Multi-criteria decision-making of national power elements of Eastern Mediterranean countries examining with techniques

The Eastern Mediterranean has an important and strategic position on the mutual trade lines starting from Europe to China and in ensuring the connection of these lines with the outside world since the periods that can be traced back to ancient Greek and Mesopotamian civilizations. This strategic position has gained more importance in the way that it can shape regional policies, especially with the energy resources that have started to be discovered since the beginning of the 2000s. The energy resources discovered in the region and the distribution of these resources to the world bring opportunities and risks into the region. In this context, the ongoing contentious situation, especially the Sharing of Maritime Jurisdiction, the Exclusive Economic Zone and the Cyprus Problem, and the medium-term developments in which both regional and global actors are actively involved and the maps are reshaped, are highly likely to be realized through power. The aim of this study is to analyse the national power elements of the countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region by using the method of multi-criteria decision-making techniques. For this purpose, realism and liberalism, as of the mainstream theories of the IR discipline, and Entropy and ARAS, which are among the multi-criteria decision-making methods, were used in the study. Since no study using the aforementioned method has been encountered in the context of regional countries, this study brings a new perspective to the literature. According to the findings obtained in the study, Turkey is seen as the most important country in terms of national power capacity in the Eastern Mediterranean. Accordingly, the most important result in the direction of maintaining the regional foreign policy is the prediction that Turkey's superiority over the regional countries can only be balanced with the intervention of a global power in the region.