Over the summer, I consciously decided to read The Dark Room by Alexis Papachelas. I knew that I would have to put aside my own writings and deal with the junta. Today’s post is not a book review, a process that I find thankless and unnecessary in any case, since I note from the outset that Dark Room should be studied by all of us. It is a thorough research, presentation and analysis de profundis, based on archival sources and unique personal interviews, which is a valuable treasure in order to achieve a decisive step towards our collective self-awareness.

Alexis Papachelas emphasizes from the first pages that nationalism, lumpenism, populism and simplification, combined with a lack of control mechanisms and people able to speak up and take responsibility, lead to national tragedies. Collective memory found him in Asia Minor, when the political trend “Small but honest Greece” triumphed, which led to the destruction of Hellenism in the Middle East, as well as in Cyprus, where tyrants became a laughingstock in the hands of foreign secrets. services and useful idiots for the modern Machiavelli. The trivial not only wears out over time, but also wears out people and situations with it, which in the case of foreign policy translates into national interests and prestige.

Opportunistic planning for Cyprus begins with the first junta, that of Papadopoulos, when he turned a blind eye to Ankara and withdrew the Greek division in November 1967, which George Papandreou secretly sent to Megalonis in 1964. Papadopoulos managed to deal a crushing blow to the Greek stay on the island, on the one hand, because he did not want tension with Turkey at a time when he was trying to stabilize himself at home, and on the other hand, he did not dare to refuse the envoy of President Johnson Cyrus Vance, who was sent to the region to calm the mood and also ask the junta to make a goodwill gesture towards Turkey. One can imagine a Yale graduate and specialist in the delicate balance of foreign policy playing cat and mouse with a lunatic dictator who believed the basis of “good diplomacy” [sic] it is only to say yes to your allies without regard to national interests. However, the dictator did not hesitate to throw a double union card on the table, offering Ankara part of Cyprus in exchange for the overthrow of Archbishop Makarios. The insignificance of nationalism as a matrix for the creation of the modern Peisistratus and the voluntary Alcibiades.

But with the second junta, the junta of Ioannidis, we are moving from a phase of populism and half-knowledge that characterized the Papadopoulos period, to a phase of complete ignorance about how the international system works, and to an atavism that only genuine chauvinism, interspersed with unambiguous simplification, can give rise to. characteristic of the thought of Ioannidis. Opposite him were the Machiavellis of Western Cold War diplomacy, Henry Kissinger and a closed group of highly trained CIA operatives who manipulated the leader of the junta, part 2, as their main tool, sometimes assuring him of their good intentions, and sometimes misleading them and leading them into terrible situations. solutions. There are characteristic moments when, in order to convince Ioannidis to leave Cyprus unfortified in the face of the Turkish invasion, the American side terrified him with the scenario of the invasion of the Bulgarian army and Soviet troops from the north. The complete disregard of events in the Eastern Mediterranean with the broader US policy towards the USSR, as well as the complete disregard for the failure of the USSR to implement such a plan to overthrow Yalta.

Ioannidis approves of the overthrow of Makarios and, as a grotesque parallax of the idealist Don Quixote, believes that in this way he achieves the union of Cyprus with the Greek center. But what conclusions can we draw from the Cypriot tragedy?

Nationalism, populism and simplification, combined with the lack of control mechanisms and people of a special caliber capable of taking responsibility, lead to national tragedies.

Conclusion 1: Patriotism is not a rhetorical device. This is a consistent political position, based primarily on the pragmatic rationality of combining the means that make up the core of state power with the ultimate goal. Good intentions or calls for the divine to come to the rescue have turned out to be inexpensive smoke since the second Athenian expedition to Milos in 416 BC. The more often and denser the call for patriotism, which is not accompanied by acts of strengthening the intelligent state, the more it turns into populism and is essentially used to lead the masses towards totalitarian schemes that promise heroic defeats, because they cannot endure the suffering of achieving the daily survival of the state in an anarchic and competitive international arena. The junta not only destroyed the concept of patriotism, but also harmed Greece socially, economically and internationally.

Conclusion 2. Dealing with foreign policy at the decision-making level requires theoretical knowledge about the functioning of international system structures and international legal data, as well as empirical encounters with international political realities that permeate the international system. Politicians of genius, such as Andreas Papandreou at Davos in 1986 or Barack Obama at the start of the Egyptian Arab Spring in 2011, were forced to make the wrong choices, not to mention uneducated dictators with infallible narcissism, whose only connection to the complexity of foreign policy was a metaphysical one. the illusion of national omnipotence and the identification of the High Strategy with the Military Strategy and vice versa.

Conclusion 3. Domestic anti-crisis agencies bear full responsibility for national mistakes. Greek history for many decades was based on the tale of “bad foreigners” who led Hellenism to its decline. We are responsible for our mistakes as well as our neglect, for our tolerance, for our lack of realism, and for our belief that there is a God from the Machine who will provide a solution in our favor in the midst of a crisis. Ioannidis and the close team around him are responsible for the Cypriot. First, because he allowed his chauvinistic simplification to be subdued by the darkest part of the American deep state and those around him, because no one had the courage to respond in time to the dictator’s opportunism. When no one dares to exclaim that the king is naked, the authority of the ruler suffers, but the state survives. When a lack of integrity strikes at the core of the state, then a new national defeat awaits its emergence from the depths of historical time.

Conclusion 4: The US role in both the first and second invasion of Cyprus is extremely negative. Ioannidis is convinced by hitherto unknown elements of the American Deep State, most likely the highly anti-communist Greek-Americans of the CIA, but without confirmation from primary sources, that a coup against Makarios and the Union will not happen. trigger a Turkish invasion. The fate of the island, as well as a very important chapter in Greek-Turkish relations that still remains open, was based on an empty certainty. The US in 1974, as today, is not interested in “who is right or wrong” between Greece and Turkey. The priority of American foreign policy is the unity of the southeastern wing of NATO and the prevention of a Greco-Turkish war. We saw this in the Imian Crisis, as well as against Erdogan’s pro-Russian line from the failed coup of 2016 to today. Greece must ensure peace in the Eastern Mediterranean, but without prejudice to its national interests. In this direction, it is important to maintain the Atlantic line in our foreign policy without exception, but our national interests are ensured through the doctrine of self-help. From machine gods does not exist.

Conclusion 5: For decades, the domestic ultra-rightists have been spreading the myth that under Ioannidis only 4% of Cyprus was lost by Attila, and after the restoration of bourgeois democracy, another 36.2% of the Cypriot territory was lost. “Cyprus lies far away” by Konstantinos Karamanlis is presented by the far right as the indifference of the then Greek Prime Minister towards Cyprus, while in fact it is a realistic assessment of the situation, based on insufficient equipment and insufficient military logistics, which the regimes, both Papadopoulos and Ioannidis, ” bequeathed” to the Third Hellenic Republic. The military mobilization of July 1974 is now taught internationally as an example of a state’s failed preparation for war, with Ioannidis fighting real enemies on the run with an imagined load of hard power and zero national unity due to the revulsion for his regime in the collective consciousness. .

Knowledge is the antidote to populism. The Dark Room is a thorough analysis of blunders, Kissinger’s Machiavellianism, and where chauvinism and populism can lead to a state that has lost its momentum of popular expression and is left to a group of half-lunatics who express themselves in the collective grandeur of their personal gaps. The ray of light that enters you at the closing of the Dark Room is that, despite significant difficulties, Greece in 2022 is in a much better position than in the period 1967-1974, thanks to a strong bourgeois democracy that controls the fate of the country and the orientation to the West, which is steadily pointed by our collective compass. This, of course, does not mean that we do not need even more light.

* Mr. Spiros N. Litsas is Professor of International Relations Theory at the University of Macedonia.