During my childhood I spent many hours mounting, painting and positioning little soldiers and ranges of military vehicles and equipment at a 1:20 scale. At some point that came all together to take up half the attic at home, scening both seaborn and airborn landings in Normandy, with a good amount of detail my father was proud of. I probably took tenfold the time Eisenhower had, to plan the allied forces' D-day in WW II but then again I was the sole and only commander of troops for as long as my financiers allowed me to.
It highly bothers me whenever the word D-day gets used each time some 21st century public office politicians claim the word "travail, arbeit, work ..." possibly the most mentioned word in their press statements upon yet another summit to postpone decisionmaking, as if they too are in await for a full moon to favour the tide. I can assure anyone that 70 years from now, no private nor public museum or place of worship will be showcasing the wrong letter send by Varoufakis or the pen eventually used by Merkel to sign for another bail out.
With that being said, it appears to me there is more of a military factor to yesterday's sudden and to many surprising shift in tone towards mutual consent in the Eurozone summits than the mere € 200 million Greece is to cut its defense budget with next year, a fragment of the values the latest proposals must promise in additional Greek tax revenue.
While EUro finance and prime ministers were meeting at Le Barleymont this Monday, only a few kilometers north halfway at the Boulevard Leopold III, the agenda for NATO defense ministers was being set for their summit later this week. On one location Greece was being taught a lesson on state financing while on the other Greece was praised along with the USA, the UK, Poland and Estonia as the only member states that were meeting the targeted defense spendings. This in addition to last week's EU foreign affairs ministers arriving at the legally necessary unanimous (thus including Greece) vote to extend the embargos against Russia.
I am not a conspiracy theorist but a simple down to earth acknowledger that politicians and truth or transparency are like oil and water and will admit that often to be motivated for good reasons. The figures presented at the European Commission's HQ or the logic of tying any national defense budget to that country's GDP at the NATO's HQ do not convince me but I am comforted with the suspicion that most of those who eventually come to sign for them in the name of their populations will be neither.
So in this part of the world everybody's right. The bail out package that Troika creditors and Greece will come to agree upon at the end of this week is not about the viability of collecting more taxes from Greek pensioners, businesses or visiting consumers or yacht owners nor so much about protecting the investment from tax payers in creditor countries.
Who wants to bet that in the months ahead we will see NATO deploying and indefinitely settling naval bases inside Greece with all the benefits that will bring to international institutions as well the local economy ?
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