Cyprus becomes embroiled in another Middle Eastern maelstrom with UK military bases on its soil

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — If the adage “geography is destiny” holds true, then Cyprus should be a prime candidate as its poster child.

Whether it’s the Greeks, Persians, Romans, Ottomans or the British, tiny Cyprus has been a prized possession for many. That's because of its proximity to arguably the world’s oldest hotbed of conflict, a region driven for centuries by faith as the birthplace of three great religions, and more recently by its vast energy resources.

Now, after nearly 66 years as an independent nation, Cyprus has found itself embroiled in another Middle Eastern maelstrom primarily because it hosts two large and significant U.K. military bases, the vestige of its British colonial past.

Minutes after midnight on Monday, a Shahed drone managed to evade the Royal Air Force's state-of-the-art radar installations at its base in Akrotiri. Typhoon fighters and six of the world’s preeminent warplane — the F-35 — were deployed to take out the drone, which officials said ultimately did limited damage to an aircraft hangar near the base's runway.

No one was injured, but the attack signaled a troubling expansion of the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran into European territory. It also signified the first time a third country mounted any type of attack on Cypriot soil since Turkey’s 1974 invasion that cleaved the island along ethnic lines.

Warplanes intercepted a pair of drones in a second attempted strike on the base shortly after midday Monday, driving home the point that the initial strike was no accident.

Cypriot and British officials haven’t specified where the Shahed drone took off from, but speculation is that it was the work of Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. The U.K. government insisted the drone strike on the British base wasn’t an outcome of Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to allow the U.S. to use is bases for its campaign against Iran, arguing that the UAV was launched before he made the announcement Sunday evening.

But that’s a moot point. If Iran or Hezbollah wanted to “punish” the U.K. it's unlikely it would try to hit its base on Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean — it would opt for RAF Akrotiri only some 160 miles (260 kilometers) away.

RAF Akrotiri, with its massive runway, is a prime component of the U.K.'s complex of bases in Cyprus, including Episkopi Garrison in the west and Dhekelia Garrison in the east. Its breadth measures some of 99 square miles (255 square kilometers).

In 2003, RAF Akrotiri served as a major logistical hub for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s still home to the famed U2 spy plane that conducts high-altitude surveillance flights over the Middle East.

In its first decades of independence, Cyprus had steered clear of taking sides in any regional conflict, opting instead for a “neutral” stance that tried and more often than not failed to strike a balance between East and West, Arab and Israeli. The country's EU membership put it firmly in the Western camp. But the definitive turn came years ago with the election of President Nikos Christodoulides, a U.S. educated history and politics professor, who unequivocally declared Cyprus' pro-Western, pro-U.S. orientation.

Christodoulides has leveraged Cyprus’ geography to diplomatically position the island as the “bridge” linking the EU with the Middle East, pushing a humanitarian-centered foreign policy by assiduously building strong diplomatic, commercial and defense ties with Israel, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and other countries in the region.

After the RAF Akrotiri drone strike, Cypriot government officials from Christodoulides on down took pains to underscore that the country “has not, is not and will not take part in any military action.”

Heeding Christodoulides’ plea for help to bolster the island’s own anti-drone defenses, Greece dispatched four F-16 fighter planes and two cutting-edge frigates, while France will send a frigate of its own and land-based anti-drone and anti-missile systems, according to officials. Germany is also expected to send a warship, while Starmer said he's sending a warship and helicopters to help protect RAF Akrotiri.

Despite this, the British bases in Cyprus perpetually cast a shadow over any Cypriot government policy. The Cyprus government says U.K. authorities are obliged to inform it when they would use the bases for any military action, but that’s more of a courtesy than anything else.

Yale Fellow and president of the Politeia think tank Anna Koukkides-Procopiou likened Cyprus’ conundrum to the analogy of a billiards table where a ball sits undisturbed, almost forgotten in a corner of the table until it's suddenly thrust into a pocket after other balls collide with it.

“We’ve chosen sides and we have to face the music now," Koukkides-Procopiou told The Associated Press, adding the priority for Cyprus now is what it must do to make itself less vulnerable to the vicissitudes of its geography.

A phrase "British bases out," hangs during an anti-war rally in the southern city of Limassol, Cyprus, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon at the HM Naval Base in Portsmouth Harbour, in Hampshire, England, Tuesday, March 3, 2026, ahead of being deployed to protect British military personnel in Cyprus. (Andrew Matthews/PA via AP)

Royal Navy Type 45 destroyer HMS Dragon at the HM Naval Base, in Portsmouth Harbour, in Hampshire, England, Tuesday March 3, 2026, ahead of being deployed to protect British military personnel in Cyprus. (Andrew Matthews/PA via AP)

A protester holds a sign that reads in Greek "Get all the armies out" during an anti-war rally in the southern city of Limassol, Cyprus, Tuesday, March 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

The gate of the U.K.'s RAF Akrotiri air base at sunset after it was struck by a drone earlier in the morning near Limassol, Cyprus, Monday, March 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

A transport aircraft prepares for landing at U.K.'s RAF Akrotiri air base near Limassol, Cyprus, Tuesday, March, 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

U2 spy aircraft takes off from U.K.'s RAF Akrotiri air base near Limassol, Cyprus, Tuesday, March, 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Petros Karadjias)

NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.

In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.

To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.

To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.

“The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I've never seen that before.”

Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.

Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.

The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.

The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.

Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.

For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.

Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world's premier public health agency.

But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.

“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.

The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.

The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.

As this was playing out, Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”

The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.

The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”

Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”

The CDC's acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.

The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.

But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.

In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.

The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.

Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC's lack of trying.

“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency's work now is delayed and subdued.

Instead of working with nearly all of the world's nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.

That's not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can't possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.

Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Passengers on the the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, watch epidemiologists board the boat in Praia, during their voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)

Workers set up temporary shelters in the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Crew members of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, wait their turns for a first interview with epidemiologists, during the voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)

Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

A Spanish Civil Guard officer inspects the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)