Editorial Ta Nea: Greece’s values-based foreign policy

The Russo-Ukrainian war gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the opportunity to break his diplomatic isolation and return to the table of the major international players, donning the mantle of a mediator.

His bargaining chip is that due to his country’s good relations with both Russia and Ukraine, he can host peace talks, though neither of the two meetings between the warring parties in Turkey yielded any progress.

He is also returning as a blackmailer, however, declaring that for Turkey to approve the accession of Sweden and Finland to NATO, in which all decisions must be taken unanimously, and demanding as a quid pro quo that the “terrorists” who have fled to the West must be expelled and that the US must sell to Ankara the F-16 fighter jets that it needs.

This comes as no surprise. Turkey always operated in this fashion. At times it has achieved its objectives and at others it has backed off.

At the same time, Erdogan knows very well that he cannot exploit the strategic role that current circumstances may offer him in order to reap gains in Turkey’s claims against Greece.

His rhetorical outbursts, the threats unleashed by his ministers, and the revisionist maps drawn up by Turkish generals are ineffective for a very simple reason: Greece’s positions are based on international law and its powerful allies know that.

Greece does not want tensions in its relations with Turkey.

On the contrary, as Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias underlined in an interview published in the weekend edition of Ta Nea, Athens is willing, in the framework of international law that it has set as a precondition, to conduct a civilised dialogue with Ankara.

It is under no circumstances willing, however, to be drawn into a dispute over non-negotiable issues such as sovereignty over the Greek islands of the Aegean.

Greece is determined to internationalise in every possible manner and in all relevant forums (including the EU, the US Congress, and the UN) continuing provocations, such as the recent barrage of flights of Turkish war planes over inhabited and other Greek islands, and it expects its allies not to succumb to Turkey’s blackmail, in whatever form it may be expressed.

Aside from the sorrow, rage, and the global outcry it has triggered, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has awakened and sensitised democracies to the dangers of authoritarianism and revisionism.

It has also revealed the fundamental distinction between Turkey’s bargaining stance as a country that keeps equal distances between Russia and Ukraine on the one hand, and Greece’s values-based policy on the other.