by Nikos Akritas (July 2026)
Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to be having a hard time of it at the moment. Hugely unpopular and down in the polls, he has had to resort to meddling in the affairs of the main opposition party, the CHP, which was looking as though it would finally oust him.
By leveraging a compliant judiciary to annul the election of the party’s leader, Ozgur Ozel, through accusations of electoral irregularities, Erdogan has ensured that Ozel’s predecessor, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who could never win an election against him, is once again the main opposition leader.
That said, to most Turks Erdogan is not having a hard time of it at all. He is not the one suffering the consequences of runaway inflation and severe economic mismanagement, which has made life for ordinary Turks utterly unaffordable. Hence the domestic uproar and spontaneous street demonstrations, which Erdogan has swiftly declared illegal.
But there is nothing like a war, or the credible threat of one, to distract an angry electorate and rally a populace behind an unpopular leader.
The Turkish parliament is moving to pass the Maritime Jurisdiction Areas Law, which would codify the ‘Blue Homeland’ doctrine. This legislation lays claim to large expanses of water around Turkey as its own, even though they fall squarely within the sovereign territory and exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of other countries. In defiance of prevailing interpretations of international maritime law, Erdogan is seeking to legitimise these expansive claims through a domestic legal system he has spent years ensuring is entirely accountable to him.
The upshot is that Turkey refuses to recognise the right of Greek islands to extend their maritime zones to the full 12-mile limit. The argument being they are merely islands. In effect, major islands of the eastern Aegean—including Rhodes, Lesbos, and Chios—as well as countless others, are claimed as lying within Turkish waters. It would be like Cuba claiming that the Florida Keys have no continental shelf rights and fall entirely within Cuban waters.
What has brought about this sudden, aggressive interest in laying claim to parts of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas that the world recognises as belonging to others?
Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a country may lay claim to the waters around it up to 12 nautical miles as its sovereign territory. The problem for Turkey is that the overlapping territorial sovereignty of Greece’s thousands of islands would effectively create a continuous, sovereign Greek maritime space. Should Greece exercise its legal right to expand to this 12-mile limit, Turkey would be effectively boxed into its own coastline in much of the Aegean—a scenario Ankara has long declared a direct casus belli.
While maritime disputes involving islands exist elsewhere in international law, Ankara’s increasingly militarised interpretation has alarmed both the EU and regional neighbours. The oil and gas exploration in these waters, proving increasingly promising, has attracted deep-pocketed energy companies from the United States and Israel to form partnerships with Greece and Cyprus.
Turkey, on the other hand, has sought a different approach, sending military warships to shadow and warn off international exploration vessels. Erdogan wants access to maritime spaces that enjoy near-universal international recognition as the sovereign territory or EEZ of his neighbours. Driven by a desperate bid to secure independent energy resources, he has warned that any country interfering with Turkey’s self-declared right to enter these waters will suffer the consequences.
His heavy handedness has set alarm bells ringing. The EU recently rejected Turkey’s claims to the ‘Blue Homeland’ waters, while diplomatic circles have repeatedly pointed out that Turkey’s illegal military occupation of Northern Cyprus does not entitle Ankara to claim vast territorial waters on its behalf.
Energy exploration activities between Greece, Cyprus, and Israel have also given rise to defensive security alignments. Turkey has chosen to see this development as a threat to its dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean, even though each of these neighbouring states possesses but a fraction of Turkey’s standing military might, total wealth, and population.
Turkey has responded to criticisms of its aggressive stance by announcing war games manoeuvres, effectively a massive show of strength, in and around the waters in question. For Erdogan, it is a win-win situation.
Given Turkey’s military capability—it has the second-largest military in NATO and is increasingly producing its own military hardware—its neighbours fear the escalation of a minor incident.
Should Erdogan successfully provoke a response, it would only rally his disaffected electorate behind him.
If Turkey’s neighbours back down to avoid conflict, compromising their own territorial integrity, Erdogan wins access to resource-rich waters internationally recognised as belonging to other states.
Ultimately, Erdogan is gambling on the fact that Turkey is simply too valuable a piece on the NATO chessboard to be sacrificed. He calculates that although some of the waters in question constitute sovereign EU territory via Greece and Cyprus, Brussels lacks the stomach for a genuine military conflict and will fold in the face of a credible threat.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent the EU into a state of alarm, waking the bloc up to the hard-power threats on its doorstep and causing NATO to rush through the membership of historically neutral nations. Turkey is not threatening a land invasion of an EU member state, but does riding roughshod over the territorial waters and EEZs of one amount to something fundamentally different?
It looks increasingly like the EU’s ultimate test case is approaching. The bloc will soon have to decide what it will do when an aggressive country violates the territory of a member state. Except in this case the aggressor will be a core NATO ally. Given the countries who will lose sovereign rights and EEZs are relatively minor economic and political players in the wider scheme of things, my guess would be appeasement will be on the cards.
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Nikos Akritas has worked as a teacher in the Middle East, Central Asia and the UK.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
