The Workshop of Young Researchers on Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy was held at the Songjiang campus of SISU on 30 September 2025. The conference was organised by the School of International Relations and Public Affairs (SIRPA) of SISU and the Study Center on Diplomacy of the Shanghai Universities.

Professor Yang Jiemian, former president of the Shanghai Association of International Relations and Chairman of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Shanghai Institutes of International Studies, delivered a keynote address entitled My vision of the Systematic Construction and Academic Interpretation of Xi Jinping’s Diplomatic Thought.

The workshop was attended by young SIRPA graduates, as well as current graduate students keenly interested in mainstream theoretical research. Participating graduate students came from no less than eight country wide institutions as follows:

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

East China Normal University

Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences

Shanghai Institute of International Studies

Jiangsu University

Jiaxing University

Tongling University

Gansu University of Political Science and Law.

The workshop was chaired by Professor Guo Shu Yong, Party General-Secretary of SIPRA at SISU, and the leading expert of the Xi Jinping Thought Institute of Diplomacy. Professor Chang Can from the Department of research results and platform management of the Research Office at SISU, and Professor Liang Kun, Director of the Institute’s Office, also shared their practical experiences.

In his closing speech, Professor Guo praised the brilliant speeches delivered by the graduates, noting that the Chinese Communist Party committee of SISU, the university leadership, and its bodies attach great importance to academic research of Xi Jinping’s Diplomatic Thought, the practice of the “three progressions”.

For several decades the international system has seen a concern about the so-called North-South divide. This divide encompassed a gap between the advanced industrial world and the so-called third-world that encompassed Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia. In more specific terms it was an economic gap, best indicated by a much lower standard of living outside of Europe and North America.

Even before the end of the Cold War, the Mediterranean saw increasing numbers of illegal immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees from war zones coming from the Middle East, North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and of course Sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of thousands of refugees began crossing the Mediterranean fleeing from war zones, civil wars, and of course last but not least economic conditions that were not acceptable anymore given the opportunities that people in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America saw in the advanced industrial democratic world. This gap was compounded by the fact that the demographic growth in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia was not economically sustainable. Rising expectations saw then millions of people trying to move into Europe. In 2019 alone, 2.7 million immigrants from non-EU countries entered the EU.

As refugee and immigration crises in the European Union have shown neither national governments nor the European Union institutions have been able to develop a systematic or coherent approach in dealing with constant conflicts in the Middle East or Africa. The end of the cold war had welcomed the idea of peace in our time, but as Samuel P. Huntington prophetically outlined in his essay and eventual book The Clash if Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, the international system was going to see a constant conflict between the secular democratic Euro-American world and as it turned out, the Islamic and Chinese world. The wars in the Persian Gulf, the Near East and the rise of Islamic terrorism in Africa, Europe and Asia followed the traumatic attack by a handful of radical Islamic terrorists on New York. By 2021 the consequences could be seen through the American retreat from Afghanistan. That country had been the breeding ground for the attacks on New York. The United States, Britain and other Western countries came to be humiliated by the Taliban’s victory. 

The Taliban victory in Afghanistan saw hundreds of thousands more refugees trying to enter Europe principally through Turkey and Belarus. Radical Islam wrote a new chapter in the history of the Islamic world. 

The constant international crisis that precipitated a flow of immigrants and refugees to Europe demonstrated increasingly the inability of the European Union and the United Kingdom to resolve an issue that challenged in the final analysis European culture, European economic wellbeing and societal sustainability. The rise of political parties that articulated the apprehension, fears and anxiety of widespread strata of the European population accepting non-European and Islamic newcomers, legal and illegal in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium and Germany for example, were symptomatic of future political instability. The inability of European countries to agree on common policies of protecting European borders and even developing a defensive mechanism outside the framework of NATO speaks of structural deficiencies in European strategic decision making.

Immigration was in the final analyses fueled by demographic growth in   Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Governments in Europe were unable to respond to the increasing expectations of the populations of those regimes. The population of Egypt had reached by 2020 102.3 million, Pakistan 220.9 million, Bangladesh 164 million, Ethiopia 115 million, and Nigeria 206.1 million; these are examples of what Europe was going to face. Increasing mass communications and transportation allowed millions of people to enter Europe. 

European governments seem unable to coordinate a policy that could cope with the increasing movement of people from the developing world towards Western Europe and North America. The issue of illegal immigration was of concern to many societies in Asia, Latin America, and Africa to the extent that economic concern lead many people to move from one nation to another. For example, the case of Bangladesh stands out, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis were moving into India generating social, economic and social conflicts. And in the case of Africa, millions of people were moving across the continent with spill over into North Africa and Libya. In turn, hundreds of thousands of Africans were trying to cross the Mediterranean into Italy, Spain and Greece to reach the promised land: the European Union.

The sustainability of such movements did not and does not seem to concern international organizations and NGOs that were and are interested in bringing refugees to Europe. Inevitably, the issue of settling refugees, providing employment and preventing cultural clashes was the subject of much debate but with no solution in sight.

Critical debates on sustainability and climate change did not necessarily address themselves to the catastrophic problem of population growth and food supplies. In fact, the reluctance of some countries such as India, Indonesia and China to comprehend the anxieties of industrial states and European and North American activists was to be expected. Beijing, Delhi and Jakarta were by far more concerned with their populations and their standard of living. Rising expectations could not be postponed because they could be a cause of political instability. The demand for fossil fuels was not decreasing as energy was crucial to the creation of a higher standard of living for hundreds of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Immigration is bound to be the biggest challenge for the European Union and Britain. Illegal immigrants from the Middle East were coming to France to cross the channel as others were trying to come through the Italian peninsula to enter Switzerland and Germany. The soft underbellies of the European Union, Italy, Spain and Greece continue to be so. Countries such as Belarus and Turkey use the movement of immigrants into the European Union as a tool for gaining concessions from Brussels and individual European countries. The president of Turkey Erdogan had been successful earlier (in 2015) in gaining financial support from the European Union and Germany to stop the flow of Islamic immigrants into the continent. Hundreds and thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan could become a great tool for gaining concessions from the European Union and single European states whose power is becoming ever more marginal. 

The trend in international conferences shaped by Western powers and NGOs on climate change, sustainability, energy and food security, and human rights should be understood in the context of an overwhelming demographic shift that does not seem to enter into the political calculus of Western decision makers and their constituents. 

The normalization of relations between Morocco and Israel came in with the United States agreeing to legitimize Morocco’s annexation of Spanish Sahara, a territory which had been vacated by Spain in 1976, something that Rabat had been seeking for a long time regardless of the opposition of the Organization of African Unity and ostensibly against international law and precedent. Trump was able to convince Arab parties to recognize Israel by promising arms and foreign aid, more importantly, opposition to Iran and its nuclear policies gave Washington even more psychological leverage amongst conservative Arab states.

There were a series of factors which allowed President Trump to seize the moment and achieve these diplomatic breakthroughs which contributed to the changing balance of power in the Middle East. These developments had not been expected and did not receive the deserved attention in terms of power shifts in the region and in the international system. Such an evolution will be seen in the context of an increasing shift away from the use of fossil fuels, specifically oil and coal, and an increasing trend towards renewable energy, ranging from solar power to hydrogen power, and as many expected, advanced nuclear power, with a possible move towards nuclear fusion. An indicator of these trends was the realization on the part of some Middle Eastern powers that their possession of oil reserves was not guarantee for future economic wellbeing and security. Thus, confrontation and war with the Jewish state and support for the Palestinian cause had become an ever greater liability for the future of political and economic wellbeing of many states, ranging from Africa to the Persian Gulf.

The trend away from fossil fuel was and is being further highlighted by the concerns over climate change and the policies that states will follow to mitigate the effect of climate change and global warming. Indeed, one crucial concern in the financial world, for example, was the role of the insurance and reinsurance companies in planning new insurance policies and possibly high premiums for catastrophes, fires and severe weather storms such as hurricanes. These trends inevitably influencing the corporations whose profits derive from investments in economic enterprises connected to the energy sector, ranging from oil refining to coal powered power plants, the plastic industry, the automotive industry, air transportation, shipping, and tourism. Areas of interest for alternative and renewable energy sources range from solar power, hydrogen power, nuclear power through both fusion and fission, and eolic power.

The consequences of such a shift for the financial institutions and investment banks, and most importantly for pension funds, are difficult to fathom. In analogous terms, the consequences for international power relations become ever more problematic for forecasting international security trends and future balances of regional and global power. The breakthrough of the Trump Administration in brokering peace agreements in the Middle East is an indicator of how decision makers in Washington crafted US security policies in the Middle East and the Mediterranean to further American interests. Traditionally, as John Kerry and the Obama Administration had kept harping on, there was a constant focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict and how failure to resolve the Palestinian – Israel conflict would block peace from being reached in the region. Indeed, the success and appeal of Iran in the area owed much to its fanatic opposition to the Jewish state and its support for the Palestinian cause. As it was, it turned out that given the trends in the Arab world, the Palestinians could not now veto peaceful relations between Arab states and Jerusalem. The Saudi state did not object to these developments and its role as the guardian of Islamic holy sites, its control over huge petroleum resources, and foreign exchange allowed Saudi rulers to indirectly promote Israeli-Gulf cooperation.

The trend away from the use of fossil fuels is taking place, paradoxically, when Turkey is challenging many of its neighbors for control over oil and gas production in the Mediterranean while truculently threatening Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, France, and the European Union. In fact, Erdogan, at the United Nations was denouncing Trump and the United States, along with Israel in virtually anti-Semitic terms in his promotion of Palestinian rights and independence. Ankara was meanwhile moving arms, mercenaries and advisors into Libya while claiming rights over large swaths of the Mediterranean Sea. The Turkish moves in the Mideast and North Africa were matched by an increasing Russian military and political presence in the region, highlighted by Moscow’s military presence in Syria, and an ever larger navy in the Mediterranean. Trends in the Middle East and Persian Gulf also witnessed an ever increasing interest in Chinese investments, especially in the case of Iran, where the Ayatollahs were enticing Beijing in return for oil, gas, and financial backing of the Iranian economy with the hope of blocking American influence in the Gulf. Peace trends were being paradoxically strengthened by the ever increasing fear on the part of Arab States of Iranian Shiite imperial ambitions that saw a very successful manipulation and control of paramilitary organizations controlled by Iranian officers and the revolutionary guard in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, the Gaza Strip, Yemen, and very likely in some African States as Islamic radicalism spread throughout East and West Africa.

As the Gulf saw conservative Sunni Arab States reassess their relations and past confrontations with the state of Israel, the diplomatic breakthroughs were an indicator of shifts in the balance of power in the area as Turkey and Iran were articulating nationalist neo-Islamist ideologies generated by Khomeini’s Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979. In the 20th Century, the region’s preeminence from West Asia to North Africa was connected to international demand for oil and gas. From the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, to Libya and Algeria, oil and gas became one of the central themes in international conflict and cooperation with oil producing states manipulating the price of oil. Geology gave these states in the Middle East and North Africa an incredible leverage in extracting concessions both economically and politically from Europe and the United States. However, by 2020, concern about climate change and the increasing CO2 emissions, convinced all nations of the necessity for decreasing the use of fossil fuels and to seek alternatives in renewable energy or nuclear power.

The economic shifts in the evolution of energy alternatives were inevitably shaping the economic evolution of the international system. Leaders of Gulf States, as well as other oil producing nations such as Norway, realized that the demand for advanced technology and scientific research was now as important as the financial resources that had been accumulated in the last two generations. The trend toward peace treaties was structurally driven. Thus, ideology was now taking a more secondary seat in the political calculations of the leadership in the Arab and Islamic world. All the same, it had been inevitable that for some countries ideological considerations did not lose their primary role in their foreign policies, as in the case of Turkey and Iran. By September of 2020, Ankara had goaded Azerbaijan to go to war with Armenia as a conflict between the two Caucasian countries would have enhanced the neo-Ottoman ambitions of Erdogan’s Turkey. Some of Erdogan’s statements were already causing apprehensions in Tehran as he implied by the end of 2020 in Baku that Iranian Azerbaijan, with a Turkish-speaking population, was part of the greater Turkey that Erdogan was envisioning.

Iranian Shi’ite ideology was not to be underestimated in Tehran’s policies as the Ayatollahs’ aggressive moves within the Arab and Islamic world were rationalized in terms of defending Islam and Shiism. Trends in the Gulf toward more peaceful relations with Israel and more cooperation with the United States were ever more motivated by anxiety and fear about Iranian political ambitions. Turkey’s own imperial moves in North Africa, the Caucasus, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria and Turkish vocal and truculent support for Palestine as it denounced “Zionism” were again indicators of historical ideological motivations that were provoking anxieties in many Arab countries, particularly Egypt, the most important Arab country. Erdogan’s cooptation of the Muslim Brothers, an organization dedicated to Pan-Islamism, and by now based in Turkey after fleeing Egypt, was not to be underestimated. The Muslim Brothers were very influential in Tunisia, Morocco, Qatar and they were supported even by the Iranian Mullahs, regardless of their historical aversion towards Sunnis.

The trends toward new configurations of power relations in the region and in the Mediterranean had been made strategically possible by the fact that in the United States and Canada, more oil and gas was being produced than ever before, and the United States was not dependent on oil imports as the case had been in the 1970s and 1980s. If anything, the US could be an alternative to Europe and Japan for oil and gas. President Trump tried to pressure but failed to convince Germany to abandon the construction of gas pipelines from Russia, offering American gas via maritime routes.

The ever increasing surplus of oil and gas in the world was decreasing the economic power of many states, not only in the Middle East but also in states such as Mexico, Venezuela, Angola and Nigeria, a trend that was enhanced by the discovery of new fossil fuel deposits in the world. In the Mediterranean, the discovery of gas and oil deposits in the territorial waters of Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt saw increasing cooperation in building sea pipelines to carry gas through Europe. Cooperation was brought forward amongst gas producing states within an International Organization, including, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Greece, Italy and Jordan.

What stands out in terms of the historical developments shaping the international system is European Union’s inability and certainly Germany to have a role in promoting peaceful developments in the area. Even the much vaunted role of China in the international system does not see a comparable Chinese involvement in promoting peaceful trends in the area. As it is, the international system relies –as always- on Washington and Moscow with the contributions of Paris and London in promoting a more stable Middle East. That is to say historically the role of the Great Powers that had shaped the Middle East in modern time is not declining. Trump had indeed reasserted American power in the wake of Obama’s failure to resolve some of the more outstanding conflicts of the Middle East. The evolving shift away from the use of fossil fuels has been matched by a reassertion to Great Power politics echoing the developments of European 19th Century history, as Imperial Russia, Great Britain and France competed for hegemony over the territories of a declining Ottoman Empire. The paradox now is that Erdogan’s Turkey has become a revisionist power trying to reassert a historical role more consonant with Ottoman history and reflecting a virulent Turko-Islamic nationalism.

National and international rhetoric about climate change, human rights and the more progressive world has not necessarily impacted on international power politics whilst the arms race in the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific were and continue to be harbingers of new political scenarios. Realism and idealism continue to shape international diplomatic activity, national rhetoric and political ideologies regardless of the fact that the Covid-19 virus did have an impact on slowing down diplomatic interaction and that climate change rhetoric appealed to more active political parties in Western countries.

The successful diplomatic activity of the Trump administration which has begun in 2017 with Trump’s visit to the area and Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, triggered the chain of developments that brought more Arab States to recognize Israel. In turn, the expansion of alternatives to fossil fuels, the fear of climate change and new developments in mass communications and artificial intelligence portend to be the harbingers of structural changes in the international political economy.

In his intervention during the consultation session, 12^th December, 2019, Dr. Leventis stressed the role of the International Security Forum as the leading Cypriot think tank promoting the cause of peace and disarmament in the region. In this context he emphasized that the island republic of Cyprus, being the south easternmost gate to the European Union but at the same time enjoying friendly bilateral relations with the Arab world as well as Israel and Iran offers the perfect venue for reconciliation and disarmament efforts promoting much needed peace and stability in the turbulent Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

In the margins of the three-day Brussels conference, Dr. Leventis held private meetings and consultations with a large number of delegates, including officials of the European External Action Service, discussing ways the International Security Forum, Cyprus can contribute to the network’s stated goals.

Idlib is bleeding. Radical Islamists, who lost the war in Syria, are trying to retain power in the country’s north-western province at the cost of civilian lives. This is the final obstacle to attaining peace in the country.

Brett McGurk, US Special Presidential Envoy to the Coalition fighting the Islamic State speaking at the American Institute of the Middle East, three years ago, said: Idlib Province is the largest Al-Qaeda safe haven. It borders with Turkey and it is Ankara whom we should talk to about it.

McGurk was as much right as he cut corners: he is perfectly aware how the Islamists found themselves in Idlib. It all began in 2011 with the attacks of Al-Qaeda terrorists on Syrian government forces which held the line in the northern part of the province next to Jisr ash-Shugur. The Syrian-Turkish border existed then only on paper. In fact, it was utterly permeable resembling a block of Swiss cheese. Uncontrolled crossing points were a common occurrence. The most important of which was located near the Turkish border town of Reyhanli. Over time, this porous border turned into a real transit camp, through which Islamic militants from all over the world penetrated into Syria. Moreover, loads of weapons were supplied via the ports of the Hatay Province, also on Turkish soil.

A year later, the US entered the frame under the CIA operation codenamed Timber Sycamore. The Americans, supported by the special services of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Jordan, illegally sent military advisers, equipment and funds to Syria – with the consent of neither the Syrian government nor of any body of the international community. By 2013, Washington satisfying, inter alia, the wishes of Tel Aviv, gave the go-ahead for the supply of weapons to several thousand Islamic militants. The latter operated under the clear order of overthrowing the Syrian government.

Throughout this time we have been reading reports in Western media calling those Islamic militants ‘rebels’. It was clear to everyone, however, they were just abandoned villains planning to turn Syria into a theocratic state. They set up their training camp between Mount Zāwiya and the small town of Maarrat al-Nu’man, south of Idlib. From there, these atrocious jihadists penetrated into other parts of Syria.

In the following couple of years, 2014 and 2015, the Islamists, who by now possessed state-of-the-art weapons including anti-tank missile systems, pursued a hard-fought offensive on the province’s capital, the very city of Idlib, which was then controlled by the Syrian government forces. Alas Idlib fell. Damascus troops sustained losses. They retreated far inland. At this very moment, Bashar Al Assad sought military aid from Russia.

After the fall of the province’s major city, thousands of militants of the Islamist Army of Conquest aided by Turkey and the Gulf states advanced further, to Aleppo. They were stopped by the Syrian Army at great sacrifice of life. The turning point of the war occurred in late 2016 with the complete liberation of Aleppo from the armed gangs. The scattered militias made their way back to Idlib: first from eastern Aleppo, then from the Damascus suburbs of Ghouta, later from Yarmouk and Al-Hajar al-Aswad located further south, and finally from Daraa and Quneitra. All the survivors flocked to Idlib – groups of foreign mercenaries and a metley of local jihadists from the ranks of Al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra.

Meanwhile, a new bloody drama was unfolding in Idlib – a struggle for power between various gangs. The “moderate Syrian opposition”, closely connected with Turkey and the Gulf countries, started creating its own political structures – the “Salvation Government” with its own security services and police. Those “moderates” decided to establish a new command system to dismember the country and cut off Idlib from Syria in the future.  In turn, Jabhat al-Nusra jihadists, renamed by that time Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), suggested that the new territory be under their patronage. Nobody wanted to share power. Quite a natural thing, because at stake there was money, weapons, assistance from the allies, control over pivotal routes and border crossing points. By the beginning of 2019, HTS militants managed to resolve the conflict for their own benefit.

The US, Great Britain and Germany took a wait-and-see approach. As for Syria itself, its government troops had planned a military operation to liberate Idlib since the summer of 2018, but calls coming from the West “to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe” forced Assad to postpone the offensive. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian made clear what Europe really feared. Many militants in Idlib have European countries’ citizenship. In case of a military operation, they would flee to Europe posing a threat to the entire continent. In this context, Le Drian confirmed McGurk’s words about Idlib’s becoming a haven for al-Qaeda’s international recruits.

At this point, we need to revisit Turkey’s role. Already a year ago, in September 2018, an agreement was reached within the Astana process on a ceasefire in Idlib coupled with the creation of a twenty-kilometre de-escalation zone. The Russian military police prepared humanitarian corridors for all those civilians wishing to leave the province. Moreover, under Turkish supervision all heavy weapons had to be taken away from the area.

Ankara had six months to fulfill its part of the deal. Things turned out in a different way. Before the Turkish military’s very eyes the HTS militants intruded the buffer zone with weapons consolidating their position. They increased the number of attacks across the dividing line, including the shelling of populated localities. The Russian Khmeimim military base in Latakia suffered drone attacks. But the Turkish military command on the ground condoning of the new militants’ intrusion turned into a boomerang: at the end jihadists attacked the stronghold of the Turkish Army itself, forcing the latter to ask for Russian air power assistance. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice from Goethe’s ballad, the perfidious Turks had to admit their blunder: Wrong I was in calling spirits, I avow, for I find them galling, cannot rule them now.

Obviously, the problem of Idlib requires an urgent solution. The situation is rapidly deteriorating. Both sides are already preparing for an offensive. The Syrian Army against the militants who took refuge in Idlib and the militants against the government troops’ positions. A compromise can be found only by means of joint action guaranteed under the Astana process parties with the involvement of those Western countries whose citizens are fighting in Syria on the side of jihadists. Then the question arises: does such a big number of players have enough political will to reach an understanding?

Sadly, as long as this issue remains unresolved, Idlib will maintain its status of the new-found haven for terrorists. In such a case, Syria will continue to be in the state of endless war.

The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued statements in which it points to the Americans as being excessively emotional. Moreover, it has accused US of supporting terrorism while pointing out the unwillingness of Obama’s administration to fulfill its part of the deal. Such a deal was achieved with great difficulty; it required great efforts exercised from different quarters.

In Moscow it was quickly noticed that after reaching the Geneva agreement on the ceasefire in Syria different approaches for cooperation with Russia from the part of the US State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA have been identified.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said that Washington was considering various options for action with regard to Moscow in case of failure of the agreements on Syria, including sanctions. The Washington Post reported that the White House in early October held a meeting with representatives of the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces. The meeting discussed the issue of air strikes on positions of the Syrian Government Forces. According to the paper, the meeting proposed to conduct the operation in secret, in order to circumvent White House objections. Obviously, President Obama reaching the very end of his term in office does not want to get involved in such a risky operation without the approval of the UN Security Council.

US Secretary of State John Kerry explained the US problem during a meeting with the Syrian opposition. He said: “Our international law experts tell us that we have no grounds for sending troops, unless the UN Security Council adopts a resolution. Such a resolution can be interposed by Russian or Chinese veto. We cannot do it if those people do not attack us or if we are not invited to Syria. Russia was invited by the legal regime.”

Legally Moscow is Syria’s ally and actually is a party to the conflict. But the United States and its allies in the framework of the international coalition, formed to combat ISIS, operate in Syria without a mandate of the Security Council or an invitation by Damascus. Clearly, by the yardstick of international law, the international coalition members are the aggressors. Turkey belongs to the same aggressors’ category: Ankara, without prior consultations with the Syrian Government sent in troops to Northern Syria in August.

But Washington, being too long at the receiving end of diplomatic defeats in the Middle East, seeks to shift all the blame on Moscow, accusing her that she is allegedly already militarily present in Syria, refuses diplomacy, and ‘seeks to achieve its goals through military means’.

The US went as far as blocking the Security Council resolution drafted to condemn the mortar shelling of the Russian Embassy in Damascus. The US attitude demonstrates flagrant disregard for the Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations. When similar crimes were committed earlier against the diplomatic missions of Western countries, Russia had always unreservedly lent its support to the Security Council condemnation of these acts.

Recently Tehran decided to publicize Washington’s attempts to sway her to their side in the Syrian conflict. In the last few months, the Americans tried to persuade the Islamic Republic of Iran or even sought to force Tehran to accept in a diplomatic way, that Bashar Assad should not play any role in the political future of Syria. However, Ayatollah Khamenei has forbidden to conduct parallel negotiations with the US on regional and Syrian issues, because the history has proven that the American officials do not deserve their confidence at all.

On the other hand, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticizes Americans as well: “we see the United States have been carrying out a duplicitous policy in Syria – one part of the US leadership works with terrorists, while another part is pursuing a policy that supports the self-defense forces of the Syrian Kurds”.

All of this means that Washington has completely exhausted its diplomatic resources. The US leadership feels that the consequences of its military and diplomatic failures in the Middle East region are to be expected. Rushing from the table of negotiations to the military maps and vice versa, trying to change the impending future, the United States only narrows the space to maneuver.

The latest statement we had from the Chief Negotiator of the victimized side on the Cyprus equation i.e. the Greek majority, whose right to self-determination has been violated for 70 long years, came out last weekend. It reads as follows: Today we have the best chance ever for reunification of Cyprus which is why we should take advantage of it and do everything we can in this direction. This is a unique opportunity and this window of opportunity will not stay open forever.

Many observers wonder what has radically changed in the talks to make Andreas Mavroyiannis come out with such a strong and enthusiastic statement: mark the phrases he used: the best chance ever for reunification, unique opportunity and window of opportunity [that] will not stay open forever.

Before putting out such an unsubstantiated enthusiastic statement about the prospects of the talks Andreas Mavroyiannis ought to have answered a host of hard questions:

1. How does an apartheid system of guaranteed population and property majorities in the constituent states to be established promote in any conceivable way reunification of the island republic?
2. Let us, for the sake of the argument, or even for the sake of being positive and constructive, accept that the Turks should be allowed to have the above described majorities in their constituent state in the future (con)federation under discussion. Naturally, a crucial question arises: has the Turkish side accepted to substantially reduce the territory under their control?
3. Who is going to finance the huge compensations needed to be paid to the Greek Cypriots who were forced out of their properties by the use of force of the notorious Turkish Armed Forces – which incidentally, habitually massacre the Kurdish population day in day out in real time in Turkey’s southeast?
4. The autocephalous Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus exists for almost two millennia. It is the oldest trusted institution among the eighty per cent of Cypriots who declare their loyalty to the Greek Orthodox faith. Thereby the Greek Orthodox identity and faith outlasts in historical presence and surpasses in loyalty any 20^th century (or 21^st for that matter) attempt at state building. In historical perspective, the frail and fragile state structures in the island of Cyprus turn pale before the endurance of the Church. Has the Turkish side agreed to the restoration and restitution of the Church’s inalienable properties and rights in the territory under their control? What will be the status of, say, the historical Diocese of Kyrenia – one of the three founding Dioceses of the Church of Cyprus – under the prescribed TC constituent state?
5. The running of three cumbersome state machineries in a Lilliputian (Con)Federal State structure presupposes a colossal, in proportion, budget: who will fund the three state machines – one of the ‘GC constituent state’, one of the ‘TC constituent state’ plus the (con)federal government administration?
6. Security and Guarantees. This is the most crucial aspect of the equation pertaining to securing the implementation of an agreed settlement. The Turkish (Cypriot?) side has not budged an inch from their insistence on Turkish guarantees. Ankara floats ideas for permanent presence of its troops, however reduced in number. Are we oblivious of the record of the Turkish Army? Another recipe for disaster?

There are no clear, let alone, just answers to the above crucial questions. The contorted answers floated in the international media outlets are undemocratic and unacceptable to say the least. A single example suffices: Mustafa Akinci, the TC leader, in a recent interview with the ‘Wall Street Journal’ unconvincingly spoke about loans and use of the natural gas proceeds to finance the settlement. He claimed that the latter belongs to both communities. Agreed in principle. But in what proportions? And what proportion of the NG proceeds should be pre-frozen for the settlement?

Part of the Cypriot press speculates that Andreas Mavroyiannis is just playing music to American ears in order to carry favour with the superpower in his bid for election as president of the next UN General Assembly. We do not wish to enter into this speculative discussion. We wish him good luck. For there is no doubt that his prospective election to this top UN job will be a great victory on the international plane for our semi-occupied Republic of Cyprus to whose continuity we all vow allegiance.

To put things into perspective, the number of obliterated Kurdish communities in Turkey proper is twenty times bigger than the number of Greek communities (around 150) erased from Cyprus’ ethnic distribution map as a result of the brutal Turkish invasion of 1974. The ongoing death toll of ethnic Kurds stands, as of today, at eight times the number of Greek Cypriots killed (military and civilian) as a result of the 1974 two phased Attila operation. Moreover, the size of the Kurdish population seeking autonomy, civil and political rights in Turkey exceeds 12 million. Clearly, the magnitude of the Kurdish problem for Ankara is simply immense. The thirty years old heavy-handed approach of successive Turkish governments to this purely political problem, no doubt constitutes an ongoing war crime – possibly bordering genocide – for which Ankara should be held accountable by the international community.

Yet the approach of major European powers to Erdogan is one imbued by appeasement rather than indictment for the numerous war crimes committed diachronically by the Turkish leaderships against Armenians, Greeks and Kurds alike. This is certainly the case with Germany.

More and more analysts are convinced that hundreds of years of close relations between Germany and Turkey dictate today’s approach of Berlin to Ankara with reference to the Kurdish, possibly, the Cyprus issue as well as the unprecedented refugee crisis caused to a great extent by Ankara’s interventionist policy in Syria.

Let’s take a brief historical review of German-Turkish relations in order to establish the background to current approaches. At the high tide of Ottoman ascendance (16^th, 17^th & 18^th c.)  German states in the old continent adopted a friendly approach to the Sultan while the rest of Europe was teaming up against the Ottomans. In 1761 a peace and friendship pact was signed by Ferdinand II of Prussia and the Sultan. Consequently, the two parties exchanged ambassadors. Confirming the lasting nature of the close bilateral relations, the Prusso-Ottoman Treaty was renewed in 1790.

The following 19^th century saw an unprecedented flourishing of German-Ottoman bilateral relations:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent visits to the neo-Sultan (mocked at in the recent German state broadcaster music video that provoked Erdogan’s wrath) seem to be a continuation of the path set out by the Kaiser who decided to come to the rescue of the Sultan at a time when his Ottoman Empire all but collapsed.

Having supplied Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918) with a German military mission under Marshal von der Goltz, Bismarck followed up his Turkophile move with a much-advertised visit to the Sultan-Khalifa.

Subsequently, Abdul Hamid II turned to Germany for aid to fight the Russo-Ottoman war of 1877-78 – which he badly lost: the Sultan was forced to sign up to the San Stefano armistice, just outside the walls of Constantinople, to save his skin from the advancing Russians. He drew German loans to wage this ill-fated war against the Russians while he struck a deal with Deutsche Bank for financing the Baghdad – Constantinople railway. German investments in end of 19^th century collapsing Ottoman Empire take an upward turn sideling French controlled Ottoman Bank. The closeness of German-Ottoman relations is testified once more by the three visits of Kaiser Wilhelm II to Constantinople (1889-1917).

German schools mushroomed in the Bosporus. The German Military mission helped to train the Young Turk officers who under Kemal’s leadership set out to eradicate the ‘infidel Armenians and Greeks’ thereby Turkifying Asia Minor once and for all. German military advisers no doubt inspired the young and ambitious Mustafa Kemal to go for the ‘final settlement’ of the thriving Christian minorities question in Turkey. It is interesting to observe that the elimination of the progressive Greek and Armenian communities in Anatolia took place twenty years earlier acting as a precursor of the results of the (in)famous Nazi Wannsee Conference (Berlin suburb, 20 Jan 1942) that took the decision on the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’ in the European space deemed vital by Nazi Germany.

In WWI the two countries were close allies. General Otto Liman von Sanders (1855–1929) served as the leading military adviser and commander in the Ottoman Empire. Already in 1914 the Germans ‘advised’ the Young Turks on the expulsion on Greeks from Eastern Thrace and Anatolia. In 1918, General von Sanders commanded an Ottoman Army during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign.

Early in WWII, Turkey and Germany signed a Non-Aggression Pact (1941). Turkey’s pro-Nazi Germany policy is well documented in a unique and fascinating account produced by Frank G. Weber entitled The Evasive Neutral (University of Missouri Press, Columbia & London, 1979). Turkish duplicity was laid bare only when German defeat was more than obvious: on 23 February 1945 Ankara declared war on Berlin.

In our next article, we shall continue our analysis on German-Turkish ties by looking into more interesting aspects of their recent close cooperation.

Indeed, those who closely follow the politics of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ascertain that this is his ‘absolutism dream’: to celebrate the centennial of the Republic of Turkey as the supreme ruler, the neo-Sultan, whose ‘wisdom’ in governance is challenged by no one let alone the unruly ‘mountainous Turks’: a Turkish government’s official jargon term for the Kurds. Yet, common sense, let alone sophisticated political analysis, tells that the endless bloodshed that Turkey experiences in recent months are a direct consequence of the Turkish President’s relentless and authoritarian rule. In other words, Erdogan’s dream is everybody else’s in the country nightmare!

Today, Turkey lives a daily nightmare: from the continuous massacre of Kurdish freedom fighters in the southeast and the genocide conducted against the civilian Kurdish population of this vast region, to the terrorist attacks and the bloodbath caused by the week in week out clashes of pro-Kurdish and pro-democracy demonstrators with the police in Ankara and Istanbul.

Consequently, yesterday’s fresh bomb blast in the heart of the capital, Ankara, killing 34 and wounding more than hundred innocent citizens should come as no surprise. The moral responsibility for the country’s shameful drift to bloody chaos lies nowhere else than the brutal policies of Erdogan seconded by Prime Minister Davutoglu; policies that sadly target all well-intentioned detractors: be it the freedom-loving Kurds, the free press, the investigative journalists, the intellectuals, the Fethullah Gulen movement, the secularists and so on and so forth. Erdogan has created an endless list of enemies both inside and outside the country, locking himself up in an untenable position of brutal repression of dissent. In true terms, Erdogan is shooting himself in the foot, putting himself in the solitary confinement component of his country’s political landscape, from where he finds no escape. Sadly, all this happens at the dawn of the 21^st century! Erdogan’s foreign policy mistakes are equally horrible: endless meddling in Syria’s internal affairs, including underground support and personally benefitting from ISIS illegal oil sales, taking on Russia: downing its fighter plane September last in a futile gimmick to drag NATO into the conflict, using the Turkmen Syrian minority to secure future territorial gains at the expense of Syria, stifling engulfment of the dwindling Turkish Cypriot minority while implanting backward devout Muslim settlers and other dubious foreign elements in occupied Cyprus.

Concluding our short analysis with a view to end the massacre of both Turks and Kurds: as I pointed out to my well-meaning Turkish intellectuals, friends and colleagues, at Istanbul’s Pugwash Conference in 2013: there can be no military solution of the Kurds’ inalienable right to self-determination. The more high-armoured troops the ruthless Erdogan-Davutoglu duo sent to the southeast to brutally suppress the rebellion, the more Kurdish-inspired terrorist attacks we are bound to see in the Turkish political and financial capitals. And this is to the severe detriment of the peace-loving average Turk in the street.

In our next article, we shall substantiate our analysis by revisiting the historical precedents – of the not too distant past – to Erdogan’s ruthlessness against the country’s minorities. Precedents that almost exterminated Asia Minor’s culturally rich Greek Orthodox minority.

Indeed, the Italian Minister of Interior encapsulated the unfortunate, if not desperate, situation in which Greece unwillingly finds itself.  Angelino Alfano, in very eloquent terms, resembled the EU to a building where the residents quarrel non-stop and everybody blames the poor janitor, the powerless gate keeper to the EU, that is to say, Greece. How true!

On the other hand, Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister shouts out: ‘why should I subject my country to the burden of unruly refugees when I did not have a hand in all this’?

But is it so? Are the European leaders absolutely clear of any responsibility of the horrors taking place in the Middle East North Africa region today? It is high time, the Europeans, reflected on the root causes of the current MENA region crisis. The root causes are no other than the unilateral policies of NATO aimed at regime change in an entire raft of countries of the region in order to serve US interests. We are now experiencing the long term consequences of non-stop US interventions in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and now in Syria to which the EU-NATO either unwisely subscribed or was unwillingly dragged into. Thirteen years into the US-led ‘Coalition of the willing’ intervention in Iraq, the country is still shattered by bomb blasts that kill hundreds week in, week out. Five years since the NATO bombing campaign that unseated and assassinated Muammar Qaddafi: Libya is in deep tribal civil war, ungovernable and a hot bed of jihadists.

What is new with US allies in the region? The Saudis, who have an abominable human rights record, yet have been for decades the US military-industrial complex best client building up a formidable war machine, have been for a couple of months now stitching up, a new Arab NATO-style alliance, purportedly to ‘fight terrorist organizations’. For once, Riyadh has been aiding and abetting extremist Sunni organizations for five years in Syria in effort to topple largely secular Assad and radicalize the Sunni population of the country. In this alliance, the House of Saud, relies on the support of Turkey, the arch state terrorist, of the region, who has been murdering its own Kurdish population on and off for over thirty years, with a revived vengeance as of late. Ankara is seeking to neutralize the YPG, the Syrian Kurds civil protection units that have achieved success in pushing away Islamic State terrorists with the help of Russian airstrikes on ISIS targets.

In conclusion, what the MENA region needs to pacify is not another NATO-style unilateralist organization but consolidation of the Syrian political process after the agreed ceasefire. For obvious reasons ISIS, being an extremist terrorist organization is excluded. The ISIS threat should be eradicated. Russia, invited by the Syrian government, seems to be the only power that achieves, through its air campaign, real results in that respect. Ironically, the EU blindly follows the US, in imposing sanctions on Russia, failing to see where the threat lies and who its real ally is in securing a prosperous European future.