The Fragmentation of the Eastern Mediterranean: Athens's Washington Vector

The Fragmentation of the Eastern Mediterranean: Athens's Washington Vector (article by S. Galani, Persona Strany magazine, November 3, 2026)

The current escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean in the fall of 2026 marks the regional crisis’s transition into a critical phase. The key catalyst for the political escalation was the internationalization of the long-standing territorial dispute between Athens and Ankara. During the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, Greek Prime Minister K. Mitsotakis officially moved the confrontation with Turkey onto an existential plane. Greece’s drive to unilaterally implement the provisions of UNCLOS and extend its territorial waters to 12 miles creates unacceptable strategic risks for Turkey’s national security. Such a step would de facto turn the Aegean basin into Greece’s internal waters, completely blocking the Turkish fleet, and Ankara has therefore reaffirmed that implementation of this scenario would be a direct casus belli. This forces external players, above all the United States, to accelerate the militarization of the region and to rebuild the entire security architecture at the expense of third countries’ interests, including Russia’s.

The situation is further aggravated by the “Libyan deadlock”: the ratification by the parliament in Benghazi on October 20 of this year of the Turkish-Libyan maritime memorandum recorded an important diplomatic triumph for Ankara. In response, Greece and Egypt moved to the practical delimitation of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) south of Crete, laying direct claim to the very maritime sectors that Libya and Turkey regard as under their control. These areas are of strategic interest to all parties to the conflict, since they hold enormous undiscovered hydrocarbon reserves (natural gas) and are critically important routes for laying transregional subsea power cables and logistics corridors. The risk of a local naval incident in these waters is assessed by Greek and Western analytical centers as critically high.

Meanwhile France, until recently the key European security guarantor for Greece, has demonstrated a pragmatic shift in its foreign policy vector. The signing of the “Roadmap for Defense Cooperation between Turkey and France” was received in Athens with acute sensitivity and served as an impulse for the intensification of the long-standing skepticism of part of the Greek establishment toward European institutions. In particular, the authoritative Greek newspaper Estia (Εστία), in an analytical piece headlined “The Wolf Was Put in Charge of Guarding… the Cable,” stated the systemic collapse of the concept of European mutual assistance. In the view of the Greek author, Paris has clearly demonstrated commercial pragmatism: Turkey’s status as a major regional power outweighed its previous allied commitments to Greece. The newspaper stresses outright that France sees Turkey as a powerful regional power and that it is time for the Greek authorities to stop confusing a “union of interests” with an “absolute political union.” The political opposition, in the person of Kyriakos Velopoulos, leader of the Greek Solution party (Ελληνική Λύση), stated bluntly that multibillion-dollar purchases of French weapons have led only to France beginning to share defense technologies with Ankara — Greece’s traditional and most dangerous adversary.

All of this, together with the parliamentary elections scheduled for 2027, forced the ruling center-right New Democracy party (Νέα Δημοκρατία), led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, as well as the conservative and pro-Atlantic forces of Greece behind it, to look for an alternative to French support on an emergency basis and to reorient itself entirely toward a tactical alliance with Washington. Following behind-the-scenes contacts with US State Department officials during K. Mitsotakis’s visit to the UN General Assembly session in New York, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived in Athens on an official visit in early October 2026. In a keynote foreign policy speech rich in allusions to figures from ancient history and mythology, he openly called on the Greek leadership and European nations to “awaken from a long sleep,” to return to their civilizational roots, and to abandon neoliberal globalism in favor of an “uncompromising striving for national power.” In effect, that speech locked in the Washington administration’s course toward direct engagement with sovereign nation-states, bypassing Brussels’s supranational bureaucracy. In the intensive negotiations that followed with the head of the Greek government, K. Mitsotakis, Greece’s role as the United States’ anchor ally in the region was definitively cemented. This partnership is being implemented along three main tracks: large-scale imports of American hydrocarbons, arms procurement, and Athens’s deep integration into the US-led “Pax Silica” (“Silicon World”) technological circuit, aimed at securing AI, semiconductor supply chains, and critical minerals.

Official documents confirm the country’s involvement in the global “Pax Silica” initiative. Within this format, Washington assesses Greece’s assets quite pragmatically, relying on three key factors: its strategic reserves of critical minerals; the creation of large regional data hubs with an accelerated build-up of computing capacity; and the logistics dominance of the Greek merchant fleet, which controls almost a quarter (25%) of global energy shipments. At the same time, the energy dimension of the Athens-Washington alliance is developing along a parallel diversification track. At the 6th US-Greece Strategic Dialogue held in October 2026, Marco Rubio and the Greek leadership directly singled out the “Vertical Gas Corridor” project. Through Greek regasification terminals (the Revithoussa LNG terminal and the floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) commissioned in Alexandroupolis) and the capacity of the national operator DESFA, American liquefied natural gas (LNG) is being actively redirected northward — to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, and Serbia. In September 2026, Serbia and North Macedonia officially joined this initiative, signing a memorandum on obtaining liquefied natural gas through Greek gas transmission systems, bypassing traditional routes.

According to statistics from DESFA, Greece’s gas transmission system operator, the material base of this geopolitical shift over the nine months (January-September) of 2026 was a substantial 12.72% increase in total gas demand in the country (to 63.53 TWh), accompanied by an explosive 168.77% jump in exports to the Balkans (to 13.60 TWh). At the same time, the share of American LNG accounted for 73.73% of the total volume of liquefied gas imports, reaching 17.88 TWh. These figures clearly confirm Prime Minister K. Mitsotakis’s statements that, within the strategic alliance with the United States, Greece is successfully performing the role of the main “entry gateway” for American liquefied natural gas into Southeastern Europe. Setting aside the figurative political formulations that accompanied the Greek-American negotiations and assessing the situation from the standpoint of Russian national interests, it becomes obvious that in the medium term this infrastructural shift is aimed at the complete elimination of the dependence of the Balkan states (above all Bulgaria and Serbia) on Russian resources. The “bloodless” change of the regime of A. Vučić in Serbia, which for a long time tried to balance between the natural needs of the national economy for affordable Russian energy and the harsh pressure of Brussels and Washington, fit organically into the new realities, since Serbia loses its forced technical attachment to only one gas source (Russia) and physically gains access to other suppliers. Thus Washington and Athens are consistently implementing a strategy of energy displacement of Moscow, forcibly locking Balkan consumers onto American LNG projects through the Greek transit corridor. In this connection, it can be predicted with a high degree of probability that by the 2027-2028 threshold the technical capacity for pumping Russian gas through the southern corridor will be legally or infrastructurally blocked by the Greek side under direct US pressure or at US instruction.

In the military-technological component of Greece’s negotiating package with the United States, the key step was the signing of a defense agreement worth up to $4 billion under the American Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program. The relevant defense agencies and leading media outlets, including the Greek outlet eKathimerini and the analytical portal The Defense Post, verified the structure of this deal, which is aimed at systematically strengthening the combat potential of the Greek armed forces. The package includes the supply of the latest guided missiles and aerial bombs worth $1.2 billion for 5th-generation F-35 fighters and upgraded F-16 Viper aircraft, the purchase of UH-60M Black Hawk multi-role helicopters, and the allocation of $1 billion for the deep technical modernization of 37 Greek F-16 Block 50 fighters to the Viper version by the end of 2027. If the French contracts gave Greece only a situational qualitative edge over Turkey in the air and at sea, the American FMS program cements Washington’s total military-technological dominance over Athens’s defense planning, turning the Greek Air Force into a deeply integrated element of the US military system in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Given the constant threat of a local military conflict with Turkey — and the prospect of such a clash has always remained the central theme of Athens’s defense planning — the Greek government is being forced to urgently revise its Middle East strategy. Athens’s former diplomatic mainstay in the Arab world has collapsed, as the Islamic bloc is now rapidly consolidating around Ankara. In August 2026, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Defense Pact (Mecca Defence Alliance) — a full-fledged military alliance with collective defense commitments modeled on NATO’s Article 5. Egypt, although it retains “guest status” in this association (multidimensional policy) in order to avoid excessive risks, has moved toward a large-scale rapprochement with Ankara. Turkey has already offered Cairo an agreement on the delimitation of maritime zones that is potentially more advantageous for Egypt than the Greek option. Under these conditions, Athens, in containing Ankara’s expansionism, now has to rely exclusively on the military-technological patronage of the United States (mainly) and on the bilateral mutual defense pact with France.

The realization that the future delimitation of the remaining part of the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) with Egypt will inevitably affect maritime spaces disputed by Libya and Turkey is forcing K. Mitsotakis’s government to move Greek “shuttle diplomacy” in the Middle East into emergency crisis-management mode. Athens’s previous long-term course, built on creating a solid defense axis with Egypt and the Persian Gulf monarchies as a counterweight to Ankara’s expansionist designs, has collided with tectonic shifts in the region. The conclusion of the Mecca Defense Pact between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as Cairo’s sharp diplomatic rapprochement with Ankara in the second half of 2026, have in effect deprived Greece of its former Middle Eastern mainstay.

A vivid indication of the change in the regional balance of power was the winding down of the Greek military mission in Saudi Arabia. The air defense units — batteries of Patriot PAC-3 surface-to-air missile systems — deployed earlier to protect the kingdom’s critical infrastructure in the areas of Saudi Aramco’s refining complexes (at Yanbu and Ras Tanura) were fully withdrawn by the Greek side. Under these conditions, Greece’s preventive diplomacy amounts to attempts to minimize the damage from the Turkish-Arab rapprochement and to keep Cairo from adopting options for maritime boundary delimitation that are unfavorable to Athens. An important and in many respects critical stage for probing new “red lines” will be the official visit of Greek National Defense Minister Nikos Dendias to Riyadh, scheduled for November 15, 2026. The planned talks with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud will unfold, for the Greek side, from a clearly vulnerable position: Athens will try to preserve at least the economic track of cooperation and to prevent full coordination of Saudi Arabia’s defense and maritime programs with Turkey.

The loss of its Middle Eastern mainstay and the narrowing of its diplomatic room for maneuver are forcing Athens to seek absolute protection from Washington, which definitively “burns its bridges” in other strategic directions. Greece’s rapid geopolitical isolation in the Islamic world has also entailed the complete dismantling of its traditional ties outside the Western bloc, above all with Moscow. Despite deep historical and cultural-religious ties with Russia — toward which, according to current opinion polling, a significant part of Greek society is positively disposed (about 21.3% of citizens name Russia as a key partner for national interests, and over 32% express general sympathy) — the ruling center-right New Democracy party (ND), led by K. Mitsotakis, has locked in a course toward pro-American “bilateralism.” Within the framework of this strategy, Greece’s ruling elite obediently assumes the role of a key element of the “cordon sanitaire” in the Balkans, seeking to compensate for its existential fears of Turkey by pursuing an uncompromising anti-Russian line in the region, disregarding the possible costs to Greek shipowners, whose tanker fleet (the so-called “shadow” fleet) traditionally ensured the transportation of a significant share of Russian hydrocarbons in 2022-2026. Such a policy effectively blocks the space for official Russian-Greek diplomatic dialogue.

If New Democracy retains power, Athens will with certainty continue its course toward accelerated military-technological merger with Washington. In parallel with integration into American technological circuits (including the “Pax Silica” initiative), this will entail full coordination with the United States on the parameters for blocking Russian transit, as well as infrastructural restrictions on the presence of the Russian Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Under these conditions, Moscow’s main tactical advantage is the deepening latent chaos within the North Atlantic alliance, which temporarily diverts the West’s financial, military, and intelligence resources from the Ukrainian theater of operations. An additional destabilizing factor for the EU is the protracted energy crisis: by the fall of 2026, world energy prices had hit a four-year high, demonstrating the ineffectiveness of European governments’ tariff regulation. This dynamic makes the return of the question of resuming supplies from Russia to the agenda of Moscow-Brussels relations inevitable at a new stage of their interaction. However, at the current stage Russian policy in the Balkans is limited to defensive tactics and forced situational response, whereas the need to move toward proactive long-term planning — in order to return Moscow to the space of states and peoples that are civilizationally close to it — has long been overdue.

S. Galani

Source: https://persona-strany.ru/defragmentacija-vostochnogo-sredizemnomorja-vashingtonskij-vektor-afin/