The Eastern Mediterranean is entering a new phase of competition where legal claims, deterrence and sovereignty remain central, but they are increasingly prosecuted through capital allocation, infrastructure design and transactional politics. The rules of this game are not being renegotiated; they are being repriced.
For Athens, Ankara and other regional capitals, the strategic challenge is no longer whether to assert legal rights, but how to do so in an environment where investment decisions, corridor design and governance frameworks increasingly determine which claims acquire economic and political weight over time. Law still defines the boundaries of the game; capital increasingly determines its outcomes.
Turkey approaches this landscape through scale and optionality. Its ambition to participate across the full spectrum of energy and infrastructure deploying TPAO in upstream, midstream and downstream, reflects a strategy aimed at indispensability rather than formal recognition. By extending its reach beyond the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean into Africa and Asia, Ankara seeks to ensure that legal isolation in one theatre does not translate into strategic marginalisation. Delay, ambiguity and route contestation are not substitutes for legal claims, but tools to prevent adverse legal outcomes from becoming economically final.
Greece operates on a different axis. Its strength lies in institutional alignment: regulatory predictability, EU embeddedness and compatibility with Western legal and financial systems. For Athens, the attraction of capital treats EU law as enforceable rather than aspirational. By positioning itself as an institutional gateway for capital, Greece enhances its credibility with partners, but also assumes greater responsibility for managing geopolitical frictions generated beyond its direct control. The trade-off is between influence gained through alignment and the strategic flexibility required to navigate a fluid regional environment.
The regional dimension has more complexity. It is shaped by the gravitational pull of Israel’s energy and infrastructure strategy, which increasingly anchors east–west corridors across the Eastern Mediterranean. Israeli-led projects do not resolve Greek-Turkish legal disputes, but they alter their practical consequences by introducing alternative routes, partners and sequencing options for capital. In doing so, they affect which legal positions translate into commercial reality first.
Egypt’s capacity to potentially supply gas to Lebanon, Palestine and Syria will involve regional agreements for infrastructure and supply. It would be Gulf, American and European financiers and operators that would determine the access to quantities and transport for it. This possibility adds a further expansion of the regional potential if it is done from a lens to secure peace and stability – for Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Within this architecture sits Cyprus, occupying a structurally pivotal but politically exposed position. Cyprus is not an actor in the same sense as Greece or Turkey; it is a node. It offers proximity to Israeli energy systems, EU legal jurisdiction and potential processing and transit capacity, while lacking the enforcement power to secure outcomes unilaterally. Its role is therefore catalytic but fragile: Cyprus could help Europeanise regional energy and infrastructure flows, but only if legal rights are backed by transparent governance mechanisms capable of withstanding political pressure.
Overlaying these dynamics is the unresolved tension within European Union energy strategy itself. Europe’s simultaneous pursuit of energy security, decarbonisation and strategic autonomy creates ambiguity for Eastern Mediterranean gas. While diversification away from Russian supply has temporarily elevated the region’s relevance, the longer-term trajectory of the Green Deal raises questions about asset longevity. For Greece, alignment with EU energy frameworks is both a shield and a constraint; for Turkey, exclusion from those frameworks strengthens incentives to pursue parallel routes and partnerships. The result is a narrowing window in which projects must secure political, regulatory and financial anchoring to avoid being overtaken by policy shifts and strategic uncertainty emanating from regional conflict in Libya, Syria and Palestine.
There is an uncomfortable historical resonance here. In the decades preceding the First World War, access to resources, transport routes and industrial capacity increasingly shaped diplomacy among European powers operating within weak or misaligned governance frameworks. Capital flowed rapidly, infrastructure expanded and legal claims proliferated but without institutions capable of absorbing shocks or reconciling competing interests. The parallel is not predictive, but cautionary: when economic integration races ahead of political and legal coordination, stability becomes brittle rather than resilient.
Paradoxically, the same transactional system that sharpens rivalry may also create narrow synergies between Greece and Turkey. Capital-led diplomacy does not erase legal disagreement, but it can incentivize coexistence. Turkey brings scale, geography and execution capacity; Greece brings institutional credibility, expertise and legal alignment. Cooperation, where it emerges, is unlikely to resemble reconciliation. It will be modular, reversible and project-specific, structured to preserve legal positions while allowing commercial activity to proceed.
Whether such arrangements endure depends on governance. Capital investors and the corporate organisations – especially publicly listed companies with shareholder expectations – can and must reinforce legal claims by embedding them in enforceable contracts, rule of law frameworks and institutions, which without credible dispute-resolution mechanisms and regulatory continuity it can also undermine them. Government-to-government diplomacy once advanced slowly but steadily. Today, business and capital often move first, leaving politics to catch up. The risk is that legal victories remain symbolic while economic pathways are decided elsewhere.
As a vulnerable frontline region, the Eastern Mediterranean cannot allow its future to be shaped by hard power alone; stability and growth depend on embedding energy, defense, and connectivity into credible governance frameworks that support multilateral cooperation and bankable investment. What is changing in the Eastern Mediterranean -mirrored in parts of Latin America, Asia and Africa, is not the importance of law, but how law translates into power: legal claims and agreements matter only when they can be converted into investable projects anchored in trusted institutions and aligned with European and multilateral priorities. In this environment, access to capital determines momentum, pragmatic politics shape negotiations, and institutions decide which outcomes endure.
The United States increasingly shape this system not by arbitrating disputes directly, but by directing capital, structuring incentives, and privileging governance compatibility. At this juncture, responsibility lies not only with governments to uphold the rule of law, but equally with business leaders and investors, whose capital allocation choices must actively reinforce governance, risk mitigation, and institutional credibility – so that governance and multilateralism evolve in step with power, rather than reacting after the strategic landscape has already been set.
* Cleopatra Kitti is a Senior PolicyAdvisor at the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and a Certified Independent Director.
