The Foreign Desk has become a regular visitor to – and participant in – various diplomatic events: the Munich Security Conference, Globsec, the Arctic Circle Assembly, the Black Sea Security Forum in Odessa, the Warsaw Security Forum and a few Nato summits. (If any organisers of any similar wing-dings are reading, all invitations considered, etc.) You could probably spend your entire year bouncing from one such beano to the next, draping your neck with sufficient laminates that standing upright becomes difficult by about August. There’s also the chance of being appointed defence minister of some minor Balkan republic by accident or as a result of a card game.
Indeed, I suspect that there are people who do live like this or who wonder, as we bump into them in yet another queue for yet another buffet, whether Team Foreign Desk might actually be itinerant freeloaders. Augur of the day: Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (left) in conversation with European Council president Antonio Costa (centre) (Image: Charis Akriviadis/Shutterstock) The question that inevitably arises is whether any of this gabbing is doing much good. The Delphi Economic Forum in Greece, from where this dispatch is sent, seems as good a location as any to ponder this question – certainly, many trickier questions have been pondered just up the street at Ancient Delphi, where the cloak-clad sages of 20-odd centuries ago consulted the high priestess of the Temple of Apollo, otherwise known as the Delphic Oracle.
For what it might be worth in the current context, she might have suggested to one impetuous and proverbially acquisitive ruler – the Lydian king Croesus – that picking a fight with Persia was a terrific idea, nothing could possibly go wrong and so forth: Croesus and the Lydians got duly stomped. The obvious jokes and/or deft philosophical observations about the significance of the location of the Delphi Economic Forum have probably all been done, not least by this correspondent. The theme of this year’s event is “The Shock of the New”, to which it might be reasonably retorted that we, as a planet and a species, have possibly reached the point at which shocks are nothing new and the new is no longer shocking.
Greece, for example, is presently contending with the fact that a decent chunk of its immense global shipping fleet is becalmed by a conflict between the US, Israel and Iran. On Wednesday, a Greek-owned, Liberia-flagged freighter, Epaminondas, was fired on in the Strait of Hormuz by an Iranian gunboat. For most non-US Western democracies, the set text of the foreseeable future is likely to remain the address given to the World Economic Forum in January by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney – the still-rippling impact of which is in itself something of an advertisement for events such as these.
Carney’s speech was a call for co-operation among the world’s middle powers in order to protect each other’s interests in the escalating absence of US leadership. Countries of roughly that rank are always well represented at Delphi. Speakers this year include Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Albanian prime minister Edi Rama, Prince Albert II of Monaco, and ministers from all over an Eastern Mediterranean/Balkan region that’s full of small to medium-sized countries with good reason to be nervous about any upsetting of the global order.
As one such leader told me on the first afternoon of this year’s Delphi Economic Forum, there is always value in turning up in person. “When you can look them in the eye,” says president Alar Karis of Estonia, “you get more confidence: are we dealing with the right people, the right person? So, this helps to continue, or to develop, a collaboration.” Great things can happen at an espresso station.