Port in a Storm: Enhancing U.S.-Greece Cooperation at Alexandroupolis Acknowledgments

The ambitious scale and timeframe of the European Union’s (EU) energy goals point to the urgent need to develop significant infrastructure to bring supplies northward into the continent from the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere. [...] In combination with its ongoing military modernization drive, this latter aggression led to Russian predominance in and around the Black Sea littoral, including by growing the size of its Sevastopol-based naval and air fleets and ringing the surrounding basin with sophisticated air and coastal defense systems such as the advanced S-300/-400.10 Moscow’s 2015 and 2020 interventions in Syria and Liby. [...] In particular, the Eastern Mediterranean’s historical importance as the crossroads of three continents, and as an anchor and gateway for southeastern Europe, is reflected in the priority granted it by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which seeks to expand China’s economic, technological, political – and ultimately military – influence and presence in Asian, African, and European trade arteries a. [...] Ambassa- dor to Greece Geoffrey Pyatt said in April 2022, “certainly one of the consequences of this [Ukraine] war will be that the center of geopolitics of Europe is going to shift to the East and to the South.”24 In particular, not enough has been done to integrate the continent’s infrastructure with the Eastern Mediterranean and enable the more effective flow of energy and forces northward into. [...] military there by Greece “allows us to con- tinue to provide military assistance to Ukraine and to counter malign actors and exercise and operate in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea region.”39 JINSA Port in a Storm: Enhancing U.