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
During the COVID crisis, Fauci ruled. Nobody in the education department was listened to to say, you can't do that to the schools. No one in the Department of Commerce said, we're going to have massive unemployment if you do this. Okay? So there was no element of common sense. And so anybody who would come in at this point would have to say, look, We're dysfunctional.
We're arguing over issues of whether or not gender can be changed and whether it's an equal class. What are we talking about? We're looking at the situation in the federal government that no one really knows at the top what in God's name is happening at the bottom. We have to change that. The Cold War is over. Our foreign policy has to shift. Yes. As it is.
And whoever became president at this point might have better manners, but would be doing about the same thing. And Roosevelt set the stage with the 100 days. Yes. And what is now happening is the opposition is inevitably forming because we're a democracy. Noah was a king, and now we're going to find out more about Donald Trump and his political acumen, and we'll see.
But we are at a stage that was predictable and a stage that's good because any country that can reinvent itself after 50 years, just by having a few years of horrible crisis, it's wonderful. Look at how we adjusted ourselves after World War II to being a world power. I were comfortable with it for decades and built our economy on that.
When you take a look at the way we handle it after the civil war, what other country had a civil war that came back to fairly a decent, you know, okay. You know, we had it, we re-engineered slavery through that made the South, not just an agricultural area. And we re-engineered the world in world war II and re-engineered at the end economically.
And after 50 years, it's obsolete and you're trading your car regularly because you don't want your neighbors to think that you can't afford it. And so this is how we are. It is inherent in the American culture that a crisis looms where other countries would live through it and devolve and not be willing to change. We transform ourselves and it's really not fun to live through that time.
There's never been one. And we've been here for a long time. And we've done this lots before. So if we didn't collapse after the Civil War, and we didn't collapse after the Depression, This is not one of the worst crises we've had. So it's just a way we change things, okay? I remember my family, my father used to say, I need a new car. And my mother would say, you don't need a new car.
You need this and that and the other thing. And you're not buying a new car. And there'd be terrible fights. Who won? My mother. But it was...
I think not, because there is no power in the world that can still challenge the United States.
the russians have demonstrated that their vaunted red army now not red uh is incapable of overrunning a much smaller weaker country that after three years of fighting he only held a small sliver of it and that's goes in keeping with what i used to think it was taught by a man called andy marshall who's in office net assessments and he said the russians are not nearly as good as everybody believes
So I was once in Hungary, and I was born there, and I was watching a Russian maneuver. And the gas lines were leaking. They were plastic, and you needed them going forward on tanks. And nobody seemed to care. Six months later, I happened to wander back there to take a look. It was still leaking. You remember the line of tanks lined up in Ukraine, off the mountain, out of gas, waiting for days?
I think they were still using that same gas line. The point is that the Russian... logistics system and its senior staff, its commanding generals, particularly the staff level, were not very creative, shall we say. They took their bearings for World War II with a mass attack by infantry, backed by armor and artillery. Yes. And they didn't understand that that no longer functioned.
The massing of troops is very, very dangerous, and that there has to be a different model of warfare. So they attacked Ukraine as if this was 1941, and they're at war. And the Ukrainians were very agile because they had great intelligence.
When the president said, we're not going to give you intelligence anymore for a day, that time, the intelligence he was talking about was intelligence for satellites of exactly where the Russian troops were, down to the smallest number. So the smaller Ukrainian army could mass against them and block them. So that was a really serious threat. Yes. And he did it for a day.
I don't think he really cut it off. He just said he would. But the Russians never adjusted to the fact that the war they planned to wage in Europe, which they never did, was untenable at this point. And so Russia, unless it wants a nuclear war, it can't have that. It's not a viable power. And it's not influential in the world either.
The Chinese, as I said, are blocked in by a very clever structure of islands we've built around them. It's very hard to pass through them, and especially to get back. And so a world war would indicate there would be another global power. And China's not a global power. It just doesn't have the forces to do that. Russia's not a global power. We're a global power and we don't want to be one.
We want to come home. And we are going to come home. We'll still have relationships and we'll still have forces scattered here and there. But this massive commitment we made to the entire world to defend them against communism. Well, communism died 10 years ago. And Russia kind of, I suspect US and Russia will reach a good relationship. Remember, we rebuilt Japan. We rebuilt Germany after the war.
We made them great allies. This is American system when we fight wars. And I suspect that one of the things that Trump is trying to engineer with Putin is an understanding. The Russians are in bad economic shape. Their economy grew because the war and definite deficit spending on the war machine built it. But they're cut off. The oligarchs are furious.
And there's a great argument going on in Russia between the nationalists, if you will, and liberals who want to become integrated. And Putin is, look, Putin attacked Ukraine. His forces were unable to penetrate. So he took a mercenary army, the Wagner Group, to join them. Now the army and the Wagner Group didn't like each other. So the Russian army didn't give them artillery shells.
So after a while, the Wagner group came back and tried to do coup d'etat in Moscow. Now, tragically, they all died in an airplane crash. I couldn't, my heart goes out to them. But when you take a look at the execution of the war, as it actually was, It was a cluster something. It was terribly executed and politically almost suicidal for Putin.
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