Right, let's get something straight. Go easy on the hay — foot-and-mouth is doing the rounds. And if there is a single soul out there who was genuinely impressed by the Top Gun: Middle-Aged production staged at Andreas Papandreou airbase — who actually bought the sudden European love affair with the security of our half-occupied island — then we have a serious national IQ problem on our hands. (Setting aside, of course, the clinically military-obsessed, the accounts whose profile photo is a helmet, and the pitiful little parrots and trolls on the Presidential Palace payroll.) And frankly, that IQ problem will become rather apparent at the upcoming parliamentary elections. Trust me — Fidias's little seedlings will be the least of our worries.
Remind me: in precisely which Marvel universe do you proclaim that you are opposed to military operations, that your role is purely humanitarian, that you are never part of the problem but always part of the solution — those wretched bumper-sticker lines some overpaid PR firm fed him and he's been recycling ever since like a broken record — and you do all of this... from a military base, in front of a military helicopter (that's what the budget stretched to), doing your best Tom Cruise impression — if Maverick were a retired civil servant from the air force? Fine. I know that after three years of the Christodoulides administration I should have built up antibodies by now. But sometimes I genuinely wonder just how stupid or desperate they think we are, up there on the Hill.
Never mind the fact that our man was so dazzled by his little playdate with other people's frigates and fighter jets that he completely missed how this whole war footing has quietly screwed everything — from the investment climate and business confidence to tourism. (The primary sector, for its part, is having its own private clusterf**k with the foot-and-mouth.) That's what you call going for a Charles de Gaulle moment and scoring a spectacular own goal.
Anyway. From this reboot of Three Amigos — easy casting: Mitsotakis as Steve Martin, Macron as Martin Short, and ours as Chevy Chase — the one line worth keeping is Macron's: Any attack on Cyprus is an attack on Europe. Hmm. Could that possibly be applied retroactively? Do Turkey's relentless threats against the Republic of Cyprus's very existence count as an attack, or are they filed under friendly family squabbling? If Ankara threatens to sabotage the Cyprus-Greece electricity interconnector, will the Charles de Gaulle sail back into the region to... score one for our side?
Because here's the thing — and this is where it gets interesting. If we had a President with the reflexes of a cat rather than a tortoise, he would have seized Macron's line and turned it into a banner. More precisely, into the standard-bearer for a Cyprus settlement. What's the eternal refrain of the rejectionists — the people who've been saying no to any solution, including crossword puzzles on the back pages, for fifty-two years? That Turkey will never honour its side of any agreement and will use it as a springboard to gobble up the rest of Cyprus. Right? (Yes, I know — the obvious question then is why the hell are we negotiating in the first place, but we said something earlier about national IQ, so let's move on.) And into that gap slots — perfectly, like the last piece of a long-sought jigsaw — Macron's commitment that "any attack on Cyprus, etc. etc." Is there a stronger guarantee against the Turkish threat within a settlement framework than Rafales and a floating Charles de Gaulle, combat-ready and on standby for Cyprus's security at any moment, as our three blind pilots in F-16s assured us? (That's the Greek title of Hot Shots — the Top Gun spoof — and far closer to what we actually witnessed at Andreas Papandreou base.)
Strike while the iron is hot, as we say back in my village. The moment things calm down in the region: direct talks, immediate movement towards a bizonal, bicommunal federation solution, picking up exactly where the Crans-Montana process left off. With the assurances of EU leaders to protect Cyprus from any threat serving as the guarantee. That would also reveal just how seriously they take their own grandiose announcements and thundering slogans — the ones that send our President and his fustanella-wearing fan club into fits of patriotic rapture.
Unless, of course, Europe's "protective shield" for Cyprus applies only to stray Hezbollah drones.
This article was first published on 10.03.2026
Source: CHARLES DE(OWN) GAULLE
