I am presenting today an unusual dialogue that took place between Greek politician and economist Yanis Varoufakis, 64, and renowned American economist and public policy analyst, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Mr Varoufakis, a 1987 graduate of the University of Essex and former Greek Minister of Finance, currently serves as Secretary General of the European Democracy Movement, which he co-founded in 2016. The dialogue between Mr Varoufakis and Professor Sachs was broadcast on YouTube in August 2025; it held the shocking title: What they’re not telling you is huge. Following are main highlights of the talk.
The conversation began with the major crises in the world, the ones that led to wars or those threatening peace.
Professor Sachs started with Ukraine. “Had there been no NATO push to Ukraine,” he said, “there would have been no war. For Taiwan, if the US says: look, Taiwan is part of China and we’re not going to arm Taiwan because Taiwan is part of China, a war is avoided. When it comes to the Middle East, it’s as simple as that as well in my view, which is that there needs to be a State of Palestine alongside the State of Israel on the boarders of the 4th of June 1967 and that is what the International Court of Justice, the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Countries, the BRICS, and essentially every other part of the world, other than Israel and the US say… I count the votes in the UN General Assembly where I spend a lot of time, and more than 180 countries support the two-State solution, and the ones that don’t are [the US and] Israel which is led by a completely criminal extremist government; criminal in the sense that it’s violating the genocide convention. Its Prime Minister was given an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court for good reason. So, you have Israel opposing this, you have a handful of countries that always side with the US… The rest of the world, 95 per cent of the world population live in countries that have said squarely: we need two States, so how far away is that? Well, it’s one veto away, because this came up to a vote in the UN Security Council in 2024… And in the UN General Assembly where it went afterwards, there were 180-plus votes for the two-State solution advising the UN Security Council to get on with it.
“A simple question: Could the US face down this extremist, violent, criminal government? The answer is it could, for a basic reason that is not naïve: None of this is in America’s true interest. It’s not that America is benefiting from using Israel as its bull work in the Middle East, no, the US is paying a heavy price because it’s run by the Israeli lobby when it comes to Middle East policy. It’s a corruption that is absolutely shocking; how much money goes from pro-Israel groups to Congress buys them off.
“If you go to history, where did Zionism originate? Not with Theodore Hetzl in the 1890s, but with British protestants, Christian Zionism that actually goes back to the 1600s. But the real Zionism of the 19th century came with British fundamentalists who didn’t want Jews living in Britain… The only minister [in the British government] who voted against [the Balfour Declaration] was a Jew, the only Jew in the government… It turns out that Zionism was an anti-Semitic movement. The rabbis, the whole rabbinic tradition of Judaism was against Zionism. For decades. It’s actually even in the Babylonian Talmud: You must not return to Israel; God will determine when that happens, not you… don’t go making a mess.” At this point Mr Varoufakis exclaimed that as Mr Sachs is saying his piece, the American Ambassador in Israel does not believe in the existence of a Palestinian people.
Talk shifted to a global crisis of a different nature, that of climate change and green and sustainable energy, an area Professor Sachs is an authority on. Seeing that Trump has gone back on the green transition and is promoting fossil fuels, it accentuates the US’s disastrous isolation from the realities shaping the emerging global order. On this front, according to Mr Varoufakis, China, cannot be ignored as a formidable giant redefining the standards of human development across the board. Professor Sachs replied: “There’s a bright spot, you named it: China. China not only is massively installing zero-carbon energy, but it is developing a whole panoply of technologies needed for the energy transformation. China leads in solar, in wind, in fourth generation nuclear, in hydrogen, in electric vehicles, in battery supply chains, in digital infrastructure… China’s made an echo-system that the world needs… China has the capacity the world needs to actually get this done, China produces 1200 gigawatts of solar energy front now… If we do this right, China will be the central player in this because of its industrial base, but also Chinese companies are saying: We’re happy to invest in Asia, we’re happy to invest in Africa, we’re happy to invest in Western Asia to give the capacity locally for the production of this transformation.”
According to Professor Sachs, the US is still adamant on denying these facts, failing to realise that it is handing over the leadership of the world to China where technology and scientific fields are concerned. “I was speaking with the African leaders, they want this transformation. They know the partnership with China is essential for what they need to do,” Professor Sachs said. “While we ran out of time for climate safety, we have not run out of the intention to do something except in the US and Europe… But I’m still counting on the fact that the 85 per cent of the world population that is in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean still understand this is real, and we should do something about it.”
Unfortunately, the US and Europe stand alone failing to understand that the world is approaching a multilateral leadership instead of a unilateral one.
Watani International
5 September 2025
