Energy as Statecraft: Natural Gas, Israeli Foreign Policy, and the Eastern Mediterranean

Abstract

How does the discovery of new energy resources influence the formation and execution of state foreign policy? This dissertation examines that question through Israel's transition from chronic energy scarcity to natural gas producer, between the 2009 discovery of Tamar field and the October 2023 outbreak of Israel's war against Hamas. Theoretical frameworks all anticipated that such a structural change would redirect Israeli foreign policy in unique ways. This dissertation offers an alternative account. The discovery of new energy resources does not redirect a state's foreign policy but absorbs into its existing foreign policy agenda: energy deepens cooperation where the foundations for it already exist and entrenches conflict or asymmetry where they do not. The primary explanatory variable is not energy but the path dependency of each bilateral relationship. Energy is an instrument of statecraft whose effectiveness is conditioned by the prior trajectory into which it is introduced; it rarely redirects that trajectory. The argument is developed through five bilateral cases – Jordan, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Turkey-Greece-Cyprus – drawing on process tracing, open source primary and second sources, and personal interviews. Across all five cases, energy amplifies the existing trajectory of bilateral relations and rarely redirects them. Four conditions determine how those amplifying effects operate: the prior state of bilateral relations, which sets the ceiling of what energy diplomacy can accomplish; the relative distribution of leverage between parties; the presence of commercial actors willing to absorb political risk; and third-party facilitation, in which the United States emerged as an indispensable presence. The dissertation contributes to scholarship on Israeli diplomatic history, energy and foreign policy, and Eastern Mediterranean geopolitics, offering a corrective to frameworks that predict uniform effects from energy discoveries regardless of prior relational context.