Desperate for cash, and playing all the cards in his hands, Greece’s newly elected PM is in a pinch. Having vowed to end austerity in his country, [Alexis] Tsipras is “all in” in a forieign [sic] policy game of high stakes poker between Greece, the EU, and unlikely table partner Russia. With a final installment of a €240 billion euro bailout in the offing, Greece must have a four month extension for the broke government to carry on. News today that Tsipras bumped up his visit to meet with Russia’s president by a month seems a sure sign the EU and Greece’s biggest creditor Germany are not going to budge.
Russian Insider looks to be a pro-Putin vehicle (check out the sidebar: “Putin Crushes BBC Smartass.” “The Latest Russian Fighter Jet Blows America’s Away,” etc.), but it is correct that Tsipras has advanced his trip to Russia (but he will be in Berlin two weeks before then).
It’s way too soon to suggest, as Russia Insider does, that Germany and the EU “are not going to budge.” What’s going on here is an ever more elaborate dance by “Brussels,” Berlin (the two don’t always see eye-to-eye), and Athens. The best guess continues to be that a fudge clever enough to allow all parties to declare victory will eventually be found. That said, the chance of matters slipping out of control (a “Graccident”) are undoubtedly increasing.
The pro-Putin Tsipras is playing the Russian card — and playing it hard — but perhaps not quite as hard as the rather would excitable Russia Insider would have us believe:
As for Greece dropping out of the EU and the eurozone, many experts say this is inevitable. Whether or not Alexis Tsipras and his ministers are prepared to give NATO heart palpatations [sic] by joining Putin’s Eurasian Union, only time will tell.
“Many experts” are wrong. It is not “inevitable” that Greece will drop out of the euro zone or, even more so, the EU. The politics are not, to borrow a word from another debate, “settled.” As noted, Tsipras is also going to Berlin: As I said, a dance.
There are signs, however that Washington is beginning to fret.
The Guardian reports:
Before the sun had set over the Acropolis, the top US diplomat Victoria Nuland had waded in, holding talks with Greece’s foreign minister, Nikos Kotzias, in Athens.
Nuland, who is assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, flew into the capital amid mounting US concerns that the great euro debt crisis has begun to pose a geopolitical threat. Allowed to veer out of control, Greece could end up in the ambit of Russia, financially bereft and without the EU links that keep it bounded to the west. Nato’s south-eastern flank would be immeasurably weakened at a time of mounting global security worries over Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East.
Under Tsipras’s steely leadership, the country has worked hard to stoke such fears. Exploiting his far-left Syriza party’s traditionally good ties with Moscow, the young leader has allowed his ministers to suggest openly that they would turn to Moscow as a strategic protector in the event of Athens being ejected from the 19-nation currency bloc. Russia, in turn, has said it would happily consider a Greek request for aid – despite its own financial woes – should its fellow Orthodox state ask….
Amid the shrillness and shouting, Washington worries Europe may be losing the wood for the trees. Diplomats hate unpredictability. But against a backdrop of growing speculation over Athens’ ability to remain in the euro, there are rising fears that Moscow has identified Greece as a potential Trojan horse.
“Russia has a great interest in seeing the Greek crisis turn for the worse,” said Dimitris Keridis, a professor of political science at Athens’ Panteion University. “It is very supportive of the drachma lobby precisely because a Greek exit from the euro [Grexit] would hurt the eurozone, weaken Europe and de-link Greece from the west. Russia does not want a united, strong Europe because it sees it as a potential geopolitical threat.”
US diplomats fear that the hard line creditors are taking could backfire. Too much attention, they say, is being paid to the pressure of bailout concerns at the expense of geopolitical power and the influence that Greece exerts at the crossroads of east and west. Regionally, few places are as important as the southern island of Crete, home to facilities that provide command control and logistics support to US and Nato operating forces.
And from another Guardian report:
There is quiet US pressure on Germany to avoid pushing Greece away from Europe. According to one source, the words “our boys didn’t die on the beaches of Normandy for this” have been used in conversations between the State Department and the German foreign ministry.
Well, Greece has already moved some way towards Russia.
More than a touch disingenuously, the same article has this:
On coming to power, Alexis Tsipras appointed a hard-right conservative to the defence ministry and pledged not to leave Nato. When that defence minister took to a military helicopter to oversee manoeuvres, Tsipras made sure a key Syriza politician was alongside him, wearing (to the amusement of some on the left) a Greek airforce flying jacket. It was a signal, above all, to the Americans: Syriza’s commitment to Nato is real.
Not so much. As I noted the other day, the Financial Times had this to say about Panos Kammenos, that “hard-right conservative” defense minister (and about Greece’s foreign minister too):
Nikos Kotzias, the foreign minister, and Panos Kammenos, defence minister, have both been cultivated by figures close to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. Mr Kotzias — a former Piraeus university professor — has espoused increasingly nationalist positions, developing a relationship with Alexander Dugin, the Russian nationalist philosopher, during several visits to Moscow, according to a colleague who declined to be identified. Mr Dugin, who is close to several figures in the Moscow security establishment and last August called for a “genocide” of Ukrainians, was invited by Mr Kotzias to speak at an event in the Piraeus campus in 2013, where he extolled the role of Orthodox Christianity in uniting Greeks and Russians [I posted something on that here]. Mr Kammenos has also been a frequent visitor to Moscow. A picture shows him in the Russian capital two weeks ago, meeting the chairman of the Russian Duma’s foreign affairs committee and the deputy chairman of its defence committee.
It’s interesting to read about that reported “quiet pressure” on Germany from the State Department. My suspicion here is that the State Department is being played by Brussels as well as Athens. Stuck in its outdated and damaging EU-integrationist views, Foggy Bottom is probably all too susceptible to being influenced by a Brussels leadership that is prepared to, as the phrase goes, “do what it takes” to preserve the euro zone “as is” regardless of Germany’s (legitimate) concerns. There’s nothing that Brussels would like more than to see the Obama administration apply pressure on Angela Merkel to give in to the Greeks.
The administration should do nothing of the sort. The least bad option for Greece would be “Grexit,” default and aid, although this still seems unlikely. As for the Russian option, so long as Syriza remains in power Greece will be a very unreliable NATO “partner” and, I suspect, a major intelligence risk. Nothing will change that. But although Greece might take some of Putin’s rubles, it will not quit NATO (although there are some reasons for hoping that it might), nor will it join Russia’s “Eurasian Union.” Greece’s politics have been badly twisted by the disaster that the euro has brought in its wake, but they have not been that badly twisted. For all the sentimental attachment that many Greeks may feel for their fellow Orthodox to the north, sentiment only goes so far.
When it comes to Tsipras’s Russian gambit, Berlin and Washington should be prepared to call his bluff.