To Vima International Edition spoke to Dr Spyros Economides, Associate Professor of International Relations and European Politics at the London School of Economics, and Coordinator of the Politics & Geopolitics Cluster at the school’s Hellenic Observatory Centre for his take on what the US elections will mean for Greece.
This interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.
To Vima :Let’s start a bit more broadly. Can you tell me a bit from your point of view what impact these US elections will have on Europe?
Economides: It will depend greatly on who is elected.
If there is a return to a Trump presidency, Donald Trump has made all sorts of claims about what may happen to the transatlantic relationship, what may happen to the US’s participation in NATO, because he’s threatened to withdraw the US from NATO. And so this is something which creates a great degree of uncertainty and this is something which we just have to wait and see what he actually does.
He also made great claims about putting an end to the war in Ukraine. But what this actually means, and what this means for the European members of NATO is also very very unclear.
If we have a continuation of the Biden administration in the form of a Kamala Harris presidency then I don’t think you will necessarily see much change in terms of the US’s participation in NATO or its relationship with Europe.
We still have to see what will happen with the situation in Ukraine because irrespective of who’s elected president of the United States of America next week, I think that there’s a general push to find some kind of solution to the war in Ukraine, and I don’t think the Harris administration will be any more reticent to try and a solution. And this will cause divisions amongst the Europeans obviously.
To Vima: One issue is that Trump is very big on raising, increasing, and implementing tariffs. And this of course will also have a big impact on Europe should he be elected. What will the US elections mean for trade in Europe?
Economides: Inevitably there are all sorts of trade considerations, and if Donald Trump decides that he’s going to impose tariffs on specific items traded with the European Union, then this is going to cause tensions. But I don’t think that Donald Trump actually cares about [these tensions] very much, so the consequences of this are negligible to him. He will do whatever he thinks he needs to do to fulfill his promises in terms of “making America great again” and “America first” and the rest of it.
I think the general problem we have right now is that on the one hand, a Harris presidency seems to suggest a degree of predictability and also a degree of being able to talk and discuss in a more regular fashion. A Trump presidency would just mean everything is unpredictable. There’s no sort of certainty about what may happen next, because of the nature of the individual and the way he governed last time as president.
I think the uncertainty in economic terms is going to be horrible for the Europeans, because uncertainty makes the markets jittery. And once the markets are jittery, the consequence will be felt across the whole of Europe.
To Vima: Also there’s the question of how Trump or Harris will continue or change the US’s approach to Israel and the ongoing war in Gaza, and what the implications for Europe will be on that as well.
Economides: I mean it’s very interesting to note that in the context of what’s happened in Ukraine, there is a Western position. There’s a position that supposedly the West has coalesced around, and everybody’s on the same page and everybody’s imposed economic sanctions on Russia, and everybody’s assisted the Ukrainians in their fight to one degree or another.
But in the case of Israel-Gaza, even though we talk about the West, there’s no real Western position.
We talk about the US a lot on this issue because the US is of course the closest possible ally that Israel has. It’s also the supplier of armaments. It’s also supposed to be the biggest broker in terms of the Middle East, especially if you look at the background of the Abram Accords and the rest of it.
Each individual European state has to lesser or greater degree said Israel must be allowed to defend itself but at the same time there has to be a resolution to the Palestinians homeland problem. But there’s lots of variation about what the Western countries say, so that’s also an interesting relationship between the USA and Europe on this point.
There’s a lot more variation in position and a lot more public disquiet about what’s happening and how Israel is pursuing its military aims and what the civilian humanitarian consequences are of its military campaign. And these things mean that there is dissension between the USA and many European states on this issue.
To Vima: Then if we can turn for a moment to Greece– which of these factors or other factors are going to be most important for Greece in terms of its own national and international relations agenda? And how could this election impact the Greek and US relationship?
Economides: So on the one hand, the bilateral relationship between Greece and the US I think is pretty strong. And I think it will remain that way because I don’t think that the Trump administration will have any real concerns about its relationship with a country like Greece.
Under both the Trump administration and the Biden administration, the Greek relationship with the United States of America improved. Agreements were signed in terms of defense cooperation, arms transfers were agreed, sales were put in place, [Prime Minister] Mitsotakis visited Washington and spoke to Congress. So I think in this bilateral sense, on a strictly bilateral level, It’s unlikely that we’ll see much variation in the relationship, always with a caveat in the background that you never know what a Trump administration might do.
What will be problematic though is what happens in the broader international context with respect again to Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, etc.
Because of the unpredictability of what might happen in the Trump administration, the geopolitical context might change. And these changes could have implications for Greece as well. But that’s not something that’s necessarily to do with a bilateral relationship between Greece and the US. It’s more about the moving parts and the consequences of the moving parts which at this stage we simply don’t know enough about.
To Vima: At several points in history the US and Greek bilateral relations were of course very vexed. And so at what point would you place sort of the beginning of this incline in friendly or bilateral relations?
Economides: Look, this is an extremely long story. It’s an extremely paradoxical one.
Even if you want to take the darkest days of when anti-Americanism was at its peak in terms of modern Greek politics in the 1980s, one of the major sort of symbolic gestures that the first PASOK government went on about was the idea that we must remove the US army bases in Greece. And there was a big sort of negotiation with the United States about the bases. But the bases didn’t leave. Only the base in Glyfada. And the rest of them, the seriously important ones, remained in place. So underlying all of this is the understanding that the American military relationship, the defense relationship, is intrinsically important for Greece.
It’s important especially concerning the relationship with Turkey, and now more broadly speaking in the context of the Eastern Mediterranean.
So I think in the last 10 years what has happened is that the context of the Eastern Mediterranean has increased in importance, and Greece in that particular context has become a much more valuable ally for the USA.
To Vima: And speaking of the relationship with Turkey, which of course for Greece is a defining issue– according to all estimations, no one would expect that Kamala Harris is going to drastically change the US approach to Turkey. And there is no indication Trump plans to get closer with Turkey. However, there is this tendency that he has to sidle up to strongmen and Erdogan certainly sells himself as a strongman.
Economides: Again, it comes down to whether we fear the unpredictability of a Donald Trump presidency. Because under a Harris presidency, at least you will see some logic to what’s going on and what the next step might be and it will be communicated in a much more clear and obvious fashion.
Now, for example, just say hypothetically, that Turkey becomes a very important actor in terms of trying to broker a peace between Ukraine and Russia. This has happened before, right? Now, the two ways this can happen is that under a Harris regime, you can understand that if he plays some kind of mediating role and the outcome is satisfactory to all and to the United States of America, then you might see how Turkey may be rewarded in some sort of way. And that reward may take the form of military hardware, and this may lead to some kind of imbalance of power, equality in the Aegean. But you can see there’ll be a logical sequence there, and at least it will be communicated in a fair fashion.
If Donald Trump comes to the White House, you may see the same kind of thing happening, but the rhetoric and what surrounds how Erdogan is rewarded may be completely out of kilter. And that’s what I mean by unpredictability.
So this is just a hypothetical scenario, right? But it’s just under a Trump administration you never know what may happen next, how it will be expressed, how it will be communicated, and how Athens will receive it.
I think there’s a safety net there for Greece in that it has a series of agreements and arrangements in place with the United States of America on certain strategic and military issues, which I think any incoming president will find it hard to break.
