Erdogan-Μitsotakis meeting cancelled: A diplomatic fiasco or kindergarten?

“There is no question of stopping the dialogue with Turkey,” Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis said on Wednesday after the meeting between Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in New York was ultimately cancelled after a last minute postponement by the Turkish side late on Tuesday.

The official pretext was Erdogan’s participation at a meeting with US President Donald Trump with Arab and Muslim leaders, at a time that coincided with the meeting with the Greek PM. The two delegations allegedly tried to find a new available time for a meeting but this was not possible due to the heavy schedules of the two leaders.

Through leaks to Turkish newspaper Milliyet, Ankara alleged it was disturbed that the Greek side had made known to public the scheduled Erdogan-Mitsotakis meeting.

A diplomatic kindergarten? In my eyes it looked like that.

However, during the day it became clear that Erdogan had little interest to meet with Mitsotakis especially after his call on UN member-states to recognize the Turkish-occupied North of Cyprus and ahead of his face-to-face meeting with Donal Trump on Thursday, where important issues like the purchase of F-35, the crisis in Gaza and the broader Middle East, the Kurds and all other geo-political issues that lay close of the heart of the Turkish president. Greece’s seemed the minor problem in the area.

Too bad for Athens that had heralded the upcoming meeting “drums and trumpets” so to say, leaking to media an agenda about the underwater cable to facilitate the energy connection Greece-Cyprus-Israel as a bargain card for Turkey’s participation in the EU’s Defense Program SAFE.

All hope ended abrupt and with Greek opposition parties describing it as a “diplomatic defeat” for Greece.

But Foreign Minister Gerapetritis carried the whole issue with dignity and told state broadcaster ERT in his usual mellifluous style:

“There was a scheduled meeting between the two leaders. It is obvious that there was a change of schedule, due to the subsequent meetings that were extremely important. An effort was made to find the appropriate available time, but this is probably not going to work. There is no question of stopping the dialogue, on the contrary, what we want to achieve with Turkey is to have a structured dialogue, which will recognize the value of communication, so that crises are not generated. “There will be an opportunity in the near future to have a meeting between the two leaders.”

Some Greek media criticized the cancellation speaking of a “missed chance for dialogue” between the two countries who are not in the best of their often troubled relations.

However, it should be stressed that the meeting was scheduled to last no longer than 30 minutes and if one considers that Erdogan uses a translator I wouldn’t see any substancial “dialogue” but a courtesy meeting, a warming-up meeting for another constructive meeting in the future.