Turkey Faces U.S.-Israel Alliance in the Eastern Mediteranean

The Eastern Mediterranean hosted the civilizations of the ancient world, as well as the major conflicts that shaped the world we know today. The recent natural gas discoveries has renewed interest in this region, whose geopolitical was simultaneously rising. For Turkey, deep wounds dating back to the defeat in the Battle of Navarino in 1827 were reopened, while Israel’s ambitions to dominate the Middle East were ignited.

The Eastern Mediterranean has become a critical geopolitical fault line, while the balance of power in the region was disturbed by Iran’s exit from Syria and the pressures on Hezbollah in Lebanon. At the heart of this transformation lies a sharp dynamic of polarization: Washington, together with its regional allies, seeks to establish an integrated security and economic architecture, while historically significant powers, foremost among them Turkey, find themselves facing what they regard as “strategic encirclement.”

Turkey’s exclusion from the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) was only the latest manifestation of what Ankara sees as a systematic effort to marginalize it. On the other hand, Israel, Greece, and Cyprus were imagined by the project as the nerve center of the region’s energy and security networks.

U.S. shifts

To disentangle the recent power dynamics, U.S. foreign policy in the Eastern Mediterranean has to be examined. The Menendez-Rubio Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act in 2019 marked a shift in U.S. approach to the region from flexible diplomacy to rigid institutional frameworks.

The change in the U.S. orientation was backed by broad bipartisan consensus and pro-Israel and pro-Greece lobbying groups in Washington. The aim was to abolish the historic reliance on Turkey as the guardian of NATO’s southern flank, replacing it by a Greek-Israeli alliance. In this context came the U.S. decision to lift the arms embargo on Cyprus, while the U.S. continued to impose armament restrictions on Ankara.

This architecture is now being further entrenched through the proposed Eastern Mediterranean Gateway Act. The act aims to bolster the role of Eastern Mediterranean nations as a strategic bridge within the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). The bill goes beyond the economic cooperation, seeking to generalize the model of the CYCLOPS Center in Cyprus.

Since 2018, the United States has established a security relationship with Cyprus aiming at training security teams from Eastern Mediterranean, most notably were Lebanese and Egyptian government officials. To deepen this security collaboration, the Cyprus Center for Land, Open-seas, and Port Security (CYCLOPS) was founded with a declared goal to support capacity-building in nations where in-country training is impossible.

From the U.S.-Israel perspective, these legislations are seen as necessary to establish stability, protect energy corridors, and secure “democratic” allies. For Ankara, conversely, they are read as structural threats and attempts to build a “wall of isolation” designed to shrink Turkey’s strategic space and tie regional states, including Egypt, to a counter-Turkey security, energy, and food framework.

The Blue Homeland

The trilateral framework between Israel, Greece, and Cyprus, has been recently reinforced with the Jerusalem summit in December 2025, which sought to deepen cooperation on security, defense, and military affairs. On the other hand, Ankara has realized that the balance of power cannot be altered through gunboat diplomacy alone. It also requires counter-institutionalization, leading to Turkey’s proposed Maritime Jurisdiction Areas Law, known as the Blue Homeland Law (Mavi Vatan Yasası).

This legislation comes as a direct response to what Turkey sees as an attempt to impose a Western fait accompli that marginalizes its rights over its continental shelf. The law aims to transform the Blue Homeland doctrine from a military vision into an international legal framework. It would establish a 12-nautical-mile rule in the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, while maintaining the six-nautical-mile rule in the Aegean, coupled with the warning that any Greek expansion there would be considered a casus belli.

The law extends Turkish jurisdiction over economic activities including laying undersea cables in maritime area claimed by Turkey. This move places the region before a classic security dilemma. While Turkey views the law as a legitimate defensive instrument to break encirclement and protect its energy independence, Athens, Nicosia, and Tel Aviv regard it as an expansionist regional doctrine that challenges international maritime law and threatens vital energy corridors, such as the EastMed gas pipeline and the GREGY electrical interconnection project.

On the other hand, Turkey is headily seeking alternative continental outlets away from the Eastern Mediterranean to save its strategic location between Asia and Europe. Alongside the Development Road project with Iraq, Ankara is working to revive railways linking its southern ports to Aqaba’s port in Jordan through Syrian territory. For Turkey, this land-sea route represents the most important strategic bypass around the exclusionary IMEC corridor.

From Iran to Turkey

The U.S.-Israeli strikes that targeted Iran helped accelerate the silent confrontation between Israel and Turkey. With the potential recession of Iran’s regional influence, Israeli decision-makers began to view Turkey as the most significant regional challenge. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett highlighted this shift in February 2026, when he told American organizations that “Turkey is the new Iran.”

According to several analyses, Turkey is now the only regional actor whose hard military power rivals Israel. This competition is now finding its most serious encounters in Syria and Lebanon. For Ankara, the collapse of the Lebanese-Syrian wall would mean the full tightening of the Israeli-Greek logistical siege on Anatolia’s southern coast.

Syria after the collapse of al-Assad acts as the battlefield of this rivalry, as Turkey moves quickly to re-engineer regional security and secure its strategic depth. Turkey’s moves have not been limited to the political sphere, but also extended to military deployments. Following the transition in Damascys, Turkey has installed advanced air-control radar systems, including HTRS-100 radar, near Damascus International Airport and at other Syrian bases. This deployment could undermine Israel’s “freedom of aerial action” over the Levant. The act reflects Ankara’s transition from soft expansion to hard deterrence against Israel’s ambitions.

Turkey adopts a cautious pragmatism. Although it prefers to deal with legitimate state institutions, it sees Hezbollah’s attrition war with Israel in Lebanon as a tactical necessity to delay the Israeli march of domination to Damascus and, ultimately, Ankara. While Iran managed an ideological project based on exporting chaos and arming proxies, Turkey operates as a “pragmatic and populist” actor seeking to maximize its geopolitical gains as an active member of the NATO.

On the other hand, warning of “a radical Sunni axis” is raised by Israel as a security scarecrow to justify its regional dominance enterprise. The question is whether Washington is going to adopt the Israeli narrative, turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, whereas the sense of being targeted may push Ankara to accelerate its pre-emptive military buildup, transforming strategic disagreements with a difficult ally into a zero-sum confrontation with a real adversary.

Grey-Zone Pragmatism

Against this backdrop, Turkish-Egyptian rapprochement seems to be a geopolitical necessity for both nations. Turkey needs Egypt to break its isolation, while Egypt seeks to save its options. Cairo faces a challenge because of its prior integration into the energy infrastructure linking Israel and Cyprus, through gas imports from both countries, as well as the GREGY electricity interconnection.

The recent U.S. bill calls to deepen this arrangement by turning Egypt into a fixed functional partner within this axis. Ankara therefore views Egypt’s capacity for strategic maneuver with caution, given this web of interdependence. The paradox is that Turkey itself is involved in this regional network.

Although Turkey declared a ban on trade with Israel in solidarity with Gaza, millions of barrels of Azerbaijani oil kept flowing through Turkey’s Ceyhan port to Israel, carried by Greek shipping fleets.To avoid embarrassment, these Greek vessels reportedly registered the Egyptian Port Said as its destination.

Turkey has deep institutional roots within NATO, which raises serious questions in Western and Arab capitals about whether its current turn toward the Blue Homeland doctrine represents a permanent geopolitical shift or merely a negotiating tactic to improve the terms of its partnership with the West. Conversely, the U.S. marginalization of Turkey could turn on mutual fears.

Certainly, the power dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean have shifted from transient diplomatic competition into geopolitical contestation that could shape the Middle East new order. Legislations, ports, and energy pipelines are the instruments weaponized by the actors to control the region. At the crossroads stands Turkey between facing the Israeli expansionism and saving the NATO coherence with the U.S.