By Alexis Papachelas
Eighty years ago, Greece’s geopolitical fate was sealed on a piece of paper that the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill, gave to the other statesmen meeting with him in Yalta. Nowadays, one has the feeling that the world is set to be divided again. Not exactly as it happened in Yalta in 1945, because Greece today is not the divided, devastated country it was at the end of the Second World War, but also because the world is much more anarchic and it is not clear who is the winner and who is the loser, nor who will sit at the final table where the new spheres of influence will be carved out.
Besides, with US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the table, one doesn’t know where one may end up. Trump can easily exchange a country for something we can’t even imagine, while Putin plays the game masterfully without ever showing his cards.
Over the last 60 years, Greece has had two major concerns: The first was to move on stable tracks that protect it from misadventures and deviations, ensuring its continuous modernization. The EU has ensured this for us. The second concern was and remains Turkey. For this issue, we had placed our hopes in our relations with the US. We believed that, at crucial moments, Washington would intervene to prevent a war in the Aegean or on Cyprus. Mainly because it would not want the cohesion of the Western Alliance to be disrupted. As a veteran and experienced diplomat often says, “We pretended that we would stand by the US in a generalized war and they pretended that they provided us with security guarantees.”
But now we have moved on from the era of safe assumptions and diplomatic hypocrisy to the absolutely dry world of transaction. That old cliche of every Greek politician when addressing an American interlocutor that “Greece is the cradle of democracy” concerns very few people and seems ridiculous when you see how Trump behaves toward Canada, a country with which the US maintains the closest relations.
We are now in a world where the main question, before you take part in the deal, is “What do you bring to the table?” “Do you have an army?” “Yes.” “Are you willing to risk sending it on a dangerous mission on behalf of your allies?” “Do you have natural resources?” “Let’s make a deal,” “Do you have a serious military industry?” “Do you have innovation to offer in the production of weapons systems?”
Unfortunately, we have weakened some of our cards ourselves. Domestic populism and the long-standing corruption and inadequacy of our political system have eroded the necessary security culture. We like to talk tough, as if we’re like Israel, but in practice we are a mess in critical areas. However, we have proven to be good at playing our geopolitical cards from the times of the renowned Greek diplomat and politician Alexandros Mavrokordatos to the present day. With a little ingenuity and perseverance we will find the safe geopolitical path. We just need to get serious and be united, if possible, because the most important thing in this anarchic and dangerous scenario is to be able – in difficult times – to rely on your own strength. Ukraine, which is in danger of not having a seat at the big table that concerns its own future and which saw its geopolitical certainties and expectations collapse in a few hours, has learned this lesson.
Source: Kathimerini
