“We can do this to any country we want. We can do it here too.” According to a published on September 25, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece, conveyed this message during a March dinner in Athens while discussing the expected fall of the Romanian government with Greek Minister for the Environment and Energy Stavros Papastavrou. Papastavrou replied that the United States could not replace a Greek government elected by the Greek people.Wall Street Journalinvestigation
Although Guilfoyle’s lawyer disputes the newspaper’s description of the exchange, the report immediately caused political controversy in both Greece and Romania. In Greece, the alleged words landed on particularly sensitive ground. They sounded less like an eccentric diplomatic indiscretion than an updated, Trumpian version of a much older doctrine through which Washington decides how much sovereignty smaller countries are allowed to exercise.
The story has since taken another turn. On October 13, the White House asked Guilfoyle to resign amid a widening series of misconduct allegations, all of which she denies. These went well beyond the reported conversation about governments in Greece and Romania and included allegations involving gifts and favors, the use of official access, contacts with Greek business interests and lobbyists, and her conduct in office.
Yet the allegations surrounding Guilfoyle’s departure are only one part of the story. Her own account of what she believed she had accomplished in Greece points to the broader political and economic project behind her tenure. Her farewell statement deserves credit for its candor about the political economy of her mission.
Guilfoyle said she had worked to deliver “meaningful victories for the American people.” She pointed to expanded US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports through the Vertical Corridor, new opportunities for American businesses and investment, stronger “American energy dominance,” and a United States that remains the “indispensable leader in Southeast Europe.” The beneficiaries she chose to name were not Greek households struggling with energy bills but the American people, American businesses, and American geopolitical power.
The latest scandal was not Guilfoyle’s first collision with Greek public opinion. Her relationship with the country had started badly before she even took up the post. During the 2015 debt crisis, after Greek voters rejected a new austerity package, Guilfoyle called Greeks “freeloaders” on Fox News and told them to “suck it up.” She also complained that they retired too early and compared the need to discipline them to training a dog that urinates on a rug.
The comments resurfaced when Trump nominated her for the Athens post and provoked sharp criticism in Greece. Guilfoyle subsequently stressed her “love and admiration” for Greece in public but issued no retraction or apology for the original remarks.
The Business Behind the Scandal
The investigation is fundamentally a story about energy, business, and lobbying. At its center is Christos Marafatsos, a registered lobbyist for AKTOR Group, one of Greece’s largest construction and infrastructure companies.Wall Street Journal
According to the and federal lobbying records cited by the House Foreign Affairs Committee, AKTOR paid Marafatsos $160,000 through June 2026 to establish contacts with the Department of State, Department of Energy, and the Executive Office of the President. He accompanied Guilfoyle to official meetings, where some participants reportedly assumed that he was part of her staff.Wall Street Journal
Guilfoyle has simultaneously been one of the most visible advocates of expanding American LNG exports through Greece and across Southeast Europe. AKTOR has positioned itself to benefit heavily from that expansion.
Through Atlantic SEE LNG Trade, a joint venture with the state-owned Public Gas Corporation of Greece (DEPA), the company has signed long-term deals around the import and transport of US LNG through the Vertical Corridor. Beginning in 2030, the venture is contracted to buy at least one million metric tons of American LNG every year for twenty years under its expanded agreement with Venture Global.
AKTOR’s own projections demonstrate the scale of the opportunity. The company says LNG agreements already signed or in development could eventually generate around €90 million in annual EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from 2030, or around €1.8 billion over twenty years. These are company projections, not guaranteed profits. But they make clear why the emerging gas route is not simply a matter of abstract geopolitics.
The Vertical Gas Corridor is supposed to move gas from Greek LNG terminals north through Bulgaria and Romania toward Moldova, Ukraine, and Central Europe. Washington and European governments present the project as one that will advance “energy security” and diversification from Russian gas.
But replacing one form of dependence with another is not the same as independence. Europe’s growing reliance on LNG ties prices more closely to global gas markets, competition with Asian buyers, shipping constraints, and geopolitical shocks. The European Commission itself notes that gas remains a key price-setting fuel in Europe’s electricity system, while LNG has become far more important to the continent’s supply mix.
The environmental bill will also be substantial. LNG is not simply pipeline gas arriving on a ship. Gas must be extracted, processed, liquefied at extremely low temperatures, shipped across an ocean, and converted back into gas before it can even be burned. The finds that, on average, LNG has substantially higher supply-chain emissions than natural gas produced close to where it is consumed, largely because of the additional energy required for liquefaction and long-distance shipping.International Energy Agency
The Price Is Set by the Most Expensive Tomato
The cost-of-living problem does not begin or end with LNG. It is also embedded in the architecture of the European electricity market, and in Greece’s implementation of the EU Target Model through the Hellenic Energy Exchange.
The simplest way to explain marginal pricing is with a market stall. Imagine filling a basket with tomatoes from several sellers. Most stalls offer them cheaply, but demand is high enough that you also need tomatoes from one expensive stall. Now imagine that the rules require you to buy every tomato in the basket at the price charged by that last, most expensive stall.
That is how the electricity market works in Europe. There are some complications to the overall picture: retail bills also reflect contracts, hedging, network charges, taxes, and state support. But the wholesale mechanism matters enormously.
According to the European Commission, gas supplied only around 17.6 percent of EU electricity generation in 2025. Yet fossil fuel plants still determined electricity prices in roughly half of all hours across the EU. The EU itself acknowledged this problem during the energy crisis. Emergency legislation recognized that exceptionally high gas prices could generate extraordinary revenues for lower-cost electricity producers and temporarily imposed a revenue cap on some inframarginal generators.
Motor Oil reported €689 million in group earnings after tax in the first half of 2026, compared with €163 million in the same period of 2025 and €362 million in the first half of 2024. Its first-half profits were therefore more than four times their 2025 level and around 90 percent higher than two years earlier. HELLENiQ ENERGY shows a similar pattern using its own adjusted measure. Adjusted net income reached €393 million in the first half of 2026, compared with €128 million in 2025 and €236 million in 2024. This means adjusted profits more than tripled in a year. The two companies use different accounting measures, so the figures should not simply be added together. But the comparison with their own recent results makes the trend difficult to miss.
Nor did all these profits come from the Greek domestic market. A substantial share of refining activity is export-oriented. That distinction matters. But it does not exhaust the policy choices available to the Greek government. Poland has enacted a temporary windfall tax on extraordinary fuel sector profits, with a 60 percent rate on profits above the statutory benchmark and advance payments during the year. Greece could have pursued a similar extraordinary tax. It did not. The government could also have imposed a profit margin cap at refinery level. It did not do that either.
We can see the consequences in Greece today: households confront intense pressure from energy costs while the country’s dominant refining groups have recorded a sharp rebound in profitability.
Rubio in Athens
Marco Rubio’s visit to Athens in October supplied an almost theatrical coda to the controversy. For the day of his official meetings, Greek police imposed a twenty-four-hour ban on all outdoor public gatherings in a broad section of central Athens surrounding the US Embassy. The official order justified the measure on public security grounds and warned of the risk of serious crimes and disruption to social and economic life.
On the eve of the visit, thousands of workers, trade unionists, university and school students, and left-wing organizations marched through central Athens against US policy and Greece’s involvement in war. Police blocked the main demonstration from reaching the US Embassy. But in a surprise action, trade unionists reached a point opposite the embassy, unfurled banners, and lit flares, making their protest visible despite the security cordon. The World Federation of Trade Unions reported that police repeatedly attempted to block demonstrators and used tear gas.
A visit devoted to deepening the “strategic” relationship with Washington took place amid restrictions on public protest. It was challenged in the streets by social forces contesting the economic and geopolitical costs of that relationship.
For Greek audiences, both the Guilfoyle affair and Rubio’s visit carried echoes of a much longer history of US intervention. During the Greek Civil War, Washington became the principal external backer of the Greek government and the anti-communist monarchical order, supplying weapons, aircraft, and military advisers. Greece also became one of the first postwar battlefields where American-made napalm was used against the communist-led Democratic Army, years before the weapon became notorious in Vietnam.
In 1965, the US Embassy concluded that the United States should, if possible without open confrontation, prevent the ousted, democratically elected Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou from returning to power. After the colonels seized power in April 1967, Washington stopped short of a rupture with the junta and continued substantial military assistance. Even Bill Clinton acknowledged, during his 1999 visit to Athens, that the United States had allowed its Cold War interests to prevail over its obligation to support democracy.
The Same Corridor
Arguments on the European left have sometimes treated anti-imperialism and everyday class politics as if they belonged to separate universes. One involves the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, military bases, diplomacy, and sovereignty, while the other involves wages, rent, heating, and food.
The Vertical Corridor and the EU electricity market show how artificial that separation can be. A single policy complex can expand American geopolitical leverage and create decades of revenue for US LNG exporters while generating major returns for Greek capital and deepening Southeast Europe’s dependence on fossil fuel infrastructure. At the same time, it can expose households to a market in which expensive gas sets the wholesale price of electricity that is generated much more cheaply from other sources.
Guilfoyle’s alleged remarks about Washington’s power were only one part of a much broader series of controversies surrounding her tenure. By the time the White House asked her to resign, scrutiny extended far beyond that conversation. But behind the individual scandals lie contracts, lobbyists, terminals, pipelines, corporations, and billions of euros. The democratic question and the cost-of-living question are not competing stories. They run through the same corridor.
This article originally appeared in , a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. JacobinSubscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.