Greek Revival.(renewed foreign policy)(Brief Article)

For too long, the words "Greek" and "diplomacy" were an oxymoron. Greece's populist leaders had a knack for picking the wrong friends and annoying the country's allies in NATO and the European Union. The late prime minister Andreas Papandreou was a fiery critic of America, and Greece seemed almost to revel in its role as spoiler. It was constantly at odds with Turkey, its bitter rival. It openly sided with Serbia and its thug-in-chief Slobodan Milosevic during Yugoslavia's civil war. "We appeared to be on the wrong side of every foreign-policy front," says Greece's Balkan envoy, Alex Rondos, "and the West considered us miscreants."

That was the old Greece. The new Greece is far different. Led by Prime Minister Costas Simitis and Foreign Minister George Papandreou, the son of Andreas, Athens has adopted a dramatically new approach to relations with Europe, America and its Balkan neighbors. Educated in the West, modernist and Europe-oriented in outlook, Simitis and Papandreou head a group of technocrats who seek to make Greece a more dynamic and reliable democracy--and a force for stability in the region.

Old-guard critics deride them as "America's boys." But they seem to be succeeding. Relations with Turkey are better than they've been in decades. Far from shunning Macedonia, Greece has become, oddly enough, the beleaguered republic's new best friend and biggest investor. Last week Simitis met U.S. President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. It was only a get-acquainted session, but the American president praised Greece's new "vision," particularly its new demarche with Turkey. Papandreou himself told NEWSWEEK that Greece nowadays is a more confident country: "We're acting with a sense of responsibility and have an historical opportunity to change the face of this region for the better."

Greece's transformation began in 1999. Then, in one of the more humiliating diplomatic blunders of modern Greek history, the foreign minister of the time, Theodore Pangalos, offered sanctuary to Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish terrorist fleeing authorities in Turkey. The idea was to hide him at the Greek Embassy in Kenya. But Turkey got wind of the plan and seized Ocalan, its avowed public enemy No. 1, and whisked him home for trial and conviction.

The debacle forced a wholesale rethinking of Greece's foreign policy. Simitis sacked Pangalos and replaced him with Papandreou, who has since brought a more worldly and accommodating attitude to his post. "He has a vision of Greece as a bridge between Europe and the Balkans," says Sherle Schwenninger of the World Policy Institute. Adds Nicholas X. Rizopoulos, a history professor at Adelphi University in New York: "He doesn't talk, look or think like his father. He's a total antithesis."

That new thinking has already brought dramatic changes in the country's tangled relations with the outside world:

Yugoslavia and Kosovo: Greece walked a tightrope during the civil war and subsequent NATO air campaign. Greek public opinion was--and remains--pro-Serb. At the outset of the Kosovo conflict in 1999, Greece worried about refugees and the reaction of its own people, and tried to persuade the allies not to bomb the Serbs. Yet while Greeks took to the streets to protest the ...