A Contested Mediterranean: What Role for the US?

This report explores maritime security conditions in the Mediterranean and the evolving US engagement in the region. As critical infrastructure becomes increasingly vulnerable to sabotage, freedom of is undermined by conflict, and energy disputes generate tension, US policy focus on the region has become fragmented and disengaged. The authors call for a sustained American role to strengthen maritime domain awareness, allied coordination, infrastructure protection, and the capacity to respond when Mediterranean crises affect US and transatlantic interests.

Executive Summary and Policy Recommendations

Compounding Challenges

Critical Infrastructure and Basing Vulnerabilities

Freedom of Challenges

Irregular Migration and Human Trafficking

Militarization and Great Power Rivalry

Organized Crime, Illicit Trafficking, and Sanctions Evasion

International Cooperation and Fragmentation Challenges

The Case for Preventive Engagement

The United States retains a significant military presence in the Mediterranean, but its strategic attention and higher-value military resources have increasingly shifted toward other theaters. This is a miscalculation because while the sea basin and its littoral areas are essential to allied military operations, global trade, energy flows, and American hard power projection, the region’s security environment has been growing increasingly complex.

The security conditions across the Mediterranean are deteriorating on multiple fronts. Critical infrastructure, from ports and energy distribution and production facilities to undersea communication networks, face growing vulnerability to sabotage. Freedom of (FoN) has come under pressure from conflict spillover in the Black Sea and Red Sea, maritime chokepoint disruptions, and the proliferation of shadow fleets operating outside regulatory frameworks. Maritime energy disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean continue to generate tensions among regional actors, including US allies. Organized crime and irregular migration add to the pressures on governments across the region.

These trends, while predating reduced US engagement, have continued to unfold alongside the ongoing shift in attention and resources toward other theaters. Russia, China, and Iran have, meanwhile, expanded their presence in and around the Mediterranean basin, reflecting their strategic objectives and facilitated by the region’s own conflicts and vulnerabilities. At the same time, a smaller and more episodic American role risks creating additional opportunities for competitors to consolidate their positions and leaves allies with more onerous surveillance, coordination, and response burdens. And while European partners have assumed a larger of these responsibilities in recent years, existing responses remain fragmented across military, migration, law enforcement, infrastructure, and other frameworks.

The United States does not face an immediate Mediterranean crisis. However, the region has demonstrated its ability to demand costly US intervention when instability escalates. A sustained American role supporting rather than replacing European regional efforts could strengthen maritime domain awareness, allied coordination, infrastructure protection, and the capacity to respond when Mediterranean crises affect US and transatlantic interests.

Policy Recommendations

Maintain a modest but continuous US maritime security baseline force for the Mediterranean. The US currently has the Navy’s Sixth Fleet headquartered in Naples, Italy, six forward-deployed destroyers stationed at the port of Rota, in Spain, as well as maritime patrol and reconnaissance capabilities spread throughout the region, and it engages in regular Mediterranean operations. But those assets are frequently pulled away to other theaters. What is needed now is to establish a minimum Mediterranean readiness/availability requirement, ensuring that some intelligence, surveillance-and-reconnaissance, command-and-control, and surface-combatant capacity remains available for Mediterranean contingencies.

Improve maritime surveillance and protect critical infrastructure. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) runs Operation Sea Guardian, which supports maritime situational awareness and can protect critical infrastructure when authorized by the North Atlantic Council. NATO has also established the Maritime Center for Critical Undersea Infrastructure (CUI) as well as the CUI-Network, which aim to enhance coordination on safeguarding these assets; in 2025, the alliance explicitly expanded the latter’s work in the Mediterranean. What is needed now is to move from periodic surveillance toward persistent monitoring of selected high-risk transit corridors. Rather than create a new institution, existing elements of different models can be adapted by integrating naval surveillance, unmanned systems, commercial shipping data, and infrastructure operators. This can be piloted in one or two corridors where, for example, military threats, shadow fleet presence, and undersea cable sabotage risks overlap.

Counter shadow fleets, sanctions evasion, and illicit maritime networks. Washington is already sanctioning Iran- and Russia-linked shadow fleet networks aggressively. Moreover, the EU’s Operation EUNAVFOR MED Irini monitors hundreds of ships, ports, airports, and suspect flights; shares information with law enforcement agencies; and has added a maritime-situational awareness mandate. An additional step to bolster these efforts would be to connect financial intelligence to operational maritime enforcement. This could be achieved by creating a joint US-EU mechanism — potentially through existing NATO/Operation Irini channels — that turns ownership, insurance, automatic identification system (AIS) manipulation, and financial intelligence from the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) into prioritized vessel watchlists for European port inspection and maritime surveillance.

Use American diplomacy selectively to prevent maritime disputes from escalating. Washington has supported Greece-Turkey dialogue and mediated the 2022 Lebanon-Israel maritime agreement. But Washington can push for more regular Greece-Turkey deconfliction mechanism exercises under the NATO umbrella as well as update them to cover the kinds of incidents that created the 2020 crisis over their competing offshore claims. Rather than attempt to mediate every regional maritime dispute, US diplomacy can intensify when disputes show signs of military escalation.

The United States maintains significant military infrastructure and naval capacity in the Mediterranean region, but its posture has become leaner and more episodic as strategic attention and high-end military assets have increasingly been redirected to other theaters. By 2025, American naval strength in the basin had declined to a multi-year low, while US carrier deployments have become occasional rather than routine. [1] Though not a full withdrawal, the tempo reduction reflects a broader shift in priorities even as maritime security in the Mediterranean has become more complex. The region’s overlapping challenges, including energy infrastructure vulnerabilities, freedom of (FoN) threats, irregular migration, illicit trafficking, and intensifying militarization, have all increased in recent years, elevating the Mediterranean to a key arena of global competition and concern.

With American focus mostly turned elsewhere, China, Russia, and Iran have expanded their activities in and around the Mediterranean, creating a more crowded strategic environment for the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. That said, there is not a straightforward correlation between the declining American presence on the one hand and increased regional activities of its rivals on the other. The case for US engagement is therefore not a call for a return to an earlier era of American maritime dominance but the preservation of a modest but sustained role that can support allies, improve coordination, maintain access, and reduce the costs of responding when crises escalate.

Compounding Challenges

The Mediterranean sits at a critical intersection of geopolitical interests for the US and littoral countries alike. It provides essential routes for global power projection, hosts infrastructure vital to NATO operations, and facilitates transatlantic trade. But the region’s security conditions have for years been deteriorating along several dimensions. Energy infrastructure vulnerabilities are increasing as disputes over maritime borders intensify. Migration pressures on destination and transit countries persist, with routes continually shifting between eastern and western corridors. Trafficking networks operate with growing sophistication. Strategic maritime chokepoints face mounting challenges to free passage. And regional militarization is escalating. These trends point to scenarios that constitute threats to core US interests, such as compromised naval access, instability affecting NATO cohesion, as well as adversarial actors’ growing influence and control over strategic corridors. The policy choice before the US becomes whether to engage preventatively while challenges remain manageable or wait to respond actively only when they escalate into crises directly affecting American interests and security, at which point intervention becomes much more costly.

In considering these issues, it is important to distinguish between the sub-regional differences across this wide theater. The Eastern Mediterranean faces intensifying tensions driven mainly by great power competition and energy discoveries among littoral states, from Cyprus to the countries of the Levant. This half of the Mediterranean basin is also where Russia’s military buildup and Iranian proxy activities have been concentrated. The Western Mediterranean presents different but equally complex challenges: migration pressures from Morocco to Spain and from Tunisia and Libya to Italy, illicit trafficking networks spanning the region, and strategic international competition for control over key North African ports. Though at the same time, it is important to note that many if not all of the above-mentioned issues can be observed, to one degree or another, in the east as well as the west.

As these trends have been unfolding, US priorities and attention have been shifting elsewhere, compelling Europe to take greater responsibility for Mediterranean security. China’s, Russia’s, and Iran’s expanded military, political, and commercial activities in the region, which have been occurring at the same time, have their its own drivers; but limited or inconsistent Western engagement can certainly make it easier for outside actors to consolidate positions once established.

The interconnected nature of infrastructure protection, human mobility, illicit trade, FoN, and military cooperation in this region — and their global repercussions — demands a cohesive strategy that bridges civilian and military efforts across both sub-theaters. The Mediterranean is not solely Europe’s or North Africa’s problem. Measured American leadership can help prevent regional issues from necessitating expensive, long-term interventions.

Critical Infrastructure and Basing Vulnerabilities

Securing critical infrastructure is placing growing demands on governments and corporations around the world, with ports, shipping lanes, energy facilities, and food-production sectors increasingly vulnerable to competition, strikes (both conventional and in the cyber realm), and environmental disruptions. This is equally true in the Mediterranean region, where local states understand the challenge must be met through improved monitoring, allied coordination, and infrastructure designed for resilience rather than just low construction costs. The nature and degree of exposure differ between east and west. In the Eastern Mediterranean, spillover from neighboring conflicts have spurred littoral authorities into action to protect their critical infrastructure. [2] These states have seen how Russia’s war in Ukraine brought subversive attacks on submarine cables in the Baltic Sea, while maritime and transportation infrastructure across the Middle East has come under repeated threat since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and subsequent regional conflagrations. [3] In July 2026, explosions from a drone attack on Egypt’s Damietta port, [4] which occurred amid the US-Iran conflict, set two nearby-moored ships on fire, including an American-owned gas storage vessel. The incident underscored the region’s exposure to direct assaults on maritime infrastructure.

The Western Mediterranean faces a similar set of vulnerabilities — particularly to its role as Europe’s primary gateway for North African trade and energy imports — albeit mostly due to other risk drivers, including uncontrolled migration flows, sabotage, and efforts by outside powers to assert control over critical infrastructure. Maritime transport remains the main channel for trade across the globe, and the Mediterranean is one of the world’s busiest maritime spaces, supporting 20% of all global seaborne trade; more than 24% of all merchant vessels ply these waters annually. [5] The Strait of Gibraltar, linking the Atlantic and Mediterranean, is a critical chokepoint to such sea-based traffic, with the Spanish Algeciras and Moroccan Tanger Med port complexes serving as major logistics nodes on either side. Further east, additional key seaports, such as Valencia, in eastern Spain, and Marseille-Fos, in southern France, anchor important container, industrial, and energy supply chains. For the European Union, whose shipowners collectively control a substantial of the global commercial fleet, keeping those corridors secure and open is a direct strategic and economic interest. Compared to the Eastern Mediterranean, the region’s western half has seen fewer hybrid attacks (i.e., covert or overt destabilizing activities, below the threshold of open armed conflict) outside of the cyber sphere; but it has not been immune. [6] In 2022, coordinated sabotage of undersea fiberoptic cable landing sites near Marseille degraded telecommunications services in France, an incident the country’s authorities described as “unprecedented.” [7]

The North Atlantic alliance recognizes the threat and has adopted several initiatives to help its members protect their critical infrastructure. In the Mediterranean basin itself, NATO annually conducts five to six focused naval missions under Operation Sea Guardian, which supports maritime situational awareness and can be employed to protect critical infrastructure if directed to do so by the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s principal political decision-making body. NATO has also established the Maritime Center for Critical Undersea Infrastructure (CUI) as well as the CUI-Network, which aim to enhance coordination on safeguarding these assets; in 2025, the alliance explicitly expanded the latter’s work in the Mediterranean. [8] These maritime surveillance efforts remain episodic, however. Especially the most heavily utilized regional transit corridors and infrastructure networks need continuous monitoring, which could be accomplished, in part, through improved integration of allied naval surveillance, unmanned systems, commercial shipping data, and infrastructure operator activities.

For the United States, infrastructure throughout the wider Mediterranean region is crucial for maintaining transatlantic trade, deterring adversaries, and protecting the maritime arteries that support America’s military bases in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Washington maintains a significant regional naval presence in the form of the Sixth Fleet, headquartered in Naples, Italy, buttressed by a network of bases and installations from multiple US military services as well as NATO facilities arrayed around the basin. Nevertheless, the Mediterranean is no longer dominated by the kind of sustained American maritime posture seen during decades. European allies and NATO have been assuming greater day-to-day responsibility for maritime monitoring, infrastructure security, and regional vigilance, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — but coordination and surveillance challenges remain.

Military bases on NATO’s southwestern flank, which include the Rota naval station and other key installations in Spain as well as the British facilities in Gibraltar, are crucial to securing the Atlantic-Mediterranean chokepoint. Although — or perhaps because — these bases and the string of littoral alliance installations further east underpin the region’s broader security architecture, they are also subject to attacks. [9] NATO members, including Croatia, Italy, Greece, and Spain, have faced a rising volume of cyberattacks on ports and other sensitive sites — Russia, China, and Iran are suspected in many if not most of these incidents. [10]

But alongside the growing threat of attacks on ports and other infrastructure, a more ever-present concern relates to rival external powers’ efforts to gain access to or outright control over strategic maritime assets, particularly along the North African coast. The broader Tanger Med industrial ecosystem in Morocco is emblematic of this trend, illustrating China’s growing commercial footprint in North Africa. Namely, the adjacent Mohammed VI Tanger Tech City, a Sino-Moroccan development partnership, has attracted a growing cluster of Chinese industrial investments, raising worries in the EU that the kingdom could become host to Chinese factories able to circumvent European trade restrictions and, potentially, locking Morocco into China’s advanced technology ecosystem. [11] Russia’s entrenchment in eastern Libyan ports further highlights the risk from an even more security-forward standpoint. Moscow has used access to those facilities and logistics networks, in breach of the United Nations arms embargo, to move weapons into the Sahel, gaining an adversarial position astride a critical EU trade and energy gateway. [12] The Libyan case is emblematic of how limited and inconsistent Western engagement can facilitate the consolidation of outside actors that have their own independent, countervailing, and potentially destabilizing objectives.

Freedom of Challenges

Freedom of has been one of America’s most consistent foreign policy commitments, upheld across administrations for over two centuries, and treated as a foundational principle of the international order the US helped build after the end of World War II. From the Barbary Wars (1801-05 and 1815) to Operation Prosperity Guardian (2023), Washington has repeatedly put naval power behind the principle that commercial and military vessels must be able to move freely through international waters. This foundation makes current trends in the Mediterranean a national security concern for the US and a test of the commitment that has underpinned American credibility globally.

Though increasingly under pressure from multiple directions throughout the Mediterranean basin, FoN is particularly endangered in the eastern half. The Russo-Ukrainian war poignantly illustrated this fact. First, Russia’s sharply escalated aggression in the adjoining Black Sea region in early 2022 prompted Turkey to apply its rights under the 1936 Montreux Convention, which empowers Ankara to regulate traffic through the Turkish Straits (the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles). [13] As soon as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Turkey closed the straits to all foreign military ship traffic — including that of both of the belligerent parties but effectively only affecting Russia (since Ukraine has virtually no navy) — preventing them from entering the Black Sea or exiting into the Eastern Mediterranean, with the exception of warships returning to their ports. Russia then compounded the disruption to FoN in the Black Sea by blockading Ukrainian seaports and attacking its maritime exports attempting to traverse the basin.

As much as 95% of Ukraine’s agricultural products had heretofore been transported by ship, so the Russian actions interrupted Mediterranean-bound grain flows to 400 million consumers in Asia, North Africa, and beyond, including crucial food deliveries destined for Egypt. [14] Ukraine has historically been one of the largest suppliers of wheat to the UN World Food Program (WFP), with 40% of its global wheat supplies sourced directly from Ukrainian farms before Russia’s escalation, the majority heading to Middle Eastern and African countries. [15] The resulting price spikes and shortages of grain in the summer of 2022 led to food insecurity across the Middle East. Support from NATO members to provide alternative export options for Ukrainian agricultural products and protection for the Black Sea-Mediterranean route eventually stabilized the situation. But the episode nonetheless underscored the vulnerability of supply chains crossing the Mediterranean and Middle East and North African regions. A more sustained US naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean would improve surveillance and strengthen allied coordination, providing additional reassurances to commercial shippers needing to enter and exit the Black Sea as well as to their insurers.

To the southeast, attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have also impinged on FoN and international trade into and out of the Mediterranean basin. [16] The disruption in Red Sea traffic contributed to a sharp decline in port calls and a quadrupling of shipping rates in the Mediterranean when the crisis began. [17] Though the Houthis framed their attacks as resistance to Israel, the brunt has been felt primarily by Western and Asian economies, since the Red Sea is the most direct maritime path connecting the two markets. Between October 2023 and 2025, the Houthis launched more than 530 attacks on ships passing through this critical transportation route, sinking or hijacking several vessels and significantly reducing the volume of shipping into the Eastern Mediterranean. [18] The threat has since become more serious, as the Houthis took control of Yemen’s western coastline and islands along the Bab al-Mandab strait, putting them in a position to threaten or close this critical chokepoint linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and, through Suez, the Mediterranean. [19]

In December 2023, in response to the initial Houthi strikes on Red Sea shipping and to reassert FoN in the maritime corridor, the US formed Operation Prosperity Guardian in coalition with around 20 other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore, all of which were directly affected by the disruption. [20] And a month later, Washington, with support mainly from London, spearheaded the offensive-centered Operation Poseidon Archer, carrying out 12 months of strikes on Houthi targets inside Yemen. [21] In parallel, the EU launched Operation Aspides in February 2024, a purely defensive mission designed to protect commercial vessels. [22] When President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration expanded the tempo and intensity of the US air campaign, rechristened Operation Rough Rider; it lasted roughly seven weeks, until early May 2025, when Oman brokered a cease-fire. The pause held until the Houthis reentered the conflict in support of Iran in March 2026, soon after the February 28 outbreak of the US-Israeli military action against Iran. This conflict has exacerbated preexisting international maritime pressures and broadly reshaped threat calculations across the region, with insurance rates rising by up to 1,000% for vessels operating in this area. [23]

Operations Poseidon Archer/Rough Rider and Aspides have all been reactive engagements, resulting in serious costs and limited gains. In the American case, the campaign required the short-notice redeployment of naval and air assets from other theaters, incurring direct military costs and diminished presence elsewhere and illustrating the tradeoffs involved when forces needed to respond to a crisis are committed to other missions. Europe’s Aspides faced a different constraint: assembled from a handful of multinational ships on short notice, it could protect individual civilian vessels but could not eliminate the source of the threat.

While only a small portion of US seaborne trade utilizes the Suez Canal or the Strait of Gibraltar, 30% of global container shipping transits these passages. And because the Red Sea and the Mediterranean form a single trade corridor linked by the Suez Canal, disruption at one end quickly leads to congestion and cost spikes that ripple through the entire global shipping sector. A sustained US role in the Eastern Mediterranean would help bolster the resilience of commercial maritime transit along this route. By anchoring naval coordination involving its European allies and Egypt, such a US-backed regional effort could better protect the Suez approaches and Mediterranean ports as well as reinforce the air- and missile-defense and surveillance links that support operations to blunt Houthi attacks.

Adversarial seizures of maritime chokepoints or threats to shipping routes can incur significant security and commercial harm. The 2026 US-Iran conflict has brought this point into sharper relief with Tehran’s forcible closure of the Strait of Hormuz and its Yemeni proxies’ analogous designs on the Bab al-Mandab. The Mediterranean is bottled up by three similar chokepoints — the Strait of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, and the Turkish Straits — and potentially threatening Iran-linked activity is already present in the approaches to at least the latter two.

Defending these corridors requires sustained presence, but the available baseline has changed. During the 2003 Iraq invasion, two US carrier strike groups operated in the Mediterranean at the same time. [24] Today the US’s continuous naval presence there has become much leaner, centered on a handful of destroyers dispersed across the basin: the Sixth Fleet is headquartered in Naples, its flagship is homeported in Gaeta, Italy, and six destroyers are based at the Spanish port of Rota. [25] As of early October 2026, that presence includes no carrier or amphibious group in the Mediterranean, and operations against Iran have pulled Rota’s destroyers eastward, leaving fewer ships for exercises with allies or to respond to the growing number of regional emergencies involving unilateral attempts to restrict free maritime passage. [26]

The Department of Defense’s own reports show the number of excessive offshore sovereignty claims, undermining FoN rights for international vessels, increased from 22 in fiscal year 2022 to 29 in 2023. [27] Four of these occurred in the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. [28] While the Sixth Fleet retains the capability to respond to such incidents, it has fewer assets at its disposal than in periods of more consistent Mediterranean presence, and those forces are more often diverted to other operations.

Challenges to free maritime passage anywhere in the world undermine core US national interests. However, in the Mediterranean, unfettered access is critical to guarantee mobility for US naval forces between Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the Indo-Pacific via the Suez Canal. The Sixth Fleet’s Naples headquarters provides a logistical base from which to quickly mobilize to all of them. In 2011, the US, along with European and Arab allies, depended on unrestricted Mediterranean access to intervene in the Libya crisis. [29] In 2024, Operation Iron Shield , which helped protect Israel from Iranian missile attacks, hinged upon unrestricted access to and air control over the entire basin. [30] In recent years, however, this continued access has faced growing pressure from both physical threats and intra-regional geopolitical disputes. In the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, competing Greek and Turkish offshore claims, alongside a bilaterally negotiated Turkish-Libyan maritime delimitation agreement, risk creating diplomatic friction and complicating naval operations and infrastructure-protection missions. The Montreux Convention’s restrictions on warship transit through the Turkish Straits during the Russo-Ukrainian war further illustrate how geopolitical developments can constrain the movement of allied naval assets between the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

The value of maintaining FoN throughout the Mediterranean basin, of course, is not limited to war-time responses. In peacetime, the US and its allies rely on the same access to interdict illegal arms shipments, monitor hostile activities, and disrupt trafficking networks. Since 2015, for example, European allies have repeatedly intercepted illicit arms shipments heading to Libya. [31] Israeli coastal patrols, in turn, have spent a decade targeting or interdicting Iranian sanctions-busting oil and weapons shipments, including cruise missiles and drones moving through the same corridors. [32]

On the commercial front, even limited disruptions to freedom of can translate quickly into economic losses and energy price spikes. The Red Sea crisis — to say nothing of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz — demonstrated this clearly. Supply chain delays caused by Houthi attacks affected US manufacturing, technology, and pharmaceutical sectors, while economic slowdowns in Europe reduced demand for American exports. [33] Moreover, the proliferation of low-cost attack drones, missiles, and cyberwarfare employed by both state and non-state actors have made these disruptions easier to carry out and harder to detect. As infrastructural vulnerabilities increase and responses become more reactive, they will undermine US force projection across multiple regions. To prevent that, the US will have to prioritize protecting critical infrastructure and safeguarding FoN throughout the wider Mediterranean.

The vulnerability of strategic energy infrastructure often has global economic implications. The apparent 2022 sabotage of the Russian-built Nord (North) Stream natural gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea was a reminder of how exposed such infrastructure can be, though the economic impact was minimal given the EU’s earlier push to cut back on Russian gas purchases. The repeated Iranian strikes on oil and gas facilities across the Gulf in 2026, on the other hand, have poignantly illustrated how energy supply disruptions can have truly worldwide effects. [34] The Mediterranean region — to a dense web of energy infrastructure, including liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and submarine electricity transmission cables that ring or crisscross the basin — is thus particularly vulnerable to similar war-time targeting or hybrid attacks. But the threat environment is not limited to open warfare. The more routine and lingering nature of the threat to these assets, especially in the eastern part, is one of overlapping sovereign claims and legal wrangling over access to offshore natural resources.

Technological advances have increased the potential for offshore gas exploration in the Mediterranean, though environmental concerns deep-sea offshore drilling have grown alongside improving capabilities. [35] Since Israel’s development of the Tamar natural gas field in 2009, the Eastern Mediterranean has emerged as a hotspot for offshore exploitation. [36] Israel’s Leviathan gas field came online in 2019, enabling export agreements with Jordan and Egypt. Another massive gas field, Aphrodite, located within the Cypriot exclusive economic zone (EEZ), [37] was discovered in 2011, and drilling for the first appraisal well began in mid-2023, with an eye to beginning production in 2027. [38] Egypt’s Zohr offshore natural gas field, discovered in 2015, a vision of Egypt as a gas hub, although expanding domestic demand has undermined that ambition. [39] Since those heady early days, exploration has continued apace. The Italian company Eni discovered an estimated 2 trillion cubic feet of gas off Egypt’s coast in 2026. [40]

These discoveries have raised hopes of improved energy security for producers and potential regional consumers alike but have also heightened political tensions and disputes. The East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), announced in 2019 to provide a cooperative framework around the Leviathan, Aphrodite, and Zohr fields, conspicuously excluded Turkey and drew Ankara into a countermove. [41] In 2019, Turkey signed a controversial maritime boundary agreement with Libya’s United Nations-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), asserting expansive Turkish claims that overlap with what Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt consider their EEZs, effectively creating a contested area between Crete and Libya. [42] The GNA received critical Turkish military support in return to defend against a 2019 assault by the opposing forces of General Khalifa Haftar. Turkey’s intervention in Libya certainly involved broader considerations, but the maritime agreement shows how energy politics can become intertwined with civil conflict. The maritime deal became both cause and consequence of Ankara’s deeper involvement.

The regional tensions that followed the Turkish-Libyan offshore delimitation deal were not contained by diplomacy. In 2020, Turkey and Greece pursued competing offshore exploration programs that resulted in an armed standoff. [43] Turkey sent offshore gas exploration vessels accompanied by warships into waters Greece and Cyprus consider their EEZs. Athens scrambled its own navy, and Paris sent French warships in support of Nicosia. The dispute was never fully resolved, even with US diplomatic engagement. [44] Despite some forward momentum toward starting production, Cyprus’s Aphrodite field remains underdeveloped due to the broader Greek-Turkish divide over the island, Turkey’s exclusion from the EMGF, and EU sanctions against Turkish drilling. [45] So rather than a commercial and energy security success story, the aftermath of the discovery of the Aphrodite gas field has come to showcase how a legal conflict can begin to spiral out of control when sustained diplomatic engagement fails.

In contrast, the US-mediated Lebanon-Israel maritime boundary accord in 2022, fragile as it is, demonstrates that pragmatic resolutions in the Eastern Mediterranean are, in fact, possible. [46] One of the main goals of the agreement — and why Washington devoted significant diplomatic capital to achieve it — was to translate Israeli-Lebanese energy cooperation into a pathway toward deconfliction. After some initial optimism, [47] the deal’s prospects as a confidence-building mechanism were undermined by an uncertain outlook on gas exploration as well as regional instability following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel. Yet despite all of the open conflict and instability that has occurred since, the Israeli-Lebanese maritime boundary agreement itself remains in place.

In some ways, the concord was unique: more typically, the US has restrained its involvement in other such complex negotiations between Mediterranean littoral states, often leaving European partners to manage competing claims — even among NATO allies. The comparison, thus, demonstrates both the potential and limits of American diplomacy. On the one hand, US involvement alone cannot resolve the thick web of underlying political and sovereignty disputes that drive Eastern Mediterranean tensions; but on the other hand, targeted mediation can be valuable when maritime disputes threaten escalation, commercial developments, or relations among US allies.

The fragmented political landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean, undelimited maritime boundaries, and competing legal frameworks for dealing with competing claims, combined with the technical challenges inherent in deep-sea drilling and uncertain reserve quantities, suggest that the promised energy bonanza may be more elusive than initially anticipated. However, the main lesson remains that maritime boundary disputes, once triggered by energy discoveries, tend to grow into conflicts that outlast the economic incentives that created them. These disputes are transforming Eastern Mediterranean resources from a potential global energy solution into a source of regional instability and militarization that then impedes commercial activity. These are the geopolitical risks American and European companies are forced to navigate.

While the Eastern Mediterranean has dominated headlines with offshore gas discoveries and EEZ disputes, the Western Mediterranean plays a quieter but critical and generally far more stable role in assuring Europe’s energy security. LNG terminals in Spain and Italy handle significant North African gas imports, and renewable energy interconnectors are beginning to link Morocco’s solar energy to European grids. Algeria, meanwhile, remains a major and generally reliable hydrocarbon supplier to southern Europe. [48]

The region also presents genuine opportunities for greater cooperation, particularly on energy transition. North Africa’s abundant solar and wind capacity, combined with gas pipeline infrastructure — including the transcontinental Medgaz, Transmed, and Greenstream — create a credible pathway for supplying Europe with renewable energy and, potentially, green hydrogen. These sectors are drawing more foreign investment and negotiation. Real risks accompany such opportunities but should be viewed in proportion. Greater energy integration can create dependencies if countries become overly reliant on particular suppliers, export markets, or infrastructure corridors. More broadly, while instability in Maghreb countries is concentrated in Libya, other countries remain susceptible to governance and economic pressures that can shift political conditions quickly. Neither vulnerability is unique to the Western Mediterranean. Rather, they are a feature of energy dependency relationships anywhere. For Europe, the challenge is not to avoid cooperation but to pursue it in ways that build resilience on both sides, strengthen long-term energy security, and give partner countries a greater stake in their resulting infrastructure and investment.

Irregular Migration and Human Trafficking

The Mediterranean has emerged as one of the world’s most heavily utilized migration corridors; the sheer number of people trying to make these dangerous maritime crossings into Europe has led to multiple humanitarian crises over the past decade. [49] Three primary routes have developed. The Eastern Mediterranean route runs primarily through Turkey to Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria. The Central Mediterranean channel connects Libya and Tunisia to Italy and Malta. And finally, the passage in the Western Mediterranean links Morocco and Algeria to Spain, including the Canary Islands. While these routes are somewhat fluid, shifting based on enforcement patterns and bilateral agreements, the division provides a useful framework for tracking movement.

Over the past decade, Mediterranean migration flows have repeatedly adapted to enforcement pressure with traffic shifting among different routes in response to changing push and pull factors across the basin. The Eastern Mediterranean witnessed its sharpest spike in migrants after the outbreak of civil war in Syria in 2011, reaching nearly 885,400 detected crossings via Turkey into Greece, Cyprus, and Bulgaria in 2015; these individuals originated from 103 countries, but Syrians made up a quarter of the total. [50] Another 52,000 Syrians that year took the equally dangerous Central Mediterranean route through North Africa into Italy or Malta. [51]

In response, the EU and Turkey reached a €6 billion deal whereby Brussels would pay the Turkish government to host refugees on its own soil and prevent them from entering Europe. [52] Following the implementation of the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, Eastern Mediterranean crossings dropped sharply, from hundreds of thousands annually to thousands. But as that route tightened, Central Mediterranean crossings surged. In 2016, Italy received over 181,000 migrants, a historic increase. A similar, albeit more problematic, EU-backed Italian migration deal with Libya’s Government of National Accord in 2017 aimed to curb Central Mediterranean flows. [53] The agreement cut the rate of arrivals to Italy in 2018. But simultaneously, Western Mediterranean crossings rose by 172%, with half making their way to Spain, which recorded 57,250 arrivals in 2018. [54]

The Mediterranean has continued to see persistent flows in subsequent years, with North African states serving as source, transit, and destination countries. The location of the Spanish exclaves Ceuta and Melilla, directly bordering Morocco, and the relatively short oversea crossing to mainland Spain have made the Western Mediterranean route attractive despite significant risks. This corridor recorded over 56,000 arrivals in 2023, with pressure on the Canary Islands, which saw a 154% increase compared to the year. Likewise, the Italian island of Lampedusa’s relative proximity to the Tunisian coast has increased Central Mediterranean journeys by migrants, witnessing 158,000 illegal crossings across the whole corridor, a 50% increase compared to the year. [55] By comparison, in 2023 the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex) registered 60,000 crossings via the Eastern Mediterranean route, with mainly Syrians, Afghans, and Palestinians making the attempts.

Receiving countries in Europe have struggled with multiple pressures as a result. Politically, migration that appears uncontrollable fuels the rise of far-right parties and populist leaders across Europe, many of whom oppose EU integration and NATO’s role on the continent and view Russia’s expansionism uncritically. In terms of security, sustained pressure on border and asylum systems can create enforcement and information gaps that trafficking and smuggling networks exploit. Processing backlogs can also impede timely identification, security screening, and appropriate processing of new arrivals. [56]

Economically, southern European states often bear the costs of staging reception center facilities, processing arrivals, and providing social services, which stress local budgets. The budget of Frontex, which grew from €143 million in 2015 to over €1 billion, has partially offset some of these costs through operational support and grants. In 2023, for instance, Italy received €39 million in Frontex grants, while its interior ministry reported migration reception costs of €1.7 billion annually. [57] At the same time, transit countries receive separate EU neighborhood funds for border management capacity, though the amounts and conditions of these deals and packages have been consistently contested.

For migrants themselves the humanitarian toll remains severe. According to the International Organization for Migration’s (IOM) Missing Migrants Project, more than 3,100 migrants died or went missing across all three Mediterranean corridors in 2023. [58] Most of those fatalities were along the Central Mediterranean route. These figures are widely considered underestimates, as many incidents go undetected and unreported. In Libya, for example, sub-Saharan migrants have faced systemic abuse and exploitation. Mass graves, torture, and extortion have been widely documented as recently as February 2025. [59] Armed militias back traffickers who reportedly leverage EU support to solidify their influence and profit from migration control while being complicit in serious human rights violations. Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized the EU’s migration deal with Libyan coast guard forces, in July 2025 warning that funding meant to reduce migration has frequently been diverted or misused, and in some cases used to avoid providing legal protections and perpetuate abusive detention. [60] Preliminary 2026 data suggests that arrivals have fallen: IOM recorded 89,600 arrivals as of October 19. Yet the humanitarian toll remains severe, with nearly 2,500 people recorded dead or missing so far, more than 1,000 of them on the Central Mediterranean route. [61] These patterns show how migration policy can be used by local networks for political and financial gain, often at the expense of meaningful protection for migrants.

Meanwhile, Moscow has sought to weaponize migration to exacerbate the pressures on European countries, indirectly presenting a serious challenge to US interests. [62] Russia and its ally Belarus have deliberately instrumentalized migration along the EU’s eastern land borders. Russia’s expanding military presence in Libya and the Sahel has raised concerns among European officials that Moscow could exploit Mediterranean migration routes in a similar manner. Assessments by the European Parliament and EU member state intelligence agencies warn that Russia-aligned networks, particularly in Libya and previously in Syria and Turkey, facilitated unchecked migration into Europe to overload border systems, stress alliance cohesion, and fuel far-right political movements that oppose Euro-Atlantic institutions. [63] Moscow’s ultimate goal is to undermine intra-European and transatlantic ties. This and other hybrid warfare activities require responses beyond simple border security from European allies. Where such activity intersects directly with Russian hybrid operations and NATO security, targeted US intelligence and security cooperation can complement European border and law enforcement responses.

Militarization and Great Power Rivalry

The United States’ shrinking regional footprint notwithstanding, the Mediterranean has become increasingly militarized over the past decade, with more naval exercises and armed buildup by littoral as well as external states. Illustrative of the latter trend, China, Russia, and Iran have been expanding or routinizing their military presence in and around this basin — part of their broader participation in intensifying great power competition on the global stage. The eastern half of the Mediterranean has seen the most concentrated activity from these rivals to the US and Europe. In the western half, the regional military buildup has predominantly been in the form of NATO’s enhanced southern flank operations and North African military modernization programs.

China has conducted three notable joint military exercises with Russia in the Mediterranean, beginning in 2015 with relatively small-scale naval drills designed, in part, to highlight mutual strategic interests in the region. [64] Those exercises have since grown in ambition. In 2017, Chinese warships conducted a series of live-fire drills in the Mediterranean before stopping in the port of Piraeus, Greece (where the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO holds a controlling stake in the Piraeus Port Authority), en route to join Russian naval vessels for maneuvers in the Baltic Sea. Through the port call China sought to display both its naval reach and commercial leverage. [65]

Russia’s intervention in Syria beginning in 2015 created an opportunity to expand its network of Mediterranean bases — namely, the Tartus naval logistics facility and the Hmeimim Airbase — from which it could project power into Libya and further into the Sahel. [66] This later expansion coincided with a period of reduced US attention in the Mediterranean and complicated the operating environment for NATO. [67] A more consistent American role might not necessarily have prevented this Russian presence, but greater surveillance of Russian movements, allied coordination, and sustained attention would have improved Western awareness of and responses to Moscow’s development of logistics networks in the region. Although the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 disrupted Moscow’s position and ended the certainty of its basing arrangements in Syria, Russia has since negotiated a reduced presence at Tartus and Hmeimim with the new leadership in Damascus. [68] Meanwhile, the Kremlin has strengthened its reliance on Libya’s air bases, ports, and overland corridors to sustain operations across Africa. Its influence networks, built through Russian military advisors and personnel from the paramilitary Wagner Group — now reorganized largely under the state-controlled Africa Corps — therefore remain a security concern for NATO and the US. [69]

Iran, likewise, expanded its maritime presence in the wider Mediterranean after Syria’s civil war began in 2011, deploying its naval forces to bolster the Assad regime and exert regional power. [70] Until Assad’s forced departure, Tehran’s support for the Axis of Resistance coalesced around the Eastern Mediterranean, using Syria as a corridor for supplying Hamas and Hizballah. [71] The toppling of the Assad regime, Israel’s wars against Iranian proxies across the Middle East, and the 2025 and 2026 US interventions against Iran have dealt major blows to Tehran’s regional posture, but its underlying willingness to continue to compete for influence in the basin continues. [72]

NATO has responded to this militarization on its doorstep by rival powers through increased naval patrols, expanded exercises involving Spain, France, and Italy, and strengthened security partnerships with Morocco and other North African partners. [73] But the transatlantic alliance’s response has been mostly reactive and incremental rather than strategic: it has focused on managing immediate threats rather than establishing a sustained posture capable of deterring rival military expansion, monitoring adversarial logistics networks, and protecting critical maritime infrastructure across the basin.

A more strategic approach would align naval deployments, intelligence sharing, joint exercises, and infrastructure protecti...