Mitsotakis, Erdogan hoping for a reset
Greek, Turkish leaders will meet at NATO summit after 16 months, but detente has pitfalls
Greek officials hope that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday, their first in 16 months, will solidify the recent relatively calm relationship between the two countries and keep the communication channels open.
But the Greek government government is also aware that Turkey’s aspirations to dominate in the Eastern Mediterranean, along with the “Blue Homeland” expansionist policy, are pillars of Turkey’s policy and that the recurrent flare-ups of the past few years are the direct result of Turkey’s ambitions for regional dominance.
There will be three separate meetings between Greek and Turkish officials on the sidelines of the two-day NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania. One between Mitsotakis and Erdogan, where other officials will also be present; the second, between the new foreign ministers, Giorgos Gerapetritis and Hakan Fidan; and the third, between the new defense ministers, Nikos Dendias and Yasar Guler.
On the Greek side, Gerapetritis and Mitsotakis’ diplomatic adviser, Ambassador Anna-Maria Boura, will also attend the Erdogan-Mitsotakis meeting.
The information out of Ankara is that there is a will to fast-track negotiations on so-called “confidence building measures” and some analysts believe that Egypt, with which Turkey has aimed to repair relations, could play the honest broker.
Still, the two nominal allies differ even on what is negotiable. For Greece, the only point of contention is the demarcation of exclusive economic zones; it favors taking the dispute to the International Court of Justice. But Turkey wants many more issues to be discussed, for example demilitarizing the Greek islands closer to the Turkish coast and discussing the rights of the Muslim minority in Thrace, which it calls Turkish, even though Muslims there belong to other ethnicities, as well.
In any case, Mitsotakis and his aides believe that this meeting will go better than the first one with Erdogan, in September 2019, in which the Turkish president’s aggressive posturing was followed by the signing of the Turkish-Libyan memorandum delimiting the two countries’ maritime jurisdictions, the failed attempt to push hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees early in 2020, and the tense naval standoff of the following summer.
