Three Mediterranean Grammars at the UN Podium

The stage that the United Nations General Assembly sets up in New York every September carries the code for how three different states construct their own survival. To decode it, three concepts must first be clarified: normative revisionism, a state expanding its own sphere of autonomy while exposing the injustice of the existing international order; securitization and exceptionalism, a state removing international law from its binding force by defining itself as under permanent existential threat; and defense of the legal status quo, a state compensating for its own lack of capacity by leaning on the weight of international norms. The performances of Turkey, Israel, and Greece at the UN podium are, respectively, near-textbook examples of these three models — and the fact that these three languages do not speak to one another is the real reason behind the region’s intractability.

Erdoğan’s UN addresses, from the 79th General Assembly in 2024 to the 81st General Assembly in 2026, are woven around the same core sentence: the “the world is bigger than five” emphasis, targeting the Security Council’s structure built around five permanent members. This repetition is not coincidental; it functions as an identity-building device that positions Ankara as the spokesperson of a “Global South” pushed outside the system. What the 2025 and 2026 speeches had in common was raising the issue of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s inability to be present in the hall for two consecutive years and framing this as “an injustice against Palestinian brothers”; from the same podium, Erdoğan described the situation in Gaza as an atrocity unseen in human history. Yet behind this normative language lies a concrete capacity accumulated outside the podium: military-logistical presence in Syria, the joint defense pact signed with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and defense-industry exports. The discourse of justice at the podium functions as ground that lays legitimacy in advance for steps taken in the field — which places Ankara in the position of a “reforming revisionist,” one that criticizes the system while co-opting the system’s founding concepts (justice, representation) for its own benefit.

Netanyahu’s UN performance, by contrast, draws not on normative persuasion but on direct securitization. His use, at the 79th General Assembly in 2024, of a map showing the West Bank and Gaza as Israeli territory, led numerous country delegations — including the Turkish delegation — to walk out of the hall; at the 80th General Assembly in 2025, Netanyahu addressed a hall that was nearly empty. The unchanging backbone of his speeches is threatening language directed at Iran and the message “we are winning”; international legal mechanisms, meanwhile, are coded as biased and dysfunctional tools. The real addressee of this rhetoric is not international public opinion but the allied elite in Washington and Israel’s security-focused domestic electorate — indeed, the applause of the guests in the gallery during the speech makes visible whom the message is actually built for. For Israel, the UN podium has become not a ground for negotiation but a venue where unilateral decisions are announced in advance.

Mitsotakis’s podium strategy, in turn, is fundamentally different from these two: rather than escalating tension, it freezes the issue by clinging to the language of international law. An early example of this strategy was his direct address to the Turkish people at the 77th General Assembly in 2022, through a video with Turkish subtitles, conveying the message that Greece poses no threat. In his most recent statements in 2026, however, the tone hardened noticeably: the emphasis that a cautious posture should not be read as weakness was combined with the message that unilateral maritime spatial-planning steps in the Aegean would continue. On the Cyprus issue, Athens defends a bi-zonal, bi-communal federation solution within the framework of UN Security Council resolutions and the EU acquis, while refusing to even bring Turkey’s proposed two-state model to the negotiating table. This insistence shows that Greece’s discursive strength comes not from its own military capacity but from the EU-US-centered normative weight behind it — which leaves Athens structurally fragile in preventing faits accomplis on the ground.

Read together, these three models make clear why the Eastern Mediterranean remains an unresolved crisis basin: the parties speak, from the same podium, three separate languages that do not recognize one another’s conceptual framework. Turkey, wanting to rewrite the rules, faces the risk of diplomatic isolation if it leans too heavily on hard power; Israel, treating the rules as void for itself, faces the risk of losing international legitimacy altogether; and Greece, taking shelter behind the rules, faces the risk of being unable to prevent faits accomplis on the ground. For Turkey, the real strategic question is how sustainable the balance between normative justice discourse and hard-power capacity is; the disruption of this balance is the single fracture point that could confront Ankara with the risk of diplomatic isolation. As for whether the podium performances in New York will blow a lasting peace into the region, that question cannot go beyond being a rhetorical illusion, because a common ground that would bring these three grammars closer to one another has not yet been established — at least in the short term.