Geostrategy of the Greece–Turkey Nexus and the Emerging Trans-Regional Alliance
Abstract
This paper examines the structural transformation of the Eastern Mediterranean security architecture as of the first quarter of 2026. It argues that the emerging alignment between Greece, Cyprus, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and India—here denominated the “Hexagon”—constitutes a novel form of asymmetric multilateral deterrence that transcends the classical bilateral Greece–Turkey paradigm.
Rather than functioning as a formal alliance, the Hexagon operates as a flexible, trans-regional network linking energy infrastructure, defence coordination, and trade integration. The paper synthesises recent strategic developments through 28 February 2026, including the 16 February 2026 Chevron–HELLENiQ offshore lease agreements south of Crete; the December 2025 Greece–Israel–Cyprus Joint Defence Action Plan; the January 2026 EU–India Trade Agreement; and the 11 February 2026 Erdoğan–Mitsotakis High-Level Cooperation Council in Ankara.
Using these developments, the study constructs an updated Bayesian game-theoretic model of multi-actor deterrence under conditions of incomplete information and shifting coalition structures. It concludes with policy recommendations for the G7, NATO, and the European Union aimed at stabilising NATO’s southern flank amid intensifying multipolar competition.
I. INTRODUCTION: A CENTURY OF STRUCTURAL FRICTION
The rivalry between Greece and Turkey is not a contingent diplomatic dispute; it is a structural condition embedded in the post-Ottoman reorganisation of the Eastern Mediterranean. The modern framework was established by the Treaty of Lausanne, which formalised borders and institutionalised an uneasy Aegean equilibrium. What followed was not reconciliation but managed antagonism.
As Christos Kollias and Suzanna-Maria Paleologou have described, the relationship has evolved through “cycles of brinkmanship and thaw”: recurring episodes of near-conflict mitigated through tacit understandings, third-party mediation, and NATO pressure—yet never resolved at the level of foundational legal principles. The equilibrium has endured not because disputes were settled, but because escalation was repeatedly contained.
The defining rupture remains the 1974 Cyprus crisis. Turkey’s military intervention—justified by Ankara under the contested framework of the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee—produced a durable de facto partition of the island. Half a century of UN-sponsored negotiations has failed to bridge this division. The events of 1974 entrenched a precedent: disputes could cross from legal argument into military action while remaining technically intra-alliance.
Subsequent crises reinforced this pattern. The Continental Shelf confrontations of 1976 and 1987 brought two NATO allies to the brink of kinetic engagement over seabed jurisdiction. In each instance, force—or the credible threat of force—was deployed as an instrument of positional leverage within the Alliance itself. NATO’s southern flank thus evolved not as a coherent strategic perimeter but as a zone of contained instability.
The 1995 resolution of the Turkish Grand National Assembly declaring casus belli against any Greek extension of territorial waters to twelve nautical miles remains the standing legal-military tripwire. Greece’s right derives from the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to which Turkey is not a signatory. The result is a juridical asymmetry: Athens grounds its claims in codified international maritime law; Ankara rejects the framework and advances an alternative interpretation based on equity and proportionality.
As Nuno Morgado’s 2025 work on neoclassical geopolitics suggests, Turkish strategic culture—like that of Russia—often conceptualises space as inherently competitive rather than legally stabilised. From Ankara’s perspective, the Aegean archipelago is not merely a constellation of sovereign islands; it is a structural constraint on maritime projection. Any concession, therefore, is perceived not simply as territorial adjustment but as strategic diminishment.
This logic has crystallised in the doctrine of Mavi Vatan (“Blue Homeland”), formalised during the tenure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The doctrine reframes Turkey as a maritime power entitled to expansive jurisdiction across the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. Its symbolic consolidation occurred during the 2025 Teknofest defence exposition, dedicated explicitly to Blue Homeland principles.
Escalation has since shifted from rhetoric to juridical manoeuvre. On 17 June 2025, Turkey submitted a revised maritime map to UNESCO that directly conflicted with Greece’s maritime spatial plan filed the same day. The Greek submission rests on full island-generated Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) entitlements under UNCLOS; Turkey’s counter-map adopts a median-line methodology that sharply curtails the maritime effect of the Greek island chain. What emerged was not merely diplomatic protest but a form of competing juridical geography—two mutually exclusive spatial orders projected onto the same sea.
The absence of adjudication is telling. Neither side has jointly petitioned the International Court of Justice. Instead, Ankara has favoured incremental consolidation through operational signalling. During October 2025, a series of NAVTEX advisories accompanying deployments of the research vessel Piri Reis in the central Aegean reinforced a pattern of creating “facts on the water” rather than seeking judicial settlement.
By February 2026, however, the dispute can no longer be understood as a contained bilateral friction. It has globalised.
On 16 February 2026, Chevron and HELLENiQ Energy finalised offshore lease agreements south of Crete, expanding hydrocarbon exploration within zones claimed by Greece under UNCLOS. Three days later, Turkey’s Defence Ministry issued a formal protest. What might once have been a narrow energy concession has become a node in a larger contest over maritime legitimacy.
Meanwhile, the December 2025 Greece–Israel–Cyprus Joint Defence Action Plan institutionalised trilateral military coordination, linking air defence, intelligence-sharing, and maritime surveillance. In January 2026, the European Union concluded a landmark trade agreement with India, reinforcing supply-chain diversification and deepening economic ties between South Asia and the Mediterranean basin. On 11 February 2026, President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis convened a High-Level Cooperation Council in Ankara—an effort to stabilise tensions even as structural rivalry persists.
Concurrently, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania advanced Black Sea–Aegean Corridor infrastructure projects in early 2026, integrating ports, rail, and energy networks from Southeastern Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean. The result is a layered strategic transformation: energy concessions, defence alignments, and infrastructure corridors are intersecting in a theatre once defined primarily by bilateral naval standoffs.
The Eastern Mediterranean is no longer a peripheral dispute zone within NATO. It has become a primary arena of multipolar negotiation, where regional actors interface with global powers through energy licensing, trade corridors, and deterrence networks. The Greece–Turkey nexus remains the structural core—but it is increasingly embedded within a wider trans-regional alignment whose cumulative effect may redefine NATO’s southern flank..
II. THE HEXAGON ALLIANCE: ARCHITECTURE, COHERENCE, AND ANALYTICAL LIMITS
The emergence of a Greece–Cyprus–Israel–UAE–India alignment has generated substantial commentary. Yet much of the analysis oscillates between two distortions: either overstating the grouping’s institutional cohesion or misidentifying its strategic logic.
What Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described in his February 2026 Knesset address—delivered during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit—as a “Hexagon” directed against “radical” Sunni and Shia axes is not, in institutional terms, a treaty-bound alliance. It lacks a founding charter, a mutual defence clause, and permanent command structures.
Analytically, it is better understood as a polycentric deterrence network: an overlapping lattice of bilateral, trilateral, and minilateral arrangements whose cumulative interaction generates strategic depth. Its power lies precisely in its informality. By avoiding the institutional overhead of collective defence commitments, the Hexagon preserves flexibility while raising the cost of unilateral revisionism in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Its architecture rests on differentiated pillars: Israel as technological-military anchor; India as extra-regional strategic depth; the United Arab Emirates as financial and logistical bridge; Cyprus as forward operating node; and Greece as the EU–NATO hinge. Egypt, while not formally embedded, increasingly functions as a structural auxiliary.
II.i. The Technological–Military Anchor: Israel
Israel’s role in Eastern Mediterranean security has evolved qualitatively since 2022. What began as intelligence exchanges and defence procurement facilitation has matured into deep structural integration with Greece and Cyprus.
Athens and Nicosia have invested several billion euros in Israeli missile and rocket systems, including the PULS (Precise and Universal Launching System) rocket artillery platform. More consequentially, Greece’s proposed multi-layered air and ballistic missile defence architecture—designated the “Achilles Shield”—is estimated at approximately €3 billion and draws on technologies derived from Israel’s Iron Dome and Iron Beam systems, adapted for maritime and island deployment across the Dodecanese chain.
The late December 2025 Joint Defence Action Plan signed by senior military officials from Greece, Israel, and Cyprus formalised an operational relationship that had previously remained semi-institutional. It commits the three states to intensified joint air and naval exercises in 2026, including Greece’s participation in Israel’s Noble Dina naval drills.
For Israel, Greece provides a strategically indispensable European anchor:
A NATO member state that confers Alliance legitimacy to Israeli security cooperation;
An EU jurisdiction capable of embedding Levantine energy routes within European regulatory frameworks;
A geographic platform enabling forward basing proximity for exercises and logistical integration.
However, structural tensions persist. As Turkish analyst Murat Yeşiltaş has observed, Israel–Turkey rivalry has expanded beyond tactical friction in Syria into the maritime domain of the Eastern Mediterranean. From Ankara’s vantage point, Israeli military integration with Greece is perceived less as geo-economic cooperation and more as strategic encirclement. Should escalation occur, the Israel–Turkey competition could migrate from political signalling to military balancing—an escalation pathway the Hexagon’s informal architecture has not institutionally anticipated.
II.ii. The Extra-Regional Strategic Depth: India
India’s entry into Eastern Mediterranean calculations constitutes the most consequential structural shift of the 2020s. New Delhi’s interest is not opportunistic but systemic. Greece represents the prospective European terminus of the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), first announced at the 2023 G20 New Delhi Summit and reaffirmed in the February 2025 joint statement of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Modi as “one of the greatest trade routes in history.”
The January 2026 EU–India Trade Agreement provided institutional ballast to the corridor, embedding it within European commercial law. Analytical projections—including those from the Atlantic Council—suggest that IMEC could reduce Asia–Europe transshipment times by roughly 40 percent and generate approximately $5.4 billion in annual trade savings on a single-stack cargo rail basis.
Turkey occupies a central position in India’s Mediterranean calculus. Ankara has criticised IMEC for bypassing Turkish territory and instead promotes the Iraq–Europe Development Road Project as an alternative connectivity architecture. India–Turkey tensions are compounded by Ankara’s support for Pakistan—perceived in New Delhi as a persistent strategic adversary—and by Turkish influence over the Trans-Caspian “Middle Corridor” jointly advanced with Azerbaijan.
India’s preference for the Jordan–Israel–Greece axis therefore represents not only an economic routing decision but a strategic distancing from the Turkey–Pakistan–Azerbaijan corridor alignment.
Yet structural complications remain. The Port of Piraeus—initially designated as IMEC’s European terminus—remains majority-owned (67 percent) by China’s COSCO Shipping Company, a paradox for a corridor partly conceived as a diversification hedge against China’s Belt and Road Initiative. France (Marseille) and Italy (Trieste) have advanced competing candidacies, with Rome appointing a dedicated special envoy and framing Trieste as a viable alternative during the 2025 Trieste Summit.
Moreover, IMEC’s decentralised governance model—emphasising national adoption rather than the centralised state financing characteristic of Beijing’s BRI—has produced coordination deficits. Atlantic Council analysis in 2025 characterised 2026 as a decisive year requiring resolution through G7 and G20 sherpa processes.
India thus supplies strategic depth to the Hexagon—but also introduces infrastructural and geopolitical complexity that tests the network’s coherence.
II.iii. The Financial and Logistical Bridge: United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates functions as the Hexagon’s principal strategic financier and connectivity guarantor. Abu Dhabi’s investments in the Port of Piraeus and the Great Sea Interconnector—the Euro-Asia electricity cable linking Greece, Cyprus, and Israel—constitute the alliance’s physical substrate.
This infrastructure creates a deterrence logic rooted not in military parity but in shared economic stakes. Energy interdependence and digital connectivity generate reputational and financial costs for disruption, embedding stability within commercial value chains.
The Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) between India and the UAE has further sustained IMEC momentum amid the geopolitical turbulence of 2025.
Abu Dhabi’s engagement reflects broader Gulf strategic diversification. The Eastern Mediterranean offers both an export corridor and a hedge against overdependence on either Chinese Belt and Road structures or exclusively U.S.-centred architectures. The UAE’s participation is thus simultaneously economic, geopolitical, and reputational—signalling Gulf capacity for autonomous strategic initiative in an evolving post-petro-dollar environment.
II.iv. The Forward Operating Node: Cyprus
The Republic of Cyprus represents the most striking transformation within the Eastern Mediterranean security equation. Historically framed as the unresolved “Cyprus Question,” Nicosia has shifted from passive object to active strategic node.
The trilateral summit in Jerusalem on 22 December 2025—attended by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Prime Minister Mitsotakis, and President Nikos Christodoulides—produced not only the Joint Defence Action Plan but also formalised maritime security and energy cooperation. Cyprus now hosts joint training facilities and functions as a surveillance and logistical platform for maritime presence operations.
Domestic political risks are tangible. The AKEL party has expressed reservations regarding deepened military alignment with Israel, and collective memory of the 1974 intervention continues to shape public opinion. Nonetheless, the integration calculus currently favours participation: access to Israeli air defence technologies, the stabilising umbrella of EU membership, and the commercial incentives embedded in the Great Sea Interconnector outweigh the domestic political costs.
Cyprus has thus become not merely a contested island but a forward operating node within a broader deterrence ecosystem.
II.v. The Egypt Variable: An Emerging Fifth Pillar
Early formulations of the Hexagon tended to underweight Egypt. Yet Cairo increasingly functions as an auxiliary stabiliser. In May 2025, Greece and Egypt signed a Strategic Partnership Agreement aimed at deepening political coordination and reinforcing regional stability. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis characterised the relationship as a “strong forward-looking partnership” between “pillars of stability.”
Egypt’s opposition to the Turkey–Libya maritime memorandum—criticised by Cairo as violating both the spirit and letter of UNCLOS by disregarding Crete’s EEZ entitlements—aligns it structurally with Athens.
However, Egypt’s participation remains calibrated. Cairo maintains complex bilateral channels with Ankara and faces internal political constraints that limit overt bloc formation. Its role, therefore, is not that of formal member but of strategic balancer—an actor whose alignment increases the deterrent density of the network without institutionalising it.
Analytical Synthesis
The Hexagon is neither an alliance in the NATO sense nor a mere diplomatic alignment. It is a deterrence web: technologically anchored by Israel, economically deepened by India, financially underwritten by the UAE, territorially facilitated by Cyprus, politically legitimised by Greece, and indirectly reinforced by Egypt.
Its strength lies in distributed interdependence. Its weakness lies in institutional ambiguity.
The following section will examine whether this polycentric architecture enhances stability—or merely shifts the geometry of escalation along NATO’s southern flank.
III. THE CHEVRON MOMENT: ENERGY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND STRATEGIC SIGNALLING
The 16 February 2026 signing ceremony at the Acropolis Museum was choreographed with deliberate symbolism. In attendance were Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, U.S. Ambassador Kimberly Guilfoyle, and senior executives from Chevron and HELLENiQ ENERGY. The message was unmistakable: Greek sovereign jurisdiction in the Eastern Mediterranean now carries visible American commercial backing.
Under the agreement, the Chevron–HELLENiQ ENERGY consortium—holding 70 and 30 percent operating interests respectively—secured leases for four offshore blocks: South Crete 1, South Crete 2, South of Peloponnese, and Block A2. Together they encompass roughly 47,000 square kilometres of ultra-deepwater acreage. Initial 2D and 3D seismic surveys are scheduled for the second half of 2026, with exploratory drilling contingent upon geological confirmation.
The Turkish Ministry of Defence responded on 19 February 2026 by denouncing the leases as “unlawful” and contrary to international law and good neighbourly relations. While the rhetoric followed a familiar template, the strategic content marked an escalation. The blocks south of Crete do not fall within even Turkey’s most expansive publicly articulated maritime claims. Ankara’s objection therefore signals a qualitative shift: energy development per se—irrespective of precise cartographic overlap—is increasingly treated as incompatible with the doctrinal logic of Blue Homeland.
The Chevron agreements operate simultaneously on three strategic planes.
First, they alter the deterrence equation. Large-scale American corporate investment transforms any prospective interference into more than a bilateral maritime incident. Disruption of seismic operations would affect U.S. commercial interests directly, thereby raising the reputational and geopolitical stakes for Ankara. The presence of a major American energy firm effectively internationalises what might otherwise remain a regional dispute.
Second, Chevron’s broader Mediterranean portfolio embeds the Greek leases within an integrated energy arc. The company already operates significant gas assets offshore Israel and holds development interests in Cyprus’s Aphrodite field, alongside exploration exposure in Egypt. The Greek concessions thus become part of a coherent Eastern Mediterranean energy ecosystem under American corporate leadership. Dislodging one node would require contesting the integrity of the entire network—a far more complex undertaking than challenging a single isolated licence.
Third, the parallel award of exploration interests in the Ionian Sea to ExxonMobil reinforces the signal. When multiple major U.S. integrated energy firms commit capital to a jurisdiction, it reflects a collective assessment of legal stability and regulatory predictability. In effect, the American energy sector has rendered a market-based judgement in favour of Greece’s interpretation of maritime law over Turkey’s revisionist posture.
As Greek government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis observed, the leases mark Greece’s return to large-scale offshore hydrocarbon exploration after more than four decades. The geopolitical dividend extends beyond national revenue. Following the 2022 energy shock triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine, European diversification away from Russian gas has become a strategic imperative. Eastern Mediterranean production—if commercially viable—aligns directly with EU objectives of energy security and strategic autonomy.
The Chevron moment, therefore, is not merely about hydrocarbons. It is about sovereignty signalling, alliance embedding, and the deterrent value of commercial entanglement. Energy exploration has become a mechanism of geopolitical anchoring.
IV. THE DIPLOMATIC DIALECTIC: CONFLICT AND ACCOMMODATION
An analytically adequate account of Eastern Mediterranean geopolitics in 2025–26 must resist reductionism. The same week in February 2026 that witnessed Turkey’s sharp condemnation of the Chevron leases also hosted the 6th Türkiye–Greece High-Level Cooperation Council in Ankara. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis discussed Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean disputes, migration management, and confidence-building measures. They signed agreements aimed at strengthening legal, cultural, and economic ties, and reaffirmed a bilateral trade target of $10 billion—up from approximately $7 billion in 2025.
This simultaneity—escalatory signalling alongside institutionalised dialogue—is not paradoxical; it is structural. The relationship operates within a constrained strategic equilibrium. Neither unilateral confrontation nor unilateral concession is rational. The result is a durable pattern of managed rivalry: sufficient cooperation to preserve economic interdependence and prevent catastrophic escalation, yet insufficient convergence to resolve foundational disputes over maritime jurisdiction, airspace sovereignty, and EEZ entitlements.
Within this equilibrium, legal rhetoric functions as positional signalling. Mitsotakis’s consistent invocation of international law and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea underscores Greece’s strategy of juridical legitimisation. Erdoğan’s recurrent emphasis on the rights of the Turkish Muslim minority in Western Thrace under the Treaty of Lausanne serves as a countervailing narrative of reciprocal obligations. Neither constitutes a concrete negotiating proposal; both reinforce domestic legitimacy while maintaining bargaining leverage.
Military confidence-building measures agreed in April 2025 between senior defence officials further institutionalise this management architecture. Yet these mechanisms operate at the tactical level. They are designed to prevent accidents, manage airspace incidents, and reduce miscalculation—not to alter the structural competition over sovereignty claims.
Thus, the diplomatic dialectic persists: energy concessions deepen strategic entrenchment; defence cooperation thickens deterrence; dialogue mechanisms dampen immediate escalation. The Eastern Mediterranean in early 2026 is not sliding toward inevitable conflict, nor is it approaching reconciliation. It remains suspended in a stable but tense equilibrium—an arena where sovereignty, energy, and alliance politics intersect under conditions of calculated restraint..
V. NATO'S SOUTHERN FLANK: SYSTEMIC STRESS AND STRUCTURAL VULNERABILITY
The dual membership of Greece and Turkey in NATO—a structural anomaly managed since their accession in 1952—was historically stabilised by two conditions: consistent American strategic arbitration and the shared logic of collective defence against the Soviet Union. By the mid-2020s, both stabilisers have eroded.
The disappearance of a singular existential adversary has exposed latent intra-alliance rivalries, while the gradual recalibration of U.S. global priorities has weakened Washington’s automatic role as final arbiter. The result, as reflected in recent strategic assessments including those of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), is an Alliance operating amid geopolitical fragmentation in its own southern theatre.
Turkey’s strategic trajectory encapsulates this tension. Its acquisition of the Russian S-400 system and subsequent suspension from the F-35 Lightning II programme symbolised a visible rupture with NATO interoperability norms. Simultaneously, Ankara maintained dense economic relations with Russia throughout the Ukraine war period, including expanded LNG and transit arrangements via BOTAŞ. Coupled with the maritime revisionism embedded in the Blue Homeland doctrine, this posture has generated persistent questions regarding the compatibility of Turkish strategic autonomy with collective Alliance commitments.
Yet the Turkish file cannot be reduced to revisionism. Ankara’s February 2022 closure of the Turkish Straits to belligerent warships under the Montreux Convention materially constrained Russian naval reinforcement of the Black Sea fleet. Turkish intelligence-sharing has reportedly constituted a substantial share of NATO and Ukrainian maritime situational awareness in the Black Sea theatre. The sale of Bayraktar TB2 drones to Ukraine and Turkey’s role in brokering the July 2022 grain export arrangement further underscore Ankara’s capacity to function as a pivotal NATO partner when its strategic interests converge with those of the Alliance.
Recent European analyses—including the May 2025 European Commission Black Sea Strategy and assessments by Chatham House—converge on a common conclusion: Turkey will remain indispensable in the Black Sea by virtue of geography, straits control, and its possession of NATO’s second-largest standing military.
The Alliance management dilemma is therefore structural rather than moral. NATO cannot simply “choose” between Turkey’s contributions and its revisionist Mediterranean posture. The task is to design a framework that leverages Ankara’s Black Sea indispensability while constraining escalatory dynamics in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. NATO’s existing institutional mechanisms—designed for external deterrence rather than intra-alliance rivalry—are ill-suited to this dual requirement.
An additional vulnerability emerges from evolving U.S. strategic prioritisation. The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy’s explicit focus on the Western Hemisphere and Indo-Pacific theatres signals a redistribution of American strategic bandwidth. Under a high-intensity Taiwan Strait contingency scenario, the U.S. arbitration function in the Eastern Mediterranean could attenuate precisely when the Hexagon’s deterrence architecture remains in consolidation.
European actors have begun to internalise this risk. The March 2025 London summit discussions on pan-European tripwire deployments, which included outreach to Turkey, and the 20–21 March 2025 European Council meeting in Brussels reflect early attempts to conceptualise greater autonomous deterrence capacity. Yet Europe’s institutional ability to manage a Greek–Turkish crisis without decisive U.S. intervention remains underdeveloped. NATO’s southern flank, therefore, faces systemic stress: high interdependence, high rivalry, and declining arbitration certainty.
VI. THE MONTREUX DIMENSION: STRAITS, CONVENTIONS, AND STRUCTURAL LEVERAGE
The Turkish Straits—Bosphorus and Dardanelles—constitute the single most consequential leverage point in the Eastern Mediterranean security architecture. Control of these chokepoints under the 1936 Montreux Convention grants Ankara unique authority over naval access between the Mediterranean and Black Seas. No other regional actor possesses comparable structural leverage.
Turkey’s February 2022 decision to close the Straits to the warships of belligerent powers—interpreting and applying Montreux in a restrictive manner—demonstrated both the potency of the instrument and Ankara’s readiness to exercise it in ways that constrain not only Russia but also non-Black Sea NATO naval presence. The episode illustrated a recurring reality: Turkey can simultaneously reinforce and circumscribe Alliance strategy.
Montreux management is closely linked to Ankara’s broader energy and transit ambitions. Turkish policy planning over 2024–25 emphasised BOTAŞ’s expansion of LNG supply contracts—agreements with Shell, TotalEnergies, and ExxonMobil totalling up to 8.1 bcm annually by 2027—aimed at consolidating Turkey’s role as an indispensable transit and hub state. The logic is dual: maritime control on the security axis reinforced by infrastructural centrality on the energy axis.
This dual-leverage architecture complicates any containment approach directed at Ankara. The distribution of costs across NATO and EU partners—ranging from Black Sea naval access to energy transit dependencies—renders sustained punitive isolation strategically counterproductive. Turkey’s autonomy is structurally embedded within Western supply chains and defence planning.
A time-sensitive dimension now overlays the equation. The Montreux Convention includes provisions for potential amendment, with August 2026 representing the formal notification window for revisions that could lead to a new convention framework by November 2026. Ankara’s opposition to any encroachment upon its straits sovereignty is categorical.
However, should Russia succeed in degrading or severing Ukraine’s Black Sea maritime access, pressure for Convention modernisation would intensify—particularly from NATO members seeking enhanced rotational naval presence. Such a scenario could produce a paradoxical convergence: Hexagon partners and Turkey might share an interest in preventing unilateral Russian dominance in the Black Sea, even while remaining competitors in the Eastern Mediterranean.
This latent convergence is obscured by the prevailing bilateral Greek–Turkish framing. Yet structurally, Montreux represents not only a constraint but also a potential coordination platform. Whether it becomes a vector of intra-alliance friction or a basis for calibrated cooperation will depend on the interaction between Black Sea contingencies and Eastern Mediterranean escalation dynamics over the remainder of 2026..
VII. BAYESIAN GAME-THEORETIC PROJECTIONS, 2026–2030
The forward outlook for the Eastern Mediterranean can be analytically structured through a Bayesian incomplete-information framework. In such a model, each actor assigns probabilistic beliefs to the “type” of its counterpart. For heuristic clarity, two stylised types are posited:
Rational–Status Quo (RSQ): prioritises economic growth, institutional integration, and risk minimisation;
Revisionist–Ideologue (RI): prioritises symbolic sovereignty expansion, reputational dominance, and doctrinal fulfilment—even at elevated economic cost.
Strategic interaction depends not only on material capabilities but on beliefs about which type the counterpart embodies. The 16 February 2026 Chevron–HELLENiQ ENERGY agreements introduce a new structural parameter into this belief matrix. American commercial entanglement raises the expected cost of escalation and alters payoff calculations across scenarios.
Scenario A: The Salami-Slicing Stalemate
High Probability (≈45%)
Turkey continues incremental maritime revisionism: NAVTEX challenges to Greek continental shelf zones; the June 2025 UNESCO maritime map filing; calibrated diplomatic reinforcement of the Turkey–Libya memorandum via engagement with both Tripoli and Benghazi. Simultaneously, Ankara sustains institutional dialogue with Athens and Brussels.
The Hexagon deepens defence integration, expands energy cooperation, and frames Turkish actions within EU legal discourse. The interaction settles into a Nash equilibrium of managed rivalry. Neither side secures decisive advantage; neither risks catastrophic escalation.
The long-term asymmetry lies in accumulation. Incremental “facts on the water” slowly erode Greece’s effective control, even absent overt confrontation. The principal danger is not war but alliance fatigue—Western habituation to low-intensity revisionism that gradually normalises the new status quo.
In Bayesian terms, repeated incremental moves without decisive Western pushback increase Ankara’s posterior belief that the Alliance is a “Low-Cost Response” type—reinforcing the attractiveness of further salami tactics.
Scenario B: The Indo-Pacific Contagion
Moderate Probability (≈20%)
A major Chinese military move against Taiwan triggers large-scale U.S. strategic reallocation toward the Indo-Pacific. Mediterranean naval and air assets are reduced; Washington’s arbitration role attenuates.
Ankara, interpreting this as evidence of a temporarily weakened American commitment, could test boundaries—most plausibly through a limited fait accompli reminiscent of the 1996 Imia/Kardak crisis: symbolic seizure of uninhabited islets, combined with calibrated harassment of Greek maritime activity.
However, the Chevron factor significantly shifts the calculus. Interference with American-operated seismic surveys would escalate beyond a bilateral crisis. Even under Indo-Pacific prioritisation, the United States would confront a direct challenge to its corporate and reputational interests.
The deterrence architecture therefore changes qualitatively after February 2026. Greece now benefits from a form of indirect or “proxy” deterrence anchored in U.S. commercial exposure. Under this scenario, French and Israeli capabilities would likely provide immediate operational reinforcement, but the American commercial stake increases the expected cost of Turkish adventurism beyond what existed prior to the lease agreements.
The Bayesian inference problem for Ankara becomes sharper: misclassifying U.S. resolve under Indo-Pacific distraction could yield a high-cost strategic miscalculation.
Scenario C: The Black Sea Pivot
Low-to-Moderate Probability (≈15%)
Facing sustained Western cohesion and battlefield attrition in Ukraine, Moscow offers Ankara a “Grand Bargain”: diplomatic and energy concessions in the Mediterranean in exchange for a restrictive interpretation of the Montreux Convention—closing the Straits to all NATO warships, including those of non-belligerent states.
Such a move would dramatically alter Black Sea deterrence dynamics and strain NATO cohesion. Yet this scenario requires Turkey to compromise a core element of its strategic autonomy posture: control of Montreux as an instrument of balanced leverage. Analyses from Chatham House and the Foreign Policy Research Institute consistently describe Straits sovereignty as a non-negotiable national interest.
Nonetheless, structural vulnerabilities exist. Turkey’s energy interdependence with Russia—including flows via the TurkStream pipeline—and its tourism sector’s reliance on Russian visitors create channels of economic influence. A resourceful Russian diplomatic strategy could attempt to exploit these dependencies.
For the G7 and NATO, the dilemma would be stark: accept diminished Black Sea access or counterbalance through intensified Mediterranean deployments—risking escalation along NATO’s southern flank.
Scenario D: The Energy Breakthrough
Moderate Probability (≈20%)
A major gas discovery in the Herodotus Basin—geologically analogous to the Levantine Basin—transforms the economic calculus. Should seismic surveys beginning in late 2026 confirm substantial reserves, public announcement of a commercially viable discovery between 2028 and 2030 becomes plausible.
Exclusion from a hydrocarbon architecture potentially worth hundreds of billions of euros in royalties and transit revenues would impose reputational and fiscal opportunity costs on Ankara. Domestic constituencies—industrial, financial, and energy-sector stakeholders—could exert pressure for recalibration.
Within the Bayesian framework, such an outcome increases the likelihood of Turkey shifting from a Revisionist–Ideologue posture toward a Rational–Status Quo type. Participation in or accommodation with the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum could follow, stabilising maritime disputes through economic interdependence rather than legal adjudication alone.
The Chevron commitment strengthens the plausibility of this scenario. A 70 percent operating stake by a major U.S. firm implies confidence in geological prospectivity. While commercial risk remains substantial in ultra-deepwater exploration, the entrance of a global operator recalibrates probability estimates in favour of at least a moderate discovery case.
Structural Synthesis
Across all scenarios, the February 2026 energy agreements function as a pivot variable. They:
Increase escalation costs for Turkish interference;
Embed the dispute within American commercial strategy;
Enhance the economic payoff of cooperative recalibration;
Raise the reputational stakes of miscalculation.
The Bayesian problem for all actors remains one of type inference under uncertainty. Greece and its partners must determine whether Turkish revisionism is tactical bargaining or structural doctrine. Turkey must determine whether Western commitments are durable or contingent.
Between 2026 and 2030, the stability of NATO’s southern flank will depend less on formal treaty clauses than on the evolution of these probabilistic beliefs—and on whether energy interdependence proves capable of transforming rivalry into managed competition rather than cumulative escalation.
VIII. POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS
VIII.i, For the G7: Formal Recognition of Critical Infrastructure Status
The G7 should formally designate the Great Sea Interconnector, IMEC Eastern Mediterranean shipping lanes, and the offshore exploration blocks operated by Chevron–HELLENiQ ENERGY and ExxonMobil as Critical Global Infrastructure (CGI).
Such designation would reframe interference not as a bilateral maritime dispute but as a systemic challenge to G7 economic security and rule-of-law norms. The shift is not merely rhetorical: CGI status would integrate these assets into coordinated resilience planning, sanctions pre-authorisation frameworks, and collective diplomatic signalling.
The precedent lies in the sanctions architecture deployed after Russian interference with Ukrainian energy and transport infrastructure beginning in 2014 and expanded after 2022. By embedding Eastern Mediterranean infrastructure within that legal–political template, the G7 would increase the expected cost of disruption and reshape Ankara’s payoff matrix toward restraint.
VIII.ii For NATO: Structural Reform of Alliance Dispute Management
NATO’s existing intra-alliance dispute management framework—Confidence and Security Building Measures (CSBMs) at the military level and ministerial dialogue at the diplomatic level—remains ad hoc and personality-dependent. As U.S. strategic bandwidth shifts toward the Indo-Pacific, reliance on episodic American arbitration becomes increasingly unsustainable.
The Alliance should therefore develop a formal Maritime Dispute Resolution Protocol, embedded within NATO’s command and planning structures and coordinated with the NATO–EU institutional interface.
Such a mechanism would:
Establish rapid incident deconfliction procedures;
Provide neutral technical arbitration panels for maritime claims;
Integrate legal advisory capacity grounded in international maritime law;
Reduce escalation risks arising from tactical encounters at sea.
Institutionalising dispute management strengthens alliance cohesion and reduces the probability that misperception escalates into crisis—particularly under incomplete-information conditions characteristic of Bayesian strategic interaction.
VIII.iii For the European Union: IMEC Governance and Port Sovereignty
The European Union must resolve a structural contradiction within the IMEC corridor: reliance on a port majority-owned by a Chinese state enterprise as a primary European terminal. The Port of Piraeus is operated by COSCO Shipping, raising sovereignty and resilience concerns in the context of strategic competition.
Greek diversification—strengthening Thessaloniki and advancing the Black Sea–Aegean corridor with Bulgaria and Romania—provides a foundation for mitigation. However, EU-level coordination is required to prevent destructive port competition and ensure commercial viability of the corridor as an integrated logistics ecosystem.
Additionally, the EU should advance the EastMed–Poseidon pipeline as a functional component of IMEC’s energy pillar. Its existing designation as a Project of Common Interest provides regulatory scaffolding. Integration of maritime, digital, and energy corridors under a unified governance structure would reduce fragmentation risk and enhance strategic autonomy.
VIII.iv For Athens: Strategic Ambiguity Management within the Dialogue Architecture
Greece’s dual-track approach—deepening defence and energy integration within the “Hexagon” format while maintaining the Erdoğan–Mitsotakis dialogue architecture—remains strategically sound. The leadership channel between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Kyriakos Mitsotakis provides crisis-management elasticity that a pure containment posture would foreclose.
The bilateral trade target of $10 billion and the structured confidence-building measures framework serve as stabilising off-ramps during periods of tension. Athens should continue to anchor maritime delimitation strictly in international law while signalling openness to economic inclusion mechanisms—potentially including calibrated Turkish participation in a reformed Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum.
This approach preserves deterrence credibility while keeping open a pathway for Ankara to transition—within the Bayesian typology—from a Revisionist–Ideologue posture toward a Rational–Status Quo orientation.
Concluding Assessment
Across all four policy vectors—G7, NATO, EU, and Athens—the objective is consistent: reshape the strategic environment so that restraint yields higher expected payoffs than revisionism.
Infrastructure designation, institutional reform, governance integration, and calibrated dialogue each function as levers within a larger deterrence architecture. The success of these measures will depend less on declaratory statements than on sustained institutional follow-through capable of altering belief structures, not merely signalling preferences..
IX. CONCLUSION
The Eastern Mediterranean in February 2026 represents a structural inflection point in regional security architecture under conditions of intensifying multipolar competition. What was once treated within NATO as a contained bilateral anomaly between Athens and Ankara has evolved into a node within overlapping systemic contests: IMEC versus Belt and Road connectivity, energy geopolitics between American commercial presence and revisionist maritime doctrine, and a broader experiment in asymmetric deterrence within a post-unipolar order.
The Greece–Turkey rivalry now intersects directly with the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) and, by extension, China’s Belt and Road framework. Maritime delimitation disputes are no longer insulated from global supply-chain governance or energy market integration. The theatre has expanded from Aegean tactical encounters to corridor competition and infrastructure securitisation.
The Hexagon alignment’s core strategic premise is that, in a multipolar system, depth can substitute for mass. Israel’s qualitative military edge; India’s demographic scale and IMEC connectivity stake; the UAE’s financial leverage; and Cyprus’s logistical positioning together form a composite deterrence architecture. This structure constrains Turkey’s ability to translate conventional military superiority into decisive strategic outcomes.
The February 2026 entry of Chevron—alongside Greek participation via HELLENiQ ENERGY—further embeds American material interests in contested maritime zones. Any coercive disruption of exploration activity now risks direct confrontation with Washington, altering escalation thresholds in ways not present in prior crisis cycles.
Risks remain substantial. The August 2026 review horizon associated with the Montreux Convention, potential Indo-Pacific reallocation of American strategic attention, unresolved IMEC governance contradictions, and the domestic political costs of deeper military integration among Hexagon partners all represent stress points. Structural consolidation is not synonymous with strategic inevitability.
Yet the first quarter of 2026 suggests momentum. The Chevron agreements; the Greece–Israel–Cyprus joint action plan; the EU–India trade alignment; the Greece–Egypt strategic partnership; and progress on Black Sea–Aegean corridor infrastructure collectively indicate that the Hexagon’s integrative logic is consolidating at a pace that outstrips the incremental erosion strategy associated with Turkish revisionism.
The decisive variable over the 2026–2030 horizon will be energy economics. A commercially significant gas discovery in the Herodotus Basin could transform Ankara’s incentive structure more effectively than legal argumentation or military signalling. Within the Bayesian framework outlined earlier, such a discovery would raise the expected payoff of status-quo accommodation relative to revisionist persistence.
If that economic pivot materialises, the Eastern Mediterranean may transition from managed rivalry toward institutionalised competition. If not, the region will remain a testing ground for deterrence under uncertainty—where belief formation, not merely capability distribution, determines the stability of NATO’s southern flank.
