The crash of a GreekF-16military aircraft in Spain on Monday, on the very day of the inauguration of the new Greek prime minister, leader of the radical left Alexis Tsipras, could seem like abad omen for Greece’s status in NATO.
Eight French nationals and two Greeks were killed, and 21 people injured, when a Greek fighter plane crashed during NATO training inSpain.
That raised again the old question of the reliability and interoperability of NATO members' military infrastructure and weapons. At the same time, the incident has also brought back to attention the political issue: the extent to which Greece can still be considered a reliable member of the Alliance.
Since its accession in 1952, Greece has contributed to Euro-Atlantic security and at the same time has been protected by the security umbrella the Alliance offers its members.It is no secret thatthe simultaneous accession to NATO of both Greece and Turkey in 1952 prevented a military confrontation between the two countries.
During the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974, Greece and Turkey almost went to war and it was only NATO membership that prevented an outright military deflagration that would have beendisastrous for the whole region and for Europe.
More recently, during the year 2014, there was increased NATO concern, caused of many incidents, usually kept secret, involving Greek and Turkish jets above the Aegean sea. Turkish and Greek military planes are regularly engaged in mock dogfights. According to Turkish military advisor Metin Gurcan, writing on the Almonitor website, in one such incident Greek planeslocked their radars for three minutes on Turkish warplanes sent to intercept them, and Turkish warplanes responded to this harassment in kind.
Metin Gurcan also writes that “the Greek claim of 10-mile airspace is not heeded by the aircraft of the alliance in NATO exercises held over the Aegean. NATO air forces that participate in those exercises consider, like Turkey, anything beyond the six-mile territorial waters of Greece as international airspace."
The coming to power of Syriza in Athens might change Greece's perspective in NATO even more. Even before Tsipras Greece was known to be at times unpredictable.
In 2008,at the Bucharest NATO Summit, Greece blocked the accession of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), claiming that its neighbour’s use of the name “Macedonia”implies a territorial claim to its northern province of the same name. Greece blocked Skopje's bid despite pressure from all other NATO countries, and even resisting US pressure. Turkishsupport for Skopje's NATO bid seemed to rile Greece even more.
Since then, NATO has demanded a solution to the dispute before FYROM can be invited to join.The fact that last December, the International Court of Justice, ICJ, ruled that Greece hadbreached an interim deal brokered by the UN in 1995 when it blocked Skopje's attempt to join NATO did nothing to change the situation.
Alexis Tsipras’s publicly displayed anti-Atlanticism is also certain to raise NATO’s anxieties. Before the Greek elections, on 14 January, Tsipras tweeted, “We will not take part in NATO with abowed head. We will not support military interventions. We will defend international legality.”
“So do we, we defend international legality”, pointed out a NATO official, who insisted that the Alliance does not comment on pre-electoral comments and domestic politics.
Still, even without alluding to NATO’s 1999 intervention against Serbia, a traditional friend of Greece, statements such as those tweeted by Tsipras can only worry inside the Alliance, all coupled with the known position of the small nationalist rightist party allied with Tsipras's Syriza, the Independent Greeks, a xenophobic party which is openly anti-Western and pro-Russian .
Still, an important confidence-building measure will be the invitation sent toGreeceto participate in NATO’s 2015 military exercises that will assemble a hundred planes from 11 countries inMay 2015 in central Anatolia’s Konya province under the responsibility of Turkey… hoping thatGreek planeswill not start locking their radars on Turkish warplanes just for the sake a good joke.
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