The shift in sentiment from skepticism to mutual trust

Greek-American relations are experiencing a "golden age" right now, US analyst and senior fellow for national security and international policy at the Center for American Progress think tank Alan Makovsky told Kathimerini in Washington DC recently, sitting at a Foggy Bottom restaurant looking out at the University of Georgetown dorm named after Jackie Kennedy Onassis.

Having started working at the US State Department in 1983 (he was there until 1994), covering Greece and Cyprus at the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Makovsky is in a good position to note that relations between Greece and the United States have made a U-turn. With Andreas Papandreou's socialist government in power in the early 1980s and the Soviet Union expanding its influence, Washington viewed Greece as a "source of great concern and a potential risk." Ties improved in the 1990s and by the "first...