Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis participated in a conversation with Robert D. Kaplan, at the Delphi Economic Forum. The discussion follows:
Robert D. Kaplan: Welcome, everybody. It’s a sincere honour for me to be here with you, with the Prime Minister, for this occasion. It’s a cliché to say we live in historical times, but we really do. A cliché that was ascribed from Lenin, though he probably never said it, was that decades can march on and nothing happens. And then days and weeks and months go on and decades happen. Now, that’s happened in specific parts of the world, in Ukraine starting in 2022, in the Middle East, starting in late 2023. But it’s been about 80 years since we can say that decades are happening in weeks and months and days for the whole world system.
And it is a world system because we live in a more anxious, claustrophobic world because of the way technology has not defeated geography, but shrunk geography. So we’re all stuck with each other.
Greece is a country where it’s in the centre of everything. I believe it’s as close by flying time to Moscow as it is to Brussels. So it really is in the centre. So my first question, Mr. Prime Minister, how does Greece negotiate a world that I’ve described?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, it’s a pleasure to be back at the Delphi Economic Forum. Congratulations to Simeon for the incredible work he has done. The Delphi Economic Forum started in 2016. It was the year I was actually elected leader of Nea Demokratia, so in that sense, we’ve had parallel paths. So, I have every reason to wish you success and longevity.
Coming back to the question that you asked, this is indeed a very, very challenging time. I was thinking that my younger daughter is going to be graduating from college this May. And I thought that I graduated from college back in 1990, 35 years ago, which was also a period of great realignments. But I think what makes this period so different from the time when I graduated from college is this feeling of pessimism and anxiety and uncertainty regarding this changing world, which is particularly prevalent, I think, in the younger generation. When I graduated from college, the world was our oyster. Everything seemed possible. It was a time when the fallacy of the “end of history” dominated the discussion.
So the real question is, how does a country, such as Greece, navigate this very complex geopolitical and economic and technological landscape? The geography hasn’t changed. Greece is a European country, a member of NATO. It is now, I think, a proud member of the European Union rather than the sick child of Europe, which allows us to play an important role in shaping our European policies.
It’s a country that has a strategic relationship with the United States, that it values and cherishes and wants to build upon. But it is also a country that sits at the crossroads of three continents. I’m speaking to someone who believes in the power of geography. We’re also four hours flight from Abu Dhabi, five-hours flight, four-hours flight from Addis Ababa, six-hours flight from Delhi. We sit at the crossroads of the new geopolitical realignment, the new trade routes, the new energy routes.
And it’s our obligation to navigate this complex new environment in a way that, first of all, ensures the safety of the country, because safety is a precondition for prosperity. So certainly, very challenging times and very different times from what my generation experienced when we were much younger.
Robert D. Kaplan: The issue of the moment is economic, it’s tariffs. It seems that in the 1990s, I remember, globalisation was the latest buzzword, and it was used as almost a security element, when in fact it wasn’t. Are we at the end of globalisation? Will this be looked back upon as the end of globalisation? And again, in this tariff regime, how does Greece navigate?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I think it’s too early to talk about the end of globalisation because this globalised world that was created under the leadership of the United States, because it was also in the interest of the United States to create this global prosperity and exercise soft power in a way that it has done.
I think it’s very, very difficult to unravel what has been built over many decades, especially when we talk about complex supply chains. This is not something that you can actually change from one day to the next.
The truth is that globalisation has created global wealth, but this global wealth has not always been allocated in a necessarily just manner. It has created a very, very rich people and a new oligarchy of companies that exercise global power. It has certainly helped the developing world, and it has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty, but it has also isolated and marginalised the middle classes of countries such as the US, to a certain extent also Europe, because simply jobs moved to where they were at the time, cheaper.
Now we are faced with a profound realignment whose future I think is still relatively unpredictable.
I am a believer in free trade. Greece, I want to be very clear about that. Greece is a relatively small, open economy. Shipping is a key industry for Greece. Shipping is a lifeline of global trade. We have every interest in protecting a rules-based international order that fosters rather than restricts trade.
Now, speaking about the current new tariff war, I do believe that when it comes to the US-Europe relationship, there is still a window of opportunity to negotiate an arrangement that can be mutually beneficial, simply because US-European trade is too important to destroy for both sides. There will only be losers if we don’t manage to resolve this.
I was satisfied that President Trump decided to push the pause button on the tariffs that he had announced. We still have 10% tariffs, which are still pretty substantial, but much better than what was announced. I do believe that we need to use this 90-day window of opportunity to have a very honest discussion about the trade regime between the United States and Europe. If a deal, to use the language of the President of the United States, can be done, I think it needs to be a mutually beneficial deal. If this means that we all step back from our opening positions, that may be necessary in order for us to reach a compromise.
I’m reasonably optimistic that there is room to manoeuvre and a necessary acknowledgement that a full-blown global trade war will have dramatic consequences for every country, including the United States. I think the markets have sent a very clear signal that they view these trade announcements with great concern.
Robert D. Kaplan: Is Greece under-invested? Does Greece have the potential for a lot more foreign investment? Because after all, the location is perfect. It’s a free market economy. You’ve turned the economy around. Greece is a serious country now in a way it wasn’t decades ago.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: I’m glad you recognise that. I think it’s important to remind ourselves where we came from because we tend to forget easily how difficult this path was and how much progress I think we had made.
I’m glad you asked this question because I have put investment at the centre of our growth strategy. If I look back at where we were at the beginning of the crisis, we already had a significant investment gap. Actually, capital was destroyed in the crisis. But we’re making up for lost ground. We are now at around 16% of our GDP when I look at investments, we need to get to 20%.
Of course, we need to convince both Greek business people, but also foreign investors to invest in the country. This is already happening. We’ve had record foreign direct investment into Greece because I think people understand that this country has certain natural comparative advantages. I’m not just referring to our geography, for example, investments related to tourism or to logistics. You just look at the map, these investments make a lot of sense.
But what I find particularly interesting is the investments we’ve been able to attract in technology. Why technology? Because we have an amazing human capital in Greece. Our public universities are producing excellent engineers, and many international funds, international tech companies, have appreciated that. And that is why we see a booming tech sector in Greece that is actually I believe punching above our weight.
If you add all the comparative advantages that the country has in terms of its geographical position, its natural beauty, its agricultural sector… We produce extremely high-quality products. That’s why we are concerned about tariffs to the US, because we export our products to the US. Frankly, it doesn’t make much sense for the US to put tariffs on products which it does not produce at all. I don’t see the US producing olives or olive oil anytime soon.
But if you look at, for example, what we can do in terms of food security, what we can do in terms of energy, we’ve not spoken about energy, but Greece has become an exporter of energy. We’re leaders in renewable energy because we’re endowed with ample free supply of wind and sun. You add all these up, and I think you have a very convincing growth story that attracts foreign investors. And it’s much easier to make this case now than it was when I first came into power.
If you look at our borrowing costs, they are much lower than those of the US. They’re lower than those of Italy. You look at our unemployment now. It’s below that of Spain. It’s below that of Finland. It’s below that of Sweden. So undoubtedly, progress has been made, but there’s still lots of work to do. Simplifying the bureaucracy, making sure we sort out legacy issues which are related to land usage, looking at energy.
And this ties the discussion into the broader theme of European competitiveness. We need competitive energy in Europe in order to sustain our competitiveness. And the same is also true for Greek companies. But there at least, we approach this discussion I think from an advantageous position because we’re way ahead of other countries when it comes to renewables.
Robert D. Kaplan: You mentioned engineers and science. AI: China and the United States will be giants in AI, both of them. But for smaller countries, there’ll be winners and losers. A country like Estonia has done very well in a digitised economy. That’s where it really punches above its weight. How does that affect Greece? Does Greece have to become a really aggressive AI state?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, speaking about the digital transformation, the first project that we embraced when we came into power in 2019 had to do with the digital transformation of the state. And there, I think, we’ve made amazing progress. We’re now way ahead of many other European countries in terms of the digital services that we offer. For example, we have a digital wallet. When we went through the vaccination process, everything was done digitally. Friends from the US were sending me photos of little paper slips as back to vaccination certificates. None of this happened in Greece.
So I think we’ve leapfrogged quite a few countries in Europe when it comes to the digital transformation of the state. And of course, the next big leap is related to AI. We actually have a very, I think, well thought out strategy regarding our presence in this evolving AI global ecosystem. We were selected as one of the first seven “AI factories” by the European Union recognising that something important is happening in the AI space in Greece. We’re building supercomputers, we’re building many data centres. The big hyperscalers are all here to build their data centres.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: And most importantly, we are beginning to very aggressively use AI to streamline public services and to make sure that we improve the productivity of the state. And the potential there is truly enormous. At the same time, we want to focus on certain specific verticals where we feel that we have very high quality curated data sets which can be incredibly important because data is probably even more important than computing power in this new emerging world. For example, in healthcare or in defence, these are two verticals where we’re looking to very much focus on.
And of course, many startups working around AI, if we can offer them a friendly regulatory environment when it comes to data usage, access to computing power. I think we have the ingredients, again, to punch above our weight.
We don’t expect, of course, to compete with the countries that have different capabilities. But I do see in AI a tremendous opportunity to make a qualitative jump when it comes to what the country has to offer.
At the same time, I do think we need to be at the forefront of having a serious discussion about how AI and in particular the AI algorithms on our social media are undermining our democracy and are endangering the mental health of our kids and our teenagers.
I would want to look at both sides of this discussion. Very bullish on the potential of AI when it comes to transforming the state and creating new opportunities. Very concerned about the impact of AI on our democratic discourse and on the mental health of children and teenagers.
Robert D. Kaplan: You mentioned before about the long road Greece travelled. Since the Civil War, which came right after World War II, Greece has had a hard right wing. It had a populist left wing after a dictatorship of the colonels. It’s taken decades to find the centre. And I’ve always found that mass democracies function best in the centre, on the center-right or on the center-left. What are your thoughts on this? Because you’ve lived it, essentially.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Our democracy, after the fall of the junta, is already 51 years old or young, and it has been probably the best democracy that we’ve had. But this doesn’t mean that we have not had our fair share of crisis. And if you look at what has happened in Greece over the past 50 years, we, of course, need to zero in on the economic crisis, which almost ripped this country apart. We lost 25 % of our GDP. This has never happened before in peace time. Yet, we managed to recover and do much better, but we have not yet made up for the lost ground.
I think one of the reasons why we were able to do better over the past years is due to the fact that we experimented with populism. I think the Greek people reached the conclusion that populist promises are usually empty and they result in bad policies that don’t improve their lives. People at the end of the day are very practical and I think rational in terms of how they think.
At the same time, the ghosts of populism are always present. I’d say that 10 years after the worst times of the economic crisis, when we had to close our banks and when we literally flirted with complete financial catastrophe, I do sense that sometimes we don’t appreciate how close we came to a catastrophe, and we tend to forget easily what exactly happened 10 years ago.
I’m saying this because I do believe that in a well-functioning democracy, you need stable, reasonable parties that govern from the centre. It could be the center-right or it could be the center-left. But if you look at the Greek political landscape now, you have a strong center-right party that is dominating the political landscape. But apart from the party I have the honour to lead, the rest of the opposition is completely fragmented. So you don’t necessarily have a balanced system. And this may always give space for new populist voices to emerge. At a time when people tend to be maybe slightly more emotional, more pessimistic, more driven by social media, I think the danger that you could have a reemergence of populism is always there because populists and parties tend to come in cycles.
But as long as we produce real results, create jobs, improve the disposable income, keep our promises, because we managed to win a second election doing actually better than we did in 2019 for one simple reason, because at the end of the day, we delivered what we committed on. We want to do the same now.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: We’re almost halfway through our term. I do think that we still have very good days ahead of us because we have created a fiscal position that is very strong. I think now is the time to ensure that this fiscal strength is felt by the average Greek, because we have real problems when it comes to inflation, as many countries have had. I do believe that as long as you deliver, as long as you focus on real problems, as long as you’re results-oriented, as long as you remain humble and understand that the grievances that fuel the populist parties may be real, but the solutions offered by the populists are not the ones which are appropriate. I think we have a pretty good chance of winning the next election in 2027.
Robert D. Kaplan: I’m glad you mentioned social media because mass democracy functioned for hundreds of years and decades in the print and typewriter era, which really was in the centre. Fact-checked long articles. Social media emphasises the passion and simplicity, which can be the enemies of analysis, and that in turn helps the populist parties around the world. So I would think that maintaining the political centre is even more challenging in a social media era.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: It is, and we don’t expect most people to follow the discussion that we necessarily have here. It may be intellectually interesting and challenging, but we know that these days people consume information in a very, very different way.
I would argue that we also have to change the way we communicate with people without necessarily compromising on our basic principle. If I need to fit my message in a 30-second TikTok video, I will have to do it because that’s the only way to reach a younger audience.
But this doesn’t mean that I will lie to them or I will engage in conspiracy theories. I may have to be a little bit more funny or maybe a little bit different than the way I would communicate on traditional media. But we have an obligation to understand that the younger generation is communicating in a completely different way, and we have to adjust our strategies.
But the real problem, unfortunately, is that, as you pointed out, the social media algorithms are picking up on negative emotions because they are more addictive. They create echo chambers. It’s very, very easy for fake news to spread like wildfire. Even the big platforms are getting rid of fact checkers, which in my mind is very problematic. There have been intellectual debates about the limits of free speech for centuries now but we seem to disregard the fact that one can find the reasonable balance between protecting free speech and not allowing everyone to say whatever they want in a completely anonymous manner.
So these are challenges, and we approach this new media landscape from a position, as sort of more traditional parties, of disadvantage. But we also have to adjust and evolve the way we communicate.
Robert D. Kaplan: What you said about loss of memory is very crucial because new media, really, it deifies the present. It creates a “presentness”, and people forget the past. In Romania now, there are young people saying it’s worse now than it was under Ceaușescu. And I respond to them and say, ‘No, it wasn’t’, because I was there at the time. So recovering memories is very important for a nation’s progress.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: You’re absolutely right. And we tend to glorify the past. We usually say that, ‘Oh, it was better 10, 15 or 20 years ago’, which is probably not true. But again, we are in a much more complicated landscape. But at the end of the day, people understand when a public policy works. If they can go to a hospital and see an improvement in the emergency room, they will know that this is actually happening. Frankly, I think also in terms of our strategy, sometimes it’s better to let them speak and share their experiences than having us talk about what we have achieved. I understand the scepticism when politicians talk, we have to overcome an inherent barrier of distrust.
At the end of the day, I profoundly believe that people, yes, they become more emotional, but the day before they enter the ballot box, they will think about what’s best for them, what’s best about their family. They are very concerned, I think, in this changing world about protecting what they have, about stability.
Political stability is very important these days. We have a comfortable parliamentary majority. Not many European countries have that. We don’t have to engage in complex coalition negotiations. This means that we can take decisions much faster. For example, this is something that international investors very much appreciate, and this is an advantage that we have. Certainly, what people understand is that they don’t want to return to a situation where no one is making any decision when there is paralysis, especially at a time when we’re faced with important geopolitical challenges.
Robert D. Kaplan: Let’s turn to Europe. Europe, as we know, faces a challenge with Russia, with the Ukraine war. But Europe is also in the fight zone, unprotected by oceans on each side. When you look at the demographics and the development of the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, I think it’s fair to say that Europe will see more and more migration pressures over the course of the 21st century. What’s interesting is that Africa is developing middle classes, but middle classes are ungrateful. Middle classes want more and more, and they tend to migrate in the first generation of middle classes from countries because they see that other places are better for their children. So the combination of chaos, weak states, and successful middle class states in Africa will drive migration.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Thank you for being so optimistic. Well, we are at the forefront of the migration challenge, because geography has placed us on the external border of the European Union, land border and sea border, which makes managing migration that much more complex.
And if you look at the migration politics in Europe, there has been a profound change over the past years. We started with a very open and generous approach to migrants and refugees, not always making a distinction between them. And we realised at some point that this policy was no longer sustainable. It was not sustainable politically, it was not sustainable economically. And we, since 2019, have taken a very conscious decision that we will protect our borders, and that at the end of the day, we need to be the gatekeepers of who comes to our country. And we’ve done so, I think, relatively successfully.
And I think we’ve also pushed the European Union to focus more on the external dimension of migration. And a lot of progress has been made, the Pact on Asylum and Migration, which was agreed a couple of years ago. And I think we played our role in realigning the politics of migration in Europe.
Having said that, we also recognise that we’re faced with a profound demographic challenge. If you look at Greece, for example, we already are faced with labour shortages in the agricultural sector, the construction sector, even our hospitality sector. Is the answer to just open our borders and let anyone in and hope that these people may end up working in Greece and be properly integrated? Absolutely not. The answer is managed migration, sometimes through bilateral agreements with countries with which we have a good relationship, with the involvement of the private sector.
And that needs to counterbalance a tougher policy in terms of protecting our borders. But you talk a lot about borders, and borders are important. But borders should not just be a line on the map. As long as you don’t protect them, you don’t recognise that they exist, they become meaningless. This was very much the policy of the previous Greek government, and it was a complete disaster.
Robert Kaplan: To the east of Greece, you have not just Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, you also have Turkey. And Mr. Erdoğan has been in power for 23 years now. He’s getting old, but he could be in power for a few more years. Nobody knows. How does Greece manage relations with Turkey looking forward? I mean, if Turkey has just been strengthened by the overthrow of the regime in Syria, it has large water resources. It’s a very enviable geographical position.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: We’re destined by geography to live side by side. And of course, our goal is to be able to live peacefully side by side and to resolve our outstanding differences. We have one main difference with Turkey, a geopolitical legal difference, which is the delimitation of the maritime zones in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. We need to be honest, we’ve not been able to resolve this problem for more than 40 years now, and I don’t expect to be able to resolve it necessarily in the foreseeable future.
But this does not mean that we should not engage with Turkey, that we should not have open channels of communication, that we cannot work on other projects of common interest, which strengthen in particular the people-to-people connection between our two countries and our two people.
Let me give you just one practical example: we were able to negotiate with the European Union an express visa regime for 12 islands of the Eastern Aegean, which means that Turkish visitors could come to Chios or Samos, for example, get a visa on the spot and stay there for a week.This has worked really well. It’s not just an economic boost for the local economies. It’s also important for the people-to-people relationship.
At the same time, we are not naive. Greece needs to always project credible deterrence vis-a-vis Turkey. And it’s one of the reasons why we are also strengthening our armed forces and ensuring that we will also contribute to the broader discussion about European security and strategic autonomy by doing so.
So it has always been a complicated relationship. I’ve met President Erdoğan -I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve met him, seven or eight times- and I think these meetings, even if there is no tangible result, are important in terms of, at least, ensuring that we understand each other, we understand our differences, we have no surprises, and we keep our channels of communication open.
So, I’d say I’m an optimistic realist when it comes to managing my relationship with Turkey.
Robert Κaplan: And throughout the Eastern Mediterranean as well, which is emerging as a system…
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: We don’t see our foreign policy as being exclusively defined by our relationship with Turkey. We have very strong relationships with all the Gulf countries. We have a strategic partnership with Israel. We have a very strong relationship with Egypt. We feel we can be critical players in the IMEEC corridor, simply by virtue of our geography. We are looking to exploit energy reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. Both Exxon and Chevron are present now, south of Crete, looking for natural gas.
And we feel that in this complex geopolitical landscape that constitutes the Middle East, we are credible interlocutors. We can talk to everyone. We can always try to contribute towards making sure that we reduce tension and try to be constructive because at the end of the day, it is in our interest to ensure that the Eastern Mediterranean is peaceful, safe, and prosperous.
Robert Κaplan: Mr. Prime Minister, whenever I traveled through the developing world in the ’80s and ’90s, so many people told me they wanted a leader like Lee Kuan Yew. That’s who they looked up to. Who were your role models?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: For how many years did Lee Kuan Yew stay in power? Yeah. Well, I think we’re more constrained in terms of our time horizon. I’m a student of history, and I think there’s always great value in studying biographies of important leaders to understand. First of all, it’s comforting because you see how difficult things were in the past, and this puts things into perspective. But I think it also gives you a very interesting insight in the decision-making process of important leaders.
I think there have been transformative leaders in Greek history, Eleftherios Venizelos probably being the most important one. I don’t just look at his foreign policy successes and possible failures. I’m particularly interested in the zeal in which he implemented domestic reforms.
Of course, when I look at your country, there have been transformative leaders, the two Roosevelt presidents. The first one may be more interesting, because he’s less known, in terms of addressing some challenges which may not be that dissimilar to the challenges that we face today. What does it mean to deal with very powerful corporations as a state? This is something that needs to preoccupy all of us. So, we’re always looking for role-models whenever we can find them.
And of course, history never repeats itself completely. And if it does, it could repeat itself as a farce. But there are always interesting historical lessons. And I’m a big believer that one can always benefit from the study of history. I’m glad that recently we’ve had many interesting books published about Greek history. We celebrated our bicentennial in 2021.
And a country that has oscillated between great successes and great failures. But at the end of the day, we were always on the right side of history, chose the right allies, made the right choices, most important one, the choice of being at the centre of the European integration. Studying history is important not just for leaders, but for everyone. It puts things into perspective.
Robert Κaplan: America has a very unusual president now. I would call him a world historical figure, not in a good or a bad way, but just in an impactful way, so to speak. And all leaders, to a certain extent, work on instinct at the end of the moment, at the end of the day. But America’s President now, President Donald Trump, seems to be particularly governed by instinct. And he’s not a student of history. He is just somewhat a student of geography because he wants to extend North America from Greenland to Panama. How does Greece deal with the challenge of the new American President?
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Well, first of all, it’s important to understand that when we deal with the US, every European leader, I think, wears two hats. So, I wear my European hat when it comes to trade, for example, but I also wear my national hat when it comes to issues related to foreign policy and security, because as I told you, we have a strategic partnership with the United States.
I’m one of the few European leaders, because I’m relatively experienced by now in the European Council, who has actually worked with President Trump during Trump One. We’ve had a constructive and good relationship, and I do hope that we can maintain this relationship as he’s starting his second term.
He has his own way of expressing himself. But at the end of the day, it’s our obligation not to challenge the… It’s not my job to challenge the will of the American people. He is elected President of the United States, and it is my obligation to work with him to the best of my ability. It’s good that we know each other.
I also really try to build upon a relationship which has significant strategic depth, in which goes beyond my term or his term, because the work that we have done and the importance of Greece to the US from a geopolitical, but also from an economic standpoint, I think is recognised across the aisle.
I was one of the few European leaders who was privileged to speak and address a joint session in Congress. Three years ago, it was a big honour for me representing my country to also speak about the historical ties between Greece and the United States. But more importantly, maybe in this context, the shared interests that we have.
Greece is important to the United States in this geopolitical world. Geopolitically important, economically important, important from an energy point of view, even important in terms of how we manage migration. So in these types of relationships, we all have to play to our strengths.
Robert Κaplan: Thank you very much, Prime Minister.
Kyriakos Mitsotakis: Thank you.
