When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hosts Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides in Jerusalem today, the agenda will naturally be wide. Security and defense cooperation will be on the table. Yet beneath the visible agenda lies a quieter, more consequential file: energy and connectivity to Europe, not as an economic discussion, but as a question of sovereignty.
This meeting takes place at a decisive moment. Cyprus is approaching its presidency of the Council of the European Union, Greece and Cyprus form Europe's southeastern anchor, and Israel is no longer a peripheral energy actor. Energy and connectivity are not side issues; they are the connective tissue linking Israeli, Greek, Cypriot, and European interests.
This was precisely the logic behind the EastMed pipeline when it was conceived. EastMed was designed to connect Israeli and Cypriot gas reserves directly to Greece and onward to Europe, bypassing unstable intermediaries and reducing Europe's exposure to coercive gatekeeping. Signed in Athens in January 2020, the intergovernmental agreement reflected a clear strategic intent: geographic diversification and sovereignty.
Then came the freeze.
In mid-January 2022, the Biden administration quietly withdrew its political support for EastMed. Electricity interconnections were promoted as a preferable alternative. Yet EastMed did not stall for technical or economic reasons. It stalled because it collided with Washington's preference to avoid confronting Turkey's self-appointed gatekeeping role.
The timing is impossible to ignore. Barely weeks later, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Overnight, Europe discovered that energy dependency is not abstract, but a strategic liability. The project meant to reduce that liability had been halted just in time for it to matter.
What followed was not independence, but self-deception. Europe pledged to end its reliance on Russian gas. In practice, it rerouted it. With Nord Stream disabled and the Ukrainian transit route closed, Russian gas continued to reach Europe through TurkStream. The molecules remained Russian, the revenues still flowed east, but the invoice passed through Ankara. This was presented as diversification; in reality, it laundered dependency through Turkey.
The result is worse than before. Europe has not only failed to free itself from Russian gas; it has transferred leverage to a state that openly uses energy as a political instrument. Turkey now positions itself as a hub capable of blending, relabeling, and reselling gas, while extracting strategic concessions in return. Dependency did not disappear. It changed hands.
The American role in this outcome cannot be reduced to one administration. The difference between Biden and Trump is one of style, not result. Trump's problem was strategic disorientation. He repeatedly treated fundamentally different corridors as interchangeable, selling competing maps at once. By blurring IMEC with Turkey-backed routes through the Caucasus and Central Asia, he weakened the logic of sovereign connectivity.
The episode of "inviting" Kazakhstan into the Abraham Accords exposed this flaw with unusual clarity. Kazakhstan sits at the core of the Middle Corridor, economically tied to Moscow and structurally embedded in Turkey-anchored Eurasian transit networks. Wrapping it in Middle Eastern branding produced headlines without leverage – symbolism without infrastructure – and signaled confusion about which geography Washington was actually backing.
The Biden administration framed EastMed as environmentally outdated and geopolitically inconvenient, prioritizing de-escalation and climate optics while leaving Europe exposed. The Trump worldview, by contrast, favors grand corridors and transactional bargains. Yet its tolerance for Turkish ambitions, from the Zangezur corridor to personal diplomacy with Ankara, similarly reinforces Turkey's role as an indispensable intermediary. Two administrations, two narratives, one shared outcome: Europe remains dependent.
This contradiction is increasingly visible in the broader corridor debate. IMEC was announced as a transformative link between India, the Gulf, and Europe. Yet without a secure, sovereign Mediterranean anchor, it risks remaining a conceptual map rather than an operational one. At the same time, alternative routes through the Caucasus and Central Asia, marketed as "middle corridors", reinforce Turkish leverage. Even the symbolic discussion of extending the Abraham Accords to Kazakhstan reflects this confusion between optics and infrastructure.
Against this backdrop, it is essential to be clear about Egypt. Israel's expanding gas cooperation with Egypt, including agreements reached just last week, does not undermine EastMed. It complements it. Egypt provides an immediate, pragmatic export route using existing LNG infrastructure. EastMed provides a long-term, direct, sovereign corridor to Europe. One is a bridge. The other is the backbone. Together, they create flexibility rather than competition. This is precisely why Ankara reacts so aggressively to both. The Egyptian route already moves volumes. EastMed would permanently break the monopoly on mediation.
The economic argument against EastMed has also been overstated. With construction costs estimated in the single-digit billions and a projected operational life measured in decades, the pipeline does not require heroic assumptions to make sense. Under conservative European price scenarios, capital recovery would occur within a timeframe typical of strategic infrastructure, while the strategic return would begin the moment dependency is reduced. Energy security cannot be priced only per cubic meter.
Nor is EastMed limited to gas. It fits naturally into a broader corridor architecture that includes electricity interconnections, digital infrastructure, and future energy carriers. Planning scenarios already examine expanded capacity and multi-use configurations. This is not a dormant idea waiting for permission. It is a set of options actively being assessed and coordinated among regional partners and within European frameworks.
None of these questions addresses the value of the United States as an ally. But alliance is not veto power, and partnership does not require strategic paralysis. On EastMed and Mediterranean connectivity, American priorities do not merely differ from those of Israel, Greece, Cyprus, and Europe – they cut across them. This is not partisan. It reflects Washington's preference for managing intermediaries over eliminating dependence. The cost of that choice is already visible.
The Jerusalem meeting is more than a routine trilateral. It marks a recalibration by regional democracies and the European Union toward a simple truth: energy sovereignty cannot be outsourced. Advancing EastMed, alongside electricity interconnections and IMEC's Mediterranean anchor, is not a move against Washington but an assumption of responsibility for Europe's own stability.
Europe can keep calling Turkish mediation "diversification" or build the infrastructure that gives the word meaning. EastMed forces that choice. History will remember not Europe's statements after 2022, but whether it chose resilience over convenience when the path was clear.
Shay Gal is an expert in international politics, crisis management and strategic communications. He works globally, focusing on power relations, geopolitical strategy and public diplomacy, and their impact on policy and decision-making.
