Alexis Tsipras will be the tenth Greek prime minister to officially visit the White House since the end of WWII when he is greeted in the Oval Office on Tuesday by US President Donald Trump.
Alexis Tsipras will be the tenth Greek prime minister to officially visit the White House since the end of WWII when he is greeted in the Oval Office on Tuesday by US President Donald Trump.
Costas Simitis, who served as premier between 1996 and 2004, was received by two US presidents, in fact: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Moreover, Tsipras' visit will be the sixth by a Greek premier since democracy was restored in the east Mediterranean country in 1974.
The most important visit by a Greek leader came when then prime minister Constantinos Tsaldaris arrived in Washington in December 1946 for talks with the Truman administration. His visit preceded the declaration of the Truman Doctrine three months later, whereby Congress authorized financial and military assistance for a war-ravaged Greece that was about to endure another three years of a bloody civil war.
None of the subsequent White House visits by a Greek leader over the coming decades matched the landmark status as the 1946 meeting.
In the crisis years after 2009, Barack Obama received both George Papandreou (May 2010) and his elected successor, Antonis Samaras (August 2013), at the White House, meetings wrapped in diplomatic pleasantries and well-meaning statements about the predicament a bailout-dependent Greece was facing, but lacking any substantive results.
Greek press speculation over a second "Marshall Plan" proved utterly groundless and the Obama administration's involvement in bailout deliberations between Greece's institutional creditors remained positive but discreet.
Four years on, the geopolitical situation in the eastern Mediterranean is highly explosive, and not only in a figurative sense, whereas all-important US-Turkish relations have gone from strained to antagonistic.
Despite its continuing economic and political woes, Greece remains a stable western bastion in the wider region, with the Trump administration, according to press reports, mostly interested in securing greater security and defense cooperation with Athens, including an upgraded US military presence at bases in the country.