ATHENS On September 6, 1946 US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes traveled to Stuttgart to deliver his historic Speech of Hope. Byrnes address marked America s post war change of heart vis à vis Germany and gave a fallen nation a chance to imagine recovery, growth, and a return to normalcy.

Until Byrnes Speech of Hope, the Allies were committed to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character. That was the express intention of the Morgenthau Plan, devised by US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. and co signed by the United States and Britain two years earlier, in September 1944.

Just as Byrnes address was short on detail but long on symbolism, a Speech of Hope for Greece does not have to be technical. It should simply mark a sea change, a break with the past five years of adding new loans on top of already unsustainable debt, conditional on further doses of punitive austerity.