“The Strait of Hormuz will either be a Strait of peace and prosperity for all or a Strait of defeat and suffering for warmongers.” — Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, 10 March 2026

On the night of 1 March, an Iranian Shahed drone struck the runway at RAF Akrotiri — the first attack on Cyprus from outside the country since the 1974 Turkish invasion. Within days, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom had deployed naval and air assets to the Eastern Mediterranean. President Macron declared in Paphos that “when Cyprus is attacked, then Europe is attacked.” The Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier now patrols Cypriot waters. Then, on 9 March, Turkey deployed six F-16 fighter jets to the occupied north of the island — exploiting the fog of war to advance a territorial posture that has nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with a frozen conflict Europe had spent decades trying to forget.

Three weeks into Operation Epic Fury, it is Cyprus, not Tehran or Tel Aviv, that best illustrates the cascading logic of this war. The island did not choose this fight. It imports all its energy; refined fuel prices have already risen ten per cent for petrol and twenty per cent for diesel. Its spring tourism season is haemorrhaging bookings. Intelligence agencies across Ankara, Athens, and Nicosia have raised terror alert levels, citing credible threats from both pro-Iranian networks and jihadist sleeper cells. Carnegie has assessed that the convergence of Greek, Turkish, and European military deployments is reigniting tensions between Greece and Turkey, between the EU and Turkey, and between Israel and Turkey — a multi-layered strategic deterioration from which Iran benefits whether or not it was intended. For a small, open, services-dependent economy where tourism is a mainstay of GDP, the damage compounds with each additional week of hostilities past the five-to-six-week mark — locking in losses that cannot be recovered within the 2026 fiscal year.

Turkey’s exposure is the most acute in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ankara imports ninety per cent of its oil and ninety-eight per cent of its natural gas. Every sustained ten-dollar rise in the oil price adds four to five billion dollars to the annual energy import bill — a direct hit to the current account, fresh pressure on the lira, and a new inflationary impulse into an economy where disinflation had been the central policy achievement of the past two years. Pre-war growth forecasts of four per cent and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)