RIGA, (Reuters) — Strategic interests and political realities will collide over the next two weeks as the European Union battles to decide how hard to punish Turkey for its failure to open its ports to ships from Cyprus.The executive European Commission fired the starting gun on Wednesday with an unexpectedly tough recommendation that the EU suspend a sizeable chunk of Ankara’s membership negotiations.

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as branding the decision “unacceptable” and Britain, Ankara’s biggest ally in the 25-nation bloc, called it “disappointingly tough”.

Having spent much of the year warning of a potential “train crash” in Turkey’s EU bid, European Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn insisted his recommendation would not cause one since talks would continue at a slower pace.

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt told reporters the Commission was “probably putting the brakes on too hard.

“Were there to be a stop in the process, it would be a strategic calamity of the first order,” Bildt said.

Rehn proposed freezing eight of the 35 policy areas or “chapters” into which negotiations are divided and refusing to conclude any chapter until the Cyprus dispute is resolved.

But for those most sceptical of Turkey’s EU aspirations, such as Austria and Luxembourg, that may not be tough enough. An EU source said some countries wanted as much as half of the negotiations to be put on indefinite hold.

Cyprus is anyway blocking the opening of any new chapters, so the outcome could be that negotiations are partially frozen in theory and at a complete standstill in practice.

All 25 EU leaders agreed unanimously in December 2004 to open accession talks with the vast, populous, poor and overwhelmingly Muslim country, regarded as a strategically vital bridge with the Middle East and the Islamic world.

But public opinion has turned against Turkey in western Europe and against the EU in Turkey in a process of mutual estrangement that has led Brussels think-tanks to stage conferences entitled “Are we losing Turkey?”

The United States, which has also seen its relations with Ankara plummet over the war in Iraq, is now anxious at the prospect of Europe turning its back on a crucial NATO ally because of the peripheral issue of Cyprus, diplomats say.

“You simply cannot overestimate the strategic importance of Turkey,” former US ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke told a Brussels conference this month.

Many diplomats say the EU made a huge political mistake when it agreed to admit a divided Cyprus in 2004, represented only by the Greek Cypriot government in Nicosia, after the Greek Cypriots rejected a UN peace plan accepted by the Turkish Cypriots.

“Letting a divided Cyprus in was the original sin. We are paying for it now and we will continue to pay for it,” one EU ambassador said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Cyprus has used its seat at the EU table, where all decisions on enlargement require unanimity, to obstruct Turkey’s path at every turn to press its own interests.

Former Cypriot Foreign Minister George Iacovou boasted in June after holding up Turkey’s first negotiating chapter for days that since unanimity was needed to open and close each of the 35 chapters, his country had 70 leverage points.

Diplomats say the bloc’s tradition of trying to accommodate a member state on a matter of vital national interest, coupled with Greek tactical support to save Nicosia from isolation, meant the EU was a permanent hostage to the Cyprus problem.

That has infuriated Turkey’s political establishment, which has showed rare unanimity in rejecting the EU’s conditions.

Recent elections and referendums in Austria, France and the Netherlands have shown that opposing Turkey is a vote winner.