Over the course of 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has maintained a steady drumbeat of provocations targeting Greece. The year began with his foreign ministry issuing a statement threatening to declare Greece’s sovereignty as “debatable” if it continued to “militarize” its Aegean islands. Since threatening to move against Greece’s Aegean territories in September, Turkey’s president has seized upon the unveiling of a new line of ballistic missiles as an opportunity to up the ante. He boasted that the country’s new Tayfun missiles had “driven the Greeks crazy” and noted that Athens could now be comfortably targeted. At the start of December, he echoed these sentiments again and added that Greece “should not stay comfortable.” If Athens attempted to ship American weapons to its Aegean islands, “a country like Turkey,” he enigmatically warned, “will probably not pick pears.” American representatives have responded to these threats with public admonitions. State Department Spokesperson Ned Price recently reiterated Washington’s “regret” over Erdogan’s provocations. “All that an escalation of rhetoric will do,” he emphasized, “is to raise tensions and to distract us from the unity of purpose … that we need to confront any number of challenges,” namely the dangers of a more aggressive Russia.
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