Rather than modifying a policy framework that had failed for five years to deliver on its stated objectives, they dug in their heels, eventually resorting to the economic equivalent of gunboat diplomacy. And they evidently also made it clear to Varoufakis’s boss, Tsipras, that the future of negotiations depended on him casting aside his unconventional minister – which he did, first by assigning someone else to lead the negotiations and then by appointing a new finance minister altogether.