The end of the Eastern Mediterranean gas dispute is nowhere near in sight. Although Greece and Turkey assented to resume talks at the beginning of 2021 after a five-year hiatus, conflict resolution is running out of momentum. Turkish ships will soon return to the contested waters to continue hydrocarbon exploration and drilling. This disappointing outcome was predictable: Graeco-Turkish disagreements in the region are too complex, ranging from their historical ambitions in Cyprus to rival claims to natural resources in the Aegean Sea, for either side to warp its understanding of what is right. Worse still, the irredentist ideological outlook of Turkey’s ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP),  is causing Ankara to distrust external mediation and multilateral dialogue, fearing this would result in the nation’s strategic encirclement. So long as these impediments to depoliticised natural gas extraction persist, cross-national collaboration will likely remain an unstable and pervious façade.

The recent outburst of political brinkmanship between Turkey and the European Union revolves around their interpretations of international maritime law. Greece and Cyprus have both signed and ratified the 1958 Convention on the Continental Shelf and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which stipulate that states may enforce laws and extract all natural resources within the first twelve nautical miles (22.2 km) from their coastlines and that their exclusive economic zones (EEZ) extend to 200 nautical miles (370 km) into the sea or until two different zones overlap. Conversely, Turkey has only signed the 1958 agreement and maintains that distances for EEZs should be measured from the continental coastlines, rather than from the islands. Its Blue Homeland doctrine argues that the twelve-mile rule cannot be applied to the Eastern Mediterranean because of its unique geographical properties and that Turkey’s EEZ should extend to the median line of the Aegean Sea and around the Greek islands on its Anatolian frontier.

Until 2012, these profound disagreements mattered little. The delicate balance of power was challenged by the Cypriot discovery of the Aphrodite natural gas field and its concomitant auctioning to major energy companies despite Turkish opposition on the basis that this decision required the prior consent and involvement of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. In 2019, Turkey was excluded from the Eastern Mediterranean pipeline project, designed to connect Cypriot and Israeli natural gas reserves with Europe via Greece. In response, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan concluded an agreement with the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA), which bifurcated the Eastern Mediterranean in a way that reduced Greek maritime possessions and threatened to prevent Cyprus from exporting natural gas to Europe. Likewise, Turkey undertook concrete actions on the ground, deploying its naval vessels to investigate natural gas reservoirs near Cyprus in 2019 and near the Greek island of Kastellorizo in 2020.

NATO’s commitment to supervising de-escalation sufficed to reduce tensions and return Ankara and Athens to the negotiating table. Doubtless, this is positive news, but the Greek government’s recent remarks and accusations that Turkey was deliberately pushing migrant boats into its sovereign waters suggest that the two parties have reached a stalemate. Indeed, Erdogan’s hostile approach to the Eastern Mediterranean dispute remains popular among both his supporters and the wider Turkish public, opposed to the EU’s criticisms of how Ankara is managing Kurdish separatism and has suppressed dissent following the 2017 attempted military coup. The country’s purchase of the S-400 missile defence systems from Russia further indicates that Turkey is reticent to trust the West. Even direct American intervention under the Biden administration will likely struggle to negotiate a policy turnaround, as 50% of Turks consider the United States the biggest threat to their nation and hold it responsible for funding the dissident Fethullah Gülen, an archcritic of Erdogan.

Comprehensive cooperation between all Eastern Mediterranean states would require some form of reconciliation and compromise regarding Cyprus. In the twentieth century, Graeco-Turkish brinkmanship led to war in 1974 that separated the island into two conflicting political entities, and the countries twice came close to a new outbreak of hostilities – in 1987 and 1996. Understandably, this legacy still shapes the character of their diplomatic relations. Thus, Turkey continues to support the internationally unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which it helped establish in 1974, while Greece solely recognises the predominantly Greek Republic of Cyprus. Moreover, Athens refuses to demilitarise the islands located near the Anatolian landmass and insists on a ten-mile aerial border around them, despite the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) ruling that declared this frontier obsolete. As for Ankara, the fact that it currently stations 30,000 soldiers on the island in contravention of international law and continues resettling Anatolian Turks is ample evidence that the AKP has no plans to leave the local natural gas extraction unchecked.

The ongoing conflict over national claims to the Eastern Mediterranean hydrocarbon resources represents a series of intertwined and complicated disagreements between Greece and Turkey, which cannot be resolved overnight. There has been no significant effort to reunite Cyprus since the 2004 Annan Plan, which the Greek Cypriots overwhelmingly rejected, but without establishing communication and fostering dialogue between its Greek and Turkish populations, natural gas extraction in Cypriot waters and its EEZ will remain inherently divisive. On top of that, Ankara’s destabilising behaviour hinges on the widespread support for it, alimented by the fear of strategic encirclement and Turkish exclusion from the Eastern Mediterranean pipeline project. For collaboration to supersede brinkmanship and for the conflicting parties to reach consensus on international maritime law, plenty still needs to be done.