US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Athens on Tuesday for a two-day visit, skipping Ankara entirely. That break...

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrives in Athens on Tuesday for a two-day visit, skipping Ankara entirely. That break from decades of State Department tradition is being read in Athens as a clear signal of where Washington's priorities sit in the Eastern Mediterranean. The visit centers on the sixth round of the Greece-US Strategic Dialogue, which was originally scheduled for December 2025 but was pushed back repeatedly due to developments in Venezuela and the war in Iran. Rubio is flying in from Iceland and will continue to Portugal, with Athens as the only regional stop. The last two times a US Secretary of State visited Greece without pairing it with an Ankara trip were John Kerry in December 2015 and Mike Pompeo in October 2019. Before those exceptions, the State Department had maintained a near-ironclad tradition of balancing visits between the two NATO allies for 50 years. Rubio will meet Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before sitting down with Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis for a broader review of regional issues, including the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Deputy Foreign Minister Alexandra Papadopoulou is coordinating the Strategic Dialogue itself. On the agenda: defense cooperation, F-35 acquisitions for Greece, new weapons systems, and energy security. The Vertical Corridor, a US-backed project to route American LNG to the Western Balkans and Eastern Europe through Greece, is expected to take a central position in the final joint communique. The State Department's own announcement frames the talks around deepening cooperation on "defense cooperation and regional and energy security." Athens is also looking for a reaffirmation of Greece's role as a regional security anchor, particularly given Turkey's continued challenges to Greek sovereign rights in the Aegean and its opposition to US-backed Greek infrastructure projects centered on Alexandroupoli. A joint communique covering defense, energy, trade, connectivity, and artificial intelligence is expected at the conclusion of the talks. It is still under negotiation, with Gerapetritis, Papadopoulou, and Gre...