ABSTRACT
The eastern Mediterranean has historically been a troubled and turbulent region. During the second half of the twentieth century, it was the stage of a chain of ‘hot wars’ between Israel and its Arab neighbours and a ‘cold war’ between Greece and Turkey (with at least one hot confrontation in Cyprus in 1974, as well as several serious crises in the Aegean). The Mediterranean was a secondary area of competition between the US/NATO and the USSR, but its geostrategic importance is steadily increasing in the post-Cold War era, as NATO’s Southern Flank is where the sources for several of the risks and challenges mentioned in the new Strategic Concept of the Alliance, adopted in the Washington summit meeting in April 1999, are to be found.
