With a packed agenda, which includes issues touching on the economy, technology, investments and international security, the five-day visit of Kyriakos Mitsotakis to the United States began, with the main occasion being his participation in the General Assembly of the UN.
The aim of the trip is to present Greece as a country seeking to strengthen its investment footprint, while at the same time claiming an active and reliable role in international developments.
The message that the Greek side will seek to convey concerns the course of the Greek economy, fiscal stability and the continuation of reforms, with the objective of strengthening the image of the country as one that can attract new investments and host regional activities of international businesses. The government links this effort to the increase in investments as a percentage of GDP and the course of foreign direct investment.
Something that is also related to the choice of Silicon Valley in San Francisco as the starting point of the prime minister's visit, who will have contacts with high-tech companies, will visit the headquarters of Nvidia and Tesla and will meet with Greeks active in the American technology ecosystem. In the evening Mr. Mitsotakis will speak at an event of Endeavor Greece on the future of artificial intelligence.
Besides, technology and especially artificial intelligence constitute one of the main threads of the visit. Tomorrow the prime minister will meet with San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie and will be at Stanford University, at an event of the Hoover Institution, also in the presence of former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
From California, the agenda in the coming days will move to New York and will take on an even stronger investment imprint. At the center will be contacts with more than 30 institutional investors with exposure to Greece and the largest Greek businesses, as well as meetings with top executives of international financial institutions. Energy, defense, technology and services are expected to be key axes of the discussions.
Diplomatic agenda
The economic leg of the visit, however, will coexist with a dense diplomatic agenda, with the evident pursuit that our country maintain an active role in regional and international issues.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis will meet with Secretary-General António Guterres and on Thursday will deliver his speech from the podium of the United Nations. At the same time, he will have contacts with leaders, international media and representatives of American Jewish organizations, while he will also participate in an event on artificial intelligence at Columbia.
His participation in the opening event of the Global Alliance OceanEye, together with the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, is also of particular interest. The initiative concerns the use of satellite data and digital models for better monitoring of the oceans and addressing environmental and climate challenges.
On the diplomatic agenda of the Greek delegation is also the Cyprus issue, with the government seeking to maintain momentum under the auspices of the United Nations and create conditions for the resumption of talks within the agreed framework.
On the same wavelength is the presence of Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis in New York, where he will participate in a series of multilateral and regional formats, among others in the trilateral meetings of Greece-Cyprus-Egypt and Greece-Cyprus-Jordan, as well as in the quadrilateral format of Greece-Romania-Bulgaria- Croatia.
His agenda also includes the Middle East, Ukraine, the Western Balkans, maritime security and UN reform.
As for Greek-Turkish relations, with relations between the two countries now strained, no summit-level meeting has been scheduled -at least so far- between the two leaders or the foreign ministers. According to Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the schedules of the two leaders at the UN General Assembly do not coincide and there is no scheduled meeting, although he does not rule out the possibility that a tete-a-tete may take place at the last minute.