Recommended Strategy - 21
Recommended Strategy Recommended U.S. Strategy for the Cyprus Conflict
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lthough the situation within Cyprus is stable for now, the regional offshore energy dispute and intensified Turkish belligerency are raising the potential for renewed escalation in the Cyprus conflict. The highly charged visit by Erdogan in November 2020 to Varosha, a disputed town near the dividing line between the RoC and northern Cyprus, is yet another indicator that the situation in Cyprus is at a critical juncture, thereby requiring renewed and proactive U.S. policy focus. The United States cannot afford to wait until the protracted Cyprus conflict boils over, creating another regional armed conflict attracting intervention by U.S. great power rivals and spilling instability into the geostrategic Eastern Mediterranean. Thus, this section outlines a more strategic approach to the Cyprus conflict that grounds U.S. policy within broader U.S. interests mentioned below. In May 2014, Joseph R. Biden became the first U.S. Vice President to visit Cyprus since Lyndon Johnson in 1962, stating that he had “come to primarily underscore the value the United States attaches to our growing cooperation with the Republic of Cyprus.”97 Since Biden uttered those words in 2014, the risks to U.S. interests in Cyprus and the geostrategic Eastern Mediterranean have grown due to an increasingly belligerent Turkish foreign policy and resurgent great power competition with Russia. What happens within the Cyprus conflict has growing implications for achieving U.S. interests in the Eastern Mediterranean region. On the Cyprus issue, we argue in this section
that the incoming administration should be concerned with five broad U.S. interests: (1) fostering strategic stability in the increasingly volatile Eastern Mediterranean, (2) limiting the influence and ambitions of Russia in Cyprus, (3) reaffirming a strong NATO alliance, (4) enhancing stability in Cyprus to protect U.S. regional interests and support UN efforts to create conditions for a settlement, and (5) maintaining the U.S. military’s ability to project power into nearby regional hotspots. Subsequent sections will turn to translating these generalized U.S. interests into recommended objectives that include actionable policies on the Cyprus problem.
Interest One: Foster strategic stability in the increasingly volatile Eastern Mediterranean Since the Second World War, U.S. administrations have grasped the importance of the Eastern Mediterranean for deterring U.S. geostrategic rivals and securing the U.S. alliance network in Western Europe. Although the Cyprus conflict has been largely stable since the 1970s, the surrounding regional context has been far more volatile and violent. The Arab Spring that swept the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 saw popular protests morph into violent revolts, sparking civil wars and insurgencies in Syria and Libya. In 2014, Vice President Biden echoed the importance of Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean security architecture during his visit to the island, when he declared that “this island can and should be the bedrock of stability and opportunity for Europe and for the East Mediterranean.”98 The United States is already grappling with instability in the Eastern Mediterranean owing to internationalized civil wars in Libya and Syria. An unstable Cyprus would add another source of regional instability. Flare
