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.
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Appearances
The second thing is that the experts do not have a layer of common sense above them. Wise men. And the same is true of the Supreme Court. There are lawyers. When the question on integration came up, the head of the Supreme Court was Warren, was- Warren Burger. Warren Burger. And Warren Burger knew that he had to have an absolute unanimity on desegregation.
And since he'd been a politician, not a lawyer, He brought the Southerners around and he built it in and they got a 9-0 vote. Every one of them on the Supreme Court now is a lawyer. Well, the law is more subtle than the law appears. There has to be subtlety. And so what happened was that the federal government fell in love with experts after World War II. Experts won World War II.
The people who built the atomic bomb, who built the bombers, the hands of both landing craft and everything. These were experts. And the federal government fell in love with expertise, which is a very important thing to have. Yes. But there was no Eisenhower above them who may not have known how to engineer anything, but had enough common sense to know how to use them.
And that layer was lost when the politicians sank below the level of the bureaucrats. Or more precisely, they created agencies that didn't answer to anyone and made their own laws. And the problem was not they were corrupt or evil or anything like that. It's just they did their job and the other did their job and they contradicted each other.
And there was no common sense hovering above them saying, you can't tell everybody to stay at home forever. Yes. You know, we're going to have the disease. It's going to have to happen, but you can't do this. But Fauci as a doctor, well, this is what doctor says. Stay home. He doesn't tell you what to do about your job, that you're going to lose all your money. It's not his concern.
That's not his concern. That's the problem. The problem is expertise, the technocracy. And what's happening right now is what would happen with any president. But, I mean, we certainly have a president who is doing that job, radically disrupting the presidency. It's like the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, when he shut down all the banks, a bank holiday.
The banking system was collapsing. He wound up trying to stuff more people on the Supreme Court. So the same problems. So at the times we transition, there's times when great presidents like Jackson or such come up. We have these incredible problems. I wrote a book called A Storm Before the Calm. We're in that storm.
And after the storm, like in the 50s, we enter a very different place and a much more pleasant place and a much more profitable place. But right now we're in it.
Well, we went through a global conflict. It was called the Cold War. And there were a lot of casualties on all sides. It wasn't a war like World War II or World War I, but it was an intense war. There was Vietnam. There was Korea. There was Iraq. All of these, Afghanistan started with the Russian invasion. So the Cold War raged around the world. I think now the Cold War is over.
it's over because Russia has proven it cannot take Ukraine and therefore cannot take Europe and so therefore there's no reason to wage a war that's very hard to make a peace when you haven't crushed the other guy right but it happens so what the United States is doing now is as a result of this, is decoupling from the world.
Our exposure in the world in the last few years was countered to all of our traditions, but also not very profitable or happy.
So there was a time when we really cared what happened in the Congo. Back in the 60s, they supported Patrice Lumumba. We supported Maurice Chambe. Yes. Who cares what happens to the Congo? I don't want to say anything terrible about the Congo, but it's not our problem. Right. And everything was our problem. And our entire financial system was based on the two things. One,
bound imbalance trade to make the Europeans healthy. That was critical. But then we used these trade relations to build alliances in the third world. And one of them was China. And we did very well in China. We made China more dependent on us than on Russia. And we split that relationship fairly deeply. Chinese did not support the Russians in the reigning war.
It was a great strategy, but it leaves us in an untenable position if the Cold War is over. We no longer have to play this role. Now, the storm is the old elite and people supporting them are enraged at breaking norms and guardrails. Well, this country was built breaking guardrails, rules. It was called the revolution. That's how he believed it. And every 50 years,
socially, economically, every 80 years, institutionally, we break the guardrails. We reinvent ourselves. We're a country of invention. We're a country of reinvention. And when that happens, there's a terrible fight between the Anshan regime, the old regime, if you will, and the emerging regime. And Roosevelt was considered dictator, was charged with being dictator.
Roosevelt was said by Walter Lippmann, a very renowned person, the least... least capable president in our history okay and so jackson was and all of these were so he may well have been incompetent it may have been his staff who supported it doesn't matter but the united states is a great country because unlike European countries, it reinvents itself.
The war comes, the war goes, and we change with it. The Europeans fundamentally stay the same. So does China. How is the U.S. changing now? Well, firstly, what's ending? What's ending? The first problem that I said in the book, and this was published in 2020, I think, was the universities. The universities are the engine of our social structure. It's where the people come from.
And the universities had become ideological places, as they usually do, but the ideology was Yes. And the universities had become massive, inefficient entities. So it's not simply the government that has to undergo a dramatic change. Harvard, who had been the place where the wealthy went, became a place for immigrants to go after World War II. Harvard has to change.
Now, the engineering part of this is difficult. And whether the president is engineering it well or badly or not, it's being re-engineered. And the opposition comes from those who see no need for change. Yes. Who see no need not to go into Ukraine. Right. But Biden saw no need to go into Ukraine. So it's not, we can't base this just on personalities. Right.
It was Biden who established a strategy of not going into Ukraine, but sending every miserable weapon we had. He used satellites first. So I tend to depersonalize history. Every president is an egomaniac. He has to be. To believe you can be the president of the United States, you have to have an ego. The difference between Trump and everybody else is he doesn't hide it. He celebrates it.
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