The Mediterranean answers back

The Eastern Mediterranean is back to an old habit: forming combinations whenever Turkey becomes too eventful. This time, however, the combination contains Israel, which changes the arithmetic considerably.

The Israel–Greece–Cyprus Trilateral Partnership

The tightening strategic relationship between Israel, Greece and Cyprus is something more consequential than the familiar trilateral diplomacy of energy conferences, ministerial photographs and proposed cables beneath the Mediterranean. The three states are constructing the foundations of a security arrangement whose importance lies in geography. Israel supplies military weight and technology; Greece supplies European and NATO strategic depth; Cyprus occupies the maritime hinge between the Levant and Europe. Together they form a line running from Israel’s coast into the European security system.

The relationship is not new. Its purpose is becoming new. Israeli-Greek defence cooperation has expanded steadily through joint exercises, intelligence cooperation, procurement and training. Cyprus has acquired Israeli systems of its own and provides the indispensable geographical centre of the triangle. Energy infrastructure, maritime security and the Great Sea Interconnector add a civilian skeleton to what is increasingly a military relationship. Greece’s acquisition of Israeli air- and missile-defence capabilities makes the strategic logic still harder to miss. The arrangement nevertheless stops deliberately short of an alliance. There is no Mediterranean Article 5, no integrated command and no automatic casus foederis. That may prove an advantage. Formal alliances require governments to specify obligations they might later regret. Strategic partnerships permit them to develop capabilities they already know they need.

The Makkah Defence Alliance

Then came the Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani agreement. Its significance lies less in the diplomatic choreography surrounding it than in the extraordinary complementarity of the three participants. Turkey brings the second-largest military in NATO, a rapidly expanding defence-industrial base and command of the geographical junction between Europe, the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Middle East. Pakistan contributes a large military establishment and the Islamic world’s only nuclear arsenal. Saudi Arabia contributes capital, Arab political weight and custody of Islam’s two holiest places. Taken separately, each is a substantial power. Taken together, they represent the outline of something the region has not previously possessed: a security combination connecting Anatolian military-industrial capacity, Gulf financial resources and Pakistani strategic deterrence. Likewise, calling it an Islamic NATO would be premature. NATO possesses integrated military structures, common planning and decades of accumulated interoperability. Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan possess interests that coincide impressively until they do not. Riyadh has no obvious reason to inherit Ankara’s quarrels in the Aegean; Islamabad is unlikely to regard every Turkish dispute as a Pakistani national interest; Turkey has spent too much effort acquiring strategic autonomy to outsource it now. Alliances are easier to announce than to test.

Israel’s Strategic Riposte

Yet Jerusalem would be negligent to ignore the possibilities. Here chronology must be handled carefully. Israel, Greece and Cyprus did not construct their relationship in response to the Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani agreement. Their strategic convergence began years earlier, assisted considerably by Erdoğan’s deterioration of Turkey’s once-close relationship with Israel. The Mediterranean triangle therefore cannot sensibly be presented as an Israeli counter-alliance hurriedly assembled after the new agreement. Strategy is concerned with capabilities as much as intentions, however, and capabilities acquire different meanings when circumstances change. A Greek air-defence network built around Israeli technology is one thing when viewed principally through the Greek-Turkish rivalry. It becomes another when Turkey belongs to a wider defence arrangement involving Saudi resources and Pakistani military power. Israeli-Cypriot defence cooperation similarly acquires greater significance when the Levantine balance is connected to a larger strategic competition stretching towards South Asia.

The Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani arrangement did not create the Israel-Greece-Cyprus triangle. But it may be transforming its strategic function. This is counter-alignment rather than counter-alliance, and permits a useful reading of what Israel is doing. For most of its existence, Israeli foreign policy was organised around an unpleasant geographical fact. The Jewish state was militarily formidable but regionally isolated. Its diplomacy consequently sought to prevent hostile coalitions, maintain American patronage and cultivate useful relationships beyond the immediate Arab ring. Ben-Gurion’s famous peripheral strategy looked towards Turkey, Iran and Ethiopia because Israel could not penetrate the political system surrounding it. Benjamin Netanyahu has spent much of his career reversing that condition. His central foreign-policy proposition has been remarkably consistent. Israel should not bargain for acceptance from a position of vulnerability. It should accumulate sufficient military, technological and economic power that relations with Israel become an attractive strategic asset. The Abraham Accords supplied the most spectacular evidence that the proposition could work. Arab normalisation ceased to depend upon prior resolution of the Palestinian question because several Arab governments had interests that cooperation with Israel could serve immediately.

The Mediterranean triangle represents another stage in the same development, and perhaps the more revealing one. Greece and Cyprus do not need reconciliation with Israel. They need Israel. They need Israeli defence technology, intelligence cooperation and military capabilities because their own strategic environment has deteriorated. Israel, conversely, needs reliable access towards Europe, friendly maritime space and partners positioned along Turkey’s western and southern approaches. The relationship is therefore founded upon reciprocal strategic utility rather than diplomatic benevolence.

A Regional Power Posture

This is what the foreign policy of a regional power looks like. Israel is no longer merely accumulating bilateral friendships. It is beginning to connect them. To the west sit Cyprus and Greece. To the east lies an increasingly important strategic relationship with India. Between them are the Gulf, the Abraham Accords and the possibility of commercial and infrastructure corridors linking the Indian Ocean to Europe through the Middle East. The map is beginning to acquire political meaning.

Turkey sees much the same map from the opposite direction. Erdoğan’s Turkey has ceased behaving like the southeastern terminus of the Western alliance and increasingly behaves as an independent Eurasian power. Its influence reaches through the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Gulf, Africa and the Mediterranean. Its defence industry supplies both commercial exports and diplomatic leverage. Pakistan provides Ankara with strategic reach into South Asia; Saudi Arabia offers access to capital and Arab power. The competition taking shape is therefore not principally Jewish against Muslim, nor Israel against an Arab bloc. Those categories belong increasingly to yesterday’s Middle East. It is a contest between two non-Arab regional powers seeking to organise overlapping networks around themselves.

Neither network will be exclusive. Saudi Arabia can cooperate with Turkey while maintaining reasons to accommodate Israel. The UAE can work with Jerusalem, Ankara and New Delhi. India can be exceptionally close to Israel without joining an anti-Turkish coalition. Greece remains allied to Turkey through NATO while spending considerable sums preparing for the possibility that NATO paperwork may prove insufficient. This apparent disorder is precisely what makes Israel’s position interesting. A transactional regional system rewards states possessing things other governments actually want. Israel possesses rather a lot of them: missile defence, intelligence, drones, cyber capabilities, natural gas, military technology and an innovation economy unusually productive for a country whose population is smaller than metropolitan Cairo’s.

Zionism Comes of Age

Zionism began as an argument for Jewish agency. Its great political achievement was sovereignty; its strategic achievement was the capacity for self-defence. What we are now observing may be its geopolitical maturity: Israeli power becoming sufficiently valuable that other sovereign states incorporate it into their own security. The Mediterranean triangle captures that transformation better than the Abraham Accords because nobody is doing Israel a diplomatic favour. Athens and Nicosia have made a calculation. So has Jerusalem.

For seventy-eight years, Israel studied the regional balance of power because getting it wrong could mean extinction. Israel, Greece and Cyprus suggest that the balance is entering a rather different phase. Israel is no longer merely reading the map. It has started drawing lines on it.