Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman has a catchphrase for any time he is asked how he is doing. “Gan Eden,” he says, a reference to the heavenly Garden of Eden and his way of saying that everything is just fine.
That is not the Liberman we met with last week for a long conversation at the Finance Ministry. This Liberman was concerned and full of dire warnings. The world, he told the Magazine, needs to wake up immediately because if it doesn’t, it will be thrown into a dark period of chaos and anarchy.
There are, he explained, four catalysts behind the chaos.
First, he said, is the emergence of more technology driven by artificial intelligence. There are young hackers, he said, who are capable of doing things with their computers and cellphones that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
The second catalyst, Liberman continued, is the rise of cryptocurrencies across the globe. There are, he noted, 15,000 different types of cryptocurrencies today.
“Every few people get together and make a digital currency,” he said. “There are crypto markets in Iran to evade sanctions and to launder money and it can be used to finance terrorism and crime.”
Countries like Israel that have advanced technology, he said, can meet the challenge. “But there are 193 countries in the United Nations and 140 of them have no way of confronting this,” he explained.
What happens, he cautioned, if massive multinational corporations come out with their own currency?
The third catalyst, according to Liberman, is what is happening on the Darknet, a gathering place for criminals and terrorist activities. Liberman said that he became familiar with the Darknet from his roles as defense minister and chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
The fourth catalyst, he explained, is the breakdown and collapse of international order and systems.
An illustration of this, he said, can be seen in Vienna where the world superpowers continue to negotiate with Iran in pursuit of a new nuclear deal. They speak to the Iranians at the same time that Iran is supplying the Houthis in Yemen with ballistic missiles and drones and ordering them to attack the United Arab Emirates.
“They don’t even say ‘Nu, nu, nu’ and are afraid to say that the Houthi attacks are being carried out by Iran,” Liberman explained. “At the same time, North Korea is testing missiles. No one is accountable anymore. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban has taken over. You see a weakness of the global superpowers and their ability to create order and values.”
What that means, he explained, is getting the G7 – an inter-governmental political forum consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – to work with Russia and China to find ways to regulate a new world order and to stop the slide toward global chaos.
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