Is the ‘New World Order’ Really New? (w/ Yanis Varoufakis) | The Chris Hedges Report
Trump’s Board of Peace is an intricate play to maintain hegemony in the face of China’s rise, sparking talk of “a new world order” — but is the rules-based international order really worth saving?
As U.S. hegemony continues to dwindle, Donald Trump and his international allies are making preparations to maintain some grip on world power. One of these methods includes the “Board of Peace,” which was ostensibly created to reconstruct Gaza, but has demonstrated yet another attempt by Trump to undermine international law.
Yanis Varoufakis, the Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), the former Finance Minister of Greece and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism joins host Chris Hedges to discuss what the Board of Peace really means and how it relates to Trump’s larger geopolitical goals, including one seeking to curb China’s rising influence on the world stage.
When it comes to the European Union, Varoufakis explains that European nations are “freaking out about the Board of Peace not only replacing the United Nations, but also targeting them. And this is what they get for ignoring the very clear signs that Trump was sending their way, that he’s out to get them, that he’s no longer interested in having vassals that think that they are part of a Western multilateral design… it seems to me that the Donald Trump policy is forcing his allies, so to speak, firstly to accept that the genocide will continue. Secondly, not to dare say anything about it. And third, go into these spasms of quasi-autonomy.”
As for China, Varoufakis says that Trump understands that the U.S. will have to coexist with the East Asian nation but must also to rein in the Europeans while maintaining control of the Western hemisphere, likening the tentacles of the American empire to a bicycle wheel. “The bicycle wheel has a hub in the middle and it’s got spokes… you can break one or two or three spokes and the wheel still works,” Varoufakis says. “As long as you are the hub and you negotiate with each spoke separately, you keep them separate and you don’t allow them to get together and negotiate with you collectively, then you can extend your hegemony and make a lot of money in the process.”
While the context Trump faces with China rising on the world stage has pushed the United States into a new paradigm, Varoufakis casts doubt on the idea that Trump’s colonialism is much different than that conducted within the liberal international world order. “Well, I don’t want to mythologize the world we’re exiting,” he says. “Because you see, this is what liberal centrists do, radical centrists. They say, everything was so good until this man [Trump] came and destroyed it. I’m sorry, it wasn’t good. You know…I grew up in a NATO country that was a fascist dictatorship. So when people say, NATO is democracy. No, I’m sorry. It’s not for me.”
Transcript
Chris Hedges
Donald Trump’s sham peace plan, which was adopted by the Security Council in a stunning betrayal of the Palestinians and a flagrant violation of international law, is overseen by the so-called Board of Peace. While European leaders have turned their backs on the Board of Peace, numerous authoritarian regimes — including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco — have signed on for the charade. Trump says each board member will be required to pay $1 billion to join.
Initially designed to supposedly oversee the transformation of Gaza, it has broadened its mission to serve as a counterweight to the United Nations, which Trump and his authoritarian allies are seeking to gut.
The Board of Peace is to be headed by Trump in perpetuity. Its executive board members, composed of people with little experience in the region, all of whom gave full-throated support to the genocide, include Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Wall Street financier Marc Rowan, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The board which envisions a glittering Gaza Riviera of high rises is the usual pipe dream of colonists. As in all colonial ventures, the indigenous inhabitants, in order for the vision of a new Gaza to be realized, must be ruthlessly suppressed or expelled.
Nickolay Mladenov, a Bulgarian diplomat, will serve as Gaza’s “high representative”. His advisors include Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who was allied with the Jewish settlers and was involved in the creation of the Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, where more than 2,600 desperate Palestinians were gunned down and at least 19,000 wounded as they scrambled to grab a few food items from four poultry food dumps.
Security will be purportedly overseen by Sami Nasman, a senior Palestinian Authority security officer who was sentenced in absentia by a Gaza court to 15 years in prison for allegedly orchestrating assassination attempts against Hamas leaders, along with an international stabilization force, although few countries seem eager to volunteer their troops.
The Board of Peace, however, is dead in the water unless Hamas disarms, something Hamas has said it does not intend to do. It will serve rather as a cover for Israel’s ongoing slow-motion genocide. Israel occupies 60% of the Gaza Strip. It continues to block the delivery of humanitarian aid, construction, materials, and fuel into Gaza, where malnutrition is widespread and there’s little clean water.
It has committed over 1,000 ceasefire violations, killing some 450 Palestinians since the ceasefire began. Trump will revel in his role as the debauched imperial viceroy of Gaza, but his Board of Peace, like Trump’s sham university, is another scam. A way to thwart a Palestinian state, ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land and when they are gone, turn over rubble-strewn cities and towns to developers, whose high rises, if they are ever built, will never house Palestinians.
Joining me to discuss the ceasefire, Trump’s Board of Peace, and what it means for our new world order is Yanis Varoufakis, who is the Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), the former Finance Minister of Greece and the author of numerous books, including Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
Well, they can’t say that satire’s dead. The “Peace Plan” itself is a ridiculous document, as is the Board of Peace, but this absurdism is dangerous and I’m going to ask you why.
Yanis Varoufakis
Well, in 1945, the people of the world supposedly got together after a pretty bad experience of carnage, Holocaust, tens of millions of people dying. And we thought we turned the page as a species, that we declared that we’re going to have common rules and that we are going to outlaw certain things that were detrimental to the prospects of the species like, for instance, genocide, invading other people and taking over their land just because you think that you deserve it.
Now of course that was always an aspiration not so much a reality but this is the difference between the Donald and his predecessors, he doesn’t try to justify what he does, he doesn’t try to wrap it up in humanitarian foil, he just grabs and takes to the logical limit everything that George W. Bush did, even Bill Clinton.
When I hear, for instance, Europeans complain and say to me about Ukraine, we can’t allow Putin to bomb his way into changing the borders. I said, well, that’s exactly what you did in 1999, in bloody Yugoslavia, excuse my French. I mean you bomb… I mean don’t go into the discussion of whether it was a good idea or a bad idea but you can’t say that this is a principle that you uphold because you were the first ones to destroy.
Now going to, by the way, I thought that your introduction was splendid. I don’t want to add anything to it. Let me tell you how I felt when I first heard about the Board of Peace months ago with the so-called ceasefires not really ceasefire — the idea is that the Palestinians cease and the Israelis fire as they killed journalists and children only 24 hours ago.
But anyway, when I heard about this idea, I thought it was a travesty. Immediately, as you said, I thought it was something like George Lucas would have written as a script if he was on LSD or very, very bad mushrooms. But then I had second thoughts, Chris.
You know you said that this is a new order. It’s not. Maybe we are going back to a very old order. Because the idea of a corporation that is formed in a Western capital with very rich people chipping money in to join and get shares of that corporation to take over the world. That happened for the first time, at least in Britain.
It had happened a little bit earlier in Amsterdam, but it happened at a time when Shakespeare was writing Hamlet, thereabouts. It was 425 years ago. And those gentlemen who got together, they formed the British East India Company. And so this was a corporate predecessor of national colonialism. That company, as we all know, moved to India, took over India.
They moved to Indonesia, to South East Asia, similar companies did similar stuff in Africa. The British East India Company at some point had 200,000 soldiers under their command. This was a corporation. The difference is that Donald wants to do it very quickly and he doesn’t want to chip in anything. He doesn’t need to put even his own money in there. He wants other people to put in money in there and he is selected.
You watched that video, right, of Netanyahu and [Alexander] Lukashenko and all those people. It was like a bad [James] Bond movie where all the evil gang go together. They put the band back together and decide, in James Bond they have these corporations, what are they? The Spectre? They take over the world. Now, I didn’t think I would live to see that, I have to admit.
But it’s not that new an idea. I mean, it was in James Bond and it is the way that India was colonized and Africa was colonized and Indonesia was colonized. Now, one last vignette, if I may. I have to say that, you know, trying to find a silver lining, some reason to smile in a 2026, which is unfolding pretty miserably, the frustration in the faces of our European, Lilliputian leaders gives me a little bit of a smile.
Because those idiots, those pathetic fools, I mean there’s nothing, no other way I can describe them, when the Donald brought to them the idea of the Board of Peace for Gaza, they said, yeah great, as you said in your introduction, they approved of it in the Security Council and so on.
Why? Because they think, ah, that’s for Palestinians, that’s for brown people, why do we care? Now they realize it’s for them as well!
Chris Hedges
Well, because Gaza is not even mentioned. Gaza is not even mentioned.
Yanis Varoufakis
That’s right. So it’s for them as well. And it’s not to counterweight the United Nations, it’s to completely sideline the United Nations. Maybe he wants to, I think he wants to give the United Nations because he likes these stamps and he likes these logos. He’d like to purchase it at some point as well, along with Greenland.
Chris Hedges
So let’s talk a little bit about Gaza. You no doubt saw this AI-generated vision of towers along the Gaza seashore. It reminded me very much of the fantasies that were spun by the Bosnian Serbs after the war where they said they had lost Sarajevo and they were going to recreate a new city in Palais, this small ski resort.
They had similar, it wasn’t done by AI and it wasn’t digitally generated, but they had models of big stadiums and none of it ever came to pass. I can’t believe anything’s gonna come to pass like that in Gaza, I wonder if it’s more going to be the Golan Heights where they have these dreary cement boxy buildings, one of which is called the Trump Tower.
But I just wondered what your thoughts were on what their vision is. Obviously, as this kind of charter city pioneered by these people like Peter Thiel in Honduras, although there are problems there, where they’re corporate entities. They’re completely severed from the nation state that they’re in. But talk a little bit about how you see their vision, especially since you’ve kind of written about their vision in your last book.
Yanis Varoufakis
Well, there are a number of things to be said here. The first thing is that I refuse to make predictions. Why? Because I think we have a moral right, right? Duty, not right. We have an ethical and a moral duty not to predict, but to fight to stop it. This is not the weather that you can predict as a meteorologist and the weather doesn’t give a damn about your prediction, so it doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong.
Here we have a duty to stop that. That’s point number, you know, my first ethical statement if you want, but beyond that, look, remember, you remember this very well, but for the, for our audience, this Board of Peace and the ceasefire was what happened when Donald Trump astutely recognized that Netanyahu is losing the propaganda war.
There were four major countries, France, Britain, Australia, and Canada, that recognized the state of Palestine, which was, of course, very hypocritical of them because they only recognized it assuming that it would never happen. It was just a way of…
Chris Hedges
Well and they also kept sending weapons. I think the Brits reduced their weapon shipments by, what, 10% or something.
Yanis Varoufakis
Yeah, and they kept imprisoning people that were protesting against the use of those weapons. And they’re still imprisoning them. People are dying as we speak of hunger strikes in British prisons. So it was hypocritical, but it was a major defeat at the propaganda level for Netanyahu.
You know, Donald does have a sense of timing when it comes to public relations. So he steps in, he imposes that ceasefire, he brings in the Board of Peace by which effectively to seal the genocides continuation, allow Netanyahu to somehow recover from his propaganda loss while at the same time continuing the genocide by other means, by means of starvation, by means of not allowing medicine to go in. I mean the hospitals, what is left of the hospitals in Gaza today, they’re still operating on children without anesthetic. No anesthetic is allowed into Gaza as you and I speak now.
So this is continuing and it worked. I don’t know whether you… Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, but the truth is our only radical weapon left for us. Even the pro-Palestinian movement has subsided to a very large extent. I mean it is increasingly difficult to stage demonstrations. You know, we do it all the time. We try to organize it.
You know what you and I experienced in Genova some time ago, it would be very hard to emulate today because Donald’s intervention succeeded in releasing a lot of the pressure on Netanyahu so that he can continue to do it. What is the essence of this AI-generated vision or dystopia that he’s presenting? The essence is this: “I don’t care,” he says, “whether it will happen or not.” But what it does, it stops people from talking about the genocide. They are talking about, “Is this going to materialize? Is it going to look like Dubai or will it resemble Miami?”
OK, but no one is discussing the fact that for this vision to be even contemplated, you have to get rid of the Palestinians. Because the Palestinian people cannot coexist with that dystopic, AI-generated vision and you don’t see that much of a discussion. You know, there is a little bit of discussion in The Guardian and in the Times and so on about, yeah, what role will the Palestinians play?
Well, the answer they give themselves, but not in so many words that they imply, is the same role that the apartheid regime in South Africa had set aside for the Blacks. That is, they will live in some bantustans as long as they are good boys and girls and they come out at 5:30 in the morning in minibuses, they’re feted in, they do all the dirty work of the whites.
And then they go back at midnight to just drop dead tired and then come back again in the same minibus at 5:30 next morning. As long as they do that, they don’t complain and they are happy to work or they tolerate terrible wages, then yeah, sure, we can keep some of them.
But yeah, and we can have the token Palestinian defeated turncoat who is going to pretend to be the manager of some part of this dystopia. You see, already, it doesn’t matter whether they build it. That dystopic AI-generated vision has already done the job of stopping us from talking about, not you and me, but, people who had started discussing the Palestinian state.
So remember, it was all about countering the recognition of the Palestinian state by France, Britain, Australia and Canada. This has completely succeeded. At the moment, Mark Carney, who’s now the doyen of almost every centrist in the world following his Davos quite interesting speech, I would say.
Albanese — not our friend Francesca — the Prime Minister of Australia, [Emmanuel] Macron, Keir Starmer and so on, they are not talking anymore about the Palestinian state because they’re freaking out about the Board of Peace not only replacing the United Nations, but also targeting them. And, you know, this is what they get for ignoring the very clear signs that Trump was sending their way, that he’s out to get them, that he’s no longer interested in having vassals that think that they are part of a Western multilateral design.
And therefore, you know, in a sense they’re getting their comeuppance. But it seems to me that the Donald Trump policy is forcing his allies, so to speak, firstly to accept that the genocide will continue. Secondly, not to dare say anything about it. And third, go into these spasms of quasi-autonomy.
You heard Mark Carney in Davos only yesterday. He made a very good speech. The first part was excellent. I could have said it. I could have written it. But then when it comes to what needs to be done, his answer is that middle powers have to get together in order to recreate the false multilateral international order which firstly they cannot recreate and secondly is absolutely dependent on American multinational corporations, Wall Street and Big Tech.
Chris Hedges
Why do you think — it was something I explored with Norman Finkelstein — but why do you think the UN Security Council passed this 20-point ceasefire when it was just a joke? It wasn’t even a particularly well-put-together document. At least these ceasefire agreements in the past had amendments and details. This didn’t. I mean, it was clearly a farce from the moment you read it.
Yanis Varoufakis
I was desperate when I saw that it passed, I have to say that I didn’t expect it and I can’t see how the United Nations can survive that. But to answer your question, well, it’s very clear why the French and the British, the Canadians and so on went along with that. They went along with that because they thought, as I said before, that this is just for brown people — Palestinians, Muslims, who cares about them?
You know, if the Donald wants it, we’re not going to risk tariffs or higher tariffs by confronting him. [Vladimir] Putin, obviously, abstained because he has a thing happening now with Donald. They are trying to work out a deal the Europeans can stomach, some kind of face-saving deal for the Europeans regarding Ukraine. I mean, Ukraine doesn’t have a say in this.
We all know that, as Kissinger said, the worst thing that can happen to you is to be the friend of the United States. Now, the interesting question is China. I spoke to people who speak to people who know how Beijing thinks, or claim to know. And the answer I got was that, what could we do? The Palestinian Authority said yes. So we felt the need to abstain. Otherwise we’d have to go contrary against the Palestinian Authority.
And I have to say, Chris, that there is something about this argument. Perhaps the worst aspect of this decision is that the Palestinian Authority did go along with that. That is the greatest source of pain for me personally, watching the Palestinian Authority slide into a morass of complicity and of, I would even use the very, very harsh word, collaboration with the Occupier.
Chris Hedges
Well Yanis, they have provided armed units, the Palestinian Authority, to gun down resistance figures in Jenin.
Yanis Varoufakis
They acted like the IDF. They did exactly what the IDF did in Gaza. They did it in Jenin. But you know, Chris, I want to respect the struggle of the Palestinian people. I’m not Palestinian. I’m not there on the ground. I consider that struggle to be my struggle as well, because I do believe it’s a universal struggle, but I also have to prioritize what they say to me.
So even people who are on the opposite side of the Palestinian spectrum, they have been calling upon me and people like me to refrain from calling out the Palestinian Authority because they still want to maintain hope that some kind of Palestinian unity, including the Palestinian Authority, is possible because I can understand that. It’s very difficult to imagine a future for the Palestinian struggle without that unity.
Chris Hedges
Let’s talk a little bit about the kind of retrograde world order Trump is putting into place, one of naked subjugation of weaker states, Venezuela, talking about Canada, Mexico, Greenland.
That’s the macrocosm but there’s also the microcosm of going after figures like Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur [on the Occupied Palestinian Territories], where they have done to her what they did to Julian Assange, which is essentially cut her off from the financial system and you also are dealing with the kind of absurdist situation where you gave an interview and I think you said you had done ecstasy or something 25 years before, or you can explain.
So on the one hand, you see the dynamiting of the old order, but that is accompanied, we mentioned the hunger strikers from Palestine Action, it’s also accompanied by a very ruthless campaign to shut down voices like yours, like Francesca’s, and you can explain what happened to you, then extrapolate on that aspect of the new configurations of power.
Yanis Varoufakis
Well, what happened to me is a tiny, tiny minor thing.
Chris Hedges
But it’s illustrative, I think.
Yanis Varoufakis
Of course, it tells a story. So just briefly, it doesn’t deserve more than one minute. I’m a figure of hatred amongst the oligarchs in this country and in the Israeli embassy, obviously. And therefore they will do whatever they can in order to create an image of me as an unserious person, a person that needs to be reined in by the law.
So I was talking in a theater to young people, ravers, people that are into music. I really enjoy talking to audiences like that, rather than the same old lefty audiences of people like us. And I was asked a question, I was asked, have you ever taken drugs, Mr. Varoufakis? And I said, I wasn’t going to do a Clinton and say that I didn’t inhale. I said, yeah, I’ve done pot at university and so on.
And I remember it was actually 37 years ago, Chris, I took an ecstasy pill in a rave party in Sydney, Australia at the gay and lesbian Mardi Gras. It was great. And I said to them that for 16 hours I was dancing, I said there was no gravity. And then I lived to regret it because for a week I had a migraine and I never did it again. And then I made the point that, you know, I’m not going to lecture you and tell you what to do and what not to do, but beware of addiction. Addiction is the Satan.
So I said that. So the governing party, right-wing party in Greece, made a big song and dance about that. They, of course, they took a tiny little portion of what I said and the Minister of Health on television, on a television panel, ordered the district attorney to prosecute me for advertising drug taking. So, compared, however, to what they did to Julian Assange and what they’re doing now to Francesca Albanese, our friend, but also to a French judge that dared participate in the International Criminal Court decision to indict Netanyahu.
I mean, this man is even worse off than Francesca because he lives in France and he can’t even book a hotel in his own country. I mean, this is a judge of the French state appointed to the International Criminal Court and the French state is not even helping him. He’s a non-person. He can’t travel. He cannot, he has no bank account.
And Francesca, course, far more so. There’s a Slovenian judge. There is all that. But regarding the macro picture, now, I want to insist that Donald Trump is not that much of a novelty. I keep coming back to this. You know, Bush invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, trashing the United Nations. I remember how much he hated the idea of the International Criminal Court.
Obama was playing war games everyday in the White House and selecting targets, extrajudicial killings. What part of the international legal system was he not violating?
Chris Hedges
Well, including American citizens in Yemen, including a 16-year-old boy who was an American citizen.
Yanis Varoufakis
That’s right. Now the difference is, and I think that was something that came out quite strongly out of Mark Carney’s Davos speech. What Trump is doing is he’s ending the pretense that the United States can remain the hegemon around the world. In a sense, this is a quite realistic approach. What he’s saying is that we lost the New Cold War.
I started it, he started it, remember, the new Cold War against China was started by Donald Trump with the banning of Huawei, of ZTE, another Chinese company. He forced the Canadians to imprison the daughter of the Huawei owner, right? And the Canadians were very happy to do that. So that’s why I’m smiling when I see the Canadians now freaking out. So this is not a new story.
The way he understands the world, geopolitically, is as follows: he thinks that, and he’s not completely wrong on this, that because the United States has lost its capacity to impose its will the way it used to, the best way of maintaining hegemony, which has been, by the way, Chris, this has been a project that started in 1969, 1970 by Henry Kissinger when he was at the NSC, the National Security Council.
Kissinger, being Kissinger, he could see that the United States was going to lose his hegemony unless they did something about it. Why? Because from being a surplus country, it became a deficit country. And what Kissinger used to say, he didn’t know much economics, but he knew enough to know that an empire that goes into the red stops being an empire.
So the Nixon shock, the end of Bretton Woods, financialization, all that was an attempt to weaponize the dollar in order to maintain American hegemony after America slipped from a surplus position to a deficit position. And now the Mar-a-Lago paper by Stephen Miran, what Scott Bessent is all about, what Trump is all about, is how to extend this hegemony even during a time when China is making leaps and bounds in terms of industrial prowess and even AI, you know, 50% of AI experts now are Chinese. They’re not from Silicon Valley.
And his view is that he’s going to coexist with China, let China have its own territory, maybe the BRICS or part of the BRICS, and the rest of the world he’s going to look at as a bicycle wheel. The bicycle wheel has a hub in the middle and it’s got spokes. And you know, you can break one or two or three spokes and the wheel still works.
As long as you are the hub and you negotiate with each spoke separately, you keep them separate and you don’t allow them to get together and negotiate with you collectively, then you can extend your hegemony and make a lot of money in the process. So, when he sees the European Union, people don’t understand why does he hate the European Union so much?
I mean, there are many reasons, but I think the primary reason is because he doesn’t want the Europeans to be all together and to have the audacity to negotiate with him as one. So he wants to, like the hub with each different spoke, Germany one, Italy, another one and so he wants to split them up. So when they were saying, by challenging us, Danish sovereignty over Greenland, you’re destroying NATO and the EU. He says, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. And he sent [Howard] Lutnick, his Commerce Secretary to Davos just before him. And Lutnick made, I thought, what was a very interesting speech. He said, I’m not here to join you. I’m here to bury you.
And [President of the European Central Bank] Christine Lagarde walked out. But where was she walking towards? Does she have a plan for Europe? These people don’t have a plan for Europe. You see our leaders here in Europe, for 70 years, they didn’t want to be anything other than the vassals of the United States. They just wanted, they loved the idea of pretending to be, have a special relationship with the United States, but just being vassals as long as they sold more stuff to the United States than they bought and they had the surplus.
And they got dollars for that, which they then used in order to buy treasuries in order to fund the American army to pretend that it was protecting them while making a lot of money in the process. That was a great racket for them. And you know, Donald Trump says, this racket is not working for me anymore. I’ve got a better one.
Chris Hedges
What are the consequences of imploding NATO, tearing down international agreements, of course the clear violation of the UN Charter with the perpetuity of the genocide in Gaza? What kind of a world are we entering?
Yanis Varoufakis
Well, I don’t want to mythologize the world we’re exiting. Because you see, this is what liberal centrists do, radical centrists. They say, everything was so good until this man came and destroyed it. I’m sorry it wasn’t good. You know, if you were Vietnamese in the 1950s and 60s, if you, I grew up in a NATO country that was a fascist dictatorship. So when people say, NATO is democracy. No, I’m sorry. It’s not for me.
My father was abducted from my home when I was six at four o’clock in the morning by an army that was a member of NATO. So please, I’m all against communist totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia at the same time, but don’t tell me that NATO equals democracy because it really doesn’t. And we must stop ourselves from conflating everything. So the United Nations Charter is a great achievement of the human spirit and we should protect it. But NATO is not.
NATO is like a mafia that spreads insecurity in order to sell you protection. I mean, we have no reason to have NATO. After 1991, there was no point in NATO except to create new circumstances for tensions so that the American military industrial complex could continue to produce weaponry.
I remember I was talking to a gentleman some time ago, many years ago, who used to be the chief of staff of NATO, an American general. That was 16 years ago or so. And I asked him, why should we want NATO? And he said, well, no, you shouldn’t want it, you Europeans. We want it. And I said, explain to me why you want it. And he said, well, firstly, because how else are we going to create tensions so that we can keep buying ABCDE and so on from the American military industrial complex because without that the American macroeconomy will be in trouble.
Secondly, because we want to keep pushing Russia to do things that will justify us being in Europe. And thirdly, to keep the Germans down. This is verbatim what he said to me. And so, you know, doing away with NATO for me would be great. I spent all my life, all my political activism arguing for Greece to get out of NATO and for Europe to get out of NATO as well.
And the tragedy is that now you have somebody like Donald Trump, who is a fascist, right? And he will take all our countries like that in order to turn them into Miami dystopias. And he’s the one who is undermining NATO. I mean, I just couldn’t imagine that I would live to see that.
Chris Hedges
What do you think is, I’m not asking you to predict, but there are no impediments to Trump. Other than Carney, everyone in Davos was obsequious. I mean, the Europeans didn’t sign on for the Board of Peace, but they’re not confronting Trump. There’s no internal impediments to what Trump wants and very, very few external impediments.
Canada and Carney really doesn’t have a mechanism by which they can push back. Yes, they can expand trade with China, et cetera. I think Trump’s only been in power for a year, and yet the reconfiguration, both domestically within the United States and within the international order, has been huge.
Yanis Varoufakis
Well, he’s already lost one very serious battle with the Chinese. He lost the trade war with the Chinese. He tried to fight it and he lost it. He won the trade war with Europe, but lost with the Chinese. So he’s got his great constraint is China. Europe is not a constraint for him, as you say. I’m not going to add another word to that. But his major constraints are within the MAGA movement and within the United States.
So, the Supreme Court could undermine him to some extent, even though he’s appointed most of them or some of them. And forces within the United States, I mean, you know your country better than I do. There is a very deep state. There is a very intertwined set of different interests and forces. There’s a major clash happening between Wall Street and Big Tech, something that China doesn’t have to face.
In China, the Communist Party government is taking the financiers and the Big Tech people and forcing them to go into bed with one another. That’s why in China you have an application, an app like WeChat, which allows you to make free payments to anyone as long as you have one account. That will never happen in the United States because Wall Street is kicking and screaming against handing over this power to Big Tech.
But you know, Trump comes in and he takes the side of Big Tech. The GENIUS Act, I think, is a major lump of dynamite in the foundations of the American financial capital. Because essentially what he’s doing with the GENIUS Act, it’s not about Bitcoin, not about Ethereum, it’s about stablecoins, like Tether.
These are US dollar denominated cryptocurrencies that are completely out of the jurisdiction of the United States. They claim that the GENIUS Act is regulating them. It’s doing no such thing. It’s only just window dressing of regulation. And the reason why he’s doing it is because he firstly is going to make a lot of money and secondly because he’s going to allow him to expand massively the American deficit.
I have it on good authority that he’s in his negotiations with the Japanese, he said, look, you own all these long dated 30 year long or 10 year long treasuries. 1.2 trillion American dollars to be precise. I want you to sell them. I want you to buy Tether. Because what happens is this, when you buy Tether, you get, let’s say you have a hundred dollars and you buy a hundred dollars of Tether. Okay. So nothing happened.
I mean, instead of having the paper dollars, you have the Tether dollars. But what Tether does is then in order to be able to maintain its promise, to keep its promise that if you want your dollars back, you can have them. What Tether does is it goes to the American Treasury, to the US Treasury, and buys short-term Treasuries worth $100.
But that means that when you have a wall of money going to Tether away from the banking system, the Treasury Department, Scott Bessent’s department, predicted that in the next 18 months, not 18 years, 18 months, 6.6 trillion American dollars will shift from American bank accounts to Tether.
That is a huge amount of new treasuries that he will be able to issue, short-term treasuries, to fund his government while giving tax cuts. These are the things, that team, they’re not buffoons. I mean, liberals and Democrats and so on want to present Trump’s team as idiots. They’re not.
They are very well exercised and honed at making a lot of money and extending their capacity to do a huge amount of long-term damage to the American working class, to the American middle class. And he’s in the process of doing this. But all these things are going to create internal divisions. I think his MAGA base is already feeling that and you can see the tensions developing within them.
I think that is one of the reasons why he abducted Maduro. I don’t think he cares about Maduro. I don’t think he even cares about Venezuelan oil. But I think that he cares about the Cubans and the Venezuelans in Miami that support Rubio and he wants to keep them on board while at the same time denying them access to Obamacare.
Chris Hedges
And yet, if you can establish, and you lived through it in the dictatorship in Greece, if you can establish paramilitary forces, secret police, like ICE, it doesn’t really matter what the public discontent is. I can’t imagine the… it was a junta, right, in Greece was particularly popular. You had just come off a pretty brutal civil war. But authoritarian regimes, in the end, public opinion is irrelevant if you shut down any mechanism by which dissent or democratic rights are possible.
Yanis Varoufakis
In the short term, but not in the long term. This is where my optimism, my hope comes out. You know, when the CIA-inspired coup in 1967 took over this country, for a few years, nobody took the risk of demonstrating. I mean, there were some people that did and they were promptly killed and imprisoned and tortured like my mother’s brother. But, you know, it is possible to keep the lid on popular discontent using coercion, using a Praetorian Guard.
In Greece it was SI, in the United States today it’s ICE. And he’s creating, you can tell, I mean, just look at the Big Beautiful Bill, the amount of money that he’s given to ICE. Effectively, he’s building up his Praetorian Guard. But I’d like to think that history proves that you can keep a lot of people down for some time, but you can’t keep all the people down all of the time.
And at some point these ruptures will show. And, you know, we’re already seeing in the United States, solidarity movements, electoral results that are not going his way. I want to remain hopeful, even though I have no empirical evidence that it is right to hope.
Chris Hedges
Let’s just close by talking about Israel. You’re right that this essentially, this so-called ceasefire agreement, peace plan, port of peace, our cover, how are things going to play out not only in Gaza but also Israel itself?
Yanis Varoufakis
Well, like my friend, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein, our common friend, I think that in the end, there’s going to be a resolution on the basis of how a major clash, a contradiction, resolves itself. And what is this contradiction? On the one hand, as Norman Finkelstein never ceases to argue that Israeli society is being pushed in the direction of fascism, in a direction of genocide worshipping. There is opposition, of course.
Ofer Cassif, my great friend, member of Knesset, on the phone to me all the time with, you know, messages conveying the determination on behalf of our Jewish comrades in Israel to fight the good fight. But, Finkelstein is right, you know, the shift towards fascism, the shift towards the settlers away from the more liberal democratic heart of the state of Israel. That is one force and this is moving in the direction of misanthropy on a daily basis.
But then, Ilan Pappé’s analysis also comes in and I think it is also important. Israel is a political economy relying on what 300,000 people? It’s 300,000 people who are keeping Israel going in terms of its hospitals, in terms of its startups, its tech industries, which are very advanced. The universities, the technocrats, that’s about 300,000 people. That’s not that many. And they are already discontented.
It’s not that they are pro-Palestinian, it’s not that they care very much about what’s happening in Gaza. Some of them do, but the vast majority, as Finkelstein says, don’t. But they can smell in the air the odor of an impasse. And a lot of them, I see them here in Greece, they come and buy houses. They’re not just investments, they are Plan B residences in case they need to leave. And some of them have already sent their families over, not just to Greece but to various places.
Chris Hedges
Well, they hide the numbers, but aren’t the estimates that some 500,000 Israelis have left since October 7th?
Yanis Varoufakis
Yeah. So if a significant percentage of the 300,000 technocrats that are keeping Israel together leave, what are they left with? They’re left with the settlers, the fascists. They are left with the ultra-orthodox who don’t even want to join the army. So the greatest hope for the Palestinians is while they’re hammering out some kind of Palestinian unity, which is difficult, but I hope they will continue to do it and they will succeed in ways that haven’t succeeded in the past, that the capacity of Israel to reproduce itself as an apartheid state based on a high-tech sector, which is significant, but still quite small and withering if these people carry on living. Well, these are the two forces that are clashing and the resolution of which is going to determine the future.
Chris Hedges
Great. Thanks, Yanis.
