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The tradition of Soviet dissidents.

Those brave souls who spoke out against the totalitarian communist regime was based on morality.

They often sacrificed their freedom and even their lives to call out the evils of a government that mentally and physically enslaved its own citizens and waged imperialistic wars abroad.

Andrey Sakhov, the father of the Soviet Agebomb, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his criticism of the communist regime, was banished for speaking out for human rights.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was exiled for documenting the Stalinist Gulag system of prison camps and torture.

Their legacies inspired me, as did the great fall of the USSR I grew up in, the United States of America.

Sozanist in particular was a great admirer of the US, where he toured to huge audiences speaking about the horrors of the communist system.

He spoke about the genius of the American founding fathers.

He praised them.

for not becoming detached from a moral core, the basis for individual human liberty.

Ironically, the most powerful American foreign policy voice of the second half of the 20th century largely disagreed with this high praise.

It was the heavily eccentric voice of Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon's Secretary of State, who spoke not about good and evil, or even right or wrong, but about pragmatism, rational actors, and national interests.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Kissinger's belief in realpolitik defined the generation of U.S.

foreign policy.

I often find it too cynical.

Is realism really realistic?

How can American power be used only for US interests if America's leaders cannot agree on what those interests are?

Will we defend our allies against aggression as promised, or pragmatically decide on what suits us at the moment?

From the Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America.

I'm Gary Caspar.

The space between crusading global policy and America forced isolationism is where my guest this week plants the flag of analysis and concrete interests.

George Friedman is the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a firm that analyzes foreign policy and forecasts global events.

and is something of the intellectual successor to Kissinger's view of the world, realism, not idealism.

George's life of strategic analysis provides unique insight into what drives U.S.

foreign policy, at least when it's not being driven by Donald Trump's social media posts.

George, hello.

Hello.

Thank you very much for joining our show.

I was looking very much to talk to you about, of course, geopolitics, about the issues where you are one of the greatest experts.

But before we dive into this discussion of the intricacies of geopolitics, I wondered if I might start with a more personal question.

You were born in Hungary and you left Hungary very early age, yeah?

Yes.

You have no memories of Hungary, but your parents did.

And

how much did it affect your upbringing?

The memories of Hungary, the war and all these tragedies surrounding the war, did it make a contribution to your views of the world?

So just tell us a bit more about it.

Well, I certainly grew up in a house where both my parents were in the Holocaust.

My father was in Mauthausen, my mother in a little camp of Liechtenwurt.

They came back devastated.

Then the communists wanted to arrest my father because he had been a social democrat in previous life, was on a list.

We escaped by taking a a boat across the Danube to Czechoslovakia and then we were to Vienna where an American charity took us, gave us dinner,

gave us a shower, gave us clothes and a room to live in until we got a visa to the United States.

But also one of the defining points was 1956 when the Hungarians rose up on the same night my sister was married.

And at that marriage, everybody was Hungarian and everyone was looking at the newspapers and the pictures, trying to pick out which houses they lived in.

Very interesting.

What was the mood in the room?

Deep but controlled fear.

Everyone in that room had been in the Holocaust.

Everyone understood fear.

Everyone was able to subdue it, control it.

Everyone was watching what would happen.

What they thought would happen would be a devastation of Hungary and the people they left behind, but also a possible devastation of Europe again.

And these things were all there past.

The Hungarian Revolution came very fast and went very fast in a matter of days.

The panic was there, but a clear understanding was not there, my family.

Everybody was concerned only about whether this aunt or that uncle or that cousin was safe.

It became a very personal event here in the United States for the Hungarian community, rather than an ideological one or anything like that.

Now,

you talked about your family's tragic experience with Nazis.

And now you're talking about another tragic page in Hungarian history.

It's Soviet invasion and brutality of Soviet troops.

I assume that you are

not feeling uncomfortable being both anti-fascist and anti-communist?

Well, how can I like either one?

One almost destroyed my family.

The other was planning to destroy my family.

But what would you tell people that now these days are trying to separate these two?

Well, one of the things I have learned is not to have many opinions.

We have opinions and then we wish for things to be the case.

Then we shape our vision of the world based on those opinions.

And the world usually doesn't work that way.

So in my life, when I asked the question about fascism, I'm more interested in what it was and why it emerged.

I look at the same way at the Soviet Union, at communism.

For me, the foundation of what I've learned is to avoid passions

and to avoid opinions.

I want to understand why they do this.

I don't think that nations simply decide to be evil or good or any of these things.

Certain forces occur within nations.

It is simply the way in which geopolitics, which is my field, emerges.

Hungary was hungry.

Its position was its position.

It was perpetually the victim.

Russia was perpetually large, powerful, capable.

Each nation had its fundamental definition, and that definition pivoted around power, the ability to be a nation, to make decisions for yourself and not have other countries impose them on you, and so on.

So I try to understand the process that takes place

and that I am anti-Nazi does not mean I don't want to understand very clearly why the Nazis arose and I cannot do that unless I am willing to put my head in the head of the Nazis, of those who supported them.

But to me, the emergence of communism, the emergence of the Nazis,

this is what I try to understand.

Because I grew up in a house full of opinions.

Hungarians, Jews living in one house, you have many opinions, many different ones going all over the place, and they think it matters.

Yet in their lives, all the opinions they had didn't matter.

Had they been able to analyze the situation, to understand what was happening, to put themselves in the other person's, the monster's position, they may have been safer.

So, from my point of view,

opinions cloud

understanding of what is going to happen, can be very dangerous,

and really makes it impossible for you to realize just how terrible they are or how not so terrible or whatever, and make decisions based on that.

As an expert

from both from theory and from practice, having faced the horrors indirectly of Nazism through your family experience and also indirectly from communism, though you have been dealing with this as an American, as an American expert for many decades, many people thought that fascism has ended in 1945.

Many myself included, thought that communism was decisively defeated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It seems to me now that both ideologies are just very much around.

They are even thriving.

How do you explain that?

Well, I don't see Nazism thriving.

I see authoritarianism thriving in the sense that in many cases, it is seen by people that democracy, liberal democracy, is a failure.

So I don't see fascism, which had a particular ideology,

being what's at stake here.

The fundamental question is whether liberal democracy, in the way it is practiced now, binds people together or drives them apart.

Authoritarianism historically is far more the norm than liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy opened the door to the idea that people with very different beliefs, both in how governance should take place, how they should live their lives, could live together.

It is a great experiment, but it's a very difficult experiment.

If you are a fundamental moralist, if you believe that the way you think things should be,

or that the way you should live, is a moral imperative,

then it is very difficult to have a liberal democracy.

Let's for a moment jump back to Russia.

Does Putin rule

qualified

to be called fascist dictatorship?

Well, I think he is a Russian ruler in a very strange position.

The Tsars had a history of this sort of rule and an ideology.

The Soviet period had an ideology that justified the ruler.

He has no visible ideology but nationalism,

and he has no legitimate ideological validation.

He has power, but even looking at his power, it's very strange.

Around him, there seems to be no orderly structure, so that if tomorrow he died of a heart attack, it is not clear what the succession would be, what the process would be.

So it's a very odd governance even for Russia.

Because Russia, to me, has always been a place of deep ideology, of belief, of something, of

orthodoxy or of Marxism or what have you.

Now it is a place without beliefs beyond the idea that Putin is in charge.

Going back to the decades of the Cold War, you were an American and I understand you had few people that listened to you and you already had a massive reputation

backing your expertise.

But what is your view of the Cold War?

Because for many, myself included, it was an ideological battle.

Do you think that ideology played a crucial role or even an important role, or ideology was simply a cover-up for other interests that were based, as we already discussed, on historical predetermination and some patterns that have been established over decades, if not centuries?

Well, we have to look back to the beginning.

I don't see the Cold War as a standalone war.

It was what followed the Second World War, which in turn saw the First World War, which in turn follows the Napoleonic Wars.

So Europe and the world is a place of continuity of struggles.

When I look at the United States, there is something unique about the United States.

The fundamental interests of the United States are the two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific.

That is our barrier.

We did not enter World War I until the Germans started sinking American ships and British ships with Americans on board.

We did not enter World War II until the Japanese attacked us in the Pacific.

And then, remember, the Germans declared war on us.

We didn't declare war on them.

When the war ended, The United States had one fundamental geopolitical fear, that the Soviets would reach the west coast of

Europe, and Cherbourg and Bremen and others would become Russian ports and challenge us in the Atlantic.

From the American point of view, the problem of the Cold War from the United States was certainly the love of democracy, but it was also the fear of another war forced on us by an attack in the Atlantic.

So if we could keep the Russians far back,

this was essential.

So when I look at the Cold War, I look at the American imperative to keep the Russians away from the Atlantic.

I look at the American imperative to forge out of Europe a defensive phase.

And I look at the issue of the fight for the inheritance of the European empires.

which took place between the Russians and the Americans in the third world, all over the place.

So I see in an ideological element, which is a a very good justification for what we ruthlessly did.

And I see ideology as

a moral imperative,

but life and death is also a moral imperative.

And from the American point of view, what happened in Pearl Harbor, what happened in World War I or World War II, was the only thing that could threaten our existence.

And therefore, there was certainly a moral dimension to it, but there was also a geopolitical force that drove this.

And I think we cast it as a moral imperative because that's more persuasive to people.

So by pitting it as a question of liberal democracy versus oppression, it added, it was the added dimension.

And I think American policymakers profoundly believe that, that this was the only issue.

So there were two modes of thought about the Cold War.

There was an American view that was very coldly geopolitical.

There was the other moral dimension of the war, that in the sense that liberal democracy was a more moral system than communism,

and therefore we were developed also engaged in a moral system.

And I think that was true about liberal democracy being more moral.

But I don't think it was a fundamental thing that drove the United States where it went.

We'll draw back.

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You have written about Trump's diplomatic model.

And you seem to find some coherence in what to me and many others is a very incoherent set of events.

Can you explain the pattern you are witnessing and describing that analysis?

First one, understand

what he sees.

Since 80 years, the United States has been continually involved in warfare with essentially communism in a certain way, but also in wars such as in Afghanistan, wars such as in Vietnam.

It was a moral war, it was against the communist regime, but it was unwinnable.

What he came in to do is to say, look, it's been 80 years in which a norm has developed of two things.

One, that the United States is the military force that must be there first and best to combat the Russians.

The second was that we have to build an economic system

that weakened the Soviet Union and strengthened us.

So,

what I approach these matters with is simultaneously a moral dimension which is very real and binding people together

and a geopolitical reality

which shifts.

So I see him at this point as trying to do the same thing Roosevelt did with the banking system in the Depression.

issuing executive orders, closing down the banking system and recovering it, restructuring it, and trying to put more people on the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court kept knocking down his rulings.

So, this is what happens when we have an institutional crisis.

And this institutional crisis that we're having right now is: do we want to remain as exposed to the world militarily and economically as we were?

And Trump has come in, very openly saying it, but not being believed that this is what he wanted.

He asked the question

about Ukraine.

This is a European war.

Why are they fighting it?

Why are they looking at us at what we'll do?

And that's a very shocking moral thing to do because the United States is seen as the guarantor of liberal democracy.

And from his point of view, we have paid the price for 80 years of being the guarantor.

And so you see a different economic system emerging.

The free trade system emerged out of World War II as part of the Cold War, as a way to strengthen other nations, to some extent at the expense of the United States.

Foreign aid emerged as a weapon in the Cold War.

And his argument is, is look, the Cold War is over.

Prussia could not even take Ukraine.

How is it going to take Europe?

That's not the issue any longer.

The issue is to restructure the world, to see that the 80-year cycle that was created after World War II is obsolete, and try to do it.

Now, you do not violate a norm without being considered a tyrant.

Roosevelt, interestingly, was called a dictator for doing what he did, which is very similar to what Trump did, which is very similar to what Andrew Jackson and Lincoln did.

This happens.

But I'm less interested in whether we like or hate Trump, but the way we lived in the last 80 years, and I was in the Army and my daughter was in the Army fighting in Iraq, for what, I don't know, and my son was in the Air Force.

And the question was, we were fighting all of these wars, deploying all over the place.

Do we still need to do that?

And the second question comes up, the economic system that was created in order to help us in this Cold War.

Is it still relevant?

Is it still in the American interest?

So, what you see happening is where the United States took responsibility for the entire global system, in a sense, for 80 years.

It's not unnatural for it to want to go back to a place where its primary interest is its own interests.

So, I don't see Trump as anything but a very obnoxious man, personally,

and also

a man who appears reckless because he is deconstructing the previous system

and opening the door for a new one.

So when I look at the situation here, I see a normal geopolitical shift taking place.

The recognition that Russia is no longer a military threat to Europe

and therefore the ability to disengage.

This violates all the norms of the last 80 years, but it's an inevitable process.

I have to give you credit for seeing very early what so many people did not, that Putin's Russia would become more belligerent and

would

cross the border attacking Ukraine.

So indeed you even wrote it in your book back in 2008 that not just Russia would attack Ukraine, but also you predicted it would not succeed.

So what did you see back then?

And just, you know, now, could you give us a little bit of insight into the future?

So if you were so accurate predicting it, though, I also have to, you know, boast, I also made the same prediction, though, more, no, more intuitively,

not from the same strategic perspectives as you did.

But what do you expect to happen now in Russia?

What is the end of this war?

So just if you combine your analysis of the past, present, and the future.

First, why did they have to invade?

The northern border of Ukraine is 300 miles from Moscow.

The Russians remember Napoleon?

The Russians remember Hitler.

When the Medan Square rising happened, the U.S.

made a big mistake by involving itself in the future of Ukraine.

The Russians took this to mean that they were going to integrate somehow Ukraine into its structure.

And if I were a Russian leader and I looked at the map, I would say, I can't live live with that.

And so I said the Russians would rationally choose to create a buffer zone between NATO and Russia.

But they failed to understand that the border would then be on Poland, so that the Russian army would now be on the border of NATO.

And they miscalculated that the United States, which did substantially intervene, would allow that to happen.

Putin has failed.

The Russian army has failed.

It is not a force to be threatened with.

It has now descended to terror bombings in Kiev.

Now, the problem is that if the war ends on the current terms, Putin is a dead man.

The problem is Putin has no organized opposition.

He's not surrounded by a central committee or a presidium that will look at him and say, you have to go.

There's no way that another leader can emerge.

And Putin is fighting for his life.

He cannot allow the war to end on the terms it is.

It cannot allow the war to cost a million Lussian lives.

And this is all they have.

For me, the fundamental question is there are forces inside of Russia that are horrified by this war and how it turned out and what they're happening now.

I don't know how powerful the oligarchs are.

I don't know how the military is taking it.

The military was savaged in this war.

I do not understand the internal politics that allows Putin to keep his position.

So in this case, you have to look at the idea of true dictatorship.

true fascism, if you want to call it that,

where a single person has so destructed opposition forces and will act simply for the purpose of showing that he was not defeated.

So I read this as turning out with Putin falling.

When, how, I don't know.

So

Taiwan, it's another potential

hot spot on

the global map.

It's hypothetical, but

many believe you know it could be an outcome of the war war in Ukraine, that if Putin succeeds even partially, China might be emboldened.

But you were quite adamant saying that in recent years

the Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unlikely.

Why so?

Well, firstly, you have to ask the question, if this is so important, why did they invade 1050 20 years ago?

They couldn't, and they can't now.

I'll explain why.

Okay.

The problem of invading Taiwan is this.

It takes about 15 hours, 20 hours for a landing craft to move from a Chinese port to Taiwan.

In that time, U.S.

satellites would immediately pick up that they're crossing the river.

In that time, missiles that are loaded on all of these islands that they're passing through, okay, would possibly destroy those ships.

That would be not a difficult thing.

Secondly, if they didn't manage to land in Taiwan, how would they supply Taiwan with the ability of the U.S.

with

drones and everything else that exists now?

So, the military reality is that the invasion of Taiwan is a much more difficult thing than it appears to be.

And this is the reason why, for years and years, they have spoken of Taiwan as part of China, but have never attempted a military action.

In fact, it was easier to do so 15 years ago than it is now.

So this is why they will do it.

But just for

a moment, just for the sake of this very interesting conversation, imagine that your analysis is wrong and it happens to even the best of us and there is an invasion.

How should the United States under President Trump respond?

And even more important, how would it respond?

I think it would respond savagely.

So if they somehow miraculously took Taiwan,

we would blockade Taiwan completely, and I suspect in some way

hammer it to death with drones or even evade.

And when I talk about the difference in how I look at the world, I do not ask the question of what would they do.

I ask what can they do.

They have to remember that the United United States is one quarter of the world's economy.

The Chinese grew to what they are now by having access to that economy and simultaneously to investment.

So if they went after Taiwan, that would mean some sort of war with the United States.

It would mean something worse.

Xi's

success in building China into an economic power at vast rates of growth depended on its relationship with the United States.

If

he cuts those lines, he needs to find alternatives.

And there are no substitutions.

Therefore, Trump

signaled the Chinese with extraordinarily absurd tariffs.

that no one ever expects to be the ones that are there, and demanded a negotiation with China, which the Chinese have hesitated.

But there's two problems.

We have an economic relationship with China and a military relationship with China, and they contradict each other.

In other words, we have a hostile military relationship in the Pacific with the Chinese Navy, at the same time an intimate economic defense.

So I would liken this to the situation of when the Arab oil embargo took place after the 1973 war and left the United States in a very bad economic situation.

It was catastrophic.

One of the questions you raised, what if they invade Taiwan?

What will the Americans do?

Where we're in a quasi-military confrontation.

This is irrational.

Trump, with his normal subtlety and explanation,

has done was that he slammed the door on the Chinese who now have to make some fundamental decisions to make him understand the United States has room for maneuver that China does not have and try to create a very different relationship with China that exists.

In a sense, it's the same strategy as Russia.

It's more likely to work with the Chinese than with the Russians.

Are you saying that Trump has strategy?

I'm saying that he's either the stupidest lucky man in the world or he knows what he's doing.

Okay, so if I understand correctly, just, you know, it's very much, you know, a reflection of America's position vis-a-vis Europe during the Cold War.

Precisely.

So, make sure that our main geopolitical enemy could not get access to the harbors of the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans.

Yes.

Okay.

So,

just a few words at the end of our conversation about the future.

And I

think that your vision of the American future is

much more hopeful than mine or many others.

So, the floor is yours to end our talk with this vision of the future that will make us cheer up and

sleep better.

Well, first, we have to remember that the United States operates through internal crisis.

So, every 50 years, for no reason, I don't know why 50 years, we have a massive crisis.

The last one brought

into office a president who basically changed the entire tax code.

We also have institutional crises.

The last time the two crises merged was with Roosevelt.

And as we go through these cycles and we look at the various presidents at various times, the re-engineering of the United States always has first a storm.

where the norms are being violated and how can Roosevelt do this and how can Lincoln do this and all of these things.

Okay.

And after that,

there becomes a period in which there's a radical calm that emerges in the country.

So after the Depression and after World War II, Eisenhower emerges, smooths the way into the future.

So what I see is the future, we are going through the storm before the calm.

I was able to predict, I was very lucky, I said the election of 2024 would create the storm.

And first we have to deconstruct all the norms,

all the systems, and then we go into the period of rebuilding and regenerating.

We are very used to getting rid of the norm and replacing it culturally with something new.

So that terrific tension that's within the United States today between the defenders of the enchant regime, if you will permit me,

and the advocates of the revolution

is normal.

These happened before and we had civil wars over them.

So we are a very peculiar country.

We are a very unique invention

and we build our lives on reinventing things.

And so I see the future of the United States as reinventing our relations with the world, reinventing our internal structures.

hating the president who did it.

It's a very unpleasant thing when the United States emerges as the superpower in the world to see it going through this performance.

And it's not happy in the United States either.

But it's a storm before the calm.

George, thank you very much for offering us this positive vision of the future.

And I admire your belief in America's ability to self-heal all the wounds inflicted by drastic measures by various presidents.

And I hope that your predictions, based on historical analysis and patterns, will materialize and America will emerge stronger than ever before.

Thank you very much for joining us.

And thank you for having me.

And remember, we survived the Civil War.

But it was a civil war first.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

First, yes.

This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Aravolo and Natalie Brennan.

Our editor is Dave Shaw.

Original music and mix by Rob Smersiak.

Fact-Checking by Anna Alvarado.

Special thanks to Paulina Kasparov and Meg Gringert.

Claudia Bate is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio.

Andre Waldes is our managing editor.

Next time on Autocracy in America.

I think it's a very nice but slightly naive idea that now the big historic opportunity is since America is sending a lot of disturbing and surprising signals, Europe could do it alone or could do it better.

It's not going to work.

The challenges of China, the challenges of Russia, are much too big in order to be solved by Europe alone.

And I would even go that far, they are also way too big than being solvable by the United States alone.

I'm Gary Kasparov.

See you back here next week.