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

Unstable as things may feel, America isn’t collapsing, says geopolitical forecaster George Friedman. It’s merely going through a predictable and necessary reset. In ten years, we’ll be fine. George Friedman's website: http://geopoliticalfutures.com/ (00:00) Introduction (01:03) Where Will the US Be In 50 Years? (06:08) Spy Satellites and Space Strategy (10:35) Is the Pentagon Lying About China’s Technological Abilities? (20:00) The Storm Before the Calm (28:58) The Fall of American Universities Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Go to https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker and find out how you can get 4 months of ExpressVPN free! MeriwetherFarms: Visit https://MeriwetherFarms.com/Tucker and use code TUCKER25 for 15% off your first order. Jase Medical: Go to https://Jase.com and use code TUCKER at checkout for a discount Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Tucker Carlson?

  You believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years?

• 0:34Speaker 02

  We are dominant in space. Our technology is way ahead of us, but we're modest, deliberately so. We understate our capabilities.

• 0:42Tucker Carlson?

  Feels like, though, there's got to be some hard pivot or something. You know, there's some disaster that resets people's expectations.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  It's called Donald Trump.

• 0:53Tucker Carlson?

  You think that's what it is?

• 0:55Speaker 02

  What I'm saying is he's the wrecking ball that Lincoln was, and the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was, and 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 very different place.

• 1:33Tucker Carlson?

  George, thank you for doing this. So you have made a career of predicting the future, and I think that you've done a better job than anyone I've met in predicting sort of the big picture movements 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?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Well, I think the United States is withdrawing not to isolationism, but to fortress America. It's interesting that the Mexican president called for fortress North America.

• 2:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  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 invade us, no matter if they'd like to now. Mexico can invade us. 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.

• 2:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  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 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 Two, we were terrified that they would conquer Europe. Not because we love 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.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:38Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 3:39Speaker 02

  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 Europeans have had a free ride, and I think that's pretty true. And our commitment is to the defense of the United States. 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 mutual assured destruction and so on.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Next 50 years will be about a much less integrated US with the world. Not isolated, not certainly trading intensely with countries.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  But we have spent the past eighty-five years in constant warfare, small, large, covert, overt. I participated 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 battle, next battles would be fought in space. This sounds strange, but it would have been a strange world if one said the next war in Europe would be fought in the air and that

• 5:18Speaker 02

  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 in the first round. We would be hit, and they would hit. And so there was no war, because we had thirty 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 from each other. First American man in space and first Russian man in space

• 6:00Speaker 02

  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, mutually assured destruction. It was a really neat name for it. Now MAD is assured from 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.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Mad is covered in space and space is full of debris, anti-satellite systems. The Chinese are launching them constantly. We've launched 200 satellites this year. So.

• 6:58Tucker Carlson?

  Communication satellites?

• 7:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yes, absolutely. Well, they're all communication satellites. They're all looking for, you know, climate on the earth. That's what they want to look at. These are all spy satellites going up there and they're looking to 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.

• 7:23Tucker Carlson?

  Huh.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  And 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 level for space.

• 7:52Tucker Carlson?

  Physical materials?

• 7:53Speaker 02

  Physical materials. For example, the lens 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 and canals before that, material science, I think, is the radical innovation based on artificial intelligence having a major component to it.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  And all of that material science is developed for space, for survival of machines in space, particularly in telescopes.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  They were evil to, there's a company called Perithion 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 failed 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 smaller force. We knew where they were coming. And more importantly, we finally put in something called HIMARS, which was they

• 9:31Speaker 02

  could launch six rockets at a time, much better than artillery because explosive forces were great. And when there's 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 are more deeply evolved 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.

• 10:12Tucker Carlson?

  So you believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  We are dominant in space. When we go back to the Cold War, there was a time there was talking about missile gap. You might recall that. There was no missile gap. The U2s went over the place and they spotted all of it. 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 it, but we understate our capabilities and we overstate the Chinese. That's always a good way to get budgets. Uh, you know, we, we are much better at this. We've been, been at it a long time, far longer. And the Russians are third. The Russians are not second. Chinese are second.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  But command of space is now what the command of oceans was. Interesting. And, and you think the Pentagon deliberately overstates Chinese capabilities in order to justify its budgets? The 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's 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.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Elon Musk seems like a, a big player, though, in the... He certainly is. I mean, he very, he's a very smart guy. Maybe he's not likable, but he's a very smart guy. Um, he went into electric cars. And then he went into, along with people like that mayor, you know, the Amazon king, I forget his name, Bezos. He went into rockets. And of course, it was just a hobby. But it emerged into a major business. And it's, they're both major foundations of the Americans' launch program. Because

• 12:41Speaker 02

  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 on the ground and the 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 1950 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

• 13:25Speaker 02

  things that will be integrated into 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 as the social and economic era. Yes. Is at its end. It's played it out, the economic and social thing.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  The social crisis is terrible and it's 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 egalitarianism. He did something else. We stopped asking for equal opportunity and turned to equal outcomes.

• 14:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  And this 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.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  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 no going to go out. And children should not go to school. Well, we have children and if a four or five year old doesn't get to play with other children, he becomes a homicidal maniac.

• 15:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  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. Charlie Buckley ran the Bronx. One day, my father, who had finally bought a car, had 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 to Emil.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Carrier, you know, messenger's on the way to house with the check. But you remember, you vote for me, your wife votes for me, your children vote for me.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And there was a way to petition the government. Remember, the Constitution guarantees us the right to petition the government.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  The party bosses, as corrupt as they were, and they are certainly corrupt, were our channel to the government. They were our channel to corporations.

• 16:55Tucker Carlson?

  Smart. Yes.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  But they were taken out, and they were replaced by technocrats.

• 17:01Tucker Carlson?

  Can I just ask you a question? So Charlie Buckley, the war boss in the Bronx, actually got the insurance company to pay the claim to your dad?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  The insurance company was going to mess with Charlie Buckley.

• 17:12Tucker Carlson?

  That's amazing.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  But it was a place where you could petition the government. With the rise of technocracy, there was no way to petition the government.

• 17:21Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  So I didn't get Medicare, the Medicaid that I'm supposed to get, whatever it is. Because I had a good insurance policy. I didn't want to go to government insurance policy. They fined 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 I 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.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  When the question on integration came up, the head of the Supreme Court was Warren, was...

• 18:10Tucker Carlson?

  Warren Burger.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Warren Burger. And Warren Burger knew that he had to have an absolute unit, unanimity on desegregation. And since he'd been a politician, not a lawyer, he bought 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. And 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 hangars of both landing craft and everything, these were experts.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  And the federal government fell in love with expertise, which is a very important thing to have.

• 18:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  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...

• 19:15Speaker 02

  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."

• 19:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  You know, what has a disease is going to have to happen, but you can't do this. But Fauci as a doctor, well, this is what doctor says, stay home. He doesn't tell you what to do about your job, that you're going to lose all your money.

• 19:58Tucker Carlson?

  It's not his concern.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  That's not his concern. That's the problem. The problem is 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, 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

• 20:42Speaker 02

  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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• 24:17Tucker Carlson?

  So typically released in my mind, the storm entails war? That 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?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Well, we went through a global conflict. It was called the Cold War. And there were a lot of casualties on all sides.

• 24:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  We didn't, it wasn't a war like World War Two or World War One, but it was an intense war. There was Vietnam, there was Korea.

• 24:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  There was Iraq, all of these, Afghanistan, started with the Russian invasion.

• 25:04Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 25:26Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  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 profitably happy.

• 25:45Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  So there was a time when we really cared what happened in the Congo. Back in the sixties, they supported Patrice Lumumba, we supported Moïse Chambé. Who cares what happens to the Congo? I don't want to say anything terrible about the Congo, but it's not our problem.

• 26:04Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  And everything was our problem. And our entire financial system was based on the two things. One, imbalance 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. China did not support the Russians in the Great Wall.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  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 is built breaking guardrails, rules. It was called the revolution.

• 27:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  That's how he believed it. And every fifty years, socially economically, every eighty 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 old regime, the old regime, if you will, and the emerging regime. And Roosevelt was considered dictator, was charged with being dictator. Roosevelt was said by Walter Lippmann, a very renowned person, the least.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Least capable president in our history. Okay. And so Jackson was and all of these were. So he may well have been incompetent. It's maybe the staff who supported it. It doesn't matter. But the United States is a great country. Because unlike European countries, it reinvents itself. The war comes, the war goes, and we change with it. The Europeans fundamentally stay the same. So does China.

• 28:23Tucker Carlson?

  How is the US changing now?

• 28:26Speaker 02

  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 upmoded.

• 28:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Who see no need not to go into Ukraine.

• 29:40Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Who's, but Biden saw no need to go into Ukraine. So it's not, we can't base this just on personalities. 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. Every president is an egomaniac. He has to be. To believe you can be the president of the United States.

• 30:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  You have to have an ego. The difference between Trump and everybody else is he doesn't hide it.

• 30:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  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 he behaved. We strutted around, we threatened people. We didn't mean it. We had a fistfight. 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 how he behaves this way.

• 30:52Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  For me?

• 30:54Tucker Carlson?

  The Wasps don't like Trump at all.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Hey, I remember Dominic, my buddy Dominic in Springfield Gardens.

• 30:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  He was the twin to Trump.

• 31:05Tucker Carlson?

  Was he successful?

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, he's an accountant down in Long Island.

• 31:11Tucker Carlson?

  So, you're, I think you're saying that someone like Trump was inevitable in this moment?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  He didn't have that dispersonality.

• 31:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  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 his own way. 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'd be a terrible place in the world.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  But presidents craft themselves to 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, who as president tried 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, we'll try this one.

• 32:46Tucker Carlson?

  Do you think that there needs to be a war or will be a war between the United States and China to prove dominance?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  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. Takes about 10, 15 hours for a landing craft to reach Taiwan from China.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  By 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 lost. So, China has bluffed an inside strait beautifully.

• 34:24Tucker Carlson?

  So, it's interesting, because I think that 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.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we thought about the Russians, the Germans, the Japanese, everybody. One of our great powers is overestimate our enemy. If we overestimate our enemy, it's enormous what we can do.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  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?

• 35:06Tucker Carlson?

  Of 1973?

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wrecked the American economy.

• 35:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  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 any money, financial crisis doesn't bother me. To me, the essential weakness we had with the Chinese is we created China.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  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 decides it 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.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  But one of the reasons to have a domestic-based economy is you're secure nationally.

• 36:43Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  You're not depending. And during the last period, remember that...

• 36:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 37:28Tucker Carlson?

  But the Chinese haven't moved.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Chinese have nowhere to move. 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 cellphones 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.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  And two was to get cheaper products. And we concentrated excessively on bringing China into dependency on 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, that we... What if they have coup d'etat? 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.

• 38:59Tucker Carlson?

  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...

• 39:16Tucker Carlson?

  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.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  If you become too dependent on exports.

• 40:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  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 untrammelled 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

• 40:43Speaker 02

  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 failure, demonstrated failure of the Russians to take Ukraine. They should have done it in a week if they were, we were afraid of. That's when it ended. But nobody rethought, because, you know, 10 years is not that much of a timeframe, three years,

• 41:22Speaker 02

  whatever. And we are now facing the fact of how exposed we've become and how rational is the system now. It wasn't rational 10 years ago. It was pretty intensely this way. But given that a nation is not just an economy, it is security. The national security consideration outweighed for the moment the economic consideration, the financial consideration. At this point, it has to be re-engineered. So I look at history in two ways. One, there is the path that it's going to take, that has to take.

• 42:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Then this is 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 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, you know, the opposition is formed. And then you moderate and you shift and you do politics domestically. We haven't seen him do that yet. Now the question will become an engineering one. One, does he see another way?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  And two, frankly, 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 a hundred days. And I think we have seven more days left for the hundred days. And we're about at the same stage. But Americans have no sense of history. They don't ever say, "Oh, we've seen this before."

• 43:17Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  Because we didn't. We weren't alive then.

• 43:19Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  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 where they are." I'm not. So we don't remember that we've done this before.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  So it took a bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for me to realize this.

• 43:43Tucker Carlson?

  A bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania?

• 43:45Speaker 02

  I was teaching at a college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and also the US Army War College at the same time. And I went out drinking with some colonels who drink well. And, you know, they were moaning and complaining and all sorts of things about what America has become. This was back in the seventies. It was, you know, what the economy has become. The troops under us are not reliable and what's... It was terrible. And I was sitting there wondering, because I was having a fine time in my life. I didn't see it 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,

• 44:29Speaker 02

  and the misery that these men dedicated to their country felt. And I had a choice between picking up the waitress

• 44:39Speaker 02

  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 seventies, 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 fifty years. Every fifty years, we have a social and economic crisis. Last one being Reagan, when he came in on

• 45:15Speaker 02

  after the seventies. And every eighty years, we have an institutional crisis. We founded a country, eighty 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. Eighty years after that, we invent the federal government. That was World War II. So it's about that time.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  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 in making sensible solutions, but were trapped.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:32Tucker Carlson?

  You think so?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. You could forget the profession where 50% of the people at one point were unemployed. You can forget things.

• 46:41Tucker Carlson?

  You probably have no idea where the meat that you eat comes from. Do you want to know? You should know. The overwhelming likelihood is that it passed through a massive industrial processing plant, possibly, probably owned by a foreign corporation. It's foreign meat. If that's the case, then you have no way of knowing where the animal grew up, how it was raised, what it ate, what chemicals big food pumped into it to increase its profits, what kind of drugs it was injected with. That's all kept secret, meaning you can never really know what you're eating. That's disgusting. Merriweather Farms is a far better option. It's totally straightforward. Unlike the corporate competition, Merriweather Farms controls its entire operation, the

• 47:25Tucker Carlson?

  pasture on which the cattle graze, the facility where the meat is packaged in America, in Wyoming, across the Mountain West. The cattle are raised without hormones, without antibiotics, any other additives. Clean, American beef. They'll ship it straight to your door, and it's delicious. We eat it here, a lot of it. So go to meriwetherfarms.com/tucker and use the code TUCKER25 for 15% off your first order. You can also save on a monthly subscription if you sign up now. That's meriwetherfarms.com/tucker. You will love it. It's excellent.

• 47:58Speaker 00

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• 48:28Speaker 04

  Now for a quick message from Anthropic, the team behind Claude, the AI built for businesses. Customers count on their bank, and banks count on their most important systems. Now those systems count on Claude, and nine of the Fortune 10 companies use it for critical work. See why leading companies trust Claude at claude.ai/span.

• 48:52Tucker Carlson?

  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.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  It's called Donald Trump.

• 49:06Tucker Carlson?

  You think that's what it is?

• 49:08Speaker 02

  What I'm saying is, whether he planned it or just is it, he's the man of the moment. He's the wrecking ball that Lincoln was, and the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was and Jackson was.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  And he's shifting the country by emphasizing two things. One, the world culture wars are untenable.

• 49:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  Secondly, you can't keep inventing classes.

• 49:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Second, equal opportunity is not equal outcome.

• 49:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  So as Warren, the universities are, I was a university professor for a number of years, and I'm happy to see them being wrecked. Yeah. I was not happy there. Um, but the, 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 have massive unemployment if you do this. Okay.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  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 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,

• 51:10Speaker 02

  but would be doing about the same thing. And Roosevelt set the stage with the Hundred Days. And what is now happening is the opposition is inevitably forming because we're a democracy and no one's a king. And now we're going to find out more about Donald Trump and his political acumen. And we'll see. But we are at a stage that was predictable and a stage that's good. Because any country that can reset, invent itself after 50 years, just by having a few years of horrible crisis, it's wonderful.

• 51:53Speaker 02

  Look at how we adjusted ourselves after World War II to being a world power. And we're comfortable with it for decades and built our economy on that.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  When you take a look at the way we handle it after the Civil War, what other country had a civil war? It came back to fairly decent, you know, okay, you know, we had it. We re-engineered slavery through that. It 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 for your leave 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

• 52:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:03Tucker Carlson?

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

• 53:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:41Tucker Carlson?

  Who won?

• 53:42Speaker 02

  My mother. But it was... We are, and 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.

• 54:01Tucker Carlson?

  Are you concerned that the United States will be sucked into a global conflict in the next three or four years, either in Eastern Europe, Middle East, or Asia?

• 54:12Speaker 02

  I think not because there is no power in the world that can still challenge the United States.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  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 held a small sliver of it. And that goes in keeping with what I used to think. It was taught by a man called Andy Marshall, who's did off 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.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  They're 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.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  They took their bearings for World War II, the mass attack by infantry, backed by armor and artillery.

• 55:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 55:54Speaker 02

  And they didn't understand that that no longer functioned. The massing of troops is very, very dangerous, and that there has to be a different model of warfare. So they attacked Ukraine as if this was 1941, and they're at war. And the Ukrainians were very agile because they had great intelligence. When the president said, "We're not going to give you intelligence anymore for a day", that time, the intelligence he was talking about was intelligence with 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.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  So that was a really serious threat.

• 56:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 56:40Speaker 02

  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, is 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 that we have another global power.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  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 greater lives.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  This is an American system when we fight wars. And I suspect that one of the things that Trump is trying to engineer with Putin is the 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, as you will, and liberals who want to become integrated. And Putin is, look, Putin attacked Ukraine. His forces were unable to penetrate.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  So it took mercenary army, the Wagner Group, to join them. Now, the army and the Wagner Group didn't like each other. So the Russian army didn't give them artillery shells. So after a while, the Wagner Group came back and tried to do coup d'etat in Moscow. Now tragically, they all died in an airplane crash. Couldn't, my heart goes out to them. But when you take a look at the execution of the war, as it actually was, it was a cluster something. Yeah, it was terribly executed and politically almost suicidal for Putin.

• 59:30Speaker 02

  So Putin's opposition, Putin had 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 Japanese.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  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 war.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  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. Uh, I, 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 with the highest price. Eventually you buy the house.

• 1:01:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  But first there's drama. Your wife cries. These things happen.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  I think this is what he's, he's doing. He's a good negotiator. He slammed sanctions on, having no intention of keeping them there. You would be stupid. Uh, I think he overreached anyway, but he pulled back. Kept him only on China. And with the Russians, he's trying to give Putin maneuvering room. For one thing, we're not going to go to war in Ukraine. It's not going to happen, but it's a threat that he has. So if you open to the war again, you don't know what we're going to do. So we deployed 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.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  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't appear to be capitulated in the United States, which he's going to do.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  But it 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 for this. And it's, that's inevitable. But I think he has an understanding of the situation just because he's negotiated with bankrupt people.

• 1:03:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  And when you have a bankrupt person, be kind.

• 1:03:16Tucker Carlson?

  What happens in the Middle East?

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  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 they get together, have beer and work this out. But they pick Riyadh.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  They'll just pay it. So money talks and other things walk in.

• 1:04:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  The Middle East. So I think what is thought of is, look, we've been fighting in the Middle East for I don't know how many years. My daughter was a major in Iraq. And, you know, it was very bad. And I was mildly involved in Afghanistan. And this was ridiculous. We're fighting over a place neither of us really care about. Iran, the Russians are more afraid of Iran than we are. Remember the Russian opera house that blew up? A terrorist attack? So we have equal interests. We share intelligence on those things with Russians. So it's not that, oh yeah, we let them know when we've seen something that might concern them.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  They let us know. There's collaboration. But the problem of the Middle East is this.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  There are really rich people who are really afraid of a bunch of mafiosos, which are Hamas. Hamas is at the same time an enemy of Israel and a shakedown artist. Who's extracting money from many countries. The theory, I think, between the Russians and the Americans is if we bring the Saudis into deal and back them suitable and make them responsible for the region, the Saudis have nothing against Israel, they couldn't care less. Okay, the Saudis are much more interested in the states on the Gulf, you know, Emirates, Qatar, these really wealthy places where they're interested in.

• 1:05:48Speaker 02

  And the idea that Russia or the United States is going to pacify the Middle East is insane. There are two countries that can do it. One is Saudi Arabia, the other is Turkey. If Turkey and Saudi Arabia are brought together with some encouragement from the Americans and Russians, it's their problem. And the Turks have bad relations with anyone, everyone, and 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.

• 1:06:33Speaker 02

  Yes. Latin America, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, all of these things were at this. If that stops, and it's not miraculous, the Japanese and the Americans became allies. And if the Russians and the Americans say, "Look, we want to make money, we want to have decent lives, and we really don't care about the Middle East," and decide to empower, if you will, countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to handle it, but we certainly don't want another Middle Eastern war. The Iraqi war was really bad. Especially now there are cell phones and our daughter could call us every night. This was happening.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  It was bad, you know, going away in World War II and you don't see your sons. Exactly. Three 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.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  But we have to find new necessities. So I think a Russian American Anton changes the way Africa operates, changes the way Middle East operates, changes the way Asia operates. And you're already seeing new players emerging. India is exploding. Okay. Many of the European countries, the smaller ones like Poland, are developing marvelously.

• 1:07:59Tucker Carlson?

  The manufacturing power of Europe now.

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so new powers are emerging and of course 50 years will be raging at each other again. And undoubtedly there'll be wars because humans have wars. They seem to like them. History goes on.

• 1:08:16Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:08:59Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  Now for a quick message from Anthropic, the team behind Claude, the AI built for businesses. Customers count on their bank, and banks count on their most important systems. Now those systems count on Claude, and nine of the Fortune 10 companies use it for critical work. See why leading companies trust Claude at claude.ai/span.

• 1:10:31Tucker Carlson?

  Does Israel get peace with its neighbors? Does it? I mean, we're at a moment of maximum contention in the Middle East, it looks like.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  But I think, I will 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 important than that, one mistake by Israel, one mistake, can threaten its existence.

• 1:11:00Tucker Carlson?

  Israel's weaker intel infrastructure than...

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  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, it became war and almost overran Israel. Hamas is a small terrorist organization. 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.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Over a waterway. And Israeli intelligence didn't wonder what the hell they were doing?

• 1:11:43Tucker Carlson?

  Well, what was that?

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  It was a complete break. The Israelis published a report on it and finally, finally fired the head of intelligence, 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 end. 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.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Both for the Russians and the Americans, notice that they're using the same tool. I, 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 US 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.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  We had enough. And the Russians are pretty much mass too. So the Russians are doing a lot of negotiating. But they're doing it through the same agency as the Americans are. Gutter meets with Iranians.

• 1:13:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:13:47Speaker 02

  For the Russians and the Americans. So when you spend your life, if you don't have a life, like I don't have a 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 Iranians. Now, that's a wonderful thing.

• 1:14:06Tucker Carlson?

  What is that?

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  Well, the Iranians don't want to talk directly to Americans or Russians. Okay, they'll talk to the gutters. So the Americans go to Gutter, they tell the Gutter 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. Gutter 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.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  So the question Iran, just because they both went to Gutter 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 forma.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  But they're not of any substance, really. And I think we're already working more closely with 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.

• 1:15:53Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Tiny slits stretch of Eastern Ukraine.

• 1:15:57Tucker Carlson?

  You spent, you know, 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?

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  It's not that they're powerful. They're an internal bureaucracy, very complex. Made more complex by the fact that security is necessary, so that 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. They, it's the institutional structure. It is a federal institution. It's developed that way. The problem is not their power, how deeply they see. I think the field operatives are excellent. I think the Russian FSB is outstanding.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  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 so security conscious, 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.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  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 idiots are going to tell their brother-in-law. Yeah. 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

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  is first, they have mental problem, it's a lot to know. And we had, you can say, we had the intelligence, but where was it buried? And how has it gotten that up for 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, maybe isn't clear to have it.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  So you have the inefficiency that you see in federal department exists in the CIA as well. Now, how do you reform intelligence agencies 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.

• 1:19:50Speaker 02

  And it was always odd that of the five eyes, the five intelligences ensure 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 latterly trust each other at that level, more than it trusts the upstairs and downstairs. So it's a very strange thing.

• 1:20:25Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that, I mean, that describes a kind of a government, actually, that exists independent from the governments it supposedly serves.

• 1:20:34Speaker 02

  Well, the problem is, the Department of Education was supposed to serve education.

• 1:20:39Tucker Carlson?

  Right, no.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  I don't know what it serves. Health and Human Services or something. The problem is not a CIA problem. The problem is that the federal government grew vast during World War II to manage it, if it 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 screwing around. And it grew into a massive entity. And in that massive entity, information is fragmented.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:21:31Tucker Carlson?

  Right. What is it?

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  If all the analysts can't see the information. So, 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, 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, it isn't even a conspiracy. It couldn't organize one.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  The problem with the CIA is the same thing as the problem with their 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, there are 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.

• 1:22:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  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?

• 1:23:00Tucker Carlson?

  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 I don't, 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?

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  It's a very difficult thing to do. Because your own population takes pride in being Roman.

• 1:23:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  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 there's this immigrant, you know, having known the other.

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  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 continent. 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.

• 1:24:36Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  And we really didn't want to be in the Cold War.

• 1:24:39Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  The fact is that I served in Germany and I didn't like it. I liked 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 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?

• 1:25:17Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  So I think unlike, we're not an empire, we're a republic. An empire... Britain was an empire. It was monarchy and it was governed that way.

• 1:25:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  But we take no pride. We took pride in winning World War II.

• 1:25:39Tucker Carlson?

  Sure.

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  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 we're, in Britain, being...

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  You know, a general in the army was a matter of pride or serving is private was here was a duty, but we'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. 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 conquer the rest of the world. The Byzantine Empire had to conquer as much as it could. We'd have to conquer anything. I don't think we'll have any trouble withdrawing our troops

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  from the miserable third world countries we deploy 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.

• 1:27:08Tucker Carlson?

  That's the best thing I've heard in a long time. George Friedman, thank you very much.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:27:17Speaker 05

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