Our View: Biden meeting underlines Christodoulides’ biggest achievement

President Nikos Christodoulides will be the first president of Cyprus to pay an official visit to the White House in 28 years, when he meets President Joe Biden on Wednesday afternoon. The last official visit was in June 1996 by Glafcos Clerides and his host was President Bill Clinton.

This will be the third official visit by a Cyprus president to Washington. Archbishop Makarios met President John Kennedy 34 years earlier, in 1962. Other presidents – Spyros Kyprianou and George Vassiliou – had met their American counterparts in Washington, but these were all classed as ‘private visits’. Perhaps it has become a White House tradition to extend an official invitation to a Cyprus president once every three decades.

The invitation’s timing raised many questions in the media. It was announced just three days before the meeting was scheduled to take place, when the practice is for official visits to be arranged many months in advance. What was the point of a meeting with a lame-duck president six days before US presidential elections, was another question raised leading to a rather absurd answer in some media – Biden had invited Christodoulides to win the backing of the Greek lobby for the Democrat candidate.

Foreign Minister Constantinos Kombos, speaking on Tuesday, said the invitation was not “a firework which exploded at the last second,” but a “matter of recognition” of the changing and developing relationship between Cyprus and the US. “It is the result of a series of events and efforts and the commencement of the strategic dialogue and the humanitarian aid corridor to Gaza, and the evacuation of people from Sudan among other things,” he said.

He could have mentioned many other instances of cooperation such as Cyprus’ anti-money laundering drive, assisted by the US, agreements on military cooperation and most recently the signing of the Artemis Accords. Kombos is right to say that it was a “matter of recognition” because there is no denying that the Christodoulides government has placed Cyprus firmly in the West and actively pursued the strengthening of relations with the US, something no other Cyprus government had attempted. The priority had always been maintaining a balance between East and West, to keep Moscow happy.

Moscow is out of the picture now and as President Christodoulides said on Monday, speaking about the visit, “from day one we have been on the right side of history.” He attributed the invitation to the “strengthening of our country’s regional, international footprint,” but he may be overplaying the importance of our footprint. The reality is that his government has shown the US, in practical terms, that it can be a trusted and reliable ally in the eastern Mediterranean and this role is being recognised by Washington.

This is not the end of the road, but only the beginning of the building of strong relations with the US, arguably the biggest achievement of the Christodoulides government so far. The meeting at the White House should be seen as confirmation that these relations are moving the right direction.