“Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.,” Confucius warned centuries ago. In today’s Eastern Mediterranean, that maxim feels newly relevant: when deal-driven diplomacy promises quick fixes to issues embedded in law and institutions, excess becomes strategic failure. And the price does not stay local. It spreads—and reaches the core of American credibility.
Tom Barrack did not come up through the professional diplomatic corps. He is a political appointee with a strong business imprint. That is not, by itself, disqualifying. The problem begins when a transactional mindset tries to substitute for strategy—when geopolitics is treated as a technical exercise in “interest convergence” rather than a domain defined by rules, commitments, red lines, and deterrence.
Cyprus: From sovereign state to “technical obstacle”
A telling misstep was the analogy of Cyprus as an “abscess” in an otherwise supposedly “healthy” regional body. Even if the intent was to argue that Cyprus must be integrated into a broader regional equation, the metaphor is dangerous: it shifts attention away from occupation and the ongoing violation of international law, recasting them as an “obstacle” to be removed.
Cyprus is not a problem in need of “treatment.” It is a sovereign state under illegal occupation for 52 years. When statehood and occupation are reduced to “technical parameters,” reality is inverted: it is not the victim that must be “normalized,” but the perpetrator that must be constrained—and compelled to comply.
Syria and Turkey are not the same
Here lies the central error: importing deal-making habits from a landscape of collapse into a system of institutional security. Syria is a case of state breakdown outside the Western institutional framework, where ad hoc arrangements can serve as temporary bridges for damage control.
Turkey, by contrast, is a NATO member, a party to international treaties, and—however uneasily—embedded in the Western security system. In such a setting, deals cannot replace rules. At best, they test institutional discipline. When Ankara is “rewarded” without compliance, transatlantic cohesion becomes negotiable—and deterrence becomes a fragile narrative.
The F-35: An ecosystem that cannot be bargained
The renewed talk about the F-35 captures this strategic misread. This is not a negotiable quid pro quo, nor a “reset opportunity” unlocked by a political phrase. It is an ecosystem of high technology, data, classified support, and chains of trust—embedded in a legal and alliance-based framework.
The S-400s, CAATSA sanctions, congressional oversight, Ankara’s deep Russian entanglements in critical infrastructure, and the parallel development of the KAAN fighter are not “deviations” to be fixed through political mediation. They amount to institutional incompatibility. Re-entry into a fifth-generation ecosystem is not merely blocked by politics; it collides with the West’s legal and strategic architecture—built precisely to prevent treating security like a commodity.
A triangular set of stakes
For Greece, Turkish entry into the F-35 ecosystem would reshape the balance of power in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean—especially as Ankara invests systematically in the “grey zone” between peace and crisis. For Israel, it would touch the core of its Qualitative Military Edge (QME), a long-standing U.S. policy requirement in the region.
For the U.S., however, the stakes run deeper: the credibility of its own laws erodes, the risk of technological leakage grows, alliance cohesion weakens, and moral hazard spreads. When stability comes with a price tag, power becomes more expensive—and less effective.
“Historical grievances”? No—active, documented threats
Especially troubling is the claim that Greek–Turkish tensions are merely “historical grievances.” That framing depoliticizes the present and strips the problem of its institutional reality. These are not remnants of the past but active, documented threats: a casus belli in force since 1995; the revisionist “Blue Homeland” doctrine; interference with infrastructure projects inside Greece’s delimited Exclusive Economic Zone, including cable-laying operations; the illegal Turkish–Libyan memorandum; and, above all, the continuing occupation of Cyprus. Reducing these realities to “history” turns persistent violations of international law into a matter of memory rather than responsibility.
Athens cannot afford silence
Under these conditions, Greece cannot afford the luxury of silence. When rhetoric equates perpetrator and victim and treats institutional compliance as a bargaining chip, Athens has a duty to respond—by name, with evidence, and in public. Not against the U.S., but against choices that wound the West’s institutional cohesion and drain its reservoir of credibility.
When a transactional ambassador promises easy solutions where strategic consistency is required, he does not produce stability. He produces risk. And that risk weighs, above all, on American credibility—and ultimately on American power.
