Minister of Foreign Affairs George Gerapetritis’ speech at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto, titled 'The Rise of a New Geopolitical[...]

I am very happy to be here. You know, when a politician comes to speak to that type of audience, normally you expect he lies. But the truth is that, a) I'm not a career politician, and b) I'm not lying. I'm not a career politician because, as Robert mentioned, I essentially am an academic who lost his way in life and became a politician later during his professional career. And then I'm not lying that I am very, very happy to be here. Every time I go to universities to give a talk, it's always a tremendous pleasure because I feel that I just go back to reason, as opposed to something bizarre in politics, something which is completely unpredictable without any kind of principles to actually rely on. So, it's wonderful to be back to the house of rationality, even for a change.

I was asked to speak about the rise of a new geopolitical era, which is broad enough to encompass everything because I wanted to share with you my experience from the last 3 years. I've been in the Greek government for 7 years. I was for 4 years, during the first term in office as Minister of State, responsible for the legislative functioning of government, and then for 3 years Foreign Minister. I feel that I'm not the luckiest person on earth because I feel that the last 3 years have been a total disaster from a geopolitical point of view. Anything that could go wrong essentially went wrong. I think it's probably the worst time ever to be a Foreign Minister of a small-medium country like Greece. And - as if this is not enough-, Greece had the wonderful privilege to be a non-permanent member of the Security Council, an elected member. Had I known that we would be under this turbulent period, obviously we wouldn't have applied and campaigned to become a member of the Security Council.

Now, why a new geopolitical era? To be honest, I think that for the first time after World War II, we have a series of conditions that apply cumulatively, simultaneously. The first is that we have some tectonic geopolitical changes, and I think the most impressive is the fact that we have a total retreat of International Law and multilateralism. And this is evidenced everywhere. We feel that the power is essentially getting to an actual critical point, whereas the rule-based international security architecture, upon which the world has been built after World War II, is going downhill. Also, we see that there are some new alliances, and we have some cross-regional alliances. I feel that, more and more, geography is losing the quality as the main actor in diplomacy. For example, you see how Europe is now developing into a Europe-plus union in order to accommodate Canada as the first associated member.

And this is happening because of the second cumulative factor, which is the overall extraterritoriality of any incident happening now. There is not a single event happening now in geopolitics which is limited in space. You see armed conflicts, which are spreading around. Actually, we have the greatest number of armed conflicts around the world since World War II. We have more than 60 armed conflicts. Eleven of them qualify as large-scale wars, now as we speak, which is a high record, of course. And those wars are essentially happening, all of them, with the interference of external actors. If you just see, for example, what's happening in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, you just see that there are essentially conflicts between various African states or civil wars within one African state, and there are far too many external actors operating. And this is something that is happening for the first time to this extent.

But also we have all kinds of other incidents which are truly major challenges and are not restricted in space. For example, for the first time we have a major issue of energy insecurity because of what is happening in the Gulf, in the Red Sea, in Saudi Arabia now. So, at the same time, we have an issue of food insecurity. If one sees what is happening now in Ukraine, there is a tremendous crisis when it comes to grain because the grain corridor that has been agreed, has essentially collapsed. And there is a very serious concern about what is going to happen worldwide. Ukraine was essentially the provider of more than 40% of the grain to Europe. So now we expect to have a surge in prices of all basic foods and some shortages in terms of grain and all other edible products. Now again, we have water scarcity. This is going to be the issue for the future, I think, - and I don't feel comfortable with this - that If we ever have a World War III, this is going to be about water allocation. I think this is going to be the most acute issue for the generations to come.

And now you can see that challenges are built upon the vague perception that water is going to be scarce in the future again. You see, for example, what is happening in Ethiopia or in other places of the world. So, we do not have local type of challenges. Challenges are now global in thus that case.

The third fact is that we have an industrial revolution ongoing, especially with AI dominating our technological life and essentially determining the political bias. We are going to see some really bizarre political campaigns. Next year is going to be a very critical year for Europe because we have 8 elections, 8 parliamentary and presidential elections, which means that we expect to have significant changes in the political landscape in Europe that are going to affect also the political choices of the European Union itself. Yet, those political campaigns are truly going to be dominated by Artificial Intelligence. We all expect it, but we do not have the means to actually beat this phenomenon.

And last but not least, we have another significant actor, which is the complete change in the modules of communication between people. This is very critical as well, because communication is essentially made now by people through social media. Almost 90% of people now is essentially getting information by social media. And obviously, I don't have to say this, you all know, you all realize this is happening. We just sacrifice the integrity of any information as opposed to the velocity, the speed that this information is transferred. Actually, yesterday I was reading a very recent poll by the European Statistics Agency indicating how many people aged 17 to 80, so within our age spectrum, are actually verifying information that they are getting from social media. So, the average in Europe is 4 out of 10, which means that 6 out of 10 do not verify anything that they read on social media. Unfortunately, and this is very disappointing, Greece was almost at the bottom. With only 1 out of 10 verifying the content of the social media information, which means that essentially our basic source of information is going completely unverified. And this, in combination with AI, with the globality of challenges and with the tectonic geopolitical challenges, it all constitutes an explosive mix which has not happened in the past and we are already in the new geopolitical era.

Now, what are the main characteristics of this geopolitical era? I spoke about the root causes and how the simultaneous application of all these essentially affects this political environment, but what are the actual consequences? The consequences are, I think, pretty obvious. We have the rise of new powers which are now emerging as an alternative to the old regime, a bygone era. And of course, we have new institutions that arise out of the traditional organizations which are going downhill. And the discussion is now whether this kind of regime that we're facing now, meaning that power essentially prevails over any kind of principled global order, is only a transition or this is going to be the new status of international relations. And the truth is that nobody could respond to this question very easily. My feeling is that, at the moment, we are again trying to navigate towards a new era. It is very clear in my eyes that power has a very dominant role to perform and that we do not have the tools to actually address this phenomenon. We all feel - I'm going to New York tomorrow for the high-level week of the General Assembly of the United Nations -, and we all agree that the United Nations are now in a very bad state.

Why? Because, you know, the United Nations have actually failed to produce any kind of meaningful resolution concerning the 61 armed conflicts that we're now facing around the world.

Why? Obviously because of the structures, because of the decision-making process, and because of the total lack of deliberative attitude among the members of the Security Council, and in many occasions also the members of the General Assembly. You see how it happens. We do not have a single resolution concerning Ukraine, not a single resolution in 5 years. Why? For obvious reasons. We couldn't have, because if there was any type of resolution, that would be more or less to condemn Russia for the war of aggression, whereas Russia possesses a veto and at the end of the day, there is no resolution whatsoever.

So, veto. Veto is essentially - I think we hit the era of the paradox of veto. Veto was a very key instrument immediately after World War II. And why a paradox? Because the veto was used in a double way. For example, in the United Nations, within the Security Council, the veto was used. How? As a strong weapon in favor of the powerful nations. The winners of World War II would like to have a strong institutional machinery in order to prevent unfavorable decisions coming from the United Nations. And this is why we invented the veto for the 5 permanent members, the winners of the Second World War. And that essentially resulted in a blockade of the international order. The veto was also used in another context though. It was used, for example, within the European Union. As you probably know, in order to reach a decision within the European Union, concerning the foreign and security policy of the Union, which is the core of decisions taken by the European Union, there must be unanimity. So, every single member of the European Union out of the 27 member states, possesses an individual veto. They could just block the decision. The result was that, in Europe, we were unable to take an effective decision about Ukraine because within the 27 there were a couple of states which were fundamentally against condemning Russia for what happened.

But look at the different viewpoint. The veto within the European Union was used in order to protect the powerless, the less powerful states. It was the vehicle of the weakest in order to have a meaningful rejection of the will of the powerful nations. For small nations to actually stand alone against the will of the other states.

But what was the result in both cases? Stagnation, because we couldn't get a decision anyway. So, what is the future of the situation? There are moments in history where that type of transition, that type of the dilemma of power against rule-based order, was very evident. For example, in the early 19th century, 1812, we had the war between Russia and France. We had the war between the United States and England, essentially concerning economic domination. And it resulted in a totally different world. The world changed after this situation. The same after 1848 and all the revolutions in Europe. So do we expect a total shift of the paradigm in the new era? I feel that we are rapidly going into a totally new, different approach, and you see that this approach is fundamentally affecting the way we're thinking about geopolitics.

Now, what are we thinking? First, we go into the idea of strategic autonomy. We have to increase defense spending. We need to increase defense spending. Why? Because first of all, there is what we call in ancient Greek literature "the Thucydides trap". This is the inevitable war between the traditional power and the emerging power. And according to Thucydides, this will result in a war no matter what, because there is no other way to solve dilemmas of that type unless you have a war. Because both states, both the incoming and the outgoing, they're both very concerned about the situation, they are overarmed, and this overarming will eventually result in a very strong war. Or you're going to have the prevalence of the powerful nations and a totally different international security architecture. This new international architecture is difficult to predict yet. It is an issue of very high concern, and, you see, now there are nations which are trying to build new alliances, essentially abolishing geography, as I mentioned. You see, Canada trying to reach out to Europe, trying to reach out to India, trying to reach out to Africa. Why? Because we need to develop new international synergies.

Is this the end of the traditional post-war international security architecture? It is probable. Now is the time for states to actually form some strong alliances and echo collective concerns. But the thing is that we cannot yet find the tools, and most probably next week, after the General Assembly, we will again discuss the lost opportunity to revisit and revive the United Nations. We trusted the United Nations. The truth is that the organization didn't deliver. We do not have at the moment an alternative, and up until we find an alternative, power will prevail over principle.

September 19, 2026