Interview
‘Territorial organizational forms that resemble neither nation nor empire will increase’
Donald Trump, JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller… Those who believe these names, which have spearheaded an unprecedented change in American politics since World War II, suddenly parachuted onto the world stage are mistaken. Although they sometimes step on each other’s toes, behind these names lies an alliance whose foundations stretch back to the 1970s, the great crisis of capitalism.
Quinn Slobodian, professor of international history at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, analyzes the ideological pedigree of the new Trump administration and the MAGA and Silicon Valley team gathering around them in his recently published book Hayek’s Bastards and his earlier work Crack-Up Capitalism. Contrary to the narrative that neoliberalism died after the 2008 crisis, he emphasizes that one branch of neoliberalism continues to thrive, even converging in some ways with recent trends in global capitalism. Slobodian also questions the validity of the analysis that “nationalism and the nation-state are opposed to globalism and the established order.”
Slobodian, whose book Globalists has also been translated into Turkish, announces that his new book analyzing Elon Musk and “Muskism” will be published in the coming spring. The main argument of the book, subtitled “A Guide for the Confused,” is that Muskism promises sovereignty through technology, but in reality always turns into greater dependence on Musk.
Arguing that the same can be said for Nvidia, Peter Thiel, and Palantir, Slobodian defines the essence of Silicon Valley ideology as “pretending to give you autonomy while actually creating deeper dependency.”
Let’s first talk about the famous term neoliberalism, because the dominant narrative in both politics and academia, especially after the 2008 crisis, is that neoliberalism has ended or, at best, stumbled, and that we now live in a post-neoliberal world with Brexit and the second Trump administration. In your book Hayek’s Bastards, you point to very different branches and carriers of neoliberalism and, in a sense, reverse the narrative that neoliberalism is dead. What would you like to say about this? What does the term neoliberalism actually tell us? And are we still being governed by neoliberals on both sides of the Atlantic today?
Yes, well, it’s clearly one of those words that are sometimes called “slippery terms,” a word that tends to be used in a number of sometimes contradictory ways. So I always think it’s useful to start by separating the term into at least four different uses. I can summarize them quite quickly.
First, it’s used to define a kind of time period. So people say we entered the neoliberal era, and then they ask whether the neoliberal era is over. This is sometimes dated to the 1970s or the Reagan and Thatcher era. Then the question becomes: Did it end with the big financial crisis? Did it end with Trump and Brexit? And so on.
Another way it is used is to define a kind of policy package. So privatization, liberalization, deregulation; it’s often associated with the Washington Consensus, and people talk about neoliberalism coming to a country, say after socialism or under structural adjustment, and then sometimes neoliberal policies being implemented and then withdrawn. So you can look at the world and say this country is more neoliberal than that country.
Another way the term is used is to describe a kind of relationship people establish with themselves and others. That is, this idea of “being an entrepreneur of oneself,” seeing oneself as a set of assets to be used and evaluated in the market by gaining followers, wealth, prestige, etc. This is a kind of neoliberal mindset or subjectivity.
Fourthly, neoliberalism exists as a fairly distinct intellectual movement. Since the 1930s, there has been a group of people who call themselves neoliberals and seek a political philosophy between socialism on the left and hardline fascism on the right. These debates are associated with figures like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
These people have periodically come together and seen themselves as descendants of Hayek and Friedman, so to speak. This fourth way is my approach to the subject. Rather than trying to make grand statements about the global demise of neoliberalism or attempting to understand the effects of this or that policy change, the approach I take in my books, and most recently in my book Hayek’s Bastards, is to approach the subject as a historian of ideas. Just as one might examine conservative thought, anarchist thought, or socialist thought, finding divisions within orthodoxy and changes in doctrine. I have adopted this approach in my own work.
So that’s my starting point. We’ll probably discuss the topic mostly in this way. Otherwise, I’d be happy to make broader statements about neoliberalism in general. And here, to summarize very briefly, I think that after 2008, people expected the idea of a rule-based economic order to come to an end. In fact, it didn’t die.
We saw the rebirth of a certain type of multilateralism, central bank-driven economic governance, a focus on economic freedom rather than equality. In 2016, I think you saw the first cracks in the free trade consensus with Trump, but there was still a fairly libertarian policy domestically. Bidenomics and Biden, I think, were a fairly clear attempt to break away from neoliberal economic organization models, and then Trump accelerated that process, I suppose. So now, Trump’s approach to economic policy, especially on the global stage, has very little to do with neoliberal doctrine; domestically, it’s about deregulation, tax cuts, putting power in the hands of entrepreneurs, and transferring it to private actors away from public authorities.
Perhaps the point we should follow is the alliance formed around the 1970s by Silicon Valley elites, neoconservatives, and libertarians. Because your book also points out that these are different currents, but after the 1970s, they formed an alliance. They don’t even see the collapse of the Soviet Union and world communism as a victory. Because their fundamental concern can be summarized as follows: to bury the 20th century. I think in your book Crack-Up Capitalism, one of the gurus of neoliberal thinkers uses this expression. This century was marked not only by Soviet socialism but also by the Western welfare state model. What does this new alliance, following the tradition of Mises and Hayek, have against the welfare state? In fact, shouldn’t they be considered mainstream neoliberalism rather than marginal?
I think one useful way to understand what the issue is or the fundamental fault lines in neoliberal thought is to ask yourself at different times, “Who are they against?” You know, who do they see as the greatest threat to the market order, capitalist stability, economic freedom? The answer to this question changes from decade to decade.
So in the 1930s, when neoliberals first came together, classical liberalism, that is, liberalism that prioritizes political and economic freedom, was truly at an all-time low. Collectivism was on the rise everywhere in the world. So they saw themselves as being on the defensive, trying to find a version of political philosophy they could use to defend themselves against different types of collectivism. There were communists and fascists, and they were much more willing to form alliances with fascists when necessary to counter communists.
Let’s move to the 1960s, when the world was decolonizing. Post-colonial countries were now becoming the biggest fear. Let’s move to the 1970s… The attempt by countries of the global south to establish a new international economic order is a major source of concern. There is a period of major labor uprisings and strikes.
Therefore, organized labor is again a source of concern for neoliberals. By the 1990s, as you mentioned, with the end of the Cold War, many of those old enemies were defeated. So the Communist Party is no longer a source of concern in the 1990s. Why should you spend your energy worrying about official, party-style communism? They had persisted all over the world, even in places like Italy, until the depths of the 20th century. But by the 1990s, they were no longer a political factor. Essentially, the same is true for France.
So who are you worried about? Who is the enemy? I can say that they start their analysis this way, asking who the enemy is, and the analysis continues from there.
They see the enemy in new social movements. That is, in the civil rights movement that has turned into feminist movements, anti-racism, and demands for affirmative action. This was actually one of the surprises for me. It wasn’t something I set out to find, but it was literally a discovery. Reading the news from the early 1990s, I saw that they were very concerned about the environmental movement and the ecology movement.
This idea was quite widespread. You see it, for example, in a Wall Street Journal article about the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was founded by Hayek and others to be the vehicle for the intellectual movement.
Why were they concerned about environmentalism and the anti-greenhouse effect and global warming movements? The fear there was that the enemy had turned from red to green, and now new forms of opposition and counter-mobilization had to be found to neutralize this enemy. This is part of the main story I tell in Hayek’s Bastards; that is, how neoliberals saw new threats at the end of the Cold War.
Part of this was the new social movements that emerged in the 70s and gained more mass support. Another thing was that, as you mentioned in your reference to the welfare state, they observed that the welfare state continued to exist in the industrialized world despite Margaret Thatcher being in power, Ronald Reagan being in power, and the Washington Consensus being implemented in the global south. So the National Health Service in the UK still exists, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid still exist in the US.
And the percentage of the state budget, of GDP, spent by the state was not actually decreasing. So they began to see a connection between these things. There was a connection between the social movements of the post-1960s and the continuity of the social state. These are part of the same complex that persisted even after the demise of Soviet-style communism. This is what needs to be uprooted to get to the heart of the problem, to its origins.
I think they saw the welfare state and the civil rights movements as a link between the racialization of the welfare state and the collapse of family values, white family values. They claim that the welfare state undermined white Protestant American family values, and that these values were the essence of capitalism.
Yes, that’s right. They weren’t wrong to see a connection between the social movements of the 1960s and a new type of welfare state.
Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs in the late 1960s were indeed the economic complement to the expansion of voting rights in the US. In other words, it was said that “if we want equality in the US, it cannot be achieved simply by giving everyone the right to vote, because everyone starts from very unequal positions.” You have to find a way to provide a social safety net for everyone, no matter how minimal.
In the minds of neoconservatives and neoliberals, providing social assistance to single mothers or allowing people to, say, divorce by mutual consent, expanding reproductive rights through access to birth control pills or abortion… They saw these things as both moral and financial dangers. That is, they were undermining the fabric of the male-centered nuclear family and, in their view, creating more pressure on the state budget by forcing the government to finance the free sexual morals of a segment of the population.
Now, their sense of proportion was always very wrong, wasn’t it? It was certainly not true that funds going to single mothers were somehow the core budget problem. In fact, the issue was more about military spending and spending on veterans and things like that.
But they saw this as the essence of the disease, the social disease. So you had to solve that problem, and then you would have solved all the others.
If we trace their intellectual origins, the figures you examine in both Crack-Up Capitalism and Hayek’s Bastards seem to follow a similar intellectual trajectory, an anti-Enlightenment tradition. That is, more or less, a Burke or Herder-style hostility or a Nietzsche-style aristocratic rebellion. Their hostility towards racial, sexual, and class equality and universal ideas is a defining theme in their intellectual trajectory. In contrast, they defend a kind of cultural particularism and biological racism or genetics, or they advocate a return to nature. They defend racial, geographical, and sexual discrimination, as well as a kind of neo-colonialism. They don’t just want to colonize the Earth; they also want to colonize space, such as Mars or the Moon. How do you think these ideas, which were marginalized or believed to be marginalized after World War II, have become fashionable again in the West today?
Yes, I think it’s important to see this: If you use the perspective of looking only at neoliberal intellectuals, say from the 1930s to the 1990s, there was a surprising level of unity among them.
Because there was a common enemy, namely the socialists inside and the socialists outside, there was a desire to form a kind of united front. Everyone knew who the real bad guys were; they were sitting in Moscow, in Havana, they were usually sitting in the sociology and history departments of American universities.
But with the end of the Cold War, there is a moment of “disorientation”; the question “Did we really win?” is almost being asked. If so, with the real end of socialism, what can we expect from the social order?
Or more commonly, what they felt was this: perhaps we didn’t really win, and the enemy just changed form. In response to this, there is a fairly serious split within the neoliberal movement.
The first group was actually willing to work within a rules-based order and accepted the victory as it was. So perhaps you could use, for example, the World Trade Organization, you could use investment law, you could use government control to create a situation that is better for business, worse for the poor, but good for innovation, good for producers, and worse for buyers. Many neoliberals actually saw partnerships with Clinton, saw partnerships with Bush, even saw partnerships with people like Obama.
Now we see the end of this trajectory in things like the “prosperity movement” in the US, where libertarians and neoliberals are actually still extremely concerned about populists and racists. They want to continue neoliberalism as a kind of technocratic lawmaking, regulation, design project; without paying any attention to things like social welfare, not to mention climate change. So that’s one approach…
But this is not the approach I have been writing books about lately. What I have been writing about is the other side, the side that says, “No, we are concerned that those institutions, be it the UN, the WTO, the court system, the Department of Energy, the Department of Education, whatever, the government, will now be taken over by new socialists.” So, those who think progressives will now use the architecture of the system to introduce a new form of globalization as a Trojan horse that will work against the interests of economic freedom.
On the other hand, it must be said that this is not entirely a fantasy. If you look at the UN in the 1990s, what were they talking about? They were talking about human rights, women’s rights, environmentalism. So if you’re someone on the right, a strong neoliberal, you might have reason to worry and think, “The international system has now shifted to the left and will now pursue economic freedom,” especially with things like Kyoto, the Paris Agreements, they have reason to worry that the tide has turned in a way they didn’t expect.
So what are they doing? They’re doing the kind of things you described: They’re saying, okay, what resources are there to stabilize the order and create a new opposition to these forms of intervention? How can we speak at a fundamental level that will appeal to people, to their emotions, to their deep sense of identity, and draw them into resistance projects against this top-down progressive, you know, “woke” globalism?
So, literally, they’re starting to say that people’s attachment to their racial identities, their attachment to their nations (which previous neoliberal generations saw as a problem) is what it is. Previous neoliberals said people were too attached to their nations and races. They thought we needed to educate them to become global market actors.
Now, there is a sense that you can draw on these sources of attachment to land, skin, and family and use them as a new form of resistance against the top-down order. This was the project of the “Paleo” movement in the 1990s. Everyone watching this video has heard of the new conservatism, but probably not Paleo conservatism. Knowing the difference is crucial.
After the Cold War ended, the new conservatives said the Soviet Union was dead, but America’s mission continued. Now it was about promoting democracy. Now it was about securing America’s resources globally. It was about securing human rights. The Balkan wars, Somalia, the First and Second Gulf Wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the war on terror. That is the new conservatism.
At the same time, there was a small but significant group of people on the American right who said this was wrong. America fought the Cold War and won. Now America should turn back to its own borders and focus primarily on the enemy within.
There are very, very strong echoes of this paleo-conservative position in current American foreign policy, which I think is significantly different from the new conservatism because it does not pursue universal hegemony.
This view says, “Putin can have his sphere of influence over there,” “Xi Jinping can have his sphere of influence over there, and we should focus on eliminating the dangers within ourselves.” So within the libertarian and neoliberal movement, there were those who thought this was a correct interpretation of the post-war, post-Cold War era, and they also wanted to focus more on securing small-scale conditions for freedom.
Instead of focusing on globalism, the focus was on things like building contract-based communities. For example, gated communities in the American Southwest. Yes, small areas where the economic order is secured. These were based on separating from the banking system, protecting your own family, educating your own children. Things that had long been common for a certain paranoid wing of the American right were now becoming attractive to some segments of the libertarian right.
Yes, it seems that their vision of the future is a kind of pessimistic vision of capitalism and an eschatological view of the world.
Yes, I think the most interesting thing, the most surprising and counterintuitive thing about the end of the Cold War, was this: Instead of assuming that the global order would now be permanently secured, many people who appeared to have won the Cold War said that the global scale was actually something that should now be abandoned and that we could not expect complete, planet-wide universal freedom.
Instead, let’s return to a more pre-modern, feudal geographical order; so that you have islands of economic security and freedom, and these are in trade and connection with other islands of security and freedom. Thus, by leaving a large part of society to its own devices, you sort of solve the problem of the 20th century.
There would be no welfare state anymore. If you say, “We have no responsibility to the poor, we have no responsibility to the countryside”… I think it’s important to see that this has become one of the solutions to the ongoing difficulties of redistributive socialism for the right in sub-world-class geography.
I want to go back to Silicon Valley and quote from your book. “Neoliberals, bewildered by insistent demands to address inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, turn to nature on issues of race, intelligence, land, and money. They see this as a way to create a bulwark against the growing demands of progressives and to reverse social change, returning to the hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural differences that they imagine is rooted in both tradition and genetics.” It seems to me that Silicon Valley and the so-called “tech bro” crowd are the embodiment of all these “hard” things you mention in your book. So hardware, hard currency, genetics… These are macho types, obsessed with IQ, believing in wealth and capitalism, longing for old hierarchies, aristocratic rebellions, you name it, they have it. In that case, you’re saying that Silicon Valley capital, or the Silicon Valley tech elite—especially libertarians like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—provide the material power needed by the New Right.
I think there are several ways to answer this question. If you ask how the belief systems in Silicon Valley align with those of someone like Friedrich Hayek, I actually think there is quite a significant conflict or contradiction between the two.
One of the things Hayek was very interested in was arguing that we should have a kind of temporary, non-faith-based relationship with science. So he believed very, very strongly in the scientific process of experimentation and discovery. In fact, I would say that neoliberalism is, in a way, an attempt to extend the relationship that scientists have with each other in a laboratory, in a field of discovery and experimentation.
But he always assumed that none of these discoveries would be permanent, that they should be accepted as temporary and that new ones would always replace them, and he thought you shouldn’t try to design a social order as if it were a laboratory experiment in itself. In other words, while you should approach social problems like a scientist, you should not assume that science will provide the blueprint for social order; for him, things like individualism and freedom were prerequisites for the good life.
You could never prove these in a laboratory. The point where this diverges from the Silicon Valley mindset and the thinking of someone like Elon Musk is that they are true technocrats. They believe that society can and should be designed through engineering. Economic freedom or personal freedom is not actually a primary principle or a value to be defended against intervention for them. In fact, efficiency and productivity are more important than liberty and freedom.
That’s why the book is called Hayek’s Bastards. Because I think that in different ways, whether it’s Murray Rothbard’s racism or Elon Musk’s technocratic engineering mindset, there is a kind of abandonment of that fundamental individualism that is so central to someone like Friedrich Hayek’s thinking.
However, I think it’s quite obvious that the American economy has developed entirely on the basis of Silicon Valley innovations, product and service creation over the last 25 years. Stock market valuations are entirely dependent on a relatively small number of companies in the technology sector. So, materially, the power of the US is completely intertwined with the world of technology.
I think it is extremely important that the richest and most prominent people in the world put their economic and cultural capital behind this mega-project, and there, as you also mentioned, they provided the material basis for a more successful transformative project.
The issue with MAGA (Make America Great Again) is whether there are certain contradictions within this alliance that will make it unsustainable in the long term. I’m not sure; I think it’s an open question, but the point I want to make is that I don’t see the Silicon Valley-Trump alliance primarily as being based on a convergence of a particular philosophy or ideology. I think it’s more of a pragmatic alliance for both sides, and I think ultimately they have different priorities that happen to align for now.
But, you know, if pushed, it could actually start to crack. Even in the last 10 months, you’ve seen many moments where this alliance has been shaken.
I ask this because, reading your books, it seemed to me that these libertarian or neoliberal thinkers weren’t very politically inclined, and perhaps after the Cold War, they started to make some political connections. They started to build a mass base for their ideas or to take a gamble in that direction. It seems that now Trump’s second-term administration has begun to implement this mass-based organization. That is, MAGA and tech libertarians and the like… For example, in the 2022 Ohio elections, the Charlie Kirk movement and Peter Thiel joined forces to support J.D. Vance’s bid for the Senate. So it seems like a productive alliance.
Yes, absolutely. So J.D. Vance was Thiel’s candidate. You know, he worked at his company and is now his vice president.
So it worked to a certain extent. I think the paleoconservative values of social conservatives under the Trump administration and their antipathy towards certain types of regulatory control also align with the vision of greater freedom for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley’s vision.
But I think it depends on how far you take it. Not just with trade policy, but also with the uncertainty created by, say, gathering all the engineers at a Hyundai factory… It’s a kind of self-destructive behavior, and at some point, it might start to bother tech people.
But coming back to your first question, the issue of neoliberals focusing on a mass base, I think that’s something I definitely tried to point out in Hayek’s Bastards. If you look at it purely doctrinally, if you look at what neoliberals say they want to do, starting in the 1930s, you see a fundamental distrust of mass politics. In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, you see a belief that “if you give people the right to vote and allow them to express their ideas directly, then they will tend to choose socialism.” People, in a way, whether out of envy or atavistic, collectivist values, are naturally inclined to be communists, according to them. The purpose of politics, as liberals have long thought, is to put in place enough safeguards and narrow the scope of political expression enough so that people cannot express their natural communist tendencies.
Hayek’s stance was definitely this. That’s why he thought you needed many checks and balances, why he thought you needed independent branches of the legislature that could slow down the impulses coming from the people. Like Carl Schmitt, he relied on a distinction between legislation and law. Legislation meant things that came through governments, while law represented the ultimate values that stood above everything else and needed to be protected.
The way this changed, particularly under the influence of American populism, was that by the 1980s and 90s, the American branch of the neoliberal movement began to look for ways to use Americans’ natural anti-authority sentiment and their spirit of working their own land against the modern regulatory state and the modern tax-collecting state.
In the American sense, they thought it was possible to forge an alliance between people who simply wanted to be left alone and people who wanted to give more power to private actors and take it away from regulatory authorities. When I describe it in the book, in the 1990s, this man, Murray Rothbard, took on an advisory role to Pat Buchanan, who was running for president. He was running for the Republican nomination in 1992 and approached things very differently. Instead of saying, “America is a global superpower, we have a responsibility around the world, and we must also respect basic human rights and civil liberties norms” (which was a kind of compromise that emerged within the Republican Party even during the Reagan era), he said, “No, we are being invaded. America is being turned into a third world country. What do we owe the rest of the world? America first. We need to pay attention to the demands of young white men who feel they are constantly being portrayed as the bad guys,” he said.
So he, Buchanan, and Rothbard, hand in hand, helped spread this rhetoric, which is now, of course, the dominant rhetoric in the Republican Party. Paradoxically, this discourse sees white men in particular as the greatest victims of the modern world and argues that they must be defended against anyone who seeks to disempower them. This is certainly not something someone like Hayek would have advocated politically in the 1950s.
Much of neoliberal politics was about designing legal systems, essentially designing ways to tie people’s hands and prevent them from interfering with the market process. The neoliberal populism of someone like Javier Milei or, in certain ways, Bolsonaro, is about using certain types of social issues to draw people into an austerity-focused program that will ultimately make things worse for them financially.
In your book Crack-Up Capitalism, you discuss the concept of the perforation of national sovereignty. Escape from taxes, unions, politics, and elections creates either a multitude of small statelets or enclaves within states that weaken the sovereignty of the state. I would like to ask about Gaza, perhaps the most urgent issue in the world today, because, as you know, the Blair-Kushner plan announced by Donald Trump actually envisions the division of Palestine into economic zones, assuming that these zones will create jobs and that sovereignty will be transferred to international trusteeship. And throughout your book, you analyze how these neoliberals and Silicon Valley elites are fleeing from states and sovereignty. They love Dubai, they love Singapore, they love Hong Kong, they want to create free zones in Honduras or even Somalia. So how is this desire of capital, of Silicon Valley capital and neoliberal libertarian fantasies, to eliminate national sovereignty so intertwined with American geopolitical objectives today in terms of the Gaza plan or the Gaza situation? Moreover, while Gaza is the most recent example, as you examine in your book, it is not the only one. As you point out, there are probably hundreds of economic zones worldwide that have escaped national sovereignty, as you discuss in your book.
I wrote Crack-Up Capitalism partly to intervene in what I consider an unproductive framing of the global order problem since 2016. Since Brexit and Trump, we have constantly heard that there is globalism on one side and nationalism on the other, and that the two are alternatives to each other. It was said that the era of globalization had ended and the pendulum had swung back to nations. Some celebrated this, others criticized it, but my feeling was that it overlooked something very fundamental about the organization of the global political economy since the end of the Cold War.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it hasn’t just been nations and the world; I’m not even counting regions, but actually thousands, not hundreds, of special economic zones have been created. There are currently over 6,000 special economic zones worldwide. These are small zones of influence within nations, with different laws, different taxation policies, and often different labor and environmental regulations. These are not areas of escape from state power or national power. In fact, they are mostly used by nations to attract mobile capital and offer them more attractive conditions.
There is less oversight from authorities, regulations, etc., but since the end of the Cold War, the world has actually been riddled with these different types of economic zones, like a galaxy. If you look at some of the famous right-wing populists of the last decade, Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini, or Giorgio Meloni, what are they doing to their countries? On the one hand, yes, they are tightening borders and becoming more aggressive against irregular migration, but at the same time, they are creating special economic zones and attracting foreign capital.
Orban created new special economic zones to attract investment from China and Korea. Salvini and Meloni did the same, turning the entire south of Italy into special economic zones. In Poland, the right-wing PiS [Law and Justice] party created special economic zones.
So what I mean is that what is generally defined as a reaction against global capitalism is accelerating zero-sum forms of competition by using some of the tools of high globalization: in some cases giving more rights to mobile investors, while at the same time playing a socially conservative game.
And the persistence of such high neoliberalism tools is, I think, quite evident in a situation like the plans for post-conflict Gaza. If we can even talk about this as a possibility, of course.
But if you look at the proposals, you see that Netanyahu, Trump, Tony Blair, and the Boston Consulting Group basically agree on the same thing: This cannot be a place governed by “one person, one vote” democracy. These principles, dating back to Woodrow Wilson in 1919, the so-called principles of the modern world, are not even up for debate.
This place will be run like an industrial park or a special investment zone. The administration will consist of CEOs and public officials from outside, and conditions will be created to attract as much investment as possible to the area. And the focus will really be on infrastructure, the free movement of goods and capital, with very little emphasis on the so-called world of peace.
Names like the Apollo CEO, an Egyptian billionaire, and some of Trump’s billionaire friends are being suggested. So this is exactly what you said.
Of course, these two things can coexist, and we shouldn’t be surprised. So, there could be a new blood and soil language within the US, which definitely exists, as well as this vision of entrepreneurial adventurism and opening up new lands; these are being reshaped and redefined in ways that don’t fit the idea of national sovereignty or the old idea of empire. Greenland is another good example of this. The idea that it could be annexed informally and then perhaps turned into a place for experiments with satellite landing stations and mining industries. Then perhaps new forms of collectivity, commodified in the style of privileged cities.
I think we should continue to expect not a narrowing of political geography back to a world of nations, but rather a proliferation of these uncertain and heterodox forms of territorial organization, which, as always, tend to disempower the poorest within them the most.
You mentioned Europe just now. Finally, let’s return to Europe because, as you know, it seems connected to this new fusion. Although parties like the AfD in Germany and the PVV in the Netherlands, and figures like Viktor Orban, are seen as illiberal or populist, in your book you point to the economic programs of these movements, and it is clear that they are actually neoliberal. I recently read an article by Angelos Chrysogelos on national conservatism, and he also defines this process as the territorialization of neoliberalism. What do you say about the newspaper headlines on “the rising far right in Europe” in the context of the debates on neoliberals?
My first book, The Globalists, which has also been translated into Turkish, presented a very strong argument that the essence of neoliberalism is an attempt to reestablish a kind of global market order. Since the 1930s, there has been a strong push arguing that we need a rules-based multilateral order that maximally protects free trade and capital movement.
There are now very few defenders of this version of neoliberalism. In other words, you can hardly find anyone whose primary demand is the re-creation of a free-trade global order.
This idea has lost its credibility on both the right and the left. It really has no defenders. The WTO is like a dead duck sitting in Geneva. So the question is: Can you redefine neoliberalism, removing the global part and just providing bilateral links between Chinese investors and local party elites in Hungary? I’m a bit undecided on this.
So, I’m more inclined to argue that the struggle against neoliberalism has always been at the global level. If the global level is now off the table, then I’m not sure how helpful this term is anymore. I think that’s why there’s a degeneration, a mutation.
Alice Weidel from the AfD defines her party as a libertarian conservative party. That’s her own definition. And in a way, I find this a more accurate definition than neoliberal because she admits that the libertarian part is actually anti-welfare, pro-business, pro-austerity, pro-sound money. The conservative part, on the other hand, says they will finance everything else through punitive anti-immigrant policies, I suppose by accelerating extractivism, increasing workers’ productivity through exploitation.
If you follow their own language, you may be closer to the specificity of the present moment than to trying to revive the neoliberal label one last time. I think neoliberalism’s long-standing oppositional quality may be beginning to lose its power. It may be more useful to understand how we got here and then find which terms help us better understand the present moment.
Another thing worth mentioning is this: Europe is not a unified region, frankly. If you ask who is managing the current difficult European economic crisis most effectively, the answer right now is Spain under a socialist government. Why? Partly because they welcome immigration (especially from people of Spanish origin in Latin America), partly because they welcome Chinese investment and take advantage of it where they can, and partly because, you know, they respond to people’s demands through higher levels of corporate accountability, while also aligning the interests of the business world with the social agenda.
I think there is a lot of denial about what they can do in northern Europe. They are caught between Americans, whom they are used to flattering, and the Chinese, whom they find attractive but now feel are not allowed to work. Countries that can create their own ideological space, like the Spanish socialists, are, I think, freer to be pragmatic about the present moment. This is one of those times when terms like neoliberalism may not help us find our way as much as they once did in these complex times.
Foreign affairs writer Lily Lynch discusses the shifting political landscape of Central Europe and the Balkans in this interview with Harici. Lynch, whose work frequently appears in the New Statesman, New Left Review, and The Baffler, addresses a range of topics from Hungary’s recent elections to Serbia’s complex foreign policy maneuvers. A recipient of a 2025 LA Press Club award, she examines the “clarifying effect” of the Ukraine war on regional leadership and the evolving nature of right-wing populism across the continent. The conversation offers a detailed analysis of the challenges facing the European right and the persistent geopolitical tensions in the region.
I would like to begin with Hungary, specifically with the recent electoral victory of the right-wing populist Tisza Party, much like Viktor Orbán and Fidesz, and of its leader, Péter Magyar. What does this victory signify for Hungary’s future? The deep corruption and abuses of power involving Orbán’s circle had also received coverage in the international press. The fact that the country’s three major parties at the top of the electoral list are all right-wing paints a rather bleak picture.
I think that Magyar’s victory demonstrates several things. One is that right-wing ideas are still broadly popular in Hungary. The fact that Magyar is not so different from Orban on issues like immigration demonstrates that. So right-wing politics were not defeated in this election; instead, it is clear now that they are very much entrenched in Hungary and do reflect the sentiments of the public.
At the same time, I think there’s a particular brand of right-wing populism that is starting to cause some fatigue. This is a sort of clownish, personality-driven Trumpian populism that is wedded to Zionism, and which Orban embodied as well. I think Magyar’s success hints at a desire for a more sober and serious right-wing politics, decoupled from MAGA populism, and perhaps somewhat less revisionist: a politics that are anti-immigration and conservative but also more content with the status quo.
The electoral result also suggests that Trump’s brand has grown increasingly toxic, and that Orban’s choice to embrace Trump–going so far as having JD Vance campaign for him ahead of the election–hurt more than it helped. Trump is becoming a burden for the right, particularly in Europe. After Trump’s threats towards Greenland, no one in Europe can say they support Trump and also support respect for sovereignty. Of course, this is exactly what Orban once preached, as he fashioned himself a sovereigntist. In the end, it appeared that he only opposed encroachments from Brussels, but gave Trump’s America a pass.
At the same time, Orban’s deliberate stoking of the culture war ended up producing diminishing returns for him. Without decent economic performance, and with so much perceived corruption, his culture war crusades on issues such as gender simply were not enough to keep him afloat. In addition, Orban’s re-traditionalization efforts failed. The pro-natality policies he put in place were expensive but did little to boost the birth rate. Church attendance under Orban was even lower than it was during the socialist period, when religion was frowned upon by the authorities.
It may also be useful to touch on Serbia. The government led by Aleksandar Vučić appears to be pursuing what is often described as a “multi-vector foreign policy.” On the one hand, there is the prospect of EU membership; on the other, there are Serbia’s historically rooted ties with Russia. Yet in the course of the war in Ukraine, how should we interpret the statements coming from Moscow, particularly the strong reaction led by the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) to alleged arms deliveries to Kyiv via third parties? How sustainable is this condition of being a “swing state”?
There was a time when Vučić managed Serbia’s complex geopolitical position relatively well. At the height of the Vučić era, which was already a decade ago now, Serbia had relations with Russia, China, Turkey, the US, and many countries of the Global South that are members of the Non-aligned Movement–all while remaining a candidate for EU membership. But February 2022 changed everything for him. A major war in Europe–no longer confined to Donbass–meant that he was suddenly under much more pressure to harmonize Serbia’s policy with that of other European countries. In practice this meant things like imposing sanctions on Russia, and by voting in lockstep with EU and NATO member countries on resolutions on Ukraine in UN General Assembly votes.
It is true of course that Vucic was permitting indirect Serbian arms sales to Ukraine, which bought him a lot of credibility in Western capitals. With the Russians, meanwhile, he made excuses: He claimed that he was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and basically could not tell the West “no”. For a while I think the Russians accepted this, if grudgingly. But then as the arms sales to Ukraine didn’t stop after Vucic said they would, there were strong reactions in Russia.
I don’t think any of these actors, with the possible exception of China, trust Vucic anymore. For a long time, Vucic was all things to all people. A great example was in a UNGA vote Serbia voted in favor of a resolution on Ukraine, then Vucic immediately issued a statement saying that it had been “a mistake” and that they’d meant to vote against it. This was a deliberate strategy of ambiguity: which message to believe? The actual vote or Vucic’s statement to the press. He was masterful at this, for years: give one message to Washington, one to Moscow, and one to Brussels. I think you can sustain that kind of ambiguity for a time, and perhaps even a long time, but war has a clarifying effect. At a certain point, you just have to choose.
Vucic has also been one of the losers of the second Trump administration. This is the exact opposite of what he had hoped: he expected Serbia to be a natural ally to Trump. Instead, Vucic has been rebuffed by the administration, and repeatedly. Vucic stayed faithful to his mutli-vector foreign policy with the expectation that Trump would come to power and immediately end the war in Ukraine. I think he really believed that would happen–that Trump would end the war in Ukraine immediately. If that happened, Vucic’s job would have been a lot easier: there would be far less pressure on him from the EU, for one. So long story short, two recent developments have imperiled his multi-vector approach. First, the full-scale war in Ukraine in February 2022, and second, Trump winning a second term, and subsequent ambivalent relations with the White House.
It may also be worthwhile here to address the issue of Kosovo, which, as is well known, has in recent years become a fault line that periodically simmers and boils over. In the December elections in Kosovo, Albin Kurti once again returned to the office of prime minister. Would it be possible for you to share some information on this, or perhaps your observations and/or firsthand impressions? It seems likely that this is a place we will be discussing in the years ahead.
Albin Kurti has staked his career in part on his opposition to the creation of something called “the Association of Serbian Municipalities” of “Community of Serbian Municipalities” in northern Kosovo. Northern Kosovo is home to a Serbian-majority population who absolutely do not recognize Kurti’s government as legitimate and largely answer to Belgrade, though they often feel left on their own by the Serbian government as well. According to the 2013 Brussels Agreement between Kosovo and Serbia, the government of Kosovo has to create something called the Association/Community of Serbian Municipalities, a sort of thin layer of sovereignty or self-government that is nonetheless subordinate to Prishtina. Meanwhile, Serbia would extract itself from the north, ceding control of it to the government of Kosovo.
This has always been hugely controversial in Kosovo, as some believe it will create the conditions for eventual Serbian secession. Kurti remaining in office effectively means that there will be little progress made on this front. This is something that has made Western capitals very frustrated with Kurti, and he was under EU sanctions until last year.
However tense the current status quo is, I disagree with those who say a return to full-scale war is imminent or inevitable. There are something like 4,500 peacekeeping troops in Kosovo as a part of KFOR, NATO’s Kosovo peacekeeping force. That said, I am sure there will be the occasional flare up of localized violence. This currently happens every 1-2 years. But I highly doubt that these spasms of violence will lead to a full-scale war. Despite all the acrimonious feelings and distrust, there is little appetite for another big war in the Balkans by any side.
Finally, I am curious about your assessment, in broader terms, of what has given rise to the right-wing populist wave across Europe and/or how it is likely to shape Europe’s future overall. The supposedly “anti-establishment” profile, as in the case of Giorgia Meloni, either ends up directly submitting to the establishment, that is, to the Brussels bureaucracy, or produces state structures of astonishing corruption. This is a genuinely compelling issue, and I would be very interested in your views.
My answer about what has given rise to the right-wing populist wave is not at all original. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this wave was preceded by the 2007-2008 financial crisis, which led to an overall crisis in faith in institutions, experts, and in liberalism. This was fertile ground for a populist backlash against “elites”. Of course, these anti-establishment politicians ride to power on promises to “drain the swamp” or fight the powers that be, and then turn around and adopt very conventional policies once in office. Or, in Orban’s case, they may actually break with established consensus, but turn out even more corrupt than the liberal “elites” they rail against. There is always a rhetoric-policy gap in politics, but it’s especially pronounced on the populist right.
Interview
‘The so-called international order is crumbling; national interest is the only remaining truth’
In this extensive interview with Harici Medya at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Swiss journalist, Editor-in-chief of Die Weltwoche Roger Köppel provides a piercing diagnostic of the fracturing global order. Analyzing the downfall of the so-called “rule-based international system” through the cold lens of realism, Köppel articulates the inherent fragility of modern alliances when confronted by the supremacy of national interests. From the volatile Iran-Israel axis to the internal schisms within NATO, and from China’s emergence as a strategic alternative to the complex interplay between theology and power, each pivotal issue is reshaped by Köppel’s distinct and uncompromising perspective.
The dialogue further explores the friction between the Vatican and the American populist right, interrogating the resurgence of religion as a potent geopolitical instrument. Placing significant emphasis on Türkiye’s central role as a mediator within this “biblical” theater of conflict, Köppel champions the necessity of authentic diplomacy over moralizing rhetoric. Ultimately, this conversation offers a profound intellectual roadmap for navigating the sanctuary of pragmatism in an era redefined by the maneuvers of “great predator countries.”
I’d like to start with the ongoing talks about Iran. There is this current discussions between United States and Iran that they had an agreement about the Strait of Hormuz, but then things soured quite a bit and now Iran claims that they’re going to close the strait again because the American side also is not opening the blockade. So in a more general sense, what do you think about this ceasefire? How do you think it’s going to evolve in the upcoming days?
If I knew, I would have great qualified knowledge. Probably I could be a very rich man because I could foresee the stock market development. Unfortunately, we are in a very difficult situation where national interest, security concerns and even religious convictions are in the field of battle. And I can just hope that at the end of the day, goodwill prevails and that all sides find a way to settle this terrible situation. But how it can be achieved… I’m a Swiss. It’s very, very difficult to give here any kind of advice. I think I can understand all sides. I can understand the security concerns of Israel. I have a lot of sympathy with that. I can understand the American position, which was, since President Reagan, rather clear concerning Iran. And then you have Iran, this amazing civilization, which at least in European eyes, is also on a way, which can be—let’s be very cautious here—which can be considered a threat for other countries, building up ballistic arsenals, experimenting with nuclear explosives. It’s a very, very demanding issue. But somehow I’m still optimistic. I believe that they find a solution. But at the moment, it’s very hard to see how.
The United States and Europe had some sort of conflict between each other when it came to the Iran war. Donald Trump had certain expectations from its European allies, which already had a strained relationship after the Greenland debacle. When it comes to why Europe did not send any help, how do you describe that? Do you think Trump was right? Do you think Europe was right? What is the situation between the two parts of NATO?
I think what we see in the relationship between the EU and the United States is a symptom of the topic that has been discussed at this conference here in Antalya, which is the crumbling, which is the downfall of the so-called international order. And you can see it even on the level of military alliances such as NATO, that these alliances, they mean nothing in today’s world. We are in a world where national interest rules. And I believe that always national interest has ruled. But sometimes there was a lot of hypocrisy and the big talk about international order, rule-based order. But at the end of the day, it was only and always national interest. And we see it now with NATO: when it’s in the national interest that the Europeans can talk and use NATO, they say, “We are NATO members.” If the biggest NATO power, United States, says “Now you have to help us,” the Europeans say “No.” So I don’t want to judge this. I don’t want to say who is right and who is wrong. But I would like to say that this just indicates to us that these international rule-based systems, alliances such as NATO, they give no security today, they give no order today. The only thing that matters are national interest and the capacity of national leaders to sit together and find solutions for conflicts. And this is why this forum here in Antalya is very important. Because in such a world of national interest, where conflicts can pop up any second, any minute, it’s very important to bring back diplomacy, to talk, to create platforms such as these in order to interact. I think this is great that we have on one day the Ukrainian Foreign Minister and on the other day the Russian Foreign Minister. I wish we had more such forums also in Europe. And this is my critique of the European Union. We are too much… The European Union is too much moralizing, telling everybody who is the bad guy, who is the good guy, and is not engaging enough in finding common ground, common solutions via diplomacy.
When you look into the relationship between Europe and Russia or Europe and China, especially with the NATO meetings previously, before the second Trump administration, it was always claimed that these countries are adversaries to the Western order in general. But now, especially strained relations between Europe and the United States, we are seeing many members of the European Union trying to find alternatives to their security arrangements with the United States, which can be considered with China. Especially now we are seeing the Spanish Prime Minister going to China. Emmanuel Macron said something similar. And there were Keir Starmer’s meeting with Xi Jinping in China. So in general, do you see China being an alternative to United States? Do you think that Europe will change its course towards East?
Well, I’m from Switzerland, from a neutral country. And we try not to make enemies. We are too small; we have to be able to defend ourselves. And Switzerland is very much open to the world. We work with everybody. And even our neutrality has a bit suffered in the last years because the European Union has pushed Switzerland a lot in order to participate in the sanctions against Russia, even delivering weapons to Ukraine. Fortunately, we did never that. We were strictly neutral in the juristic sense. But with the sanctions, we have lost a bit our absolute impartiality. So Switzerland is totally open to the world. And I think many European countries should follow this path and should not talk themselves into these kind of confrontational views of the world. Of course, I mean, there might be other interests. If you look at the Baltic states, with their history with the Soviet Union, with Russia, it’s complicated. Poland has another tradition; they have to find out for themselves. But generally speaking, I would say in today’s world, we have to invest in great bilateral relationships. The European countries should cooperate with the United States, of course, with China, with Russia. I mean, Russia is a neighbor of Europe, but Europe, what is Europe? Europe is a group of small and middle countries with different histories and also different national interests. And somehow the EU is a structure which is too heavy-handed for this multiplicity of interests. So I would strongly argue from a Swiss perspective: make peace with Russia as soon as you can. Make no war, no conflict with China. Stop this moralizing attitude and patronizing of others. Just try to be a small bunch of countries who is not in big power politics anymore. Let the others be big powers. We can be big economic powers, big scientific powers, big powers of diplomacy and understanding and leave the rest to the big predator countries that are also on this planet. Of course, the big powers have big problems. We are smaller countries with smaller problems.
There’s a sentiment, there was a sentiment in the first Trump administration that if the European countries hang on tight for as long as possible, there will be eventually a leader that is willing to work together with Europe once again, which was Joe Biden in that. And when Joe Biden was elected, the Ukraine war started. And then we saw a reconsolidation of European countries under NATO umbrella in general. But now we are seeing the strain in the relationship is so hard that things may not go back as much as it can. But still, in the many international meetings, we are seeing figures like Gavin Newsom from California, which could be potentially the next president of the United States. And he was saying, “You need to once again hang on tight until 2028.” Do you think that if a Democrat president or a president that is someone that’s more close to American establishment… Do you think if someone like that gets into the presidency in United States, the concept of “collective West” will come back and Europe and United States will go back to their relationship like it was before?
Well, I hope not that we will go back in the time before Trump in that sense, because Donald Trump made—the American President made—something which was to me overdue: he said we have to talk with Russia again. We have to engage in diplomacy. Under Biden, there was no diplomacy. And if Gavin Newsom wants to be the second Biden—no diplomacy with Russia, the collective West meaning “we, the West, the best against the rest”—then I don’t think that this is a philosophy with which you can win the future. Of course, the United States is a big country; you could say a Godzilla country. And a Godzilla country has a lot of problems. They have a lot of alliances in the region of China, with Taiwan, with Japan, entanglements. It’s not easy. Of course, you have global interests. You have to see what you can do. And I think the reality, the dominating trend in the reality is—and I think Trump has realized this—the time of unilateral dominance of the United States of America is over. That was the case after the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1990. Then the Russians were lying on the ground. China was still very weak after Mao Zedong. I mean, they were starting to recover. Now we have a different world. We have China, which is basically number one economically. We have India, which is growing very fast. Russia has recovered. Russia doesn’t swallow a NATO enlargement to the east, you know, neglecting all the security concerns of Russia. I have great understanding. The Russians say “No, we don’t want this.” The Americans would never tolerate Russians or Chinese with their military structures in Canada or in Mexico. I mean, they wouldn’t wait as President Putin for eight years; they would intervene in eight hours if something like that happens. So Trump has realized America is not strong enough to be the dominant hegemon of the world. So he starts to focus, to concentrate on his prime spheres of influence, which is South America, which is the Middle East with all the oil. He has a rivalry with China. But I think Trump is, ultimately, he’s a pragmatist. Probably he was being overconfident with Iran. I can understand that. He didn’t want… I mean, he doesn’t want… He’s not interested in the interests of the United States and of Israel if Iran gets nuclear weapons. So they had to do something. But you know, they probably overestimated themselves. We will see. I don’t know, but we’re seeing this kind of multipolar world is in the making, and therefore, we need a lot of diplomacy and pragmatism. I think Trump is a pragmatist. I didn’t think that Biden was a pragmatist. I don’t think that Gavin Newsom seems like a pragmatist. I don’t know. So I hope that we see leaders, whoever it might be, who will not go back to the old times with no diplomacy, no talking, with this kind of Western supremacy attitude. This is not good. It’s not good for the West. It’s not good for the rest of the world. It’s not good for everybody.
In the first question, you mentioned a little bit of the religious conflicts. From what I understand, at least, you were talking about the Trump and Pope little fight maybe. So this situation in the last week has really gone out of control. The statements coming from both sides were pretty harsh. Donald Trump and especially a Catholic, J.D. Vance, was telling the Pope that he should be careful when he’s talking about theological matters, which was pretty interesting on its own. But when you look into this, do you think it is happening because Donald Trump saw someone that is critical of himself and he just didn’t want to take that, or you see a more sectarian conflict on the background of the situation? Because we have many figures like Peter Thiel of Palantir having meetings in Rome, talking about the Pope, talking about the Antichrist. And there was Steve Bannon who was mentioning we should overthrow Pope Francis and overthrow Vatican. There are plenty of figures in the American populist right that have a problem with Vatican. So in general, what do you say? Do you think that this is a sectarian issue?
In my first answer, I actually alluded to another biblical conflict, which is the conflict between the Israelites and the Ishmaelites, you know, going back to the great prophet Abraham and those great peoples which emerged from that great father, grandfather of civilization: the Israelites and the Ishmaelites. And Iran, you know, being one of the great empires, of course, also during the Islamic rule of the world. And then, of course, then you got the Jews, God’s chosen people. And I would say that religion is also a big part of Middle Eastern politics. But it’s great, it’s good you mentioned this dimension also in Western politics. Well, I would suggest, I mean, not to take Trump literally, but to take Trump seriously. And not every utterance of people from his camp or from other camps has to be taken totally seriously. I’m a Protestant, but I’m theologically interested. I saw with certain bewilderment these, you could say this wrestling, this verbal wrestling between the Vatican and then we saw these absurd pictures of Donald Trump, the American president, like posing as some kind of Jesus. But we have seen some similar stuff. I mean, there are people who think that Trump is losing his mind. Well, I don’t hope that’s a sign of that. I don’t know. That’s what the Americans have to find out for themselves. But I would say this is, for me, just an absurd indicator of probable—and I hope I’m wrong—nervousness on the side of the American leadership which realizes that things in the Middle East are not going according to plan. And I think that the American President has put himself under no less stress because he said he wants to finish the war in Ukraine. It’s still going on. He has his vision for Israel, he has his vision for the Middle East, he has his Abraham Accords, which is a great achievement. But now they are somehow not, you know, really, really in the spotlight anymore. You see this war in Iran, he doesn’t seem to find an end, an emergency exit. So probably these verbal entanglements are a symptom of stress. But on the other side, we have seen so many things Trump has said and strange stuff, you know, and I wouldn’t take it too seriously. Of course, the Pope, it’s his duty to criticize, to criticize war-making powers. I mean, this is his duty. And he is also… he’s right when he says it’s a crime to use God for politics, which is not only true for Christians; it’s also true for other religions today. Some powers use God to make politics. That’s always dangerous. And I think this is the ultimate sacrilege. As a Protestant, the people who speak about God meaning themselves… that’s a very dangerous species. We should be careful of these guys. So the Pope is right in saying this. And Trump, of course, he wants to present his point. I wouldn’t give too much attention to that. Peter Thiel… I have been to these lectures in Rome. I have listened to them. Yes, of course. I was there and it was confidential, so I shouldn’t say anything. But I’m smiling when I’m reading the newspapers about these lectures, what he was supposed to have said. My father was a Catholic too. Peter Thiel’s notion of the Vatican is not that the Vatican is the Antichrist. That’s not his position. I made an interview with him in my newspaper and he was explaining what he meant with Antichrist. He said the Antichrist is a worldwide bureaucracy which is grabbing power and putting sand into the eyes of the people, saying, “We save you from the apocalypse, we save you from Armageddon, from the climate catastrophe. We will bring eternal peace.” So Peter Thiel is not against the Vatican. Peter Thiel is not against whatever. You know, he’s concerned about the global bureaucratic state, which he identifies from his studies with that what the Bible called the Antichrist. But there are a lot of theologians who would not accept this description. They have a more narrow definition of the Antichrist. But it was a very interesting lecture and it was on a very high intellectual level. And I think not many politicians who criticize Peter Thiel are capable of having such a lecture themselves. So it was very interesting for me to listen to that.
Okay, one last question. It’s going to be about Türkiye. More specifically, the latest affairs that we’re seeing all around the region is bringing out a new situation where Türkiye and Israel are the new rivals in the region itself. Iran seems to be taking a little bit of a backside. And now that this is recognized by both sides, by both Türkiye and Israel, the rhetoric is getting stronger. Yesterday Mr. Tom Barrack was here and he was asked this very question and he said that it’s only rhetoric, it’s nothing more. These countries do not have to fight, are not on a path to fight. But he’s of course a side note in this situation and he obviously doesn’t want to see these two countries to get into a quarrel like that. But what do you say about this? Do you think in the near future of Middle East you expect a conflict between Israel and Türkiye?
Well, if I listen to certain statements of involved statesmen, there is not much diplomacy there. It’s very confrontational. We have listened yesterday to the Turkish President. Erdogan was very clear in his views. Also the Turkish Foreign Minister, Hakan Fidan, a very thoughtful person, but still with strong words. And I fear that now we are here in a still very serious conflict between Israel and probably Türkiye. I hope as a Swiss, that Türkiye—which under President Erdogan has in a… I’m not talking about interior politics; I don’t want to interfere, this Turks have to sort out themselves what they see appropriate. From outside, I see a very strong head of state, the President, in a smart way, who has positioned Türkiye as a key player of international diplomacy. And I hope that Türkiye can use this weight, this respect it has gained, in order to find a way also to accommodate the legitimate security concerns of Israel. Then I can understand Israel in this sense that Israel has had a lot of wars in the last eight years. It didn’t start these wars. Israel has been built out of a terrible catastrophe which is in the responsibility of the Europeans, especially the Germans, which is the Holocaust. They have created this state of Israel after the Second World War, which was not accepted by some of the nations in the Middle East. And so there were wars; Israel won these wars, they gained territory, they gave this territory back in the philosophy “land for peace.” So they gave the land, they didn’t get the peace. And there is now a new, you can say, more hardline political agenda which says, “Well, after the massacre of Hamas, we switch. We don’t believe in land for peace. Now land is peace.” It’s a bit, you could say, the Russian perspective. Russia was attacked many times. They said, “We need a cordon sanitaire in order to protect ourselves. We start to think in square kilometers.” Problem is, Israel, they start to think the same way. But at the core are legitimate security concerns. I don’t think that Israel is an imperialist power who wants to have an empire reaching from Pakistan to Portugal or, you know, a huge territorial player. But I think there are legitimate security concerns. And Türkiye, as this great moderator, has this great diplomatic force in the center of the world, of this world. I just hope that President Erdogan will find a way in order to bring Israel to the table. Now with Syria, which is very close to Türkiye, they have a great understanding, as far as I could see here, with other powers and the track record of President Erdogan, I think he’s in a unique position to bring here peace. But how this should be, I don’t know. In Switzerland, we say in the Middle East, “This is a biblical conflict.” It’s so hard to find a solution. We are glad that we are not living in this conflict field. We are living in the center of Europe. We had many wars there as well. But thanks God, they are behind us. Let’s hope they are not returning.
If it’s a biblical conflict, then we are all doomed. It’s not a thing.
No, then we are not doomed if it’s a biblical conflict, because then we can say we are all children of God and God didn’t create this world in order that human beings make war all the time. So we just have to find our… There must be a solution. We just haven’t found it yet.
Well, someone said we should be careful when talking about theology, so I should just stop here.
I agree.
Thank you.
Thank you.
In an exclusive exchange conducted by Harici Medya on the sidelines of the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy offers a clinical dissection of the shifting tectonic plates in Middle Eastern geopolitics. Amidst the fog of ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran, Levy delineates a region caught between the unpredictable whims of the Trump administration and Israel’s ambitious pursuit of regional hegemony.
Daniel Levy, a senior adviser to the government of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, was part of the Israeli team that attended the Taba summit with the Palestinians in 2001. He also participated in the second Oslo negotiations in 1995 with then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Between 2012 and 2016, Mr Levy served as Director for the Middle East and North Africa at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He is currently president of the New York-based think tank US/Middle East Project.
The veteran diplomat provides a sobering analysis of the fragile ceasefires in Lebanon and the intrinsic link between Netanyahu’s political survival and the perpetuation of conflict. Crucially, Levy draws attention to a burgeoning sentiment within the Israeli establishment that increasingly frames Türkiye as a long-term strategic challenge, mirroring the rhetoric once reserved for Iran. This profound dialogue serves as a roadmap for understanding the complex interplay of personal egos, military-industrial interests, and the calculated destabilization of state structures across the Levant.
First of all, of course, the talks are going on right now with Iran and United States. There were certain news coming in the morning. First, Donald Trump claimed that everything is fine, the Strait of Hormuz is open. Then things didn’t go that way. It seems that the Americans didn’t open their own blockade and now the Iranians want to go back to closing the Strait themselves. So, so what do you expect from the ongoing talks right now? Which direction do you think that things will lead into?
I think there are three or four basic possibilities, scenarios. One is there is a deal of some kind. Second is there may be some quiet understandings or expectations, but there’s not something you could really announce as a deal. But the American President decides he’s had enough anyway. He declares victory and walks away. Of course, Iran, with equal, if not greater justification, will also declare victory and everyone will give their speeches. But essentially the ceasefire will hold, there’ll be an arrangement in Hormuz, etc. And that could transition later to negotiations. But, so that’s the second scenario. Third scenario is Trump decides that the way to get a deal is to do one big final strike just to show that he’s still the tough guy, he’s the warmongers. The Israelis and others, those inside his administration, convince him to strike again.
Like an amphibious assault. Like a what?
Well, it could be. What I’m saying is there’s another American-Israeli aggression, maybe from Trump. The goal is you escalate to de-escalate like he did in June of 2025. But once you do that, you’re no longer in control of events because Iran will respond. If that’s the third scenario, then either that segues towards a resumption of a prolonged conflict, or that segues towards walking away, declaring victory. Sorry, negotiation. We seem to be more in the non-escalation trajectory at the moment. Even though there are the things going on in Hormuz, which if the Americans are going to blockade, of course the Iranians are as well. So that’s where we are. The problem is in trying to decipher what will happen next. Of course, there are lots of moving parts, but the thing that makes this most difficult is you have an American president who is not only unpredictable, not only incompetent, but also incoherent. He has no strategy and therefore he doesn’t really know why he went to war, what he wants to get out of the war. I know there are people who think that’s naive to claim that; no, of course, there’s American geostrategy. You’re trying to take hold of an important choke point in world energy. It’s good for the American military-industrial complex. All those arguments are fine. There’s an element of that. But that’s not what’s defined this war. What’s defined this war is the fragile ego, the peculiar personality, easy to manipulate, as we saw with Netanyahu. The reports of how Netanyahu went to the White House, went to the Situation Room, told the American president a story which in any other American administration, the experts would say, “Mr. President, now that our guest, the Israeli Prime Minister, has left, here’s what’s really the story. We’re not doing this.” This president fell into the trap that no other president has before. The trap’s been laid before by the Israeli prime minister. So because of those things, it’s more hard to predict than it would otherwise be. And the president, President Trump, can lurch from, you know, one… he can wake up one morning, he’s spoken to someone, he’s heard an interview on Fox TV and make one decision, and then the next morning makes another one. So it seems that he is fed up with the war. He knows that the politics, the economics are difficult for him to manage. But maybe he thinks he’s Jesus again tomorrow and he carries on the war.
The Lebanon part of the war was really on the spotlight because Pakistan was saying one thing, Iran was saying one thing, then the United States and Israel were saying the complete opposite of what they were claiming. So what we have seen from the beginning of those talks with the ceasefire, it seems that the initial discussion was about actually involving Lebanon, too. And now we come to a point where Israel was reluctant to listen to what Donald Trump or the entirety of American systems tells them to do. But now, for some reason, Donald Trump managed to push Israel to hold a ceasefire on their own. So do you think that this is a failure by Israeli government to not be able to hit their war goals, which was reaching out to the Litani River? What do you think about it?
So, first of all, and this is playing out inside Israel, this doesn’t feel like a win on Lebanon. They’ve destroyed things. That’s their modus operandi. But being told, and especially the very particular language that President Trump uses in his Truth Social postings, “Enough.” This isn’t where Israel thought it would be. It also makes it quite clear that this was part of the deal, that it was the Iranians and the Pakistanis who were telling us the truth on Lebanon. It is also probably the clearest indication we have that Trump actually wants to close the escalatory logic of this war and to be in an ending this deal, de-escalation place because he’s imposed this ceasefire in Lebanon on Israel. It also shows us that if the Americans want to impose something on Israel, they can. Not that we needed any proof of that. Because it’s obvious America has the leverage. America gives them the weapons, America gives them the political support. If America says stop, Israel says yes; it tries everything to avoid that. It will continue to try to provoke. So inside Israel, there is a lot of criticism. First, as usual, Israel overestimated its own capacity and underestimated that of its adversary. You had the Northern Commander of the Israeli military saying, “We were surprised by Hezbollah still having this capacity to send rockets to fire on the ground.” But, and the “but” is important. As usual, it’s a ceasefire, Israel style. And it’s a ceasefire that the Americans have accepted, at least in this respect, Israeli stipulations on the ceasefire. Which means Israel is still physically inside Lebanon. So it doesn’t have the larger security buffer, but it has a significant security buffer. In fact, they took additional land inside Lebanon, bordering Syria, in the hours leading up to this declaration. And Israel, according to the document, the text, can act to prevent immediate operations from the other side. But who defines what that is? Who defines what the threat is? As long as Israel defines the threat, it will define it widely. Nonetheless, Israel has been significantly curtailed, which never happens on the Palestinian front, of course.
With Netanyahu government, there are a lot of, maybe conspiracy theories, maybe more normal comments. But people are claiming that Netanyahu is pursuing more and more war around their neighbors and with Iran because he wants to, you know, just keep going in the political scene. If they stop, maybe he’s going to get into a court case, he’s going to get arrested. Do you think that’s the case or do you think that the Israeli government and Israeli state itself wants to pursue these wars?
So I don’t think it has to be one or the other. It can be both. And I think in this case it is both. Netanyahu, who is alive, by the way, in terms of rumors of conspiracy theories… Well, it’s a weekly rumor. Exactly. It has served him politically since October 7th to be a permanent wartime leader, for Israel to be in perpetual war. Every week he’s still supposed to be in court. Every week he still sends his lawyers to the courthouse to say, “I can’t come this week, I’m busy with the war,” which is genuinely what’s happening. It seems like with the election getting closer, he wants these conditions and he has many options: Lebanon, Iran, Gaza, West Bank. So it’s not just a continuation of war, it’s a continuation of war on multiple fronts. There are other elements to this. Economically, part of how Israel has managed its economy is a version of military Keynesianism, which has been to pump money into the economy not only through the military-industrial complex, but also through the compensation that reservists receive. So part of the money in the Israeli economy at the moment is the very generous packages that those who sign up for more and more and more weeks of military service are getting. And Israel went into this war with a low debt-to-GDP ratio, so it has headspace to keep doing that. But then there is the part of this that’s not about Netanyahu, his personal court case and political management. This is about something that goes much deeper. He has support from the opposition. The opposition criticized: “Why didn’t you get the Americans to do more with us in Lebanon? Why didn’t you build more shelters?” They’re actually mad that they stopped. The opposition are just as belligerent in this respect as the Prime Minister. Back when there were discussions over the Israelis being held in Gaza, the opposition would say, “Get the hostages released and then resume the attack. Why don’t you at least get the hostages released?” So this goes much deeper into Israeli conceptual thinking and how the state has gone on a journey to promoting and then manufacturing societal consent for genocide against the Palestinians and war in the region. And so the way one has to understand this is Israel has a vision for regional domination that requires the weakening and collapsing of surrounding states, of any potential power balances or anything that could emerge as a peer competitor. Of course, Israel’s not the only one that has been involved in encouraging the collapse of states. Israel wasn’t the primary actor in Syria for sure. Israel did then go and smash up what was left of what the Syrian successor leadership could have done after Assad fell. And it even includes trying to… there are some states you’re not going to collapse, but you want to co-opt them. You want them to become dependent on Israel, more vulnerable, like the Gulf. Israel’s desired intentional outcome from this war with Iran was that the Gulf would be more weakened. And of course, the Israeli system is very clear in which country next needs to be weakened; it’s a country called Türkiye.
Yeah, I’ll get to that. But firstly, the cost of doing all of that, the road to regional hegemony, if you will. It’s always claimed that it’s Israel’s reputation and Israel’s friendships, all in the West, in Europe, in the United States and everything. But there’s this idea that if this war stops, somehow, not just Iran, all of that stops. Probably Israel has the idea that things will go back to how it was before. There won’t be any sanctions, there won’t be any, quote-unquote, “hard feelings” with the Western countries. Do you think that’s going to be the case? Because when Germany put sanctions on weapons sales to Israel, they waited for a ceasefire in Gaza, and the moment that it took place, there was just no more sanctions or no more ban for weapons sales. So do you think that’s going to happen with European states who right now are showing negative emotions towards Israel’s actions?
So I think this is a project of overreach, of exaggeration, which is typical of a state that goes to a very extreme place, which is the case in Israel today. But the Israeli, Netanyahu and others’ counter-narrative would be: so far it works. So one thing that’s going on here is while we’re in this moment of fluidity and while he still has Trump onside in the White House, and while everyone else is going, “Oh, my God, what do we do with Trump?”—Europeans, Arab allies, even Tier One Asian-American allies—Netanyahu is saying, “Let’s exploit this moment to strengthen our position to the maximum possible, and then things will settle down again, but we’ll be that much stronger.” So the bet he is placing is if Israel is successful enough, then the others won’t have a choice. They’ll be dealing with a much more powerful Israel. You know, as soon as Germany went one way, it went back the other way. And not only went back the other way, Germany has now signed one of its biggest drone manufacturing deals with an Israeli military arms company. So Netanyahu is saying, “Look, if I can pull this thing enough in my direction, if I get more of the Gulf with me, then India will be less reticent about taking sides. It will be more with me. I have the relations with Greece and Cyprus on energy. Maybe I force Lebanese gas to come this way, maybe I force the Syrians into a similar arrangement. Even if we’ve lost image, even if the reputation looks different, power talks and we can lose the campus and we can lose public opinion, but we can retain enough power that people won’t have a choice. And then they’ll basically accept in Europe as well.” Everyone will look at America as unreliable. This is even thinking for a post… kind of how do we function with an America that has reduced power? If we can assert this, others will fall in line. That’s the gamble. That’s the bet that Netanyahu is placing. There is, to my mind, sadly too much evidence that it’s not a crazy bet. Now, I don’t think it’s going to work. I think there will be blowback. I don’t think he can succeed. But that’s what he’s trying to do. And at the moment it’s not clear that he will fail.
Final question. You already mentioned about their will to, you know, have a quarrel with Türkiye. They’re making it evident in the media, they’re making it evident by their politicians and the claims they do. But at the same time yesterday Mr. Tom Barrack was here and he asked the same question if there will be a fight between Israel and Türkiye. And he said that it’s just rhetoric, there’s nothing serious behind it, that they are just being pushed by people around the leaders like Netanyahu and Erdogan. So I would like to ask you, is there a realistic scenario where Türkiye and Israel are going to face each other and what position the United States will take in such case?
So we’re not talking short term, but this is more than rhetoric. Israeli officials go around the world to their friends and they say, “We need to talk to you about Türkiye, why this country is dangerous.” They are beginning to talk about Türkiye in the way they used to talk about Iran. And Iran was not a short-term project. Iran was a decades-long project of creating the conditions for a confrontation. They warn about the Turkish missile program. That’s the language that they use. But it’s not just that. Türkiye would be not a serious actor in statecraft if it wasn’t now testing on the other side, which I’m sure it is, which is to look at… we’re not talking about war in the short term. What we’re looking at is what vulnerabilities can we begin to create or exploit. One should, for instance, see the energy relationship not only with Greece and Cyprus, but with Egypt. And if they can pull, as I said, Lebanon and maybe try and pull Syria just to test… maybe we can’t, but let’s try. Try the first time. If there is a Syria-Israel relationship, they will see where it can go. Now, I’m not saying that will happen; I don’t think it can. But on Lebanon they will try. They may get further. On Syria, they will try. The relationship on the Kurdish front, Israel got a defeat there when the Americans came in and said, “No, we’re not going to,” when the SDF was forced into the climb down that it was forced into with the Syrian state. So they get setbacks as well. Somaliland, the Israeli recognition of… So there are going to be things happening in places that you go, “What was that about?” and then you say, “Oh, okay.” One of the angles to this story, like the Somaliland story, is a Turkish angle. Israel putting a base somewhere next to where Türkiye has an influence. Sudan. Israel’s not a main actor in Sudan, but Israel’s closest friend in the Gulf is a very main actor in Sudan. So let’s see what we can do there. So you will see sometimes under the surface things going on if Israel is able to continue to pursue this. Now, the counterpoint to that is whether you begin to get an alliance in the region which includes containing and deterring Israel as part of its DNA, as part of its mission statement, if you like. And that’s the subtext to a lot of what is going on is whether Israel can pull more people in its direction or whether we get something that begins to look like containment. But if Israel could continue to pick off country after country, one at a time, then it will continue to escalate its future planning in a belligerent way vis-à-vis Türkiye. If it is forced to roll back some of its ambitious domination project, then the Türkiye thing is too much of a stretch.
Thank you so much, sir.
Pleasure.
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