After the Cold War ended, the international community could not establish a new order. This era can be categorized as a chaotic period, a war period or a period of testing alternative strategies. During this time, the monopoly of the United States was broken after being the sole dictating power for almost 25 years.
On one hand, Russia's President Vladimir Putin's Russia is back. On the other, China is getting stronger by the day. Countries such as India, Nigeria, Indonesia, Türkiye and Mexico are increasing their influence gradually in the world. The futurists predict that countries with higher populations will take larger shares in the world economy in the next 50 years. Parallel to this, although its population is around 80 million and will likely be only a hundred million by then, Türkiye is often mentioned among the 10 most influential countries in the world in the next 50 years.
We observe that Türkiye's influence in all the recent conflicts and problematic areas in the international arena is more than its actual power. Türkiye's influence somehow appears in resolving many problems in every conflict area as the Russia-Ukraine war, the grain crises and problems in the Caucasus like the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, in the Balkans, and even in Afghanistan.
Greece had occupied half of the lands of today’s Türkiye during World War, yet with the independence war, which started right after the war, the Turkish army defeated the Greek army and chased it from Ankara, driving it into the sea in Izmir. Although both ended up as NATO members, the two neighboring countries were rival countries, more or less in equally close weights until the 1980s. Then prime minister and later president, Turgut Özal, marked the '80s as the years that Türkiye started to grow in scale in terms of population, economy, and military power.
The powerful Türkiye that emerged, especially during the last two decades of that the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) ruling period, has reached a level where nobody can compare its size and power to Greece. The aid given by the U.S. in the '70s and '80s to Türkiye and Greece was around $60 million to $80 million. Today the annual turnover of a medium-sized company in Türkiye is more than $80 million. An 11 million-populated Greece is not a country that can compete with Türkiye either in terms of the scale of economy, population or power.
As Türkiye was developing and becoming a regional power, rival countries supported the PKK terrorist organization in eastern Türkiye. Now we know a state in the west, its name is Greece. And today, with the provocation of Western states, Greece is attempting some initiatives that push its limits.
Aristotle, one of the founders of philosophy, is the philosopher who spread rational thinking and logic to the world. Each intellectual, from Islamic thinkers to Western philosophers, bases her/his thoughts on Aristotelian logic. This philosophy and logic infrastructure was also influential in shaping today's Europe. When we look at the attitude of today's Greece in its discourse toward Türkiye, there are illogical and unbalanced attitudes that would have driven Aristotle crazy, let alone the basis of a rational state. For this reason, we can summarize this irrational attitude of Greece with the statement: “Aristotle fled from Athens.”
