George Friedman
speaker
177 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
George Friedman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
You believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years? We are dominant in space. Our technology is way ahead of us, but we're modest, deliberately so. We understate our capabilities.
It's called Donald Trump. i think that's what it did what i'm saying is he's the wrecking ball that lincoln was and the wrecking ball that roosevelt was and jackson was he's shifting the country we have these incredible problems i wrote a book called the storm before the calm we're in that storm and after the storm we enter a very different place
Well, I think the United States is withdrawing not to isolationism, but to Fortress America. It's interesting that the Mexican president called for Fortress North America.
And it was a very wise move. We were engaged, forced to be engaged in the wars because the United States cannot be invaded. Canada can't invade us, no matter if they'd like to now. Mexico can't invade us. It's the command of the sea that's our defense. When the Germans started U-boats in the First World War, sinking Lusitania, that's when we invaded, intervened.
When the British Navy looked like it was going to fall in the hands of the Germans by invasion, that's when we got agitated. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that's where we were agitated.
so we're a unique country enormously wealthy and immune from attack except from the sea so our basic strategy has to be command of the scene now when the russians ended world war ii we were terrified that they would conquer europe not because we love the europeans but because what if they had control of the atlantic ports in france what would the russian navy do So we built a forward strategy.
Instead of waiting for that to happen, we built NATO. And NATO existed primarily to block the Russian entry into the Atlantic. We had to rebuild Europe in order to make it viable. And they lost their empire, and that became the third world, officially. And we fought constantly with the Russians, hand-to-hand combat, sort of covert operations, trying to block them.
And that's, for the last 80 years, what we did. Well, Russia proved in Ukraine that it is not going to be able to occupy Ukraine. It can't occupy Europe. And the Europeans have had a free ride, and I think that's pretty true. And our commitment is to the defense of the United States. The major danger to the United States is, of course, nuclear war. And that battle is fought in space.
Satellites sensing launches, being able to do mad mutually assured destruction and so on. Next 50 years will be about a much less integrated U.S. with the world. Not isolated, not certainly trading intensely with countries. But we have spent the past 85 years in constant warfare, small, large, covert, overt. I participate in some of that and it was exhausting.
So the country really doesn't have to do that. So what I see happening is two things. One, the United States taking on a role it had for most of its history. as a country that is self-sustaining, highly trading, involved in the world, certainly on alert with the great military. But the battle, the next battles will be fought in space.
This sounds strange, but it would have been strange if the next war in Europe would be fought in the air and that nuclear weapons would arise. We were protected from nuclear war by mutually assured destruction. It was the one war in which the leaders themselves would be killed on the first round. We would hit and they would hit. And so there was no war because we had 30 minutes warning.
Because we had radars and after the U-2 was shot down, we were kind of spying on the Russians. They were spying in other ways. we launched satellites. Remember the first American satellite and the first American Russian satellite were launched a month for each other. First American man in space and first Russian man in space launched weeks apart.
So I always wondered, and I don't know, that there was a kind of collaboration between the Russians and Americans to maintain MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction. It was a really neat name for it. Now MAD is short for space. Satellites are flying there. Satellites, one, block the Russians in Ukraine. American satellites could see small units down a meter level resolution.
And we put in things like HIMARS, these missile systems that could, with precision, hit them. So now tactical war is governed from space. MAD is governed from space. And space is full of debris, anti-satellite systems. The Chinese are launching them constantly. We've launched 200 satellites this year. So... Communication satellites? Military satellites? Oh, yes, absolutely.
Well, they're all communication satellites. They're all looking for, you know, climate on the Earth. That's what they want to look at. These are all spy satellites going up there. And they're looking to the Earth, and they're maneuvering around each other. And one of the things the American public has to understand is the importance of space as a strategic facility.
And in due course, it'll emerge. But the next 50 years for the Americans are going to be, I think, a very golden age. New technologies are coming. Every age we have, every cycle we have is built. The last one was built on the automobile, transforming it. Now it is built not so much on artificial intelligence in my mind, but on material science.
We are crafting new materials at molecular level for space. Physical materials. Physical materials. For example, the lenses on satellites can see things that glass can't show them. They have acuity that can see a platoon operating. And when you reach that point, there's also massive changes in medicine. We're able to re-engineer genes, in fact.
So it's in the first stages, but not in a primitive stage. So just as the automobile changed our life and the railroad changed our life previously and canals before that, material science, I think, is the radical innovation based on artificial intelligence having a major component to it.
And all of that material science was developed for space, for survival of machines in space, particularly in telescopes. They were evil to, there's a company called Prophecyon that's put solar systems on satellites so they can survive and energize. the satellites to maneuver. And it's really an extraordinary thing.
And while we focus on Ukraine properly, we fail to understand that the reason the United States did not intervene with troops is we had a better solution. We spotted the Russians moving. We could order the Ukrainian forces to be right in their way, even though they were a small force. We knew where they were coming. And more importantly,
Showing 1–20 of 177 · page 1 of 9
Next →