The US should take over the UK’s military bases in Cyprus cementing the US-Cypriot ties and getting rid of the colonial legacy of the island, Michael Rubin a former Pentagon official has just proposed.
Writing in the National Interest, Rubin, now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says that Britain’s diminished naval power cannot guarantee the security of Cyprus.
“The Royal Navy not only has difficulty projecting power globally, but it is a shell of what it was just a couple of decades ago,” he says.
After the independence of Malta and Cyprus and even with continued possession of Gibraltar, the British Navy no longer guarantees security in the region the way it once did with both permanent presence and frequent port calls.
“Whereas the United Kingdom could long use the European Union to amplify its power diplomatically, if not always militarily, Brexit shattered that dynamic,” Rubin adds.
UK’s two military bases in Cyprus
The UK has two sovereign bases in Cyprus. The Akrotiri Sovereign Base Area and the Dhekelia Sovereign Base Area. It classifies the Sovereign Base Areas, together less than 3 percent of the island’s territory, as a British Overseas Territory, the same category as Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, or the Falkland Islands.
“British possession of the Sovereign Base Areas is more a memorial to past influence than an effective mechanism to project power or protect the Eastern Mediterranean,” Rubin says.
The writer questions whether the UK can really stand up to the robust challenges posed by Turkey, Hamas, Hezbollah, and a resurgent Russia in the eastern Mediterranean.
Let the Sixth Fleet take over
“The Sixth Fleet area of operation is no longer merely something the U.S. Navy sails through on its way to Fifth Fleet hotspots in the Red Sea or the Persian Gulf, but rather a contested region in its own right,” Rubin underlines.
To accompany their withdrawal, the United Kingdom might hand over control of their Cypriot bases to the United States just as it did with Bahrain. The U.S. presence in Bahrain operates under Bahraini sovereignty, Rubin proposes.
The United States might lease the bases from Cyprus but return full sovereignty to the island. Likewise, the United States might return the areas not under active military use fully to Cyprus. The U.S. facility in Bahrain functions on only 152 acres; the Sovereign Base Areas claim nearly 100 square miles.
“The U.S. lease of Akrotiri and Dhekelia could further cement U.S.-Cypriot ties that the October 30, 2024, visit by President Nikos Christodoulides to the White House highlighted,” Rubin notes
Decolonizing Cyprus by having the United States lease a rump British base area could also serve as a model to rid Cyprus entirely of its colonial legacy, he adds.
“Today, Turkey’s occupation of half of the northern part of the island has persisted for fifty years. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions notwithstanding, the international community will never formalize Turkey’s land grab in Cyprus.
“The assumption of U.S. leases over the bases Turkey now has in occupied northern Cyprus could break the diplomatic logjam, if not under Erdogan than under his successor,” the former Pentagon official says.
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