Yanis Varoufakis: The Economics of Europe’s Descent into Warmongering

Yves here. Varoufakis gave a wide-ranging and compelling talk, covering the original sins of the European project, particularly the intent to subordinate it to the US; the consequences of the failure to enact serious reforms after the 2008 crisis, which among other things, would have lessened Europe’s dependence on demand from the US, how Europe has suffered from a decade and a half of a lack of productive investment, and how the seeming way out of military Keynesianism, which can work in the US, will be a bust in Europe.

Varoufakis is fond of capitalization in transcribing this talk, I assume intended to replicate emphasis in his speech. He is a good orator, so his talk is better suited than those by other economists to listening.

By Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and former Minister of Finance of Greece. Originally published at his website

On Tuesday, June 10 2025, I addressed a meeting at the European Parliament, an event organised by The Left and M5S Europa, on the theme of “The Economic Conditions for Peace”, alongside Jeffrey Sachs and Giuseppe Conte. My talk can be watched and read here.

[INTRODUCTION]

A year ago, I would have started this speech with a lament about the hitherto unimaginable conversion of the European Union from a Peace to a War Project. Not so today.

Over the past year, warmongering has seeped into the very fabric of the Union, it has trickled into every policy, it has soaked every one of the thinktanks that generate Europe’s dominant narratives and creeds.

Today, therefore, it makes no sense to lament what is now a fact: The EU is now a fully-fledged War Project – a project that will either land us in permanent war, or it will bankrupt us further, or probably both!

Europe’s military Keynesianism, I shall be arguing, is guaranteed to make Europe less safe, more unequal, weaker.

Only two interesting questions remain:

Why has Europe taken this road? And, now that Europe is on this war path, what is our duty to our people, to Europeans, to Peace? Let me begin at the very beginning.

[THE EU WAS DESIGNED TO BE SUBSERVIENT TO THE UNITED STATES]

At the risk of irking Europeanists who believe in their own creation myth, let me be clear: The European Union (from its beginnings as the European Communities of Coal & Steel) was an American Construction – a part of a US Global Plan that also comprised the Bretton Woods System, the Truman Doctrine and, of course, NATO.

Yes, most Europeans hankered for no more war and no more totalitarianism. But the EU was designed in Washington DC. And it was designed specifically not as a competitive market but as a Big Business Cartel run by a democracy-free bureaucracy (also known as the European Commission) not coincidentally located a stone’s throw from NATO’s headquarters.

From 1950 on, the EU was nurtured by and in tune with the interests of the United States – an inconvenient fact both for Europe’s self-important rulers and for Donald Trump.

Looking back, a common thread runs through the entire history of the EU: its total economic dependence on the United States. Initially, the EU was deeply dependent on being part of the Dollar Zone. Then, from 1971 onwards, it was deeply dependent on the American trade deficit.

So, one way or another, Europe’s deep dependence on the US was ingrained into its architecture. It will thus take much more than mere pronouncements – or a few hundred billion borrowed euros spent on weaponry – to shed Europe’s in-built dependence on the United States.

The fact that the EU was, from the beginning, fashioned as a Big Business Cartel is the reason why the EU needed fixed exchange rates: Currency fluctuations destabilise any cartel, making it hard to maintain the necessary levels of collusion between its participating producers.

From 1950 to 1971, the US took care of this problem on Europe’s behalf. As long as it was running a trade deficit with the United States, Europe’s cartel was embedded in the dollar zone – its currencies tied to the dollar But, when around 1969 Europe (and Japan) started running a trade surplus with the United States, it was game over.

On 15th August 1971, the Donald Trump of that era, President Richard Nixon, jettisoned Europe from the dollar zone, his Treasury Secretary cynically telling the dumbfounded Europeans: “From today the dollar is our currency but it is your problem!”

Two things happened next.

First, to save their Big Business Cartel the Europeans scrambled to create their own fixed exchange rate regime. They tried everything: The Snake. The European Monetary System. The European Exchange Rate Mechanism. They all proved flimsy designs that speculators had no trouble crushing. So, in desperation, they created the most noxious currency the human spirit could fashion – the euro
.
The second development was that, as America expanded its budget and trade deficits, the Eurozone morphed into a German-led net exporting machine whose aggregate demand was subcontracted to the United States.

In effect, America’s twin deficits operated like a huge vacuum cleaner that sucked into America Europe’s net exports as well as the European exporters’ profits which were thus invested in US Treasuries, US shares and US real estate. That’s how, once it was expelled from the dollar zone, Europe became addicted to the US deficits.

That was what the Nixon Shock did: It converted Europe’s utter reliance on living within the dollar zone into an even greater dependence on the US deficits.

[NEVER MISSING A CHANCE TO MISS AN OPPORTUNITY]

Here in Brussels they love the expression that Europe progresses from crisis to crisis. That’s another delusion.

The crisis of 2008 was our greatest opportunity to render the European Union viable, and to end its deep dependence on the United States.

• The French and German banks went bankrupt.
• The Eurozone’s impossible rules were in tatters.
• A domino effect, beginning with Greece, was bankrupting our governments.

It was the perfect opportunity to transform the EU from a Big Business Cartel, inherently reliant on the US for its aggregate demand, into a functional, internally balanced federation.

Instead, Europe’s radical centre (both the centre right and the centre left) decided that they would change everything so as to ensure that nothing changes. In this vein, they did their worst: Universal austerity for the many. And frantic money printing for the financiers and Big Business.

What happens when you crush the incomes of the many and hand over trillions to the very few?

Since the many are too poor to buy high value added goods, business stops investing in productive capital –– while the rich use the free cash to push through the roof house prices, share prices, Bitcoin prices, art, asset prices in general.

The natural result is soul-crushing levels of inequality and deep popular discontent.

The people got desperate. They even voted for radical progressives like me to enter the Eurogroup!

Then, in horror, Brussels and Frankfurt overthrew us, or made Mr Tsipras overthrow his own government, using not the tanks, as they did in Greece in 1967, but the banks – not that much of a difference really! A coup d’ état is a coup d’ état.

[TWO SYMBIOTIC AUTHORITARIANISMS]

Guess what happened next: Just as in the mid-war period, xenophobic ultra-rightists rose up from the woodwork.

They proved a godsent for the shockingly unpopular radical centre whose politicians could now say to voters: It is us or them!

But it was equally a godsent for the ultra-right who needed the radical centre to impose the austerity policies which created the discontent which fuelled the anger that delivered the ultra-right votes.
To put it differently, if Macron and Le Pen had any sense, they would each keep a framed picture of the other on their bedside tables, saying a little prayer in their hated opponent’s name every night before going to sleep.

[SMOKE AND MIRRORS]

Liberal Totalitarianism and Ultra-Right-Xenophobic Totalitarianism are accomplices, they feed off each other.

Meanwhile, austerity for the many and money printing for the few depletes Europe’s productive foundations, its social fabric, its sense of purpose.

That’s how the European Union lost any legitimacy it had in the eyes of the public.

Sensing this, the Liberal Totalitarians in charge came up with one failed Grand Initiative after another. Who can forget the eminently forgettable Juncker investment plan, the Banking Union, the Green Deal, or the Draghi Report that has now joined them in History’s Dustbin?

Impressive numbers were announced that, alas, dependably failed to materialise. It was inevitable. As long as our rulers said NO to the political union that could sustain a proper, macroeconomically significant, eurobond, the money to fund the necessary investment could never materialise. Even when they – finally – during the pandemic – did issue common debt, they ended up with common liabilities but no common purpose.

Every Grand Initiative ever announced was a dance with failure, smoke and mirrors by which they disguised Europe’s nakedness. The result?

After fifteen years of ZERO NET PRODUCTIVE INVESTMENT,

• Germany is deindustrialising fast, and along with it Eastern and Central Europe, Austria, Northern Italy
• Political paralysis grows on the back of fiscal pressures
• Neofascism and xenophobia are rising up everywhere
• Europe’s dependence on the United States grows stronger at the time Donald Trump is cutting Europe loose
• The Rest of the World looks at Europe as a sad case of what could have been, an irritating irrelevance.

In this sad context, our great and good leaders had another woeful idea for a Grand Initiative: Now that the Green Deal is dead-in-the-water and the Recovery Fund is spent, why not try Military Keynesianism?

[THE FOLLY OF MILITARY KEYNESIANISM]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Military Keynesianism works in the United States because America has the federal institutions, the monetary sovereignty, the fiscal power, the technostructure, and the common procurement process that are essential in implementing Military Keynesianism. Europe has none of that, nor does it have leaders interested in acquiring any of that. This is why Military Keynesianism cannot work in Europe.

Thank goodness it can’t work, I say! For if it could work, Europe would have to emulate the United States in starting a war every year so that the stocks of ammunition, missiles et al could be depleted sufficiently to justify the new colossal orders necessary to maintain Military Keynesianism.

Nevertheless, while Europe’s Military Keynesianism cannot and should not work, it serves a purpose – it is a kind of a solution for, say, Volkswagen: Now that Volkswagen can no longer sell its cars, it hands over whole production lines to Rheinmetall to produce Leopard tanks which von der Leyen makes Greece and Italy buy even though we neither want nor need them.

Yes, Military Keynesianism will fail Europe badly, but not before it further bankrupts our states and throws more fuel onto the fire burning down lives and dreams in Ukraine’s killing fields.

So, let me be frank:

• No really-existing enemy of Europe shakes in his boots watching a stagnating, heavily indebted Europe, invest billions in weaponry. Quite the opposite!
• Military Keynesianism will end up as Europe’s New Austerity for the many and a new money spinner for the few.

It will make Europe weaker while prolonging the Ukraine War in a manner that is detrimental to the stated aim of supporting Ukraine.

[EUROPE’S SURRENDER TO NATO, ITS ROLE IN UKRAINE]

It is at this point that angry yelps will rise up from the press gallery. Can’t you hear them ask: ““Is Russia not ante portas?” “Is Europe not in danger?” “Should Europe remain defenceless, especially now that Trump is abandoning Europe?”

My answer is clear: Weakening ourselves economically through a Military Keynesianism that constitutes the New Austerity which will, with mathematical precision, diminish Europe further is no way to make Europe stronger!

And lest we forget, Europe already has 1.5m men and women in uniform while, over the past decade, we spent €2.7 trillion on defence – a period during which our net productive investment was zero! Now, NATO demands that we spend three times as much – which is totally insane, given how wastefully that €2.7 trillion was spent.

In this light, surrendering our foreign and defence policies to NATO, and sinking further in unsustainable debt just to satisfy President Trump’s demands for more military spending, is the surest way of making Europe more dependent, less secure, uglier and sadder.

In this context, the powers-that-be here in Brussels are anxiously trying to keep their jobs and boost their budgets by spreading the lie that NATO had to expand in order to deter Russian aggression – when it is exactly the other way round: Like the Mafia, NATO expanded to create insecurity in order to sell us protection!

Does this mean that Putin was right to invade the Ukraine? Of course not. What it means is that NATO and Putin are accomplices – that they needed one another in their joint bid for a confrontation that strengthened both – at Europe’s expense.

It also means that anyone truly interested in Europe’s security and prosperity

• must dispel the lie that Russia is about to invade us – it can’t even if it wants to
• must work tirelessly to kill Europe’s Military Keynesianism, and
• must work toward a European Peace Process which uses Russia’s confiscated monies not as a piggybank for more useless Leopard tanks and Leonardo missiles but as a bargaining chip to end the Ukraine War in the context of a comprehensive EU-Russia Peace Treaty.

As for the politicians in this town who will not rest until they see Russia on its knees, I have this to say to them:

If you really wanted to weaken Russia, to bring Russia to its knees, you should have worked hard to admit Russia into the… Eurozone. In one fell swoop the euro would have wrecked Russia’s productive basis, it would have indebted its people and its state, it would have made its leaders rush to Brussels and to Frankfurt with begging bowl in hand!

You think I am joking. But there is too much truth in this joke for comfort!

To sum up my argument so far, Europe’s economic stagnation was the product of its total dependence on the American deficits. This dependence yielded Europe’s complicity with the decade-long American project of inciting a war in Ukraine.

And now that the US is decoupling, our rulers – resembling decapitated chickens – are running around without their heads screwed on, struggling to find ways of continuing to impede Peace in Ukraine so as to use military funds to prop up Europe’s faltering Big Business Cartel.

[WHAT’S BEHIND EUROPE’S ETHICAL DECAY: GAZA, TOTALITARIANISM]

Ladies and Gentlemen, as we speak here today, Europe is falling headlong into another ethical void: complicity in the Palestinian genocide.

It is not just the embarrassment, also known as Mrs Ursula von der Leyen, posing like a cheerleader of Israel’s genocidal army in front of its tanks hours before they stormed Gaza.

No, the European Union is not merely complicit due to our subservience to the United States. No, the European Union is also enabling, it is in fact funding, the war criminals of its own accord. Directly. Cynically. With no compunction.

• BNP PARIBAS and ALLIANZ underwrite the issues of the Israeli government bonds that fund the Israeli meatgrinder in the Palestinian Occupied Territories
• MAERSK is the prime transporter of the military machine at work in Gaza
• Since 2007, the European Union has channelled €2 billion of research funding to Israeli entities producing the means by which Palestinians are ethnically cleansed, targeted, murdered and maimed.

But there is something even scarier going on: Some of our top institutions depend financially on backing Israel’s genocide. If Europe were to do its duty and sanction Israel, the Technical University of Munich stands to lose €195.4 million from the EU’s HORIZON program which funds the University to carry out joint research with Israeli institutions.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Europe carries an enormous guilt. The pogroms against the Jews started here, in Europe. Europeans carried out genocides across Africa, in the Americas, in Australia. By forming the EU as a Peace Project, we claimed a chance to make amends for Europe’s past genocides.

However, our dependence on the US and our ruling class’s penchant to profit from imperialism have made this impossible – and so Europe’s hands are, again, covered in the blood of innocents, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in the Sudan, in Libya, in Yemen, in Syria.

It has also brought totalitarianism back into our midst, here in Europe. When the German authorities banned me from entering Germany for the crime of co-organising with German Jews a conference on the theme of ‘A Just Peace in the Middle East’, they were making a point:

To them, letting the rivers of Palestinian blood flow unimpeded represented their chance of washing off their hands the guilt over the Holocaust, over the other German genocide in Namibia, of Belgium’s crimes against humanity in the Congo…

It is, therefore, a clear warning to us: Economic stagnation begets warmongering which begets a revived European white settler mentality.

This Europe has fallen so far into a moral crevice that it cannot easily climb out of it.
Europe’s Liberal Totalitarianism, which we in Greece experienced in all its horror ten years ago, is now everywhere – and it is throwing wide open the gates through which Xenophobic Ultra-Right Totalitarianism arrives to darken our doorstep.

The time to rise up against both forms of totalitarianism is now. On behalf of the peoples of Europe.

[WHAT MUST WE DO?]

So, what must we do? Let us begin by grasping that:

• • The economic condition for Peace is to de-couple Europe’s economy from America’s wars
  • But for that we must end, once and for all, Europe’s dependence on the United States.
  • This entails ending Europe’s dependence on net exports to
  • Which means rebalancing Europe’s internal economy through
    • new productive green investments,
    • an end to structural austerity
    • an end to the madness of cartel-infested electricity ‘markets’
    • a new monetary commons by which to end the bankers’ monopoly over payments and to institute a personal dividend for all
    • a new EU-China deal that liberates us from America’s agenda of intensifying a pointless New Cold War at our expense.

Only by transforming Europe’s political economy can we end the never-ending fragmentation which breeds war, totalitarianism and the embarrassment of being led by cheerleaders of genocide and permanent war with Russia, like Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas.

How can we accomplish that? In two ways.
First, we need a Credible Plan for a Europe worth fighting for.

Second, we must organise a campaign of civil and governmental disobedience in our countries and, potentially, in the European Council until our Plan for Europe gets a chance.

We, DiEM25, have worked for a decade on this Plan – our Green New Deal for Europe – and are happy to share it with you, so that you can refine, revise, adapt it.

You, the 5S Movement and other parties eager to partake across Europe, have the organisation that we lack so that, together with our MERA25 transnational parties, we can together help organise the campaign of civil and governmental disobedience without which nothing will change, nothing will impede Europe’s, Italy’s, Greece’s, indeed Germany’s secular decline.

[CONCLUSION]

So, to conclude, seventy-five years of this European Union teach us that we face a stark choice.
A choice between a Dependent-on-the-United States, Warmongering, Stagnating Europe. Or an Independent, Non-Aligned, Prosperous, Green Europe.

A choice between a von der Leyen-type Commission that greenlights genocide, impedes Peace, illegally deletes her Pfizer chat history, lobbies for Lockheed Martin, and borrows money we can’t repay to buy weaponry we do not need – while condemning People and Planet to impecunity. Or European Institutions optimised against raw power and in favour of common prosperity.

A choice between being at the beck and call of the boardrooms of Rheinmetall, Leonardo and Pfizer, blind to the tax havens where war profits and tax fraud hide, while our coastguards turn refugees into corpses. Or a Europe of rational, that is a radical, humanism.

To even have this choice, our immediate task must be to end war, to end genocide and to terminate before it is too late the New Austerity going by the name of Military Keynesianism.