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Will Obama Change Stance on Greek Issues?

When he was elected to a first term in 2008, Greek-Americans were hopeful that then-incoming President Barack Obama would pay attention to issues that interested them. He didn’t really, with Greece eclipsed again by Turkey on the American radar screen.

Turkish troops remained in Cyprus. Turkey still refused to re-open the Halki Seminary, even though Obama stood before the Turkish National Assembly and asked the government to do so. When it didn’t, he didn’t ask again.

Turkey, aspiring to European Union membership, still didn’t recognize Cyprus, nor admit Cypriot ships and planes. In the U.S. Congress, Turkish lobbyists overran their hard-working, well-intentioned Greek counterparts who, by comparison, were under-financed and outnumbered.

With his re-election, there is little to indicate that anything will change. For the most part, foreign policy was little discussed during the campaign, with Americans focused on jobs and the economy, and the only people talking about Greece were Greek-Americans. The Obama Administration recognizes the Former Yugoslav Republican of Macedonia (FYROM) as the Republic of Macedonia, a major irritant to Greeks.

The U.S. still prefers Turkey – where a majority of people despise Americans – over Greece – where a majority of people like Americans, even if they don’t like American policy. Greece has supported the U.S. in major wars while Turkey has given America a hard time over wars in the Middle East.

Obama did, however, urge Europe to find a way to keep Greece, struggling through a crushing economic crisis in the Eurozone, while Republican challenger Mitt Romney likened Greece to a bad example the U.S. should avoid, ruling him out for many Greek-Americans as their choice.

In his first term, Obama kept the status quo of American Presidents concerning the Balkans, wrote Yannis Stivachtis, an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech and member of the Research Institute for European and American Studies, (RIEAS) an Athens-based think tank operated by John Nomikos.

“The Greek Left sees the Obama Administration continuing the old American recipe of dividing nations and creating regional conflicts aiming to enhance the American interests with the Balkans being one of such regions,” Stivachtis analyzed at the time.

This time, only a month before the elections, the Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America Aram Hamparian and American-Hellenic Institute President Nick Larigakis joined to ask Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney to outline their policies concerning Greece and Cyprus and to “stop their silence on Armenian and Greek issues.”

About the only time Greece came up during the campaign was a Greek Reporter President poll and questionnaire showed respondents came down decisively on the side of Obama, and hope he will now do the same for them.

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