Erdogan is building a new Turkish empire

This article was published in The Spectator USA. 

Last year, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan campaigned for a new constitution that would change his country’s polity from a parliamentary to a presidential system. When German officials refused to allow his ministers to travel to Germany and woo its million-strong expatriate vote, he called them Nazis. He later also accused the German Chancellor of Nazism for saying that the European Union should reconsider its relations with Turkey – a veiled threat for suspending talks to bring it into the EU. Ankara and Amsterdam withdrew their ambassadors during a spat over the same campaign.

During a disastrous visit to Athens last December, Erdogan demanded the return of ten fugitive officers Erdogan considers plotted against him in a July 2016 army coup that nearly unseated him, even though Greece’s Supreme Court ruled against their extradition. And he called for a revision of the Lausanne Treaty, which has established peace between Greece and Turkey for the last century.

But the worst clash was with the US. Last summer, Congress discussed imposing sanctions on Turkey over its refusal to release an American pastor. Now released, Andrew Brunson had been imprisoned for two years for allegedly plotting against Erdogan. The US is also withholding delivery of F-35 stealth aircraft Turkey has bought because it is unhappy over Turkey’s increasingly close relationship with Russia. Russia is building Turkey’s first nuclear reactor and Turkey plans to purchase Russian S-400 anti-aircraft missiles over the objections of NATO.

Greek official blows the whistle on refugee costs

This article was published by Al Jazeera International. 

A senior Greek official has described the way the government buys migration-related services as "chaos," after Greece's top court ordered an inquiry into the handling of European Union funds paid to Athens to assist with the refugee and migration crisis.

Andreas Iliopoulos, head of Greece’s Reception and Identification Service, which registers undocumented migrants when they enter the country, says Greek and European taxpayers may be subject to fraud because many contracts are awarded directly to Greek firms and non-governmental organisations without going through a competitive bidding process.

“[Fast-track procedures mean] I can go directly to interested parties. I can come to you and make a deal without revealing too much information to others,” said Lieutenant-General Andreas Iliopoulos in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera. “That makes sense when people are landing on the beach and we have to feed them and there are no obvious means of doing so… This happened in 2015, but we can’t claim that in 2018.

NATO and the EU suffer a setback in former Yugoslav Macedonia

This article was published by The Weekly Standard. 

The Euro-Atlantic trajectory of the Western Balkans was cast into doubt after a referendum in the former Yugoslav Macedonia backfired over the weekend.

Prime Minister Zoran Zaev gambled on the popularity of European Union and NATO entry – which enjoy support of 83 percent and 77 percent of the population respectively – to carry a proposal to change the country’s name to North Macedonia. Greece agreed last June to lift vetoes to the Balkan country joining both bodies if it adopts that name.

While 91.4 percent of voters supported the change, only 36.9 percent of eligible voters turned out, making the referendum legally invalid. The hardline opposition’s call to boycott the vote is widely perceived as having won.

East Mediterranean gas creates new allies, but deepens old enmities

This article was published by The Weekly Standard.

On January 30, the deepwater drillship Saipem 12000 sent its drill bit into a cavern beneath one-and-a-quarter-miles of water and a mile of rock in the eastern Mediterranean. Italian oil and gas company ENI, which had contracted the ship, announced a week later that the cavern, called Calypso, was “an extended gas column”, estimated at 6-8 trillion cubic feet (tcf). The gas deposit belongs to Cyprus’ exclusive economic zone – an area of water where it has sovereign rights to exploit, manage and conserve natural resources - and seismic studies suggest that it represents only an intimation of the island’s future hydrocarbon wealth.

Over the next three months, ExxonMobil and the Qatar Petroleum Company are to embark on their own exploratory drilling off Cyprus’ southern shore in October. “We know the size of the structures and the possible hydrocarbons in them,” says geologist Konstantinos Nikolaou of the intended drill sites in an allotment called Block 10. “The sum of the deposits may amount to more than Zohr… it is very promising,” he says.

At 30 tcf, Zohr is the eastern Mediterranean’s largest known gas deposit, discovered three years ago offshore Egypt. Egypt plans to be energy self-sufficient by the end of 2018, doing away with oil and gas purchases worth $3bn a year. Similar deposits would make Cyprus not only self-sufficient, but an exporter.