The appointment of a female former TV persona as the new U.S. ambassador to Greece drew some derisive, if not openly sexist, comments. Such a choice by President Trump, the analysts pointed out, is symptomatic of Greece’s supposed marginality within U.S. strategic priorities. However, Kimberly Guilfoyle’s first statements upon arriving in Greece suggested precisely the opposite. Far from signaling geopolitical indifference, in her first interview she immediately foregrounded a case that exposes the strategic logics driving today’s global tensions: She argued that the sale of the Port of Piraeus, Greece’s largest port, to Chinese investors back in 2016 was an unfortunate development. It was a mistake, she reflected, to let the Chinese state-owned company COSCO control such a critical infrastructure within European territories. Ιn a move that prompted a reaction from China, she even went so far as to suggest that legal avenues were being explored to potentially nullify the agreement. It seems that after decades in which investment in industrial and logistical capacity in the West lagged behind financialization, speculation, and service-sector expansion (Dalakoglou 2016), infrastructure has returned to the center of strategic thinking in the Anglo-Saxon world.

After all, the contemporary global economy operates through vast logistical networks. The pursuit of seamless flows and quick capital turnover have become central to strategies of profitability, often taking precedence over production as the key component of accumulation (for the impact of logistics in strategies of capital accumulation see indicative Bonacich & Wilson 2008, Danyluk 2017). In this context, ports have evolved from simple gateways into meta-infrastructural nodes that link markets, dispersed manufacturing sites, and globally stretched procurement networks into integrated processes. Positioned at the manufacturing core of global supply-chain networks, China has pursued an overarching strategy centered on investing in and securing logistical infrastructures (ports, railways etc.) designed to facilitate the westward movement of Chinese commodities and the eastward flows of raw material and energy to China. Within the “Belt and Road Initiative”, as this strategy was dubbed by President Xi Jinping in 2013, the Port of Piraeus was widely regarded as a key strategic asset. Its position as the closest major European port to the Suez Canal renders it a critical maritime gateway to European marketsⁱ. If one adds to this picture Germany’s rigid stance during the Greek sovereign debt crisis, a period in which Greece was compelled by its creditors to privatize public assets by overt financial blackmailing, the conditions under which the Port of Piraeus ultimately passed into Chinese control become far easier to understand.

However, Kimberly Guilfoyle did not merely lament lost opportunities. If the Port of Piraeus ultimately proves unavailable due to the active agreement with the Chinese, the United States could instead invest in the nearby waterfront of Elefsis Bay, developing a state-of-the-art container port capable of competing with Piraeus. U.S. engagement with Elefsis appears oriented toward consolidating a multi-layered strategic foothold in the Eastern Mediterranean. Besides the latest suggestion for the creation of a container port by Guilfoyle, the U.S.-backed ONEX Shipyards & Technologies Group has already invested in the long-established shipyards of the region. The Elefsis Shipyards were established in 1962 as part of Greece’s broader post-war industrialization strategy, which sought to build heavy industry around the maritime economy. Located about 10 nautical miles from the Port of Piraeus, the shipyard quickly became one of the major industrial facilities in Western Attica, until they fell into decline in the 1990’s. In 2020.ONEX effectively took control of the shipyard’s recovery process and financial restructuring.

Supported financially by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, however, the plan extends beyond ship repair to the creation of an integrated logistics, energy, and defense platform. Such a configuration would enhance NATO-aligned operational capacity, support regional energy distribution networks, and strengthen Western infrastructural presence amid intensifying competition with COSCO Shipping. These plans for Elefsis come at a time where the neoliberal government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in office since 2019, overturned Greece’s traditionally moderate foreign policy doctrine, which had emphasized dialogue and the maintenance of communication channels with multiple actors. The new Mitsotkais doctrine is characterized by a more Cold War-like rhetoric about openly placing the country on the “right side of history” and by Greece’s unconditional alignment with NATO following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine.

Geographically, Piraeus and Eleusis form the western part of the broader spatial complex of Attica, a region in central Greece where the capital Athens is also located. With the developments in Elefsis and Piraeus, Western Attica is becoming a key site in the emerging infrastructural rivalry between the United States and China in the Southeastern Mediterranean. Yet, the international interest in establishing infrastructures in the region did not emerge out of nowhere. Historically, Western Attica has functioned as what human geographers call a “sacrifice zone” (Apostolopoulou 2024), an area repeatedly tasked with absorbing the environmental and social burdens of industrialization in the name of national development. Shipyards, refineries, heavy industry, logistics facilities, waste-processing plants, and other environmentally burdensome infrastructures have historically been concentrated there. It is therefore no coincidence that, as the Greek government celebrates the interest of the USA in Elefsis and asserts that Greece is becoming a strategic hub, the locality itself, the people living in the area and the spatially grounded consequences of these mega-projects, remain largely unexamined. It is as though such developments are inscribed within an imagined geography of a designated sacrifice zone, one that exists to service national (and now transnational) imperatives.

By investing in fetishized keywords such as “hub,” “logistics,” and “connectivity,” the Greek government mobilizes a vocabulary marked by interchangeable, and at times conflated, meanings. On the one hand, these terms evoke the supposed initiation of a new productive model for the country built around global connections, grounded in targeted investments in logistics, employment generation, and economies of scale. On the other hand, connectivity is framed as a geopolitical alignment with Western interests. Put differently, what emerges is a gradual erosion of the boundary between economy and war, if not an effort to consolidate in the popular imaginary each as a precondition for the other.

Illustrative of the above is another large-scale project widely praised by the government, though it remains unclear whether it is situated primarily along the geoeconomic or the geopolitical axis: The so-called Vertical Gas Corridor, which is a multinational energy infrastructure project linking Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Its core objective is to channel American liquefied natural gas (LNG) arriving at Greek terminals northward into Central and Eastern Europe through upgraded pipeline connections. The initiative is widely framed as a way to diversify supply routes and reduce dependence on Russian energy while strengthening regional energy security. Internally, it was sold as the ambition of positioning Greece as a key energy gateway to Europe existing pipelines.

The problem, however, is that despite the celebratory announcements, from an economic standpoint the Vertical Gas Corridor may ultimately be a fiasco. After three construction tenders, it became apparent that the gas market does not consider the project financially viable. American gas is extremely expensive, and the proposed routes are deemed unprofitable. The entire undertaking appears to rest on a form of geopolitical speculation. If the war in Ukraine eventually ends, neighboring countries, and Europe more broadly, may well return to sourcing cheaper gas from Russia rather than relying on supplies from the United States. Behind the government’s abstract discourse of the country becoming a “hub” lies the risk that the only tangible outcome of these pipelines will be the cultivation of a “yes-sir” mentality in Greece’s foreign policy, along with a geopolitics of gratitude.

Similarly, in the case of the belated interest in Elefsis, discussions I held with dockworkers in Piraeus suggest that the port there is neither suitable nor economically viable for what Kimberly Guilfoyle has promised. Those with practical knowledge of port infrastructure do not see how a commercial port on the scale of Piraeus could be created in that location. In this case as well, what will most likely materialize is the servicing of the NATO flee in the American-owned shipyards, a form of connectivity that appears to be situated within the logic of the war machine rather than extending into the sphere of the productive economy.

Within this deliberate (con)fusion of geoeconomics and geopolitics, workers are exposed to multiple precarities. Logistics sectors often promise employment, yet the jobs created are frequently characterized by subcontracting, flexibility, and limited protections. The areas within which these systems operate are burdened with environmental and public health externalities. Οn top of that, Infrastructure with strategic or military relevance can transform civilian workplaces into potential targets during periods of heightened international tension. Precarity thus does not only concern the economic realm but also becomes physically life-threatening in multiple ways. In this way, West Attica is in dangerous of becoming a literal sacrifice zone. Anthropology should reminds us that infrastructure is never purely technical. It reorganizes social life, redistributes vulnerability, and redefines what counts as acceptable risk.

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References

Apostolopoulou, E. (2024). “The dragon’s head or Athens’ sacrifice zone? Spatiotemporal disjuncture, logistical disruptions, and urban infrastructural justice in Piraeus port, Greece.” Urban Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2024.2433968

Bonacich E. and Wilson J.B. (2008) Getting the Goods: Ports, Labor, and the Logistics Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Dalakoglou, D. (2016). Infrastructural gap: Commons, state and anthropology. City, 20(6), 822–831. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1241524

Danyluk, M. (2017). “Capital’s logistical fix: Accumulation, globalization, and the survival of capitalism.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(4), 630–647. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775817703663

Kotoulas, I. E. (2024). The Port of Piraeus as a model of GreekChinese cooperation (Greece External Relations Briefing, Vol. 76, No. 4) [PDF]. ChinaCEE Institute. https://china-cee.eu/2024/11/29/greece-external-relations-briefing-the-port-of-piraeus-as-a-model-of-greek-chinese-cooperation/

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Giorgos Poulimenakos holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo. He conducted fieldwork in the port of Piraeus, Greece, focusing on the transformations of labor and the port-city relations amidst the privatization of the port and its concession to Chinese interest, which integrated Piraeus in the global supply chain network. His research was part of the ERC-funded project PORTS, based at the department of social anthropology of the University of Oslo, and he has published on ports, global supply chains, and the Greek crisis.

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i^ Since COSCO took over, the processing of containers has skyrocketed, from 0.8 million containers per year in 2007 to almost 5 million per year in 2023. From the 17^th busiest port in Europe in 2007, it has risen to 4^th busiest today (Kotoulas 2024)

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Cite as: Poulimenakos, G. 2026. “(Con)fusing geoeconomics and geopolitics: Logistics fetishism and infrastructural speculation on the waterfronts of Western Attica” Focaalblog March 9. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/09/giorgos-poulimenakos-confusing-geoeconomics-and-geopolitics-logistics-fetishism-and-infrastructural-speculation-on-the-waterfronts-of-western-attica/