George Friedman Predicts the Next 50 Years of Global Affairs and the Importance of Space Domination

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Sephora, for all your skin care. You believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years? We are dominant in space.
Our technology is way ahead of us, but we're modest, deliberately so. We understate our capabilities.
Feels like, though, there's got to be some hard pivot or something. You know, there's some disaster that resets people's expectations.
It's called Donald Trump. I think that's what it is.
What I'm saying is he's the wrecking ball that Lincoln was, the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was, that Jackson was. He's shifting the country.
We have these incredible problems.

I wrote a book called The Storm Before the Calm.

We're in that storm.

And after the storm,

we enter a train of nations.

Clearly, we're in, and I hope we can talk about this in a transition away from the post-war order.

But I just want to start at the end.

Where do you think the United States will be in 50 years?

Well, I think the United States is withdrawing not to isolationism, but to fortress America.

It's interesting that the Mexican president called for a fortress North America. Yes.
And it was a very wise move. We were engaged, forced to be engaged in the wars because the United States cannot be invaded.
Canada can't evade us, no matter if they'd like to now. Mexico can't evade us.
It It's the command of the sea that's our defense. When the Germans started U-boats in the First World War, sinking in Lusitania, that's when we invaded, intervened.
When the British Navy looked like it was going to fall in the hands of the Germans by invasion, that's when we got agitated. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that's where we're agitated.
So we're a unique country, enormously wealthy, and immune from attack except from the sea. So our basic strategy has to be command of the sea.
Now, when the Russians ended World War II, we were terrified that they would conquer Europe, not because we loved the Europeans, but because what if they had control of the Atlantic ports in France? What would the Russian Navy do? So we built a forward strategy. Instead of waiting for that to happen, we built NATO.
And NATO existed primarily to block the Russian entry into the Atlantic.

We had to rebuild Europe in order to make it viable.

And they lost their empire.

And that became the third world, officially.

Yes.

And we fought constantly with the Russians, hand-to-hand combat, sort of covert operations, trying to block them.

And that's for the last 80 years what we did.

Well, Russia proved in Ukraine that it is not going to be able to occupy Ukraine.

It can't occupy Europe.

And the Europeans have had a free ride, and I think that's pretty true.

And our commitment is to the defense of the United States. The major danger to the United States is, of course, nuclear war.
And that battle is fought in space. Satellites, sensing, launches, being able to do mad, mutually assured destruction, and so on.
The next 50 years will be about a much less integrated U.S. with the world, not isolated, not certainly trading intensely with countries.
But we have spent the past 85 years in constant warfare, small, large, covert, overt. I participate in some of that, and it was exhausting.
So the country really doesn't have to do that. So what I see happening is two things.
One, the United States taking on a role it had for most of its history. As a country that is self-sustaining, highly trading, involved in the world, certainly on alert with the great military.
But the next battles would be fought in space. This sounds strange, but it would have been a strange world if the next war in Europe would be fought in the air and that nuclear weapons would arise.
We were protected from nuclear war by mutually assured destruction. It was the one war in which the leaders themselves would be killed on the first round.
We would hit, and they would hit. And so there was no war, because we had 30 minutes warning.
Because we had radars, and after the U-2 was shot down, and we were kind of spying on the Russians, they were spying in other ways, we launched satellites. Remember, the first American satellite and the first American Russian satellite were launched a month for each other.
First American man in space and first Russian man in space launched weeks apart. So I always wondered, and I don't know, that there was a kind of collaboration between the Russians and Americans

to maintain MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction.

It was a really neat name for it.

Now MAD is short in space.

Satellites are flying there.

Satellites, one, blocked the Russians in Ukraine.

American satellites could see small units down a meter level resolution. And we put in things like HIMARS, these missile systems that could, with precision, hit them.
So now tactical war is governed from space. MAD is covered from space.
And space is full full of debris anti-satellite systems the chinese are launching them constantly we've launched 200 satellites this year so communication satellites oh yes absolutely well they're all communication satellites they're all looking for you know on the Earth. That's what they want to look at.
These are all spy satellites going up there. And they're looking at the Earth, and they're maneuvering around each other.
And one of the things the American public has to understand is the importance of space as a strategic facility. And in due course, it'll emerge.

But the next 50 years,

the Americans are going to be,

I think, a very golden age.

New technologies are coming.

Every age we have,

every cycle we have is built.

The last one was built

on the automobile,

transforming it.

Now it is built

not so much on artificial intelligence,

in my mind,

but on material science.

We are crafting new materials at molecular level for space.

Physical materials.

Physical materials.

For example, lenses on satellites can see things that glass can't show them.

They have acuity that can see a platoon operating.

And when you reach that point, there's also massive changes in medicine. We're able to re-engineer genes, in fact.
So it's in the first stages, but not in a primitive stage. So just as the automobile changed our life and the railroad changed our life previously in canals before that.

Material science, I think, is the radical innovation based on artificial intelligence having a major component to it. And all that material science is developed for space, for survival of machines in space, particularly in telescopes.
they were able to, there's a company called Propefian that's put solar systems on satellites so they can survive and energize the satellites to maneuver. And it's a really extraordinary thing.
And while we focus on Ukraine properly, we fail to understand that the reason the United States did not intervene with troops is we had a better solution. We spotted the Russians moving.
We could order the Ukrainian forces to be right in their way, even though they were a small force. We knew where they were coming.
And more importantly, we finally put in something called HIMARS, which was they could launch six rockets at a time, much better than artillery because the explosive forces were great. And when there was Russian concentration, now this is an American was always in one of them, just one American.

It was Ukraine-operated.

But he had to put a card in to let the machine run.

So then they pulled the trigger.

So the Americans were more deeply involved than was known, but not militarily. We were not taking casualties.

And it was about time that we dealt with a problem without taking casualties. So you believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years? We are dominant in space.
When we go back to the Cold War, there was a time we were talking about missile gap. You might recall that.
There was no missile gap. The U-2s went over the place and they spotted all the...
We were way ahead of them. Our technology is way ahead of us, but we're modest.
Deliberately so. It's not that we, the scientists don't brag about us, but we understate our capabilities and we overstate the Chinese.
That's always a good way to get budgets. You know, we are much better at this.
We've been at it a long time, far longer than, and the Russians are third. The Russians are not second.
Chinese are second. But command of space is now what the command of oceans was.
Interesting. And you the pentagon deliberately overstates chinese capabilities in order to justify its budgets the chinese pentagon would never do that no but it's a it's there's a sense of passivity in the united states on military things there's a sense okay let not waste money on defense.
And there's a whole psychology developed in World War II of how to get money out. But I think the president and everyone else knows who is involved in this, that space is the battleground now.
And the amount of money Elon Musk has put into his X-Force, and he's boosting a lot of the satellites, is enormous. But everybody's in on the game.
Elon Musk seems like a big player, though. He certainly is.
I mean, he's a very smart guy. Maybe not likable he very he's a very smart guy maybe not likable but he's very smart guy um he went into electric cars and then he went into along with people like that maya you know the amazon king i forget his name uh bez into rockets.
And, of course, it was just a hobby. But it emerged into a major business.
They're both major foundations of the Americans' launch program. Because right now, you have to launch a lot of satellites because you know you're going to lose a lot of them.
And if you lose a lot of them, you lose a tactical advantage underground and a strategic capability in nuclear war. So we're emerging into a new age, which normally has a new technology, and this new technology is partly satellites, but that's really 1950s stuff emerged.
But the way these satellites are made is not made from the normal metals and plastics that we had in the past. Particularly their sensors are built with material science and solar energy and extraordinary things that will be integrated into the earth as world war ii technology became very present in the american economy in the 50s that's what's going to happen and i see this as one of those times where what normally happens in the united states is every 50 years we have a historical crisis we rage at each other this is the end of an era it's when an era exhausts itself yes and the era that began with ronald reagan has a social and economic era yes is at his end it's pleaded out the economic and social thing the social crisis is terrible and it a crisis of what I call hyper-egalitarianism, where saying that black slaves who really still weren't treated decently in the United States was a moral imperative.
But genetic engineering of genitalia do not constitute a new class yes so we've invented classes and demanded egalitarian he did something else we stopped asking for equal opportunity and turned to equal outcomes yes and this became untenable so we had a social became untenable. So we had a social crisis.
At the same time, we had an institutional crisis. The federal government was really invented in its current form by Theodore Roosevelt to deal with the recession.
But it was forged in World War II. In World War II, it was a federal government, this massive entity built around the Pentagon and everything else.

Then it won the war.

It was very efficient.

It was necessary at the time.

It evolved into something else.

It evolved into a fundamentally inefficient entity.

Its greatest weakness was experts.

I've said this in writing.

The experts knew a great deal. Fauci was not a criminal.
He was not a Chinese intelligence agent or anything like that. He was a doctor.
And you looked at the doctor and said, okay, now what do we do? And he said, well, everybody should stay at home and go out. And children should not go to school.
Well, we have children. And if a four or five-year- year old doesn't get to play with other children he becomes a homicidal maniac yes you can't do that

but we depended on him with his narrow expertise what we had lost in the federal government

was a class of people with common sense when i was a kid in the bronx there were party bosses

Thank you. government.
It was a class of people with common sense. When I was a kid in the Bronx, there were party bosses.
Charlie Buckley ran the Bronx. One day, my father, who had finally bought a car, had an accident.
The insurance company wouldn't pay. So somebody said, go see Charlie Buckley.
He went to Charlie Buckley. Charlie Buckley made a phone call.
He said, Emil, carrier, you know, messenger's on the way to the house with a check. But you remember, you vote for me, your white votes for me, your children vote for me.
And there was a way to petition the government. Remember, the constitution guarantees us the right to petition the government.
The party bosses, as corrupt as they were, and they were certainly corrupt, were our channel to the government. They were our channel to corporations.
Smart. Yes.
But they were taken out. And they were replaced by technocrats.
Can I just ask you to pause? So, Charlie Buckley, the ward boss in the Bronx, actually got the insurance company to pay the claim to your dad? The insurance company was a good mess, Charlie Buckley. That's amazing.
But it was a place where you could petition the government. With the rise of the technocracy, there was no way to petition the government.
Yes. So, I didn't get the Medicaid that I'm supposed to get whatever it is yeah because I didn't good insurance policy I didn't want to go to government insurance policy yes they find me when I finally went to get Medicaid because I had not gotten it but I hadn't known that it wasn't necessary no one ever said it to me and there was nothing to petition so had to get in.
So we have a federal government where you cannot petition the government.

And that, I think, is the most important thing.

The second thing is that the experts do not have a layer of common sense above them.

Wise men.

And the same is true of the Supreme Court.

They're all lawyers.

When the question on integration came up, the head of the Supreme Court was Warren, was Warren Berger. And Warren Berger knew that he had to have an absolute unanimity on desegregation.
And since he'd been a politician, not a lawyer, he brought the Southerners around and he built it in and they got a 9-0 vote. Every one of them on the Supreme Court now is a lawyer.
Well, the law is more subtle than the law appears. There has to be subtlety.
And so what happened was that the federal government fell in love with experts after World War II. Experts won World War II.
The people who built the atomic bomb, who built the bombers, the hands of the boat, the landing craft and everything. These were experts.
And the federal government fell in love with expertise, which is a very important thing to have. Yes.
But there was no Eisenhower above them, who may not have known how to engineer anything, but had enough common sense to know how to use them and that layer was lost when the politicians sank below the level of the bureaucrats or more precisely they created agencies that didn't answer to anyone and made their own laws and the problem was that they were corrupt or evil or anything like that. It's just they did their job, and the other did their job, and they contradicted each other, and there was no common sense hovering above them, saying, you can't tell everybody to stay at home forever.
Yes. You know, we're going to have the disease.

It's going to have to happen, but you can't do this.

But Fauci as a doctor, well, this is what the doctor says.

Stay home.

He doesn't tell you what to do about your job,

that you're going to lose all your money.

It's not his concern.

That's not his concern.

That's the problem.

The problem is his expertise, the technocracy.

And what's happening right now is what would happen with any president. But, I mean, we certainly have a president who is doing that job, radically disrupting the presidency.
It's like the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration when he shut down all the banks, a bank holiday. The banking system was collapsing.
He wound up trying to stuff more people on the Supreme Court. So the same problems.
So at the times we transition, there's times when great presidents like Jackson or such come up. We have these incredible problems.
I wrote a book called The Storm Before the Calm. We're in that storm.
And after the storm, like in the 50s, we enter a very different place and a much more pleasant place and a much more profitable place. But right now, we're in it.
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So typically, at least in my mind, the storm entails war. If there's not really a reset, I mean, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, all kind of reset and ended, you know, in 1918 at the end of the First World War, then the Second World War resets again.
And, I mean, do you think it's necessary to go through some sort of global conflict in order to reshuffle empires? Well, we went through a global conflict. It was called a Cold War.
And there were a lot of casualties on all sides. Yes.
We didn't, it wasn't a war like World War II or World War I, but it was an intense war. There was Vietnam.
There was Korea. There was Iraq.
All of these, Afghanistan started with the Russian invasion. So the Cold War raged around the world.
I think now the Cold War is over. It's over because Russia has proven it cannot take Ukraine, and therefore it cannot take Europe.
And so, therefore, there's no reason to wage a war. It's very hard to make a peace when you haven't crushed the other guy.
Right. But it happens.
So, what the United States is doing now, as a result of this, is decoupling from the world. our exposure in the world in the last few years was countered all of our traditions but also not very profitable happy yes so there was a time when we really cared what happened in the Congo back in the 60s they supported Patrice Lubumba.
We supported Moise Shambay. Who cares what happens to the Congo? I don't want to say anything terrible about the Congo, but it's not our problem.
Right. And everything was our problem.
And our entire financial system was based on two things. One, imbalanced trade to make the Europeans healthy.
That was critical. But then we used these trade relations to build alliances in the third world.
And one of them was China. And we did very well in China.
We made China more dependent on us than on Russia. And we split that relationship fairly deeply.
Chinese did not support the Russians in the reigning war. It was a great strategy, but it leaves us in an untenable position if the Cold War is over.
We no longer have to play this role. Now, the storm is the old elite and people supporting them are enraged at breaking norms and guardrails.
Well, this country has built breaking guardrails, rules. It was called the revolution.
Yes. That's how we believed it.
And every 50 years, socially, economically, every 80 years, institutionally, we break the guardrails.

We reinvent ourselves.

We're a country of invention.

We're a country of reinvention.

And when that happens, there's a terrible fight between the Angean regime, the old regime, if you will, and the emerging regime.

And Roosevelt was considered a dictator, was charged with being a dictator. Roosevelt was said by Walter Lippmann, a very renowned person, the least capable president in our history.
And so Jackson was, and all of these were. so he may well have been incompetent it may have been his staff who supported it doesn't matter but the United States is a great country because unlike European countries it reinvents itself the war comes the goes, and we change with it.
The Europeans fundamentally stay the same. So does China.
How is the U.S. changing now? Well, firstly, let's, what's ending? The first problem that I said in the book, and this was published in 2020, I think, was the universities.
The universities are the engine of our social structure. It's where the people come from.
And the universities had become ideological places, as they usually do. but the ideology was outmoded.
Yes. And the universities had become massive, inefficient entities.
So it's not simply the government that has to undergo a dramatic change. Harvard, who had been the place where the wealthy went, became a place for immigrants to go after World War II.

Harvard has to change.

Now, the engineering part of this is difficult.

And whether the president is engineering it well or badly or not, it's being re-engineered.

And the opposition comes from those who see no need for change.

Yes.

Who see no need not to go into Ukraine.

Right.

But Biden saw no need to go into Ukraine.

So it's not, we can't base this just on personalities.

Right. It was Biden who established a strategy of not going into Ukraine, but sending every miserable weapon we had.

He used satellites first.

So I tend to depersonalize history.

Thank you. not going into Ukraine, but sending every miserable weapon we had.
He used satellites first. So I tend to depersonalize history.
Every president is an eomaniac. He has to be.
To believe you can be the president of the United States, you have to have an ego. The difference between Trump and everybody else is he doesn't hide it.
He celebrates it. 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.

Right.

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.

So, I think you're saying that someone like Trump was inevitable in this moment. 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 the poor, convincingly. Presidents are actors.
Presidents shape themselves to the moment. Abraham Lincoln was a cheap lawyer in Illinois.
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 would 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 gonna 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 heart for everybody.

Well, I'm going to try this one.

Do you think that there needs to be a war

or will be a war between the United States and China to prove dominance?

China can't go to war with us. 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. In that time, our satellites will pick up the landing craft, and if we're in 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 an inside straight beautifully. So it's interesting, because I think the growing consensus is in the United States that China is too powerful to contain, that it's just inexorably going to be the leader of the world and there's something we can do about it.
Yeah, well, we thought about the Russians, the Germans, the Japanese, everybody. 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... 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

is 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 the Chinese.
But the Chinese haven't moved. 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 was to get cheaper products. And we concentrated excessively on bringing China into a dependency in 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? 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.
So I wonder if, I mean, what you're saying is so obviously true, and I think that smart people are concerned about that. And I wonder if where we find ourselves isn't also a product of our economic assumptions that, you know, capital should be free to move and that, you know, you shouldn't do anything inefficiently.
And it's not, you know, it's not as efficient to make pharmaceuticals in New Jersey as it is to make them in China. So they're now made in China, but we have to have them here.
Maybe our economic system changes with the realization that it hasn't actually served us very well. 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. Yep.
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. And 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, which they should have done in a week if they were what we were afraid of. That's when it ended.
But nobody rethought because, you know, 10 years is not that much of a time frame, 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 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 in two ways.
One, there is the path that it's going to take, that it 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 hundred days, almost over, before any opposition can form against you, go wild.
Then when the opposition forms, and I saw a poll today saying that 80% of the Republicans oppose him on courts and stuff like that, and 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 100 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.
Because we didn't. We weren't alive then.
And we don't remember. And we don't remember the Civil War.
And we don't remember Jackson telling the Supreme Court, well, if you want the Indians to stay where they are, you go keep them 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 they were moaning and complaining and all sorts of things about what America has become. This was back in the 70s.
It was what the economy has become. The troops under us are not reliable.
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 going to my study and thinking 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, I can't tell you why.
It's about every 50 years. Every 50 years, we have a socially 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. 82 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, you know, the 20s are going to be hell, guys, get ready. And then I was actually managed to pin it down to the election of 24.
Wow. Which was pure luck, 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 and 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.
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It feels like, though, there's got to be some, like, hard pivot or something. You know, there's some disaster that resets people's expectations.
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, the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was, that 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 and the universities are,

I was a university professor for a number of years,

and I'm happy to see them being wrecked.

Yeah. 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 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 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 you come in, anybody 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 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 you 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.
And what is now happening is the opposition is inevitably forming because we're a democracy

and Noah's the 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

I love you. 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

is wonderful.

Look at how we adjusted ourselves after World War II

to being a world power.

We 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 a fairly 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 it again 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.

But you don't think there's a danger of collapse, like total collapse?

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, we are, I called it an operatic country.
Mostly we don't go to the opera. But every 50 years we hold an opera that is amazing.
are you concerned that the United States will be

sucked in? years we hold an opera that is amazing do you are you concerned that the united states will be um sucked into a global conflict in the next three or four years either in eastern europe middle east or asia i think not because there is no power in the world they can still challenge the united states the The Russians have demonstrated that their vaunted Red Army, now not Red, is incapable of overrunning a much smaller weaker country that after three years of fighting you only hold a small sliver of it and that's goes in keeping with what I used to think it was taught taught by a man called Andy Marshall, who did 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 from World War II with the 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 gonna 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, they 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 get back in.

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 custom 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 it 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 a coup d'etat in Moscow.

Now, tragically, they all died in an airplane crash.

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.

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 thought, 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 the 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 a war.
The left wing has had about enough. They'd like to rejoin Europe or something nice.
And he's 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 guy the guy comes at 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 sanctions on, having no intention of keeping them there.
He knew he'd be stupid. I think he overreached anyway, but he pulled back, kept them 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 up 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 he can't look that way.
And I think Trump is trying to engineer it in such a way that Putin survives. Now, Trump will be despised of this, and 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 know, just pay it. So, money talks and other things walk in the Middle East.
So, I think what it's 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 in terrorist attack? So we have equal interest.
We share intelligence on those things with Russians. So it's not that, oh yeah, we let them know and 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 theicans 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 um the saudis are much more interested in the in in the Gulf.
United Arab Emirates, Qatar, these really wealthy places where they're interested in. And the idea that a 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.
The Saudis 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. You know, much of what happened in the Middle East, much of what happened in Asia, much of what happened in Africa was American-Russian competition.
Yes. 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 wanna make money, we wanna 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.
Exactly. 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 entang

changes the way Africa operates,

changes the way the Middle East operates, changes the way Asia operates. And you already see new players emerging.
India is exploding. Many of the European countries, the smaller ones, like Poland, are developing marvelously.
It's the manufacturing power of Europe now. Yeah.
And so new powers are emerging. And of course, in 50 years, we'll be raging at each other again.
And undoubtedly, there'll be wars because humans have wars. They seem to like them.
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Does Israel get peace with its neighbors? Does it, I mean, we're in a moment of maximum contention in the Middle East, it looks like. Well, I think I would put it this way.
Israel by itself is an accident waiting to happen. It's a small country.
It has a superb army, a much weaker intelligence system than it should have. And even more importantly than that, one mistake by Israel, one mistake

can threaten its existence.

Israel is a weaker intel

infrastructure than...

It failed to

identify, in 1973,

the buildup of

Syrian tanks and Egyptian

tanks in plain sight

and misinterpreted them as an exercise. In fact, the KMW almost overran Israel.
Hamas is a small terrorist organization. These Israelis know all about it.
I would assume that by now Hamas had been penetrated by Israeli agents so they would know it. But the best part was these guys were building little bridges over a waterway.
And Israeli intelligence didn't wonder what the hell they were doing. What was that? It was a complete break.
The Israelis published a report on it, finally. Finally fired the head of intelligence and everything.
It was a massive, major Israeli intelligence failure. That war should never have been allowed to start.
But then the Israelis also followed this very strange strategy. They started bombing Hamas territory.
It failed to end them. So they bombed them again.
Failed to end them. So they had been repeating the same thing without succeeding, hoping for a different outcome each time they do it.

So I think Israel, I'm Jewish and I really care about it,

really needs a new strategic relationship.

The Saudis are prepared to have the relationship.

Now, if Turkey and Saudi Arabia want Hamas to go away,

it will go away very fast.

So far, Saudis have not had any motivation to do it.

But you notice how Qatar,

which is a very important, tiny country,

has become the main negotiating tool.

Yes.

Both for the Russians and the Americans.

Notice that they're using the same tool.

I think the Saudis have had it.

The Turks have certainly had it.

And they themselves are threatened by Iran.

Saudi Arabia is very close to Iran.

The Turks are wondering.

The U.S. has deployed a major bomber force in certain areas that are clearly intended to take out the Iranian nuclear capability but frankly we want missile we're telling the Iranians we're planning carpet bombing guys we had enough and the Russians are pretty much masked too so the Russians are doing a lot of negotiating but they're doing it through the same agency you will as the Americans are gutter meets with the Iranians yes for the Russians and the Americans so when you you spend your life if you don't have a life like I life, you know, I spend my entire time looking at these little things.
You notice gutter is being used by the Russians and the Americans to talk to the Iranians. That's a wonderful thing.
What is that? Well, the Iranians don't want to talk directly to Americans or Russians. Okay.
They'll talk to the Gutter's.

So the Americans go to Gutter,

they tell the Gutteries what to tell

the Iranians, and they come back.

Russia had some

message to deliver to Iran.

I don't know what it was.

They went to Qatar and told them to deliver it.

So

if you're talking about unknown collaboration,

here it is.

Qatar knows what the Americans are saying

and they know what the Russians are saying.

Therefore, you must assume

that the Russians know what the Americans are saying

and the Americans know what the Russians are saying.

So the question of Iran,

just because they both went to Qatar to be the intermediary, I'm saying they're collaborating. And they are.
It's very difficult for Trump to be too close to the Russians because there is much anti-Russian feeling in the United States. It's very difficult for Putin to be collaborating with the Americans because there's much anti-American feeling in Russia.
So each of them are trying very hard not to appear too close. Occasionally threats are exchanged, pro-phoma, but they're not of any substance, really.
And I think we're already working more closely with the Russians on many matters. I think the Ukrainian war is over.
I don't think the Russians, having failed miserably in the first war, would try it again. You know, hoping for a different outcome.
I mean, look, they attacked them for three years. And look what they have to show for it.
Yeah. Tiny stretch of Eastern Ukraine.
You spent many, many years at Stratfor. And Stratfor is often described as like a private intel agency.
I don't know if that's fair or not. Sounds fair.
What's your view of the role of American intel agencies in the world?

Can Donald Trump actually run the country without reforming them?

How powerful are they?

It's not that they're powerful.

They're an internal bureaucracy.

Very complex.

Made more complex for the fact security is necessary, so the one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, and everything else. The idea that you could stage a conspiracy within the CIA against the United States is hilarious.
These guys couldn't stage a conspiracy against each other. The institutional structure is a federal institution.

It's developed that way.

The problem is not their power.

How deeply do they see?

I think the field operators are excellent.

I think the Russian FSB is outstanding.

Does the intelligence get processed properly

to get to the people who need to act on it? And what happens in intelligence agencies, they become social security conscious that they don't even want the president to know. Not because they're plotting conspiracy or anything like that.
That's nonsense. It's simply that security becomes a religion.
Need to know is something that's managed by the intelligence community. Their terror is they're going to lose agents or capabilities because some idiot is going to tell their brother-in-law what was said.
And I think that's the problem with the agencies. It's not that they're involved in a conspiracy.
I don't know how many committees they'd have to have to have a true conspiracy. The problem is that intelligence has to be classified, compartmentalized, limited.
And the ability even of the head of the CIA to know all of everything that they know is first a mental problem. It's a lot to know.
And you can say we had the intelligence, but where was it buried? And how has it gotten rid of? It was security. The problem is inherent in intelligence, which is that unless you have a small organization of people you trust completely, a large organization of people on different levels of security, the flow of information is very hard.
And the person who might be able to make sense of it may be isn't clear to have it. So the inefficiency that you see in the federal department exists in the CIA as well.
how do you reform an intelligence agency is very hard because you need that security. You need that compartmentalization.
You need to protect your sources. You need to protect your satellites.
You can't spread it around. And so what the British always had was a very small intelligence agency.

Their view was with MI to be very limited in the capabilities they had,

but very smart in making sure the information got to the people who had to have it.

And it was always odd that of the five I's,

the five intelligences share everything, which is a very important entity.

Thank you. and it was always odd that of the five eyes, the five intelligences share everything, which is a very important entity.
It's Britain, it's the United States, it's Canada, I guess they're still playing. It's Australia, it's New Zealand.
It might be called the English-speaking world, but we wouldn't call it that. Sometimes they laterally trust each other at that level more than it trust the upstairs and downstairs so it's a very that i mean that describes a kind of a government actually that exists independent from the governments it supposedly serves well the problem is the Department of Education was supposed to serve education.
Right. I don't know who it serves.
Health and Human Services. The problem is not a CIA problem.
The problem is that the federal government grew vast during World War II to manage it, if needed to, grew vaster still by trying to micromanage America. And they're very good people in the government.
It's not to question that. And they did the same thing with CIA.
It started as a very small organization called the OSS with a bunch of guys from Harvard and Yale swooning around. And it grew into a massive entity.
in that massive entity information is fragmented the key to since I was an analyst I'll say the key to the CIA's analysis collection is nice but it's worth nothing until it's analyzed if all the analysts can't see the information, for example, I spotted the Russians speaking to Qatar and the Americans speaking to Qatar. Well, it was in your time, so what the hell? But can someone recognize it? Well, when you're under such constraints of what you can see and what you can think and so on, you're just another federal agency.
So it's not something unique. It's not a government.
It couldn't govern anything. It isn't even a conspiracy.
It couldn't organize one. The problem with the CIA is the same thing as the problem with the other agencies.
And it's very easy to say, you know, if you want to say that this idiotic act was clearly planned by someone, it had to be the CIA. Now, they're idiotic things planned by the CIA.
Also, wonderful accomplishments. But conspiracy is a very hard thing to keep quiet, especially if you need a lot of people.
So it's not a government. It's a federal bureaucracy, and it needs reforming.
And reforming the CIA is going to be a very complicated thing because you have to maintain security. Yes.
And firing a whole bunch of people, doing the Elon Musk routine. Holy smoke.
can you imagine all the irritated people that now have all sorts of intelligence? And the CIA is not in danger of being shut down or even its budget examined. Like we have no idea what the CIA budget is, of course.
And everyone I know who's, you know, on say the intel committee is a loyal servant of the CIA, so we're nowhere near anything like that. But my last question is kind of a bigger question.
Do you think, as a student of history, that it's possible to wind down an empire without great suffering and humiliation? Can you just sort of gradually pull back? It's a very difficult thing to do because your own population takes pride in being Roman. Yeah.
And our population doesn't take pride in being the dominant power in the world. There's something unique and wonderful, I'll say that, about the United States.
I say this as immigrant, you know, having known the other. We are the only nation that didn't take absolute pride in making war in Iraq and trying to make it an American colony.
We're fighting the Russians. We are proud of our country, and our country is large enough to hold our contentment.
We're a continent. We're a vast continent in which we can live in peace and happiness.
And the World War I we didn't want to be in because we didn't want to be involved, and we didn't want to be in World War II. I know.
And we really didn't want to be in the Cold War. No.
The fact is that I served in Germany and I didn't like it. I liked the Netherlands.
That was fun. But Germany, no.
But we stood at the Fulda Gap, we said. Well, I certainly didn't want to stand at the Fulda G gap.
I didn't really care about the Germans much myself. I was happy to come home.
So I think in the United States, the wish has always been that the Cold War be over, that we could stop worrying about Belgium or the Congo. For God's sakes, Vietnam, who cares?

Yeah.

So I think unlike, we're not an empire, we're a republic.

And an empire, Britain was an empire.

It was a monarchy.

And it's governed that way.

Yes.

But we take no pride. We took pride in winning world war ii sure but we took no pride in the korean war we took no pride in the vietnam war the best we could say is we had to do it and having all my children serving in the military i can also say that my son was in the Air Force and so on and so forth.
It was not a pleasant thing. So where in Britain being, you know, a general in the army was a matter of pride or serving as a private was, here it was a duty.
But we'd'd much rather come home and so i don't think we'll have that problem we have the ocean protecting us the atlantic and the pacific we have canada we should be nice to canada you know it's a nice place uh we have mexico to the south all right all right we're a fortress we don't need the rest of the world rome had to got conquered the rest to the south. All right.
All right. We're a fortress.

We don't need the rest of the world.

Rome had to conquer the rest of the world.

The Byzantine Empire had to conquer as much as it could.

We don't have to conquer anything.

I don't think we'll have any trouble withdrawing our troops

from the miserable third world countries we deployed them in.

So if we had to,

I think we're one of the few empires that really didn't want to be one. We did okay.
But if my kids come home and they're well and they're healthy and they get decent careers, I'll be happy. That's the best thing I've heard in a long time.
Church Friedman, thank you very much. Thank you.
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