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
We are heavily dependent on a handful of countries for major resources. And it may be more expensive to build them in the United States, but national security requires that our supply chain be under our control.
Well, we have an example. Our industrial plant grew tremendously in the 1890s. We became the major producer of industrial products in the world. We were China. And we sold them to the Europeans. And that caused a huge boom through the 1910s and 1920s. And then World War I happened. And the Europeans wrecked themselves, as they do periodically, and they couldn't buy anymore.
And that was the first trigger of the depression. If you become too dependent on exports, you're highly vulnerable to not being able to sell them. If you become too dependent on imports, your own economy can't function. So there has to be prudence exercised. It's not a question that we go to simply being our own country and nothing else, or we go to free trade that's untrammeled.
It has to be a kind of prudent step where we balance the economic issue. But what rendered us imprudent was the Cold War. We were so concerned with Congo not becoming communist, that we would have very favorable terms and aid and everything else to these countries. And it made sense given the Cold War and our fears about what would happen.
But when the Cold War, it didn't end with the fall of communism. Cold War ended with the demonstrated failure of the Russians to take Ukraine. They should have done it a week if they were afraid of it. That's when it ended, but nobody rethought because, you know, 10 years is not that much of a timeframe, three years, whatever.
And we are now facing the fact of how exposed we become and how rational is the system now. It wasn't rational 10 years ago. It was pretty intensely this way. But given that a nation is not just an economy, it is security. The national security consideration outweighed for the moment the economic consideration, the financial consideration. At this point, it has to be re-engineered.
So I look at history in two ways. One, there is the path that it's going to take, that has to take. Then there's how you engineer it. That's what presidents do. They're engineers. Now, is this a good way to engineer it or not? Well, he's following the Roosevelt model. First 100 days, almost over. before any opposition can form against you, go wild.
Then when the opposite forms, and I saw a poll today saying that 80% of the Republicans oppose him on courts and stuff like that. And, you know, the opposition is formed. And then you moderate and you shift and you do politics domestically. We haven't seen him do that yet. Now the question will become an engineering one. One, does he see another way? And two, frankly, a personality one.
Does he back off? But what Roosevelt did, and he was a very slick guy, is he pushed to the limit, challenging every court there is. Every court was ruling against anything he tried to do. Okay, you can't do that. And so he train wrecked for 100 days. And I think we have seven more days left.
for the hundred days and we're about at the same stage but americans have no sense of history they don't ever say oh we've seen this before right because we didn't we weren't alive then yes and we don't remember and we don't remember the civil war and we don't mention jackson tell him the supreme court well if you want the indians to stay where they are you go keep them there we're there i'm not so we don't remember that we've done this before
So it took a bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for me to realize this. A bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania? I was teaching at a college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and also the U.S. Army War College at the same time. And I went out drinking with some colonels who drink well. And, you know, they were moaning and complaining and all sorts of things about what America has become. This was back in the 70s.
It was, you know, what the economy has become. The troops under us are not reliable. And it was terrible. And I was sitting there wondering, because I was having a fine time in my life. I didn't see what was any terrible. Had this ever happened before in America?
that there'd be such a disjuncture between the prosperity we actually had in spite of everything and the misery that these men dedicated to their country felt. And I had a choice between picking up the waitress or go to my study and think about this. The waitress turned me down, as they always do, and I went to study. So I started looking back in history. This was back in the 70s, really.
And I started noticing patterns that I couldn't explain. Patterns of deep crisis in the government. And then I noticed for some reason that I can't tell you why. It's about every 50 years. Every 50 years we have a social economic crisis. Last one being Reagan, the one he came in on. after the 70s, and every 80 years, we have an institutional crisis.
We founded a country, 80 years later, we have a civil war. It determines that the central government is in charge, the federal government is in charge of the states. 80 years after that, we invent the federal government. That was World War II. So it's about that time.
so i was able to say you know years ago in 2009 i wrote a book on the cycles saying that uh you know the 20s are going to be hell guys get ready and then i was actually managed to pin it down to their election at 24. Wow. Which was pure luck. It was a guess. It was no genius involved. But it was apparent to me that we could not sustain the system as it was. And there were two breakpoints.
One was the universities diverging from society. Second, the technocracy of the government that could not collaborate in making sensible solutions, but were trapped. And finally, the end of the Cold War, just like the end of World War II. And with that, everything changes. And in a few years, we'll be happy again. And we'll forget all this. You think so? Oh, yeah.
If you forget the depression where 50% of the people at one point were unemployed, You can forget things.
It's called Donald Trump. I think that's what it is. What I'm saying is, whether he planned it or just is it, he's the man of the moment. He's the wrecking ball that Lincoln was and the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was and Jackson was. And he's shifting the country by emphasizing two things. One, the world culture wars are untenable. Yes. Secondly, you can't keep inventing classes. Yes.
Second, equal opportunity is not equal outcome. Yes. So as Warren, the universities are, I was a university professor for a number of years and I'm happy to see them being wrecked. I was not happy there. But the president is also trying to restructure the federal government because it's become vast and unknowable. And that's really the problem. The problem is that
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