One hundred years ago this month, Elihu Root, an American lawyer, Republican politician and statesman, penned an article for the first issue of the Foreign Affairs magazine titled "A Requisite for the Success of Popular Diplomacy." He should know because he served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War in the Roosevelt and Taft Administrations and managed the U.S. possessions won in the Spanish-American War, especially the Philippines and Cuba. Later, he acted as what we call today a "wise man," advising presidents on a range of foreign and domestic issues.

In that article, Root wrote:

"When the difficult art of regulating the conduct of nations toward each other, in such a way as to preserve rights and avoid offense and promote peaceful intercourse, was left to the foreign offices of the world the public in each country could judge policies by results, and, in the various ways by which public opinion expresses itself, could reward or punish the success or failure of government. To perform that particular function it was not very important that the public should be familiar with the affairs out of which success or failure came. That condition, however, is passing away. In the democratic countries generally, the great body of citizens are refusing to wait until negotiations are over or policies are acted upon or even determined. They demand to know what is going on and to have an opportunity to express their opinions at all stages of diplomatic proceedings."

This was written a hundred years ago; since then, societies changed even more, and people now want to know not only "what is going on" but insist on knowing the alternatives even before the diplomatic proceedings begin.

Root thought that this was due partly to a desire to escape from certain well recognized evils that statesmen and politicians could bring on their own nation. The Greek people should have known in advance that Sir Edward Grey, a British Liberal statesman and the main force behind British foreign policy in the era of the World War I, had promised to Greece in 1915, as an inducement to enter the war, "large concessions on the coast of Asia Minor." He must have had said, "The Ottomans are dying; they don’t have even an army; all its Unionist officers fled the Empire. The whole of western Anatolia, the Aegean Sea and its islands are yours to take." He probably must have added that the "new emergent power in the international arena, the United States is going to give the rest of Anatolia to the Armenians and Kurds. Go get your fair share while you can."

And they did, indeed. The British Empire, on which the sun could not set, was guaranteeing you a success, after all. At that time, European public opinion believed that the weakening Ottoman Empire became known as "the sick man of Europe"; Imperial Russia was about to take Istanbul, and the traditional allies of the Turks, the British and the French were going to leave the Ottomans alone after they lost the Crimean War. The British government forced the British shipbuilding firm of Armstrong Whitworth and Vickers not to deliver two dreadnoughts that the Ottomans had paid in full. Instead, the ships were donated to Greece.

If the Greek people had the opportunity as Root had suggested to know what was happening in Istanbul and how the Ottomans were preparing to rip the Treaty of Sevres into pieces, even though it was seemingly signed by the accredited representatives of the government in August 1920.

But then, the means of communications were not as powerful as they are now, and they had no idea what the nationalists were doing in Anatolia. As they say, the rest is history in which one can read the sad story of 130,000 young Greek soldiers perishing at the Anatolian steps. They killed 640,000 Turkish civilians with their scorched-earth policy, while fleeing from Anatolia during the final phase of the war and 38,000 Turkish soldiers had been martyred; yet tremendous political changes had happened in Athens. The returning defeated brigades ransacked the towns; the King was sent to exile; Venizelos’ party lost the elections. Because of the economic hardship during the occupation of Anatolia, the opposition parties labeled the occupation as "The Asia Minor Catastrophe" ("Mikrasiatiki katastrofi" in Greek) and rejected the idea of annexation of Izmir and Thrace. The opposition leader Dimitrios Gounaris could estimate the coming disaster, economic, military and human; but he could not communicate his opinion to the people on time. He could not overcome the propaganda machine of the British Empire.

After what is considered "the greatest national disaster in the history of modern Hellenism" the British propaganda machine immediately changed its narration and began blaming the Greek government. If you look at the British and French records, you’ll see that it was the Venizelos government who underestimated Turkish preparations despite warnings from the French and British. Venizelos said he needed only three months to defeat the already weakened Turks on his own.

Now, history seems repeating itself. Actually, history does not repeat itself, but people repeat their mistakes that made the terrible history in the first place. The current Greek Prime minister (Kyriakos Venizelos’ great-great-grandson, who has been named after him) Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is trying to keep the Greek people in the dark. Once again, a politician is denying the lessons humanity learned after the invention of the representative governing system the Foreign Affairs magazine had written in its first issue 100 years ago, lying to his own people, the Greek prime minister is giving away Greek towns, ports, islands to the United States to be used to build military bases; but he is failing to inform about the risks those bases are creating for Greece.

His recent conspiracy scheme to wiretap the telephones of journalists and opposition politicians also seems to be part of his efforts to conceal the real intention behind the Greek lands given to the U.S. for free. He is trying to present those bases as some defense apparatus against the "Turkish danger" whilst they are not. They probably are the first footprints of a long-term NeoCon-Globalist scheme post-Russia China Operation as every high school kid would know in Moscow or Beijing. However, they cannot constitute a deterrent against Türkiye, should it choose a military operation if or when Greece’s aggression against Türkiye’s maritime interests in the Aegean area occurs.

Mitsotakis faces reelection next year; however, the wiretapping scandal could highly likely make him lose the elections. He expressed that he was unaware of what he has called the "legal wiretapping" of Nikos Androulakis, a European Parliament member and head of Greece’s third-largest political party. Mitsotakis calls it a legal wiretapping; but he says he would not have approved the move had he known about it. Greece’s National Intelligence Service reports directly to the prime minister; and Mitsotakis is the current prime minister of the country. SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras accused Mitsotakis of criminal behavior in bugging an opposition politician’s phone and called him a liar. Moreover, he implied that Androulakis was not the only person wiretapped, and called on the prime minister to resign.

Then, the probable motive of Mitsotakis was to find out who knew what he is trying to conceal from the Greek people; that is, the real motive of his tossing the lands to the U.S. military forces to be used as military bases. These donations of Greek lands to the Biden-Harris (nay: Biden-Blinken) Administration had already earned Greece a prominent place in Russia’s unfriendly countries list. Perhaps, in the euphoria of presenting them as victories against Türkiye, Mitsotakis is not aware of the long-term impact of being labeled as "unfriendly" by one of his country’s maritime partners and as a buyer of Russian gas and oil, but come winter, he should feel the pinch.

About those Greek aggressions against Türkiye’s maritime interests in the Aegean area: Greece has recently began harassing Turkish warplanes in the region. Greek warplanes locked their radar beams on Turkish F-16s twice last week, which is far from being a friendly gesture; a radar beam locked on an airplane simply means it could be followed by a rocket. Defense Minister Hulusi Akar strongly urged Greece to avoid new adventures that would result in a big defeat, just like they had observed one century ago.

"Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it," Winston Churchill said. Incidentally, Mr. Churchill was the guy who gave the warship ordered and paid for by the Ottomans to Greece, 100 years ago.