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
So Putin's opposition, Putin's under tremendous pressure to open up Russia to the West. It's a wonderful investment opportunity and many hedge funds in the United States are gathering funds for investing in Russia. Land is cheap, workers are fairly well educated, work cheap, close to Europe, all sorts of things.
I think Trump's ultimate plan is, and he was accused of being pro-Russian, which I think he just had vision of what was going to come out of this war, was, look, we got along with Germany after the war. It was just fine. And we got along with Japanese. It was okay. And the Russians haven't done anything to us to be as pissed as we are at Germany and Japan.
So I think he looks at it as a huge investment opportunity. He sees Putin as very weak. And he's trying to maintain Putin with some credibility. He's got a lot of enemies. On one side, the right wing is furious at his performance in the war. The left wing has had about enough. They'd like to rejoin Europe or something nice. And he must be under tremendous pressure for his performance in a war.
Well, I think Trump decided that a weak Russian president is much better than a strong Russian president. And he's going to try to do everything he can to make Putin look good. In the meantime, the rest of the world will think that Putin bought him. A friend of mine said, no, Putin gave him money. That's why he's behaving this way. Okay. In my view, he's a good negotiator.
He comes in first, the highest price. You ever buy a house? You come in with the lowest price you can think of. The other guy comes with the highest price. Eventually you buy the house. Yeah. But first there's drama. Your wife cries. These things happen. I think this is what he's doing. He's a good negotiator. He slammed the sanctions on, having no intention of keeping them there.
He knew it would be stupid. I think he overreached anyway, but he pulled back, kept him only on China. And with the Russians, he's trying to give Putin maneuvering room. For one thing, we're not going to go to war in Ukraine. It's not going to happen, but it's a threat that he has. So if you open the war again, you don't know what we're going to do. So deploy 20,000 more troops to Europe.
Being in Europe is a good thing for American troops. Amsterdam is a wonderful town to visit, if you're young. He's making gestures to the Russians militarily. Nothing serious. But at the same time, he's making it clear that, look, if you're going to attack, it's going to be a tough one.
and putin is not going to attack putin has to come down having won something and can appear to be capitulated in the united states which he's going to do but i can't look that way i think trump is trying to engineer it in such a way that prudence survives
now trump will be despised for this and it's that's inevitable but i think he has an understanding of the situation just because he's negotiated with bankrupt people yes and when you have a bankrupt person be kind what happens in the middle east Well, the Middle East really depends on what happened. The decision to negotiate a summit, it was decided it was going to be held in Riyadh.
I thought it was going to be held in Budapest because Orban is friends with Putin and friends with Trump. So I figured I'd get together, have a beer and work this out. But they pick Riyadh. Saudi Arabia is opposed to the Islamic terrorists as Israel is. They're terrified of them. And Saudi Arabia is a major power. So, for example, it decided to fund last month the entire Syrian deficit.
You just pay it. So money talks and other things walk in the Middle East. So I think what is thought of is look,
we've been fighting in the middle east for i don't know how many years my daughter was a major in iraq and you know it was very bad and i was mildly involved in afghanistan and this was ridiculous we're fighting over a place neither of us really care about iran the russians are more afraid of iran than we are remember the russian opera house that blew up a terrorist attack
So we have equal interests. We share intelligence on those things with Russians. So it's not that, oh yeah, we let them know when we've seen something that might concern them. They let us know. There's collaboration. But the problem of the Middle East is this. There are really rich people who are really afraid of a bunch of mafioso, which I'll call Hamas,
Hamas is at the same time an enemy of Israel and a shakedown artist. He's extracted the money from many countries. The theory, I think, between the Russians and the Americans is if we bring the Saudis into a deal and back them suitable and make them responsible for the region, the Saudis have nothing against Israel. They couldn't care less. Okay?
The Saudis are much more interested in the states in the Gulf, you know, Emirates, Qatar, these really wealthy places where they're interested in And the idea that Russia or the United States is going to pacify the Middle East is insane. There are two countries that can do it. One is Saudi Arabia, the other is Turkey.
If Turkey and Saudi Arabia are brought together with some encouragement from the Americans and Russians, it's their problem. And the Turks have bad relations with anyone, everyone, and decided to have great relations with everyone. So it's a perfect alignment. And I think what happens in the Middle East, forgetting the Israeli question for the moment, is some sort of entente.
Much of what happened in the Middle East, much of what happened in Asia, much of what happened in Africa was American-Russian competition.
Latin America, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, all of these things were this. If that stops, and it's not miraculous, the Japanese and the Americans became allies. And if the Russians and the Americans say, look, we want to make money, we want to have decent lives, And we really don't care about the Middle East. and decide to empower, if you will, countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to handle it.
But we certainly don't want another Middle Eastern war. The Iraqi war was really bad. Especially now there are cell phones and our daughter could call us every night. That's what was happening. It was bad. You know, going away in World War II and you don't see your son for two years. That's okay. But every night a phone call? You know, it was a terrible war. It was not a mistaken war.
It was a necessary war. But we have to find new necessities. So I think a Russian-American Entente changes the way Africa operates, changes the way the Middle East operates, changes the way Asia operates. And you're already seeing new players emerging. India is exploding, okay? Many of the European countries, the smaller ones, like Poland, are developing marvelously.
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