By Cengiz K. Fırat
Diplomacy, at its best, is the art of managing appearances. At its worst, it is the art of mistaking those appearances for reality.
My recent visit to Athens, in the context of the Greek-Turkish Forum — a behind-closed-doors initiative designed to keep lines of communication open precisely when they are most under strain — offered a vivid illustration of both.
The timing could hardly have been more charged. Our visit coincided with Ankara’s unveiling of a draft maritime jurisdiction bill, a piece of legislation that would formally codify Turkey’s long-standing claims in the Aegean, Eastern Mediterranean, and Black Sea into domestic law, while keeping Aegean territorial waters at six nautical miles and granting the presidency powers related to special-status maritime zones.  Our Greek colleagues were, to put it mildly, up in arms. They spoke of the “solidification of the Blue Homeland doctrine,” warning that the bill would not only poison bilateral relations but ripple dangerously into Greece’s domestic politics, with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis seeking a third consecutive term in upcoming general elections.
The reaction was telling — and instructive — for the wrong reasons. When we, the Turkish participants of the forum, pointed out that our Greek colleagues were making a considerable drama out of a draft text whose substance they had not yet read in full, and that Turkey had been explicit that the legislation was not designed to alter the current state of affairs on the ground, they continued their stance rather than engaging with the substance. Yet when we turned the mirror around and reminded our interlocutors that Athens had surprised Ankara by deploying Patriot missile batteries on islands that are supposed, under international agreements, to remain demilitarized, the subject was deftly changed. Selective indignation, it seems, is a diplomatic art form too.
THE BUILD-UP ANKARA CANNOT IGNORE
The sheer scale of Greece’s military build-up cannot be papered over and ought to concentrate minds in Ankara. Athens is currently executing a defense modernization program running from 2025 to 2036, allocating some €28 billion to strengthen its deterrence capabilities. The procurement list reads like a catalogue of modern warfare: 20 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters, with an option for 20 additional aircraft, dozens of French Dassault Rafale jets already delivered, and a program to upgrade a further 38 F-16 Block 50s to Viper standard. The centerpiece is the “Achilles Shield,” a multi-layered air, missile and anti-drone defense network anchored by a €3.5 billion investment in Israeli-made systems — Spyder for short-range interceptions, Barak MX for medium-range threats, and David’s Sling for ballistic missile interceptions. And in January 2026, the Hellenic Navy commissioned the first of its new French FDI Belharra frigates, the “Kimon,” with three more vessels to follow. 
Compounding all of this is the expanding American military footprint on Greek soil. Beyond the long-established naval superbase at Souda Bay in Crete, US armed forces now maintain a permanent presence at Larissa, used as a launch base for state-of-the-art unmanned aircraft, Volos, which hosts naval and air support facilities, and Alexandroupoli, serving as a key operational hub for the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Greece now hosts over twenty US military installations and operational sites across its territory — a presence that, taken together with the weapons acquisitions above, represents a fundamental transformation of the regional military balance.
Turkey’s core bilateral grievances with Greece remain entirely unresolved. The continental shelf, airspace disputes, the militarisation of the Aegean islands, and the Cyprus question are where they have always been. Filed under the title of “too difficult,” they are awaiting a political will that neither side has yet summoned. Greece has shown no genuine readiness to subject these disputes to binding international adjudication, although that remains the only credible path to durable resolution.
On the European front, frustration is equally acute. Greece has worked to keep Turkey out of the EU’s SAFE defense procurement program, alongside Cyprus, even as other EU member states showed genuine appetite for defense cooperation with Ankara. The Cypriot EU Presidency was deployed, with little subtlety, as an instrument to isolate Turkey at every opportunity. And the deepening Israel-Greece-Cyprus strategic axis, the IMEC corridor project, the deployment of sophisticated Israeli military hardware on Cyprus, and the French President Macron’s pointed expressions of solidarity during recent visits to both Nicosia and Athens — these are not peripheral irritants. They represent a reshaping of Eastern Mediterranean alignments that registers with real sensitivity in Ankara.
SIMILAR ELECTION CONCERNS
What strikes me most, though, is the logic of electoral paralysis that now governs the bilateral conversation. “Bear with us — we have elections coming” is not a foreign policy. It is an alibi. The Greek administration has had seven years in office. The same question must be asked on both sides: what has been accomplished? Where are we? Is there any genuine political will to move beyond crisis management toward actual negotiation?
The Greek-Turkish Forum exists because both sides understand, at some level, that communication matters. But communication without courage is merely noise management. The calm that observers see in Turkish-Greek relations today is real — and fragile, and deceptive. Beneath it, the same tectonic pressures that have defined this relationship for decades continue to build, armed now with considerably more hardware than before.
One thing, at least, is clear: in the months ahead, we will find ourselves writing far more about crises than about solutions.
