Another Spot Heating Up

In addition to Ukraine, Burma, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, and various other areas in West Africa, there’s another conflict that appears to be heating up according to this piece in The National Interest by Brandon Patterson and Dino Bozonelos. This one has the added complication of being between two NATO members—Turkey and Greece:

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has threatened an invasion of its neighbor and NATO partner Greece. The disputes between the two countries are numerous but lately have settled on the “militarization” of Greek Islands near the Turkish Aegean coast. Turkey claims that the military buildups in the islands are in reaction to Greek violations of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Article 13 of the 100-year-old treaty states that “No naval base and no fortification will be established in the said islands.” However, the same Article 13 also states that “Turkish aircraft will forbid their military aircraft to fly over the said islands” and that “The Greek military forces in the said island will be limited to the normal contingent called up for military services.”

Greece’s counterclaim is that Turkey has repeatedly violated its historical treaty obligations through continuous military flyovers and a consistent naval presence in the region. Greece has said that this threatens not only the territorial sovereignty of the islands but also the economic sovereignty of Greece’s continental shelf. While this source of friction brought the neighbors close to war in the 1970s, the two countries largely agreed to try to develop a framework for drilling rights and natural resource extraction in the eastern Aegean.

Perhaps the better way of looking at this matter than as a new conflict is as a conflict that has been going on for the last millennium with periodic détentes. Turkey has been a NATO member in name only since the Kemalists lost power. Indeed, I think that the NATO member was a regime rather than a country. Since there’s no formal way of expelling a member of NATO, we have the specter of an armed conflict between NATO members. That would certainly place additional strain on the alliance.