Tassos Symeonides
(RIEAS Academic Advisor)
Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr)
Publication date: 19 March 2020
Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS)
The coronavirus pandemic is upending the world—and the Eastern Med sub-theater is not escaping its impact. In fact, the pandemic has intervened in Turkey’s massive blackmail operation against Greece and the wobbly EU—and forces the Ankara bully to modify his tactics. Yet, while at first glance, the sultan-for-life may experience discomfort, his longer-term strategic position is still viable
save an unforeseen event. Let us see why.
1. Using illegal immigrants as a weapon of mass destruction has lost none of its potency. The pandemic will certainly force Ankara to make adjustments but that does not change the specifics in her efforts to destabilize Greece and force her to the table of one-sided
“negotiations” by allowing the mobs to crash border fences and invade her territory. Already, Greece has been forced to accept a substantial foreign population in her midst and begin to experience the dangerous cracks that are already a huge problem inside larger and more prosperous EU members.
2. The EU is obviously and wholly unprepared to tackle the pandemic. The immediate need to shut borders disintegrates Schengen in one broad sweep. Schengen is now open to “modification” that will dilute, or even defeat, its original purpose thus creating more
opportunities for the EU becoming an agglomeration of subservient entities revolving around major players as satellites. Such a future could benefit the occupant of the Golden Palace in Ankara, if of course he is still ruling.
3. With the US in Turkey’s corner, despite the latter’s open cooperation with Putin, the sultanfor-life will be further encouraged to press on with his efforts to gobble up most of the Aegean and grab an islet or two from Greece. No doubt, the “international community” shall apathetically watch just like it did during the “justified” piratical and criminal Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
4. While the frantic exchanges over the pandemic continue, Turkey will have the golden opportunity to concoct an Aegean “crisis” and outmaneuver a poorly prepared and under-armed Greece, whose “allies” will again remain inactive past the usual soft noodle statements of “support.”
5. Greek PM Mitsotakis is thus presented with an impossible situation. Greece’s economy is cracked and wobbly and stands to suffer severe body blows because of the pandemic. Her armed forces may be willing and able but the brutal lashing Greece got from her EU “partners” during the bankruptcy crisis has weakened them drastically: weapons are outdated, supplies and spare inventories remain dangerously low, and hopes for emergency arms assistance are weak to non-existent.
6. As for the supposedly privileged Greece-USA “strategic cooperation,” the concept makes a mockery of itself via Washington’s effusive support offered the sultan-for-life in a
schizophrenic display of “alliance comradeship” with the ISIS-supporting, NATOundermining, fundamentalist Islamist, Israel-hating, North Africa-disruptive whirling dervish of Ankara.
Otherwise, and in a broader sense, the pandemic is already impacting the EU and accelerating the disintegration tensions that have been lurking for years. Italy’s dramatic coronavirus predicament only stands to reinforce the muffled dislike for those “disorganized southerners” prevalent in Germany, in particular, but also among other northern well-to-do countries.
These decomposition tendencies are particularly dangerous for Greece. Germany, the “queen” of Europe, has never concealed her preference for keeping Turkey close to her breast just like before going back to the Ottoman Empire.
The colossal disruption now under way because of the pandemic could offer the golden opportunity to Berlin to reach yet another “historic understanding” on what Ankara desires and is ready to attempt to take by force in the Aegean. And in the far background, weaker EU members, like Spain and Portugal, should be also worried about the resurgence of northern “empire” tendencies presently being catalyzed by the pandemic steam roller.
It is only natural to ask the tortured question of how would a post-pandemic Europe would look like.
At best, the EU will survive albeit with serious lingering political, ideological, and centrifugal pressures.
At worst, with the pandemic as the apocalyptic catalyst, a new paradigm shall rise, most likely leaving behind all grandiose thinking for “integration” that would make an already inflexible “union” a much worse copy of itself.
Greek politicians appear aloof re. such grand strategy questions, most likely because they never really comprehended the EU as the empire that crushed their country in 2010 in order to save it.
Πηγή: www.rieas.gr