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Wary of Wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Old Foes Türkiye and Greece Test a Friendship Initiative

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (L) and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis leave after speaking to the press following their meeting in Athens during Erdogan's official visit to Greece, Dec. 7, 2023. (AFP Photo)
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (L) and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis leave after speaking to the press following their meeting in Athens during Erdogan's official visit to Greece, Dec. 7, 2023. (AFP Photo)
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Wary of Wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Old Foes Türkiye and Greece Test a Friendship Initiative

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (L) and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis leave after speaking to the press following their meeting in Athens during Erdogan's official visit to Greece, Dec. 7, 2023. (AFP Photo)
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (L) and Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis leave after speaking to the press following their meeting in Athens during Erdogan's official visit to Greece, Dec. 7, 2023. (AFP Photo)

Old foes Türkiye and Greece will test a five-month-old friendship initiative Monday when Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis visits Ankara.
The two NATO members, which share decades of mutual animosity, a tense border and disputed waters, agreed to sideline disputes last December. Instead, they’re focusing on trade and energy, repairing cultural ties and a long list of other items placed on the so-called positive agenda, The Associated Press said.
Here’s a look at what the two sides hope to achieve and the disputes that have plagued ties in the past:
FOCUSING ON A POSITIVE AGENDA Mitsotakis is to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara on Monday as part of efforts to improve ties following the solidarity Athens showed Ankara after a devastating earthquake hit southern Türkiye last year.
The two leaders have sharp differences over the Israeli-Hamas war, but are keen to hold back further instability in the eastern Mediterranean as conflict also continues to rage in Ukraine.
“We always approach our discussions with Türkiye with confidence and with no illusions that Turkish positions will not change from one moment to the next,” Mitsotakis said last week, commenting on the visit. “Nevertheless, I think it’s imperative that when we disagree, the channels of communication should always be open."
“We should disagree without tension and without this always causing an escalation on the ground," he added.
Ioannis Grigoriadis, a professor of political science at Ankara’s Bilkent University, said the two leaders would look for ways “to expand the positive agenda and look for topics where the two sides can seek win-win solutions,” such as in trade, tourism and migration.
EASY VISAS FOR TURKISH TOURISTS Erdogan visited Athens in early December, and the two countries have since maintained regular high-level contacts to promote a variety of fence-mending initiatives, including educational exchanges and tourism.
Turkish citizens this summer are able to visit 10 Greek islands using on-the-spot visas, skipping a more cumbersome procedure needed to enter Europe’s common travel area zone, known as the Schengen area.
“This generates a great opportunity for improving the economic relations between the two sides, but also to bring the two stable societies closer — for Greeks and Turks to realize that they have more things in common than they think,” Grigoriadis said.
A HISTORY OF DISPUTES Disagreements have brought Athens and Ankara close to war on several occasions over the past five decades, mostly over maritime borders and the rights to explore for resources in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean seas.
The two countries are also locked in a dispute over Cyprus, which was divided in 1974 when Türkiye invaded following a coup by supporters of union with Greece. Only Türkiye recognizes a Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence in the island’s northern third.
The dispute over the exploration of energy resources resulted in a naval standoff in 2020 and a vow by Erdogan to halt talks with the Mitsotakis government. But the two men met three times last year following a thaw in relations and a broader effort by Erdogan to re-engage with Western countries.
The foreign ministers of the two countries, Hakan Fidan of Türkiye and George Gerapetritis of Greece, are set to join the talks Monday and hold a separate meeting.
RECENT DISAGREEMENTS Just weeks before Mitsotakis’ visit, Erdogan announced the opening of a former Byzantine-era church in Istanbul as a mosque, drawing criticism from Greece and the Greek Orthodox church. Like Istanbul’s landmark Hagia Sophia, the Chora had operated as a museum for decades before it was converted into a mosque.
Türkiye, meanwhile, has criticized recently announced plans by Greece to declare areas in the Ionian and Aegean seas as “marine parks” to conserve aquatic life. Türkiye objects to the one-sided declaration in the Aegean, where some areas remain under dispute, and has labeled the move as “a step that sabotages the normalization process.”
Grigoriadis said Türkiye and Greece could focus on restoring derelict Ottoman monuments in Greece and Greek Orthodox monuments in Türkiye. “That would be an opportunity” for improved ties, he said.

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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
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Challenges of the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Pier Offer Lessons for the US Army

A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS
A truck carries humanitarian aid across Trident Pier, a temporary pier to deliver aid, off the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, near the Gaza coast, May 19, 2024. US Army Central/Handout via REUTERS

It was their most challenging mission.
US Army soldiers in the 7th Transportation Brigade had previously set up a pier during training and in exercises overseas but never had dealt with the wild combination of turbulent weather, security threats and sweeping personnel restrictions that surrounded the Gaza humanitarian aid project.
Designed as a temporary solution to get badly needed food and supplies to desperate Palestinians, the so-called Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore system, or JLOTS, faced a series of setbacks over the spring and summer. It managed to send more than 20 million tons of aid ashore for people in Gaza facing famine during the Israel-Hamas war.
Service members struggled with what Col. Sam Miller, who was commander during the project, called the biggest “organizational leadership challenge” he had ever experienced.
Speaking to The Associated Press after much of the unit returned home, Miller said the Army learned a number of lessons during the four-month mission. It began when President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union speech in March that the pier would be built and lasted through July 17, when the Pentagon formally declared that the mission was over and the pier was being permanently dismantled.
The Army is reviewing the $230 million pier operation and what it learned from the experience. One of the takeaways, according to a senior Army official, is that the unit needs to train under more challenging conditions to be better prepared for bad weather and other security issues it faced. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because assessments of the pier project have not been publicly released.
In a report released this week, the inspector general for the US Agency for International Development said Biden ordered the pier's construction even as USAID staffers expressed concerns that it would be difficult and undercut a push to persuade Israel to open “more efficient” land crossings to get food into Gaza.
The Defense Department said the pier “achieved its goal of providing an additive means of delivering high volumes of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza to help address the acute humanitarian crisis.” The US military knew from the outset “there would be challenges as part of this in this complex emergency,” the statement added.
The Biden administration had set a goal of the US sea route and pier providing food to feed 1.5 million people for 90 days. It fell short, bringing in enough to feed about 450,000 people for a month before shutting down, the USAID inspector general's report said.
The Defense Department’s watchdog also is doing an evaluation of the project.
Beefing up training Army soldiers often must conduct their exercises under difficult conditions designed to replicate war. Learning from the Gaza project — which was the first time the Army set up a pier in actual combat conditions — leaders say they need to find ways to make the training even more challenging.
One of the biggest difficulties of the Gaza pier mission was that no US troops could step ashore — a requirement set by Biden. Instead, US service members were scattered across a floating city of more than 20 ships and platforms miles offshore that had to have food, water, beds, medical care and communications.
Every day, said Miller, there were as many as 1,000 trips that troops and other personnel made from ship to boat to pier to port and back.
“We were moving personnel around the sea and up to the Trident pier on a constant basis,” Miller said. “And every day, there was probably about a thousand movements taking place, which is quite challenging, especially when you have sea conditions that you have to manage.”
Military leaders, he said, had to plan three or four days ahead to ensure they had everything they needed because the trip from the pier to their “safe haven” at Israel's port of Ashdod was about 30 nautical miles.
The trip over and back could take up to 12 hours, in part because the Army had to sail about 5 miles out to sea between Ashdod and the pier to stay a safe distance from shore as they passed Gaza City, Miller said.
Normally, Miller said, when the Army establishes a pier, the unit sets up a command onshore, making it much easier to store and access supplies and equipment or gather troops to lay out orders for the day.
Communication difficulties While his command headquarters was on the US military ship Roy P. Benavidez, Miller said he was constantly moving with his key aides to the various ships and the pier.
“I slept and ate on every platform out there,” he said.
The US Army official concurred that a lot of unexpected logistical issues came up that a pier operation may not usually include.
Because the ships had to use the Ashdod port and a number of civilian workers under terms of the mission, contracts had to be negotiated and written. Agreements had to be worked out so vessels could dock, and workers needed to be hired for tasks that troops couldn't do, including moving aid onto the shore.
Communications were a struggle.
“Some of our systems on the watercraft can be somewhat slower with bandwidth, and you’re not able to get up to the classified level,” Miller said.
He said he used a huge spreadsheet to keep track of all the ships and floating platforms, hundreds of personnel and the movement of millions of tons of aid from Cyprus to the Gaza shore.
When bad weather broke the pier apart, they had to set up ways to get the pieces moved to Ashdod and repaired. Over time, he said, they were able to hire more tugs to help move sections of the pier more quickly.
Some of the pier's biggest problems — including the initial reluctance of aid agencies to distribute supplies throughout Gaza and later safety concerns from the violence — may not apply in other operations where troops may be quickly setting up a pier to get military forces ashore for an assault or disaster response.
“There’s tons of training value and experience that every one of the soldiers, sailors and others got out of this,” Miller said. "There’s going to be other places in the world that may have similar things, but they won’t be as tough as the things that we just went through.”
When the time comes, he said, “we’re going to be much better at doing this type of thing.”
One bit of information could have given the military a better heads-up about the heavy seas that would routinely hammer the pier. Turns out, said the Army official, there was a Gaza surf club, and its headquarters was near where they built the pier.
That "may be an indicator that the waves there were big,” the official said.