posted at 6:02 pm on August 8, 2011 by J.E. Dyer<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve got to feel for Cyprus.\u00a0 The island starts out divided between Greek Cyprus and \u201cTurkish Northern Cyprus,\u201d an entity created by a Turkish armed invasion in 1974 and recognized by, well, Turkey.\u00a0 With her historical Greek roots, Greek Cyprus \u2013 an independent nation \u2013 has extensive exposure to Greek government bonds, and has been fighting a rearguard action throughout 2011 to prevent a faster downgrading of Cypriot<\/em> public debt.\u00a0 (Some US states now face a somewhat similar potential domino effect from the downgrading of US debt.)<\/p>\n Arms and the explosion<\/strong><\/p>\n Back in January 2009, Cyprus was the unfortunate flag state of the M\/V Monchegorsk<\/em>, chartered by Iran to transport arms to Syria in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1747.\u00a0 Cyprus lies off Syria\u2019s coast, and wanted nothing to do with confiscating the Assad regime\u2019s prohibited arms delivery. \u00a0But Cyprus ended up \u2013 under tremendous pressure \u2013 accepting the confiscated cargo: 98 containers of arms and explosives.\u00a0 (Sprightly account of the history on this here.)<\/p>\n On 11 July 2011, the arms shipment, which had been held without further processing under a makeshift structure at a Cypriot naval base for over two years, found itself in the path of a summer fire.\u00a0 Exploding, it killed 13 people, including the chief of the Cypriot navy, and destroyed the electric power plant that provided 53% of the power used by Greek Cyprus.\u00a0 The loss of power has put Cyprus in an economic tailspin.\u00a0 Moody\u2019s downgraded Cypriot debt to just above junk status in late July, making it likely that EU member (and Eurozone participant) Cyprus would at some point seek a bailout along with Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.<\/p>\n Cypriots, blaming the government of old-style leftist Demetris Cristiofas (and, without electric power, having little else to do), have been flooding the streets in protest.\u00a0 Cristiofas\u2019 parliamentary coalition was split when its major ally (the centrist Democratic Party) abruptly pulled out on Wednesday 3 August.\u00a0 Cristiofas holds the office of president and will not face the voters again until 2013, but the loss of his coalition means the government will be paralyzed on contentious issues.\u00a0 He appointed a new cabinet on Friday, but was unable to bring in any new ministers from his former ally, the Democratic Party.\u00a0 Nevertheless, his new finance minister put a brave face on things, asserting that \u201cthere is no issue at the moment\u201d of Cyprus requesting a Eurozone bailout.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Gas and Turkey<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n This may well be due in large part to Cyprus\u2019 determination to forge ahead with offshore gas drilling.\u00a0 The government in Nicosia has put the word out repeatedly over the last couple of weeks that it expects drilling off the southern coast to start on (or before) 1 October.\u00a0 Cyprus has been moving smartly to explore and get drilling underway since concluding a maritime boundary agreement with Israel in 2010.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But Turkey is unalterably opposed to this course.\u00a0 Turkey\u2019s position is that, having invaded Cyprus and established a Turkish entity there which no one else recognizes, she is entitled to forestall all activity in the Cypriot economic exclusion zone (EEZ) until the status of Cyprus is worked out through negotiation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That won\u2019t be happening any time soon.\u00a0 On 19 July, Turkey\u2019s Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced a significant change in the country\u2019s negotiating stance:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Turkish Prime Minister has sent a thunderbolt to the United Nations and leaders of Cyprus by announcing that his country is no longer prepared to accept the concessions it has agreed to in order to help with the reunification of Cyprus in line with a UN plan back in 2004.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Recep Tayyip Erdogan said the Turkish side will accept nothing short of recognition of a two-state solution on the island, effectively meaning if the current round of UN sponsored talks fail Turkey will likely seek international recognition for the break-away state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n The \u201ctwo-state solution\u201d thing is certainly going around (and that\u2019s a whole other post).\u00a0 But in the wake of this \u201cthunderbolt\u201d from Erdogan, Cristiofas pulled out of the UN-sponsored negotiation meeting scheduled for Friday, 5 August, without indicating a date on which he would be prepared to resume negotiations.\u00a0 \u00a0Certainly his governing-coalition woes are a key reason for the pull-out, but they are extremely unlikely to be the only reason.\u00a0 It is not clear what options Cyprus has now, with the Erdogan government renouncing the previous basis for negotiations, and determined not on reunification of the island, but on a two-state solution.\u00a0 Cristiofas cannot feel that there is much to say to Turkey right now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But 1 October is less than 8 weeks away.\u00a0 Turkey expresses continued determination to prevent a drilling start, and for implied threats of that kind there is a history.\u00a0 The Turkish navy has harassed exploration vessels operating in the Cypriot and Greek EEZs before \u2013 to the point of preventing their activities.\u00a0 In mid-November 2008, a Turkish warship prevented a Norwegian survey vessel from operating off the southern coast of Cyprus.\u00a0 In March of 2011, a Turkish warship interfered with an Italian vessel in the Greek EEZ off Crete, which had Athens\u2019 permission to survey the seabed for a communications cable to be laid between Italy and Israel.\u00a0 (See here for an account of an escalation with Greece in 2010, via a NOTAM duel and Turkish fighter patrols over a new undersea oil\/gas find.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Greece has taken note of a pointed statement by Erdogan at a 2011 naval conference in Ankara:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We want a navy to dominate the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, and also stand before the Russian Black Sea Fleet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Nothing is happening in isolation in the Eastern Mediterranean, and Cyprus, geographically and politically, is in the middle of it all.\u00a0 The Arab Spring has upset one set of assumptions, putting Syria (and Egypt) in play.\u00a0 The perennial security concerns of the major nations \u2013 Russia, Greece, Turkey \u2013 are dictated by geography and history: if Syria is in play, that causes strategic discomfort for the other big nations.\u00a0 Russia\u2019s concern is particularly acute because Turkey lies across her maritime path out of the Black Sea, and on the other side of the restive, largely Muslim Caucasus.\u00a0 Turkey asserting a new, peculiarly Turkish realm of influence (e.g., by pilfering Syria as a client from Iran) would regenerate an Ottoman-like vulnerability on Russia\u2019s southern flank.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Geography and geostrategy<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The facts of geo-history combine with undersea resources to make Cyprus a strategic prize in the Eastern Mediterranean. \u00a0Considered in the light of Erdogan\u2019s recent electoral victory, his suppression of internal checks on his power, and his various statements indicating neo-Ottoman aspirations, the July 2011 about-face on Cyprus policy comes off as a clear determination to keep Turkey in absolute control of at least part of Cyprus.\u00a0 There are two geographic reasons for this:\u00a0 Cyprus\u2019 proximity to the Levant Basin oil and gas reserves, and Cyprus\u2019 relation to the coast of Syria.\u00a0 Basically, Cyprus commands<\/em> the Syrian coast.\u00a0 Holding Cyprus and being able to fortify it is a means of holding Syria at risk from the sea.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That would come in handy if either Russia or Iran got in a position in Syria to project power from the Syrian coast.\u00a0 It\u2019s a blocking move on Turkey\u2019s part as much as anything.\u00a0 Iran, fighting hard just to keep the Assad regime in power (see here and here), is somewhat distracted at the moment, but Russia has a very long historic and geostrategic vista of security concerns about formerly-Ottoman Turkey, the Aegean, and the Black Sea.\u00a0 That is why Russia has sought to maintain at least one Mediterranean base whenever possible over the last two-plus centuries, to be able to flank her Black Sea neighbors and influence conditions in the Mediterranean when necessary.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cyprus has become uniquely vulnerable at a uniquely unstable time.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t all boil down to oil and gas:\u00a0 Americans are almost the only people on earth who don\u2019t have to think 24\/7 about geography as a key component of their security, and we foolishly dismiss the geographic security orientation of other nations, supposing that everything is \u201cabout\u201d either oil or ideology.\u00a0 But Russia can very easily be held at risk by Turkey because of geography, and the more Ottoman-sounding Erdogan\u2019s rhetoric and actions are, the more Russia will worry about that and take steps to avert it.\u00a0 Maneuvering over Cyprus because of her relative location is as high a priority as anything else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The unreliability of US power contributes to the uneasy mindset of various actors around the \u201cGreat Crossroads\u201d of Europe, Asia, and Africa.\u00a0 The EU, the US, and our collective defense organization (NATO) are failing in Libya and looking tired and dispirited in Afghanistan.\u00a0 It is less and less unthinkable that Turkey will render the UN process in Cyprus moot because she has no intention of giving up her free hand in Northern Cyprus \u2013 and that she will add new offensive capabilities to the 30,000 troops she has occupying the island.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Unfortunately, the stage is set for Cyprus to matter a great deal.\u00a0 If having a naval base in Syria becomes untenable for Russia, having the use of bases in Greece \u2013 perhaps even in Greek Cyprus \u2013 is not out of the question.\u00a0 So much has the Pax Americana faded that Britain, France, and Italy would be likely to quietly welcome such a development, rather than regarding it with suspicion and alarm.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Naval postures<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n If Turkey\u2019s posture in the Eastern Med seems to come off somewhat like China\u2019s in the waters of East Asia, it should not be surprising that the two nations, which have conducted unprecedented military exercises together over the last year, have also been conducting unprecedented naval task force deployments to distant seas.\u00a0 In 2010, China, for the first time ever, sent an operational naval task force to the Mediterranean for a series of port visits.\u00a0 Turkey, for the first time since Ottoman days (i.e., World War I), deployed a task force for a non-NATO \u201cpatrol\u201d of the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This summer, Turkey sent a four-ship naval task force to the Indian Ocean and East Asia.\u00a0 Turkey (like China) has maintained a presence in the antipiracy operations off Somalia, but this summer\u2019s deployment has so far entailed port visits in Oman, Abu Dhabi (UAE \u2013 \u201cfor the first time in centuries\u201d), India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, and Japan.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n J.E. Dyer\u2019s articles have appeared at The Green Room, <\/em>Commentary\u2019s \u201c<\/em>contentions<\/em>,\u201d <\/em>Patheos<\/em>, The Weekly Standard onlin<\/em>e, and her own blog, <\/em>The Optimistic Conservative<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" posted at 6:02 pm on August 8, 2011 by J.E. Dyer You\u2019ve got to feel for Cyprus.\u00a0 The island starts out divided between Greek Cyprus and \u201cTurkish Northern Cyprus,\u201d an entity created by a Turkish armed invasion in 1974 and recognized by, well, Turkey.\u00a0 With her historical Greek roots, Greek Cyprus \u2013 an independent nation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":38489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[211],"tags":[6637,4015],"class_list":["post-38488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyprus-trnc","tag-levant-basin","tag-oil-and-gas-exploration"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}