💥Canada’s PM @MarkJCarney just delivered the political joke of the day while standing next to Erdogan.🙂 From the joint 🇨🇦🇹🇷 communiqué: “As NATO Allies, Canada and Türkiye are bound together by shared values: human rights, individual liberties, democracy, and the rule of law.” Reality check: • Türkiye ranks 163rd of 180 on the 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Journalists, opposition figures, and civil society activists face routine arrests and prosecutions. • It holds far more political prisoners than Putin’s Russia by most credible estimates, with thousands jailed for alleged Gülen links, Kurdish politics, or simply criticizing the president. • It routinely ignores European Court of Human Rights rulings (including the long-running cases of Osman Kavala and Selahattin Demirtaş). • It has carried out broad crackdowns on independent media, civil society, and LGBTQ+ groups. • Erdogan and his government have repeatedly and openly backed Hamas — a group Canada designates as a terrorist organization — while hosting its operatives. • It maintains the occupation of northern Cyprus, conducts military operations and maintains occupation zones in Syria and northern Iraq, and rejects UNCLOS while aggressively asserting expansive maritime claims that threaten neighbors Greece and Cyprus . He even claims Jerusalem as an inheritance from the Ottoman glorious days Canada previously froze and cancelled military export permits over diversion risks and human-rights concerns. Now the joint statement treats these fundamental differences as a shared foundation of “values.” This is the classic polite Canadian performance: list the values for the cameras, set the actual record aside for trade, defense deals, and diversification away from the United States. It is the diplomatic equivalent of smiling for the photo while the facts in the room reek of hypocrisy — the same selective outrage Canada deploys against other governments when convenient.

💥The Libya setback for Greece shows that being a predictable, international-law-focused ally,no longer guarantees results in a transactional Mediterranean.🔥 In a Middle East where alliances are fluid, transactional, and increasingly untethered from old US-centric anchors, the eastern Mediterranean is becoming a test of who can operate in pure interest-driven CHAOS . Eastern Libya’s ratification of the 2019 Turkey-Libya maritime MoU—long opposed by Greece—marks a clear setback for Athens. As Sean Mathews details in Middle East Eye, Greece’s partnerships with Egypt, the UAE, and Israel proved insufficient to block the move. Egypt and Turkey now converge on multiple fronts (Sudan, Somalia, opposition to Israeli expansion post-2023), the UAE is managing its differences with Ankara while backing Saddam Haftar’s ambitions, and Israel itself has engaged the Haftar camp (including a recent Netanyahu meeting with Saddam in UAE ). A Turkish role in the east, by some Israeli calculations, may even tighten Greece’s dependence on Jerusalem. Vassilis Nedos’s reporting aligns: Turkey and the UAE are jointly facilitating efforts to unify Libyan armed forces, while Israel has also sought a foothold in Benghazi. Libya politics remains moving sand. This is not merely a bilateral Greece-Turkey or Greece-Libya problem. It reflects a broader reordering as the United States is in transition—less willing or able to underwrite regional security architectures. In that vacuum, states prioritize immediate gains (energy claims, political succession in Libya, countering rivals elsewhere) over consistent alignment with Greek or Cypriot maritime interests. Greece and Cyprus cannot rely on the assumption that shared partners will automatically defend their positions. They must become sharper, more self-reliant actors: consolidate legal and operational control over their own maritime zones (including around Crete), deepen concrete economic and security stakes with WHOEVER delivers results, and treat the region as a competitive environment rather than a fixed alliance map. 🔥Real influence will come from demonstrated capacity to exercise power and selective, reciprocal partnerships—not from counting on yesterday’s alignments. In a dangerous, multipolar Mediterranean, alertness and strategic autonomy are no longer optional. 💥”Why Greece's alliances failed to prevent eastern Libya's maritime deal with Turkey” An interesting analysis by @SeanPmathews in @MiddleEastEye highlighting the background behind Eastern Libya approved the Turkey-Libya MoU on maritime zones @NedosVassilis in @kathimerini_gr has similar analysis in Greek ⬇️ #geopolitics #EastMed