January 2021, and only after Ankara withdrew the vessel.
The meeting in Istanbul, in March 2022, did not inaugurate a harmonious relationship either. Turkey has maintained its hostile attitude towards energy resource exploitation projects initiated by Greece, Cyprus, Israel and Egypt, along with other countries, in the eastern Mediterranean. It has not renounced the treaty with the Libyan government in Tripoli delimiting the exclusive zones in the Mediterranean, thereby threatening any European project in the region, including the EastMed Pipeline. At the same time, Ankara has continued to massively support the aggressive Ersin Tatar government in Northern Cyprus, where Turks are openly hostile to the one-state project and instead promote the idea of a confederation or even independence for the Turkish side of the island.
Therefore, Athens has had serious reasons to keep being suspicious of its eastern neighbor and to be ready for anything. In October 2021, the Greek parliament ratified a defensive pact with France, whereby Greece received Rafale fighter aircraft. Cooperation with the United States has also advanced to an unprecedented level, with Athens becoming Washington's main partner in the region. Under a 2019 defense treaty , the US and NATO footprint grew to three bases in mainland Greece, the most important being Alexandroupoli, close to the mainland border with Turkey and a major center for the transfer of liquefied natural gas. Under the same treaty, the American presence also increased at the Souda naval base in Crete, where significant funds were also invested to improve the infrastructure of NATO's most important deep-water port in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.
In October 2021, the 2019 US-Greece treaty was updated with an agreement extending unrestricted access for US NATO forces to four more bases on Greek soil. And while Turkey was excluded from the F-35 program due to, among other things, its purchase and continued possession of Russian S-400 missiles, Greece applied to join the program. Relatively recently, it has also formally requested the purchase of F-35 fighter jets , which are currently the most advanced in the world.
Erdoğan, frustrated by the good relation between Greece and the United States
The regime in Ankara is therefore rightly frustrated by the prospect of Greece gaining air superiority in the region in just a few years. Also frustrating is Washington's constant refusal to follow its policy lines, especially in northern Syria, and the fact that President Biden has yet to invite Erdoğan for an official visit to the White House. Not coincidentally, Turkish aviation has carried out hundreds of flights violating the Greek airspace, the peak being reached in April 2022, with 168 such violations and 42 illegal territorial overflights in a single day, including over Alexandroupoli.
The most important points of discord under Erdoğan's authoritarian and highly arrogant regime are quite visible. While the Turkish leader is not invited to the White House and is not supported by the US administration in his regional adventures, the Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis was welcomed on an official visit to Washington in May 2022. Moreover, he used the opportunity to advocate before the US Congress against the idea of the United States responding positively to Ankara's request to deliver modernized F-16 fighter jets and kits for the modernization of those already part of the Turkish military aviation equipment. The episode prompted President Erdoğan to publicly announce that Mitsotakis “no longer exists” for him, thus inaugurating the string of highly aggressive statements that have kept going. There followed military maneuvers with the exclusion of the Greeks by the Turks and vice versa, as well as confrontations at NATO meetings.
Turkey threatens to attack Greece
The climax , until the time this text was written, was reached by President Erdoğan himself who, on the evening of September 5, 2022, said on a TV program that “Greece is not at our level, just as it is not our equal politically, economically, or militarily”. And this undiplomatic statement came after, shortly before, he had threatened that Turkey “could come suddenly, at night”, thus implying a surprise attack on its western neighbor and partner of NATO. The bellicose interior minister from the ultra-nationalist MHP party, Süleyman Soylu, complemented the president, accusing Athens of using refugee camps on Greek soil to train Kurdish terrorists who are then sent to operate in Turkey. MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli, the ultra-nationalist partner in the ruling coalition, also threatened the Greeks, saying “it is very easy for us to get from this side of the Aegean to the other”.
It is not the first time that Turkish leaders, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, use such language. The threat of coming “suddenly at night”, for example, was heard in Ankara about the Turkish army's operations against the Kurdish YPG militia, allies of the US in the fight against the Islamic State in northern Syria. But it is the first time that a Turkish president has accused Greece of “occupying” islets and rock formations in the Aegean Sea and even of militarizing some larger islands. Most of the large islands (Chios, Lesbos, Samos, etc.) came into the possession of the Kingdom of Greece, by treaty, after the First Balkan War. However, there is no treaty delimiting territorial waters in the Aegean between Greece and Turkey after the two world wars. Thus, dozens of very small islands have never been claimed. And if at the official level the Turkish side has generally refrained from making aggressive statements on this matter, the Turkish president and other officials from Ankara seem to have decided that the time has come to fight. A colonel and secretary-general in the Ministry of Defense has recently claimed that Athens has “occupied” no less than 20 “Turkish” islands and two islets , where fourteen bases with approximately 6,000 troops had been deployed.
Ankara's belligerent rhetoric, designed to divert attention from domestic problems
The fact that both Turkey and Greece will hold crucial elections next year makes nationalist themes come back to the fore, especially in Turkey. The regime in Ankara, with a presidential system of government since January 2017, has experienced a series of setbacks in domestic politics. The president's control over all state institutions has led to major blockages and that over the Central Bank has translated into an unprecedented limitation of the latter’s independence. And instead of raising the key interest rate to curb inflation, the Bank bowed to President Erdoğan's conservative vision, cutting interest rates by 5 percentage points from December 2021 until now. The result is a devaluation of the lira by around 44% and consumer hyperinflation (uncontrolled inflation) which has officially reached 80% per year. However, a group of academic specialists, using the calculation system of the National Institute of Statistics, places consumer inflation at over 180%. It turns out that the official figures are simply made up, but ordinary citizens feel the bitter truth: Turkey's economy is in deep crisis.
Adding to the above are the serious foreign policy errors that have damaged Turkey's relations with all its neighbors and traditional partners, especially the Western ones (USA, EU, etc.), the situation also being reflected in the economy. Against this background, the nationalist discourse makes more sense in Ankara than in Athens, where the aid provided by the European Union and the IMF, as well as balanced government policies, have made almost any recollection of the 2008 crisis disappear.
Despite the conflictual relationship, the possibility of a Greco-Turkish war is low
Are we witnessing signs of an imminent Turkish-Greek war, as some analysts have been warning? The arguments in favor of a positive answer are not convincing to the author of these lines. The symptoms of a conflictual relationship should not be mistaken for the conflict itself. It is true that Greece is going through a major process of modernizing its armed forces, especially in terms of aviation, while Turkey is also making unprecedented investments in multiple categories of forces. However, it is involved at an unprecedented level in the republican history, almost a hundred years old, on several fronts, and it cannot support either militarily or economically a projection of forces towards the west. And a Turkish-Greek conflict would entail huge political costs for Ankara.
The population is not overwhelmingly anti-Hellenic and has larger and more serious socio-economic concerns than the historical rivalry with Athens. Nor are the Greeks predominantly anti-Turkish. During the tourist season, from spring to autumn, thousands of people cross the border between the two states in both directions each year. I myself was part of this seasonal migration at least ten times during my time as a resident of Izmir, witnessing many scenes of friendship, not enmity, between Turks and Greeks. It is true that an authoritarian regime, such as the current one in Ankara, can decide to start a war even against the interests of its own citizens. We’ve seen this, since February 24, in the case of Putin's war in Ukraine. But we also see the costs.
