Image by TopSphere Media.

Evaggelos Vallianatos paints a bleak yet impassioned portrait of Greece’s demographic collapse, economic subjugation, and geopolitical marginalization. His diagnosis contains many truths. Greece is indeed in a prolonged state of crisis. Its countryside is hollowing out, its young are emigrating in waves, and its political class remains tethered to foreign interests. However, his proposed solution is rooted in wishful thinking, Islamophobia, and nostalgic appeals to a purified Hellenism, mirroring the very ideologies that have historically undermined Greece.

To suggest that the primary threat to Greece is Turkey, and that the response must be to wall off the country from Muslim migrants or to romanticize village life, is to ignore both the global forces behind Greece’s decline and the more pressing structural questions of sovereignty. More critically, this outlook aligns all too closely with the same reactionary instincts that brought the Crusades to Byzantium, justified Western imperial interventions, and helped shape the racist imagination of 19th and 20th century Europe, an imagination that at times cast Greeks as sub-European and warranting erasure.

The real threat to Greece is not Islam. It is the machinery of financial and strategic dependency. The eurozone debt regime, NATO’s militarized hierarchy, and the American geopolitical calculus have all combined to strip Greece of its autonomy. A country that once stood at the intersection of three continents now finds itself reduced to a peripheral outpost of Western alliances, useful only as a logistics hub for violent interventions. This is not simply a Greek tragedy. It is the fate of many nations that placed their hopes in the false promise of Western integration.

If Greece is to reverse its decline, it must look beyond tired binaries of East and West, Christian and Muslim, ancient and modern. The model is not to be found in Western Europe or the United States, whose declining empires are increasingly defined by internal decay and external aggression. Nor is the answer to mimic Turkey’s assertiveness through ethnonationalism. Rather, Greece should look to examples of pluralism, development, and sovereign balancing, especially in the East.

The Russian Federation, for instance, offers a model of multiethnic federalism where Islam is not viewed as an existential threat but as an integral part of national identity. Cities like Kazan are celebrated, not erased. This inclusive civilizational framework resonates more closely with Byzantium than does the racialized nationalism of 19th-century Europe. Greece has more to gain by engaging such models than by parroting the narratives of those who still view it as a pawn in their strategic games.

It is time to say clearly what Vallianatos does not. Greece must leave the euro. It must exit NATO. It must reject the illusion that its future lies in begging for dignity from Berlin or Washington. A truly sovereign Greece must reclaim its independent voice, build new alliances, and help shape a multipolar order that values dignity, cooperation, and cultural complexity.

Greece can be a bridge between civilizations, not a deadly border post for a decaying empire. To do that, it must break with the ideology of the Crusader and the banker alike. Only then can it begin to heal, demographically, politically, and spiritually.

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