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
But I grew up around four miles from him. We were living in Queens. We'd left the Bronx. And he lived in Jamaica Heights, which is a very nice place to live. And I lived in Springfield Gardens, four miles away. Not nearly as nice a place. But that's how we behaved. We strutted around. We threatened people. We didn't mean it. We had a fist fight. We became friends.
It was, for me, his personality is not alien. For my wife, who comes from upper-class Australian life, it's horrible that he behaved this way.
For me? The Wasps don't like Trump at all. Hey, I remember Dominic. My buddy Dominic in Springfield Gardens. Yeah. He was the twin to Trump. Was he successful? Oh, yeah. He's an accountant now in Long Island.
He didn't have to have this personality. Eisenhower, who was a very wealthy man, and I don't think he saw anybody who was poor who wasn't his servant. cast himself as the champion of war, convincingly. Presidents are actors. Presidents shape themselves to the moment. Abraham Lincoln was a cheap lawyer in his own way. He came from Kentucky. He was practically a southerner.
He crafted himself to be what he had to be. The presidency is partly what you see inside yourself and then what you become. That's all of us. If all of us lived the life we think inside publicly, it'd be a terrible place in the world. But presidents craft themselves at the moment. And if you're smart enough to craft yourself, And it takes huge discipline to do that.
You can govern, but then you're used to governing based on reality. So a presidential candidate is nothing but a realist if he's going to win. And as a realist, you as president try to hide the reality a bit and appear to be a very nice guy and having only the best wishes in the heart for everybody. Well, I'm going to try this one.
For China to go to war with us, it has to be a war in the Pacific. We've built a string of bases around China, from the Aleutian Islands all the way to Australia, with the Australian Air Force on the southern flank. And there are only narrow passages through these islands. The greatest thing we did was convince the Filipinos not to go with China, but go with the United States.
We now have four bases in the Philippines. And these block all the exit routes. So, for example, to invade Taiwan would be a very interesting thing for them. It takes about 10, 15 hours for a landing craft to reach Taiwan from China. By that time, our satellites will pick up the landing craft. And if we're in the mood, Guam will send a missile out to take it.
There's a reason why the Taiwanese always threaten to invade Taiwan and never do. They can't. So the reality is, space notwithstanding, that's another sort of war, that the Chinese Navy, you can build as many ships as you want, but you're going through a narrow strait, and we can take it out.
They're not going to go to war with us, and they may fight on the border with the Indians, which they have, and have lost. So, China has bluffed and inside straight beautifully.
Yeah, well, we thought that about the Russians, the Germans, the Japanese, everybody. Yeah. One of our great powers is overestimating our enemy. If we overestimate our enemy, it's enormous what we can do. So the Chinese can't lead, but there's one great threat that's buried beneath the talk about the financing and everything. Remember the Arab oil embargo of 1973? Yeah.
Wrecked the American economy. Yep. The dependency... on raw materials is one thing. Dependency on manufactured goods to be the basic implements of our industry is a very dangerous place to be.
If you don't have control over that supply chain, if you are so dependent, not just on China, but on any country, or the world in general, for your economy to function, and for me, because I don't have any money, financial crisis doesn't bother me. To me, the essential weakness we had with the Chinese
As we created China, Chinese exports to the United States, American investment in China, American businesses moving to China created this. And these businesses are, of course, under the control of the Chinese, as they should be. My fear is that if China decided to really hurt us, they'd stop shipping those goods. So reshoring is not just a question of jobs.
That's there too, but I think that's the cover. Reshoring is a question of national security. We are so dependent for so much of our equipment, our aircraft and everything else. from China and nowhere else really. So we are now moving rapidly into India and we'll have later a problem with India. But one of the reasons to have a domestic based economy is you're secure nationally, right?
You're not depending. And during the last period, remember that Having a disfavorable balance of payments was a strategic issue. It was a national security issue. You wanted to make your allies stronger than the Soviet allies. And we played the same game in China. We made the Chinese dependent on the United States, excessively so, so that we're dependent on China.
So it's interesting, not surprising, the president has raised tariffs on everybody. even the Canadians hate us, and pulled back dramatically, really. Not in the Chinese.
Chinese have nowhere to move. This is where the corporations move. The corporations are reshoring, but more important, moving to India, what they really have done, simply because their business is to make money It's cheaper to build it in China. It's cheaper to build it in India. Americans don't want to spend that much money on cell phones and everything.
But the problem is that, and this was a huge mistake, we did not diversify our industry overseas. We wanted less expensive goods to be made available to drive our economy. But we had a double focus on China. One was to split it from Russia. And two is to get cheaper products.
And we've concentrated excessively on bringing China into a dependency on the United States, failing to see that we were dependent on them. So my fear about this, and the part that's never talked about is, what if the Chinese or all these countries, Vietnam, what if they have coup d'etats? What if they have earthquakes, floods? What if they can't supply us with the goods we need?
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