Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs (left to right) | Getty letter from athens Beware of American econ professors! How Krugman, Sachs and Stiglitz led the Greeks astray.

ATHENS — Since Alexis Tsipras made the difficult but responsible choice of arriving at a compromise with Greece’s creditors in mid-July, preventing an outcome that would have led his country out of the euro, a number of revelations have highlighted the radical nature of the proponents of rupture in his inner circle.

In countless public utterances and interviews since his resignation, former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has spoken of how he urged the prime minister to authorize the issue of a parallel currency, to declare that Athens would default on €3.5 billion in Greek government bonds owed to the ECB on July 20 and to seize control of the Bank of Greece. Such an aggressive move would have led inevitably to the introduction of a new currency.

Recently, the newspaper I work for, Kathimerini, revealed excerpts of a conference call in which Varoufakis participated on July 16. In the call, the former minister tells an assortment of hedge-fund executives and other investors of plans he had to hack into the database of the general secretariat of public revenue at the ministry.

The idea was to use the personal data of Greek taxpayers to secretly create parallel accounts that would facilitate payments in case of a major liquidity squeeze. These accounts would be denominated in euros, but if the need presented itself, they could be turned into the new drachma “at the drop of a hat.”

Varoufakis is not the only one to have harbored revolutionary plans.

They have served Greece’s cause very poorly indeed.

On July 14, a few days before he was dismissed from the cabinet for voting against measures mandated by the agreement reached between Tsipras and Greece’s creditors, Panayotis Lafazanis, the head of the Left Platform, the influential far-left faction within Syriza, suggested seizing the national mint and expropriating up to €22 billion in reserves (his figure).

The money would have been used to pay for pensions, public sector salaries and imports while Greece prepared for a return to the drachma. Small details, like the fact that the cash reserves would have immediately been declared counterfeit, infecting all euro transactions in Greece and causing complete chaos, were ignored in the fervor of Lafazanis’s version of the attack on the Winter Palace.

And then of course, there is the story published by the newspaper To Vima about Tsipras’s own efforts to secure a loan of $10 billion from Vladimir Putin, which would be used as foreign currency reserves to support a new drachma (the Kremlin has denied the account).

‘Reckless gamble’

None of this appears to have given pause to Greece’s (and in particular Varoufakis’s) international cheerleaders. I am referring in particular here to high profile U.S. economists, like Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs, who have led the global anti-austerity campaign and have made my country a cause célèbre in that struggle. They have been right to argue that too much austerity has been imposed on Greece, and that further debt relief is required. But in recent months, as relations between Athens and its creditors have deteriorated, they have served Greece’s cause very poorly indeed.

They have wrongly insisted that the fault for the breakdown in trust between the two sides lies exclusively with the creditors. They have also — some as informal but active advisors to Varoufakis — insisted on the need for deep debt relief, in a form bound to antagonize Greece’s European partners and one that isn’t economically necessary for Greek recovery.

In a New Yorker profile a couple of weeks ago, Varoufakis says that Sachs, one of these informal advisors, counseled him repeatedly in the run-up to the referendum to default on the creditors if Greek demands for debt relief were not met.

Krugman, in a visit to Athens in April, said that structural reform did not really matter much for future growth. After the referendum was called, he urged Greeks to vote No, arguing that, especially after the imposition of capital controls, things couldn’t get much worse, and would probably get better, with a new currency Stiglitz also nudged Greeks in the direction of No, and Grexit.

James K. Galbraith, a close friend of Varoufakis, co-ordinated a secret working group within the Greek finance ministry about the logistics of Grexit, on the understanding that it constituted contingency planning against aggressive moves by the creditors. Clearly, some in government, including his friend (certainly by the end of June, if not earlier), saw the work quite differently.

World-famous economists — men of Nobel prizes and stellar academic accomplishment — have provided intellectual cover to radicals who appeared at best to be willing to take a stupendously reckless gamble with Greece’s financial, political and geopolitical future, and at worst to be planning the realization of their lifelong dream of a socialist takeover of power.

As Tsipras moves grudgingly to the center and purges his government and his party (if he manages it) of people like Varoufakis and Lafazanis, it is high time for their cheerleaders to look beyond ex cathedra macroeconomics.

They should have the honesty to admit that in the hands of such men, an exit from the euro, which Greeks never voted for anyway, either in January or in July, would have been an unmitigated catastrophe, dwarfing the costs even of the bad deal struck on July 13. And they should know by now that the best hope of building the institutions capable of supporting long-term growth in Greece lies within the eurozone, not in the desperate disorder that would sweep the country outside it.

Yannis Palaiologos is a features reporter for Kathimerini newspaper and the author of “The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules” (Portobello Books, 2014).