The world superpowers should put pressure on Athens to make it honor the Judgment of the International Court of Justice in The Hague so Macedonia can join NATO under the provisional reference. This is in brief the strategy of the Macedonian government for removing the Greek block that has kept the country from NATO integration for too long. This strategy can be discerned in the recent statements of the Macedonian state officials and in the reports of the Greek media, Nova Makedonija comments on its front page.

The Greek paper To Vima reported Wednesday that Macedonia had also sent a non-paper to NATO resurrecting its request that the country should be allowed to join the Alliance under its provisional reference. Foreign diplomats raised this issue in Skopje last week, while Macedonian diplomatic sources say that Macedonia sends such appeals before every major summit of the Alliance at the time its agenda is defined. In those non-papers the country calls attention to the fact that it has met all NATO membership criteria, that it is an active contributor to NATO’s peacekeeping missions and that at the Summit in Bucharest Macedonia was denied an invitation because of the Greek objection motivated solely by the unresolved name issue.