A New Alliance Axis in the Eastern Mediterranean Cold War: What the Abraham Accords Mean for Mediterranean Geopolitics and Turkey.

• Author: Guney, Nursinn Atesoglu
• Position: ARTICLE

Introduction

In this paper, we assume that the new Cold War, a new kind of great power rivalry, has arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean since 2015. At the strategic level, Chinese economic and Russian military assertiveness have led the U.S. to think twice about its mistakes, which opened up a power vacuum in this strategic geopolitical realm. Washington must find cost-free instruments with which to reshape the structural and institutional design of Eastern Mediterranean geopolitics, which are fragmented and confrontational at the regional level because of the severe, ongoing power struggle. We also assume that as a cost-free instrument the U.S. has decided to use already existing alliance axes in the region. The first and second axes are the direct result of a geopolitical power struggle for benefit among the regional players. The first axis emerged within energy competition in the Eastern Mediterranean and it was the direct result of strategic cooperation between Israel, Greece, South Cyprus, and Egypt--evolved and quickly militarized after 2013. The second axis emerged from the turmoil in Libya. It was crystallized after 2015 when Russia, France, UAE, and Israel decided to back Khalifa Haftar. These two axes have gradually gained an anti-Turkish stand due to Turkey's game-changing role both in terms of the energy issue and the Libyan war. However, the U.S. decision to support these axes is related to Washington's aspiration to contain Russian and Chinese influence in the region. For this aim, the U.S. initiated a third axis of alliance by negotiating the Abraham Accords with Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco in 2020.

In this regard first, we will try to explain what kind of great power rivalry has been observed in the Eastern Mediterranean by underlining new alliance logic of the new great power struggle between the U.S., Russia, and China. After this brief theoretical framework, we will try to answer the question of how the U.S. has caught the opportunity of using the alignment frameworks in the region. These alignments seem to the U.S. as suitable instruments because they are already emerged, militarized, and targeting other regional states, like Turkey rather than directly provoking Russia and /or China. Then, we will try to explain why the U.S. needs the third axis of alignments by negotiating the Abraham Accords between Israel and the four Arab states. Lastly, we will explore what will be the likely impacts of the Abraham Accords on the regional balance of power.

Regional Alliance Patterns of the New Great Power Rivalry

International Relations (IR) academics have often revisited the old concepts of international politics during the last decade to explain what happened after the demise of 'New World Order' dreams. One of these concepts is the Cold War.

Some argue that we are witnessing the rise of a new Cold War era; in other words, the return of great power competition between the U.S., Russia, and China. Without a doubt, this new Cold War is not the same as the Cold War of 1947-1991 when the world was divided between ideologically enemy camps. However, we also witness that today not only academics but also practitioners like Mike Pompeo, one of the U.S. top diplomats of the Trump Administration, enjoyed using this resemblance. The major likeness between the old and the new Cold War is the main geopolitical consequence of the great power rivalry: emergence of spheres of influence. Certain empirical observations strengthen this expectation. For example, today nobody is in a position to deny that specific military and diplomatic capacities in the hands of the great powers have been used for the purpose of anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), aiming to prevent the penetration of rival great powers into their own, special area of interest. In particular, Russian and Chinese A2/AD capabilities seemed to disturb the Trump Administration strongly enough for it to revisit the idea of containing and constraining its rival powers-mainly by strengthening American deterrence capabilities.

Although the Trump Administrations priority for American primacy was crystal clear in the pages of the American National Security Strategy, (1) Washington's means of deterrence remained rather ambiguous. On the one hand, the U.S. seemed to embrace a 'deterrence by punishment' strategy not only to address Russian and Chinese challenges but also to bring resisting regional powers to their knees. On the other hand, Washington appeared to adopt a kind of 'deterrence by denial' strategy--which meant redesigning the old rimland, ranging from the Pacific to the Atlantic via Southeast Asia, the Af-Pak (Afghanistan and Pakistan), the Gulf, and the Mediterranean. For this new redesign, instead of direct, multifaced, and intensive penetration, less costly and risk-averting means are sought in order to protect the great powers from direct confrontation. Accordingly, we assume that supporting the emergence of regional alliance axes, which are composed of friendly, ambitious, and needy regional players, turned out to be a suitable instrument for the American deterrence by denial strategy.

If we were in the old days of the Cold War, this kind of axis strategy, together with great power rivalry, would require the formation of solid alliances, strong commitments in defense pacts, at least in the form of extended deterrence, and naturally the rejection of hedging as a strategy. However, today's new Cold War is not an ideologically driven, rigid phenomenon, and that is why there is no need to reject the hedging and wedging options available for parties that are coming together in flexible alignments and cooperation schemes with the aim of acquiring benefit. Therefore, the first distinctive characteristic of the new Cold War is its reliance on flexible, shifting, and benefit-oriented alliances. This alliance pattern is not just preferred by great powers, including the U.S., as a cost-effective, more risk-free area-denial strategy in the face of real and potential rivalry, it is also willingly adopted by regional players who have their own distinct national agendas and regional strategic objectives. Contrary to the old days of the Cold War, today's regional players are either too ambitious or too capable to be the proxy or client state of the great powers. They are indisputably bandwagoning parties, but they are not incapable and involuntary followers of the leader. They are rational benefit-seekers, and as such, they can be expected to behave as opportunist--if not revisionist- actors when they spot a window of opportunity. This implies that at the regional level, regional players, too, can be expected to take part in a severe power struggle and a rough rivalry. Therefore, the second distinctive characteristic of the new Cold War is the extension of its alliance pattern. Security competition emerges on the regional and strategic levels with individual features--as a power struggle on the regional level and as a deterrence/constraint game on the strategic level, although these two levels cannot be assumed to be independent from each other. We assume that the entangled rivalry that we observe in the Eastern Mediterranean is not the exception; it is the direct ramification of this two-layered power struggle among the great and regional powers.

Three Axes Strategy: The U.S. Returns to the Eastern Mediterranean Cold War

In light of this brief theoretical framework, one can easily assume that a new Cold War has already started in the Mediterranean. Indeed, Pompeo was the one declaring that the Mediterranean will be the first front of the great power competition in this regard. First, one can witness the increasing American and Russian military presence there. In the context of Russian-American rivalry, the question of 'who pokes who' is like that of the chicken and the egg. Some argue that Western failure to uphold the post-Cold War European balance has led the Russians to think about the strategic merits of having A2/AD in the Mediterranean. Indeed, Moscow has succeeded in maintaining and even enlarging its A2/AD bubbles in this region since 2015. (2) Others argue that Russia's upper hand in Western Syria, its military assertiveness in Libya, and diplomatic charm-offensive targeting of regional players like Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia have convinced the U.S. that it must strike back by bolstering its own strategic posture in the Eastern Mediterranean. Apart from the Russian challenge, Chinas active investment strategy to have access to, and possibly in the future control, the critical infrastructure of...