Future Conflict Prospects in the Mediterranean Basin on Gas Extraction
Future Conflict Prospects in the Mediterranean Basin on Gas Extraction
The Turkish Heritage Institute in Washington hosted a panel on Wednesday highlighting the geopolitical maritime importance of Turkey and the most important challenges the Turkish government sees in this regard, especially in the light of the Mediterranean conflict on the discovery of gas among the countries of the region.
The seminar was hosted by the retired Turkish admiral Jam Jordinez, who spoke about the importance of sea security for Turkey. “The Ottoman Empire was weakened when the Europeans surrounded it from the sea, which contributed directly to its fall,” he said.
Jordeniz pointed to the alliances that are rising against Turkey in the Mediterranean from Greece to Israel, Egypt and the Romanian Cyprus, which has been patrolling the island to monitor the movements of Turkish ships.
“We hope that our control of the Mediterranean parallels what we do in the Black Sea. For decades, we have been able to achieve trade safety with Russia, which is steadily increasing because of its separation of trade in the Black Sea from any political or military reality.”
“Even during the Cold War, the worst of times, the trade agreements between Russia and Turkey were operating without any inconveniences, which deveoped in 2006 to create the Black Sea Security Forces with the participation of Ukraine, Russia and Turkey.”
While the Mediterranean has been a region of ongoing conflicts, yet, the discovery of huge reserves of gas in the Mediterranean opens a new era of conflict between Turkey, Syria, Israel, Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, because of the inter-sea border between them and the different capacities to extracting the gas.
At the time Israel has the tools enabled it to start extracting gas from offshore fields with the ambition to control the energy corridor across Cyprus, new players enter the gas exploration domain, including Russia through its presence in Tartous on the Syrian coast in the context of competition in the Mediterranean gas area.
On the most important threatening challenges to the marine geopolitics surrounding it, Admiral Jam Jordenis said that the main concern for maritime security lies in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean: the challenges of the European Union with Greece, which we cannot unite to confront.
In addition to the potentiality of the so-called independent Kurdistanen with free access to the Mediterranean, which is a fatal blow to the integration of Anatolia in southeastern Turkey. most As well as the future of Turkish Cyprus with secure agreements.
“These challenges are inseparable and interdependent, and fundamental to our concernce in geopolitical distribution at sea,” he said to North Press.
Washington-Hadeel Eweis-NPA