Our View: Kasoulides’ high-profile meetings in Washington are very telling

Surprise was expressed in some quarters about how soon after assuming his post as foreign minister Ioannis Kasoulides was invited to Washington for talks with the Secretary of State Antony Blinken and a host of other top officials. It was just a couple of weeks after taking over from Nikos Christodoulides, although it was pointed out a request for the foreign minister to visit had been submitted to the State Department, quite some time ago.

Was the timing a coincidence or, as one columnist implied, a reflection of the State Department’s reluctance to extend the invitation to Christodoulides? Could this reluctance have had anything to do with the close relations the former foreign minister enjoyed with his Russian colleague Sergei Lavrov, whom he visited in Moscow, at short notice and for no apparent reason, just a few months ago?

It is entirely possible that Kasoulides, who had served as foreign minister during President Anastasiades’ first term, was considered by the Americans as reliably pro-West, in contrast to his predecessor with his close links to Moscow, and therefore as someone they could trust to do business with. Of course, he still belongs to the Anastasiades government and had to say at his meeting with Blinken that Cyprus would not give up on the EastMed pipeline until the financial study was completed, despite saying a few weeks ago that it was an unviable project.

The US withdrew its support for the project on the grounds that it was economically unviable, but it was primarily concerned about the instability and tension it was causing in the Eastern Mediterranean, with Turkey making threats and acting aggressively because it believed it was being excluded from the exploitation of hydrocarbons. The Biden administration wants to reduce the tension in the area, which also affects Greece’s relations with Turkey and, we suspect, this was Blinken’s main message when he met Kasoulides.

Kasoulides, unlike his predecessor, had never tried to capitalise politically on the EastMed, and would therefore be more open to listening to the thinking of the US regarding energy planning in the Eastern Mediterranean. He was also due to meet Amos Hochstein, the Senior Advisor of Global Energy Security at the State Department that indicates energy was the main topic of discussion during the Washington visit.

But as has been said many times in the past, the region’s energy security is directly linked to the Cyprus problem, which will inevitably have been brought up at Kasoulides’ meetings with Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the Senior Director for Europe of the National Security Advisor Amanda Sloat. That Kasoulides was met by such high-ranking officials of the administration is significant. Perhaps the US administration wanted to make the point that a settlement or some agreement regarding energy exploitation between Turkey and the Cyprus government it would be very difficult for its energy security plans to be realised