Greece ‘a pillar of US strategy in the region’

US Ambassador in Athens Geoffrey Pyatt tells Kathimerini Washington is eyeing major energy role for Alexandroupoli

The United States wants to see northern Greece become a gateway for the transportation of natural gas and commodities to the Western Balkans and Europe, US Ambassador in Athens Geoffrey Pyatt tells Kathimerini.

The senior diplomat underlines American investment interest in the region’s energy network and stresses the importance of the Trans Adriatic and Gas Interconnector Greece-Bulgaria pipelines (TAP and IGB), the creation of a floating liquefied natural gas terminal in the northern Greek town of Alexandroupoli, as well as the need for a railway link from there to Bulgaria.

Pyatt expresses his excitement over an increased American presence in northern Greece, noting that this will materialize over the next year up to the 2018 Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF), where the US is the guest of honor, after China this year.

He also says that he is in the process of arranging a visit by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to the White House, while hailing the close defense cooperation between the two countries, centered on the US Navy base at Souda Bay in Crete.

Last but not least, Pyatt praises Athens’s moderate stance vis-a-vis Ankara, adding that Turkey must remain connected to the West. The US is the country to watch at next year’s Thessaloniki International Fair. What are your plans and expectations?

I was up at Thessaloniki, of course, and had the opportunity to see what the Chinese have done. I congratulated the ambassador. I was also struck, when you look at that event, by the fact that it has a really great potential not just as a big political thing where the prime minister and the opposition leader come and give a speech, but also, because it’s in Thessaloniki, to reinforce Greece’s regional role, this idea of Greece as a pillar of stability.

Frankly, I don’t see China or many of your partners thinking the way we think in terms of Greece’s larger regional impact. We talk about this on the record all the time, the role of Greece as the vanguard of Europe, sitting at the center of that Venn diagram, dealing with the challenges of Eastern Med, the challenges of Maghreb, and the challenges of the Black Sea region, through the Balkans.

You’re going to see as we work over the next 12 months to get ready for Thessaloniki, first of all, a major US focus on northern Greece, but also a focus on Thessaloniki not just as the second capital, as the prime minister called it, but as Greece’s gateway to the countries of the Western Balkans, which are countries – the United States and Greece are emphatically in agreement on this – that need to continue moving towards Euro-Atlantic institutions, moving towards EU membership, moving towards NATO membership if they so choose. That’s a vision which Athens and Washington share, that not everybody else is on board with. Are tax policies the biggest concern of investors considering Greece, or other factors?

The concern that I hear is that people want a level playing field. If there’s a level playing field, if there’s reasonable certainty in terms of the speed with which regulatory approvals will go through and processes. Then it’s taxes; they’re a pricing factor. You put that into your calculations and you decide if you can make money or not. The biggest concern I hear is bureaucracy, the bureaucratic impediments. What are investors looking for?

I’ll compare where we are now to where we were in summer of last year when I was getting ready for this job. In the summer of 2016, when I would talk to American companies about Greece, everybody would say: “You must be crazy. Read the newspaper. They don’t know if they’re going to make their next bond redemption. They’ve got all of these programmatic reviews with the troika that are unclear. We keep hearing about the risk of early elections. We don’t know about the stability of the banking system. Exchange rates. Capital controls.” People were very wary – there were a lot of risk factors.

Now those risk factors are largely off the table. What you’ve got are the upsides, the entrepreneurship that the Embassy has tried very hard to support, the strong Greek human capital. I made some comments when I was up in Thessaloniki and I had the chance to walk through some of the university exhibitions. Having done my visit to Patra in the summer, to Patra University, I saw another group of Patra researchers, all of whom were university graduates, mainly from little towns in the Pelopon- Geoffrey Pyatt addresses an energy forum in Alexandroupoli, northern Greece, earlier this month. ‘There’s the idea of developing Alexandroupoli as an energy hub and also a logistics hub if you’re able to materialize this railway project, linking up to Bulgaria,’ he says. nese that I’d never heard of. But there was this one woman I remember. Her area is microtubes and nanotechnology and she has a startup, which is composed of young people, all of whom came out of the university. She got her PhD in nanotechnology, and their area of specialization is using nanotubes to strengthen carbon fiber. You know, nobody in Greece knows that this kind of stuff is going on, and it’s a real success story. And the fact that it’s coming out of the universities, which in other parts of the country are so politicized and where it’s really hard to do that kind of thing. So I think people are going to see those opportunities. Will a meeting take place between the Greek prime minister and the US president or vice president?

We’ll see. We had a very good phone call, Vice President [Mike] Pence with the prime minister [Alexis Tsipras] this summer. As you know, the vice president invited the prime minister to come to Washington as a follow-up to that. We haven’t been able to make it happen yet. I’m very confident it will happen. And when the White House is ready to announce something, they’ll announce it.

But in the meantime, my approach has been, keep building, keep laying the foundation. Find the bricks that we need in terms of energy, in terms of security cooperation, in terms of our investment relationship, in terms of the people-to-people relationship. That’s the great thing about being the American ambassador in Greece right now; we’ve got the building blocks to take what has long been a solid relationship and make it a real lynchpin of how we think about US interests in Europe in the years ahead.

Souda base ‘vital’

Moving to military cooperation, how important is Souda Bay?

I was very glad that we had Senator [Ron] Johnson here [earlier in September] to go out to Souda. He’s somebody I got to know well through my senate confirmation processes and through Ukraine, and I heard he was going to be in the neighborhood and encouraged him to think about a visit.

I know he was very impressed by what he saw during his day in Crete. He was able to meet with some of the Greek military officers who run the facility and also with the Greek military officer who runs the NMIOTC, the maritime training center. We had two ships in harbor that day. I explained that it’s sort of a typical day. These guys come and go.

But the two things I think that distinguish Souda: One is its geography; the fact that it’s this vitally important platform at a time when the 6th Fleet and the US military is more active in the Eastern Med than it has been in a very long time. Souda is an indispensable platform for resupply, sustainment, all the stuff that we do to pursue the EUCOM mission in this part of the NATO region.

But equally important, and this is the part that I think sometimes gets lost in the translation – all these articles about the contract for one year or five years – is the quality of cooperation between the Greek and American military personnel. Whether it’s our Special Forces guys working on boarding in NMIOTC or the opportunity for our pilots to fly together, to become familiar with each other’s operations, that’s what NATO is all about, ultimately: the solemn commitment on the part of both countries to fight together, to work together. And Souda is a place where we develop and sustain that confidence.

It also fits – based on what I hear from [Defense] Minister [Panos] Kammenos, Alternate Minister [Dimitris] Vitsas, Admiral [Evangelos] Apostolakis – with Greece’s own vision for moving more of your defense footprint to the southern Aegean. And the simple fact is, all of these investments that we make in Souda are dual-use. We are guests. And so the upgrades and investments that we’ve made or NATO has made also are facilitating Greek military operations. They’re an enabler for the Hellenic Navy and the Hellenic Air Force.

I’m not competent to judge, but I do know that my American military counterparts are very respectful of their Greek counterparts. Just to mention a couple of areas, General [Alkiviadis] Stefanis has a superb relationship, is real friends with General Ben Hodges, the Commander of Army Europe. I see that all the time in their correspondence and everything else. General Stefanis is going to the United States this month to be inducted into the War College Hall of Fame – he’s a graduate – in recognition of his accomplishments. There’s the Hellenic Navy – this is a country with a millennia-long maritime tradition – and the Hellenic Navy Special Forces are highly regarded. There’s no doubt there. And then there’s great advantage that the Air Force has in that they’re flying all the time, which means it’s easier to maintain competence.

For better or worse, the Greek military has faced challenges because of the crisis, because of budget, because of maintenance and repairs, but the thing I’ve learned working with the American military over 28 years now in different jobs, the most valuable thing that the US military has is individual soldiers. It’s their competence, it’s their training, it’s their readiness, it’s their preparedness. And on that, Greece has the human capital to meet the highest NATO standards.