The Tucker Carlson Show - April 23, 2025


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

Topics
space dominance material science dominance satellites emergence technology crisis data brokers threats privacy universities changing
Hosted by
Tucker Carlson
Mentioned
Putin Donald Trump Theodore Roosevelt Tucker Charlie Buckley Jackson Warren Burger Ronald Reagan George Orwell Eisenhower Stratfor Biden Point S. Does Point S. Go Patrice Lubumba Walter Lippmann Abraham Lincoln Roger Marshall Andy Marshall Larry Arnn and 9 more
The Pentagon Didn’t Fire Dan Caldwell Over Leaks. They Fired Him for Opposing War With Iran. Patrick Lancaster From the Frontlines of Ukraine⧸Russia War： Kamikaze Drones & Attacks on Christians

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 27 minutes

Words per minute

146.53

Word count

12,768

Sentence count

1,269

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

17

sentences flagged

Hate speech

75

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with George Foreword by George Mason University Professor of Political Science, George W. Mason is a world-renowned political scientist, historian, and author. He has been a regular contributor to the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal, and is a frequent guest on CNN and NPR. George is a professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the author of several books, including "The Next 50 Years: A History of the United States in the Next Fifty Years" and "The Future of the U.S. in 50 Years."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years?
00:00:04.040 We are dominant in space.
00:00:05.720 Our technology is way ahead of us, but we're modest, deliberately so.
00:00:09.760 We understate our capabilities.
00:00:12.140 Feels like, though, there's got to be some hard pivot or something.
00:00:18.520 You know, there's some disaster that resets people's expectations.
00:00:22.080 It's called Donald Trump.
00:00:23.520 I think that's what it is.
00:00:25.000 What I'm saying is he's the wrecking ball that Lincoln was and the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was and Jackson was. 0.84
00:00:31.600 He's shifting the country.
00:00:33.860 We have these incredible problems.
00:00:35.680 I wrote a book called The Storm Before the Calm.
00:00:37.900 We're in that storm.
00:00:39.240 And after the storm, we enter a very different place.
00:00:55.000 George, thank you for doing this.
00:01:04.320 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.
00:01:16.260 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.
00:01:26.640 Where do you think the United States will be in 50 years?
00:01:30.040 Well, I think the United States is withdrawing not to isolationism, but to Fortress America.
00:01:36.120 It's interesting that the Mexican president called for Fortress North America.
00:01:40.420 Yes.
00:01:40.900 And it was a very wise move.
00:01:42.200 We were engaged, forced to be engaged in the wars because the United States cannot be invaded.
00:01:50.340 Canada can't evade us, no matter if they'd like to now.
00:01:53.320 Mexico can't evade us. 0.90
00:01:55.060 It's the command of the sea that's our defense.
00:01:58.720 When the Germans started U-boats in the First World War, sinking Lusitania.
00:02:05.180 Yes.
00:02:05.560 That's when we invaded, intervened.
00:02:07.440 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.
00:02:16.500 When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, that's where we're agitated.
00:02:19.820 So we're a unique country, enormously wealthy, and immune from attack except from the sea.
00:02:25.880 So our basic strategy has to be command of the sea.
00:02:29.820 Now, when the Russians ended World War II, we were terrified that they would conquer Europe.
00:02:36.540 Not because we love the Europeans, but because what if they had control of the Atlantic ports in France?
00:02:43.320 What would the Russian Navy do?
00:02:44.720 So we built a forward strategy.
00:02:48.340 Instead of waiting for that to happen, we built NATO.
00:02:52.340 And NATO existed primarily to block the Russian entry into the Atlantic.
00:03:00.620 We had to rebuild Europe in order to make it viable.
00:03:04.520 And they lost their empire.
00:03:06.560 And that became the Third World, officially. 0.90
00:03:08.300 And we fought constantly with the Russians, hand-to-hand combat sort of covert operations, trying to block them. 0.53
00:03:17.640 And that's for the last 80 years what we did.
00:03:21.460 Well, Russia proved in Ukraine that it is not going to be able to occupy Ukraine.
00:03:25.960 It can't occupy Europe.
00:03:28.020 And the Europeans have had a free ride, and I think that's pretty true. 1.00
00:03:32.420 And our commitment is to the defense of the United States.
00:03:36.080 The major danger to the United States is, of course, nuclear war.
00:03:41.980 And that battle is fought in space.
00:03:45.120 Satellites, sensing, launches, being able to do mad, mutually assured destruction, and so on.
00:03:52.320 The next 50 years will be about a much less integrated U.S. with the world.
00:03:58.720 Not isolated, not certainly trading intensely with countries.
00:04:02.820 But we have spent the past 85 years in constant warfare.
00:04:09.260 Small, large, covert, overt.
00:04:12.780 I participate in some of that, and it was exhausting.
00:04:16.700 So the country really doesn't have to do that.
00:04:20.860 So what I see happening is two things.
00:04:23.160 One, the United States taking on a role it has for most of its history.
00:04:26.940 As a country, that is self-sustaining, highly trading, involved in the world, certainly on alert with the great military.
00:04:37.340 But the next battles will be fought in space.
00:04:40.620 This sounds strange, but it would have been a strange world if we wanted to say the next war in Europe would be fought in the air,
00:04:46.800 and that nuclear weapons would arise.
00:04:51.620 We were protected from nuclear war by mutually assured destruction.
00:04:56.460 It was the one war in which the leaders themselves would be killed on the first round.
00:05:00.640 We would hit, and they would hit.
00:05:03.360 And so there was no war, because we had 30 minutes warning.
00:05:06.020 Because we had radars, and after the U-2 was shot down, and we were kind of spying on the Russians, 0.72
00:05:14.540 they were spying in other ways, we launched satellites.
00:05:19.640 Remember, the first American satellite and the first American Russian satellite were launched a month for each other.
00:05:26.240 First American man in space and the first Russian man in space launched weeks apart.
00:05:32.380 So I always wondered, and I don't know, that there was a kind of collaboration between the Russians and Americans
00:05:39.140 to maintain MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction.
00:05:42.500 It was a really neat name for it.
00:05:45.720 Now MAD is assured from space.
00:05:50.060 Satellites are flying there.
00:05:51.960 Satellites, one, blocked the Russians in Ukraine.
00:05:55.760 American satellites could see small units down a meter level resolution.
00:06:00.280 And we put in things like HIMARS, these missile systems that could, with precision, hit them.
00:06:09.160 So now tactical war is governed from space.
00:06:13.360 MAD is covered from space.
00:06:16.060 And space is full of debris, anti-satellite systems.
00:06:20.140 The Chinese are launching them constantly. 0.99
00:06:22.480 We've launched 200 satellites this year.
00:06:25.480 So, communication satellites?
00:06:30.260 Military satellites?
00:06:30.780 Oh yes, absolutely.
00:06:31.280 Well, they're all communication satellites.
00:06:32.720 They're all looking for, you know, climbing on the Earth.
00:06:37.080 That's what they want to look at.
00:06:38.500 These are all spy satellites going up there.
00:06:41.360 And they're looking at the Earth, and they're maneuvering around each other.
00:06:44.380 And one of the things the American public has to understand is the importance of space as a strategic facility.
00:06:53.320 And in due course, it'll emerge.
00:06:56.680 But the next 50 years, the Americans are going to be, I think, a very golden age.
00:07:02.120 New technologies are coming.
00:07:03.840 Every age we have, every cycle we have is built.
00:07:06.880 The last one was built on the automobile, transforming it.
00:07:10.380 Now, it is built not so much on artificial intelligence, in my mind, but on material science.
00:07:17.620 We are crafting new materials at molecular level for space.
00:07:22.360 Physical materials?
00:07:23.240 Physical materials.
00:07:24.080 For example, lenses on satellites can see things that glass can't show them.
00:07:29.520 They have acuity that can see a platoon operating.
00:07:33.640 And when you reach that point, there's also massive changes in medicine.
00:07:40.720 We're able to re-engineer genes, in fact.
00:07:44.880 So, it's in the first stages, but not in a primitive stage.
00:07:49.040 So, just as the automobile changed our life and the railroad changed our life previously and canals before that,
00:07:55.980 material science, I think, is the radical innovation based on artificial intelligence having a major component to it.
00:08:03.640 And all of that material science has developed for space, for survival of machines in space, particularly in telescopes.
00:08:16.000 They were able to, there's a company called Prophetion that's put solar systems on satellites so they can survive and energize the satellites to maneuver.
00:08:29.560 And it's a really extraordinary thing.
00:08:33.000 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.
00:08:43.560 We spotted the Russians moving. 1.00
00:08:45.920 We could order the Ukrainian forces to be right in their way, even though they were a small force.
00:08:50.980 We knew where they were coming.
00:08:51.920 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.
00:09:07.620 And when there was Russian concentration, now this is, an American was always in one of them, just one American. 0.57
00:09:16.260 It was Ukraine operated, but he had to put a card in to let the machine run.
00:09:22.420 So then they pulled the trigger.
00:09:24.800 So the Americans were more deeply involved than was known, but not militarily.
00:09:30.980 We were not taking casualties.
00:09:32.280 And it was about time that we dealt with a problem without taking casualties.
00:09:41.940 So you believe the United States can remain dominant in space over the next 50 years?
00:09:47.140 We are dominant in space.
00:09:48.720 When we go back to the Cold War, there was a time that we were talking about missile gap.
00:09:52.860 You might recall that.
00:09:54.000 There was no missile gap.
00:09:55.500 The U-2s went over the place and they spotted all of it.
00:09:59.680 We were way ahead of them.
00:10:01.000 Our technology is way ahead of us, but we're modest, deliberately so.
00:10:06.700 It's not that we decide, just don't brag about us, but we understate our capabilities and we overstate the Chinese. 1.00
00:10:15.340 That's always a good way to get budgets.
00:10:18.160 You know, we are much better at this.
00:10:20.940 We've been at it a long time, far longer than, and the Russians are third. 0.97
00:10:26.440 The Russians are not second.
00:10:27.720 Chinese are second. 1.00
00:10:28.620 But the command of space is now what the command of oceans was.
00:10:34.740 Interesting.
00:10:35.940 And you think the Pentagon deliberately overstates Chinese capabilities in order to justify its budgets?
00:10:41.640 The Pentagon would never do that.
00:10:43.660 No, but there's a sense of passivity in the United States on military things.
00:10:54.220 There's a sense, okay, let's not waste money on defense.
00:10:57.880 And there's a whole psychology developed in World War II of how to get money out.
00:11:02.700 But I think the president and everyone else knows who is involved in this, that space is the battleground now.
00:11:12.840 And the amount of money Elon Musk has put into his X-Force, and he's boosting a lot of the satellites, is enormous.
00:11:24.880 But everybody's in on the game.
00:11:28.620 Elon Musk seems like a big player, though.
00:11:31.420 He certainly is.
00:11:33.400 I mean, he's a very smart guy.
00:11:37.140 Maybe not likable, but he's a very smart guy.
00:11:40.740 He went into electric cars.
00:11:43.860 And then he went into, along with people like Meo, you know, the Amazon king, I forget his name, Bezos.
00:11:54.740 He went into rockets.
00:11:58.620 And, of course, it was just a hobby.
00:12:01.760 But it emerged into a major business.
00:12:05.520 And they're both major foundations of the Americans' launch program.
00:12:10.820 Because right now, you have to launch a lot of satellites, because you know you're going to lose a lot of them.
00:12:18.020 And if you lose a lot of them, you lose a tactical advantage on the ground and a strategic capability in nuclear war.
00:12:26.460 So we're emerging into a new age, which normally has a new technology.
00:12:32.700 And this new technology is partly satellites, but that's really 1950s stuff emerged.
00:12:38.860 But the way these satellites are made is not made from the normal metals and plastics that we had in the past.
00:12:47.540 Particularly their sensors are built with material science and solar energy and extraordinary things that will be integrated into the Earth.
00:12:57.660 As World War II technology became very present in the American economy in the 50s, that's what's going to happen.
00:13:05.200 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.
00:13:12.480 We rage at each other.
00:13:14.120 This is the end of an era.
00:13:15.660 It's when an era exhausts itself.
00:13:18.160 And the era that began with Ronald Reagan as a social and economic era is at its end.
00:13:29.340 It's pleaded out, the economic and social thing.
00:13:32.880 The social crisis is terrible.
00:13:34.880 And it's 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.
00:13:52.200 But genetic engineering of genitalia do not constitute a new class.
00:14:00.860 So we've invented classes and demanded egalitarianism.
00:14:05.960 He did something else.
00:14:08.300 We stopped asking for equal opportunity and turned to equal outcomes.
00:14:13.120 Yes.
00:14:13.640 And this became untenable.
00:14:15.440 So we had a social crisis.
00:14:17.680 At the same time, we had an institutional crisis.
00:14:21.280 The federal government was really invented in its current form by Theodore Roosevelt to deal with the recession.
00:14:28.380 But it was forged in World War II.
00:14:31.520 In World War II, it was a federal government, this massive entity built around the Pentagon and everything else.
00:14:37.580 Then it won the war.
00:14:38.780 It was very efficient.
00:14:39.940 It was necessary at the time.
00:14:42.140 It evolved into something else.
00:14:44.680 It evolved into a fundamentally inefficient entity.
00:14:50.160 Its greatest weakness was experts.
00:14:52.720 I've said this in writing.
00:14:56.600 The experts knew a great deal.
00:14:58.620 Fauci was not a criminal.
00:14:59.940 He was not a Chinese intelligence agent or anything like that.
00:15:03.580 He was a doctor.
00:15:04.880 And you looked at the doctor and said, okay, now what do we do?
00:15:08.140 And he said, well, everybody should stay at home and go out.
00:15:12.060 And children should not go to school.
00:15:13.600 Well, we have children.
00:15:15.840 And if a four- or five-year-old doesn't get to play with other children, he becomes a homicidal maniac.
00:15:21.000 Yes.
00:15:21.720 You can't do that.
00:15:23.700 But we depended on him with his narrow expertise.
00:15:27.520 What we had lost in the federal government was a class of people with common sense.
00:15:36.060 When I was a kid in the Bronx, there were party bosses.
00:15:41.740 Charlie Buckley ran the Bronx.
00:15:43.740 One day, my father, who had finally bought a car, had an accident.
00:15:48.420 The insurance company wouldn't pay.
00:15:50.460 So somebody said, go see Charlie Buckley.
00:15:52.800 He went to Charlie Buckley.
00:15:54.580 Charlie Buckley made a phone call.
00:15:56.040 He did, Emil.
00:15:56.540 So, carrier, you know, messenger's on the way to the house with a check.
00:16:02.720 But you remember, you vote for me.
00:16:05.400 Your white votes for me. 0.84
00:16:07.260 Your children vote for me.
00:16:09.940 And there was a way to petition the government.
00:16:13.060 Remember, the Constitution guarantees us the right to petition the government.
00:16:17.740 The party bosses, as corrupt as they were, and they were certainly corrupt, were our channel to the government.
00:16:24.120 They were our channel to corporations.
00:16:25.460 Smart.
00:16:25.940 Sure, yes.
00:16:27.060 But they were taken out.
00:16:29.080 And they were replaced by technocrats.
00:16:31.340 Can I just ask you to pause?
00:16:32.220 So, Charlie Buckley, the ward boss in the Bronx, actually got the insurance company to pay the claim to your dad?
00:16:39.620 The insurance company was a good mess, Charlie Buckley.
00:16:41.580 That's amazing.
00:16:42.580 That's amazing.
00:16:42.820 That's amazing.
00:16:43.140 But it was a place where you could petition the government.
00:16:46.540 With the rise of the technocracy, there was no way to petition the government.
00:16:51.540 So, I didn't get the Medicaid that I'm supposed to get, whatever it is.
00:16:59.060 Yeah.
00:16:59.660 Because I had a good insurance policy.
00:17:01.120 I didn't want to go to government insurance policy.
00:17:03.040 Yes.
00:17:03.280 They fined me when I finally went to get Medicaid because I had not gotten it.
00:17:08.340 But I hadn't known that it wasn't necessary.
00:17:11.240 No one ever said it to me.
00:17:12.620 And there was nothing to petition, so I had to get in.
00:17:16.180 So, we have a federal government where you cannot petition the government.
00:17:20.960 And that, I think, is the most important thing.
00:17:23.360 The second thing is that the experts do not have a layer of common sense above them.
00:17:28.040 Wise men.
00:17:29.680 And the same is true of the Supreme Court.
00:17:31.560 There are lawyers.
00:17:33.380 When the question on integration came up, the head of the Supreme Court was Warren.
00:17:40.240 Warren Burger.
00:17:40.800 Warren Burger.
00:17:41.820 And Warren Burger knew that he had to have an absolute unanimity on desegregation.
00:17:49.960 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.
00:17:59.200 Every one of them on the Supreme Court now is a lawyer.
00:18:02.420 Well, the law is more subtle than the law appears.
00:18:06.220 There has to be subtlety.
00:18:07.400 And so, what happened was that the federal government fell in love with experts after World War II.
00:18:14.540 Experts won World War II.
00:18:16.800 The people who built the atomic bomb, who built the bombers, the hands of the boat, the landing craft and everything.
00:18:22.780 These were experts.
00:18:23.680 And the federal government fell in love with expertise, which is a very important thing to have.
00:18:29.600 Yes.
00:18:29.820 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.
00:18:38.780 And that layer was lost when the politicians sank below the level of the bureaucrats.
00:18:47.920 Or more precisely, they created agencies that didn't answer to anyone and made their own laws.
00:18:54.560 And the problem was not that they were corrupt or evil or anything like that.
00:18:59.520 It's just they did their job and the other did their job and they contradicted each other.
00:19:03.580 And there was no common sense hovering above them, saying, you can't tell everybody to stay at home forever.
00:19:13.800 Yes.
00:19:14.600 You know, we're going to have the disease.
00:19:16.060 It's going to have to happen.
00:19:17.340 But you can't do this.
00:19:19.120 But Fauci, as a doctor, well, this is what the doctor says.
00:19:22.620 Stay home.
00:19:24.120 He doesn't tell you what to do about your job, that you're going to lose all your money.
00:19:28.260 It's not his concern.
00:19:29.440 That's not his concern.
00:19:30.320 That's the problem.
00:19:31.660 The problem is expertise, the technocracy.
00:19:35.500 And what's happening right now is what would happen with any president.
00:19:40.680 But, I mean, we certainly have a president who is doing that job, radically disrupting the presidency.
00:19:47.700 It's like the first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, when he shut down all the banks, a bank holiday.
00:19:55.140 The banking system was collapsing.
00:19:56.720 He wound up trying to stuff more people on the Supreme Court.
00:20:02.960 So, the same problems.
00:20:04.940 So, at the times we transition, at the times when great presidents like Jackson or such come up, we have these incredible problems.
00:20:12.960 I wrote a book called The Storm Before the Calm.
00:20:15.520 We're in that storm.
00:20:17.880 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.
00:20:28.600 But right now, we're in it.
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00:23:27.500 So, typically, at least in my mind, the storm entails war, that there's not really a reset.
00:23:35.480 I mean, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, all kind of reset and ended, you know, in 1918.
00:23:43.180 At the end of the First World War, then the Second World War resets again.
00:23:46.140 And, I mean, do you think it's necessary to go through some sort of global conflict in order to reshuffle empires?
00:23:53.320 Well, we went through a global conflict.
00:23:55.220 It was called the Cold War, and there were a lot of casualties on all sides.
00:24:00.980 We didn't, it wasn't a war like World War II or World War I, but it was an intense war.
00:24:07.100 There was Vietnam. 0.89
00:24:08.340 There was Korea. 0.98
00:24:09.720 Yes.
00:24:10.040 There was Iraq. 0.97
00:24:10.960 All of these, Afghanistan started with the Russian invasion.
00:24:14.560 Yes.
00:24:14.780 So, the Cold War raged around the world.
00:24:18.860 I think now the Cold War is over.
00:24:21.520 It's over because Russia has proven it cannot take Ukraine, and therefore, it cannot take Europe. 0.93
00:24:27.980 And so, therefore, there's no reason to wage a war.
00:24:32.420 It's very hard to make a peace when you haven't crushed the other guy.
00:24:36.880 Right.
00:24:37.120 But it happens.
00:24:40.020 So, what the United States is doing now, as a result of this, is decoupling from the world.
00:24:46.580 Our exposure in the world in the last few years was countered to all of our traditions, but also not very profitable and happy.
00:24:55.680 Yes.
00:24:55.980 So, there was a time when we really cared what happened in the Congo.
00:25:02.200 Back in the 60s, they supported Patrice Lubumba.
00:25:05.580 We supported Moise Shambay.
00:25:07.980 Who cares what happens to the Congo? 0.98
00:25:10.420 I don't want to say anything terrible about the Congo, but it's not our problem.
00:25:15.060 Right.
00:25:15.800 And everything was our problem.
00:25:18.460 And our entire financial system was based on two things.
00:25:22.120 One, imbalanced trade to make the Europeans healthy. 0.87
00:25:30.080 That was critical.
00:25:31.620 But then we used these trade relations to build alliances in the third world.
00:25:40.200 And one of them was China.
00:25:42.060 And we did very well in China.
00:25:43.720 We made China more dependent on us than on Russia. 0.61
00:25:47.040 And we split that relationship fairly deeply.
00:25:51.700 Chinese did not support the Russians in the Ukrainian war.
00:25:55.300 It was a great strategy, but it leaves us in an untenable position if the Cold War is over.
00:26:01.640 We no longer have to play this role.
00:26:04.460 Now, the storm is the old elite and people supporting them are enraged at breaking norms and guardrails.
00:26:13.280 Well, this country is built, breaking guardrails, rules.
00:26:19.860 It was called the revolution.
00:26:21.980 Yes.
00:26:22.260 That's how we believed it.
00:26:23.820 And every 50 years, socially, economically, every 80 years, institutionally, we break the guardrails.
00:26:31.420 We reinvent ourselves.
00:26:33.220 We're a country of invention.
00:26:35.320 We're a country of reinvention.
00:26:36.280 And when that happens, there's a terrible fight between the Enchon regime, the old regime, if you will, and the emerging regime.
00:26:46.580 And Roosevelt was considered a dictator, was charged with being a dictator.
00:26:51.600 Roosevelt was said by Walter Lippmann, a very renowned person, the least capable president in our history.
00:27:01.100 And so, Jackson was, and all of these were.
00:27:07.740 So, he may well have been incompetent.
00:27:10.720 It may have been his staff who supported him.
00:27:13.080 It doesn't matter.
00:27:14.540 But the United States is a great country, because unlike European countries, it reinvents itself.
00:27:23.300 The war comes, the war goes, and we change with it.
00:27:27.700 But the Europeans fundamentally stay the same. 0.90
00:27:31.580 So does China.
00:27:33.740 How is the U.S. changing now?
00:27:37.000 Well, firstly, what's ending?
00:27:41.520 The first problem that I said in the book, and this was published in 2020, I think, was the universities.
00:27:52.320 The universities is an engine of our social structure.
00:27:56.200 It's where the people come from.
00:27:59.600 And the universities had become ideological places, as they usually do.
00:28:05.660 But the ideology was upmoded.
00:28:10.160 Yes.
00:28:10.400 And the universities had become massive, inefficient entities.
00:28:14.660 So, it's not simply the government that has to undergo a dramatic change.
00:28:21.100 Harvard, who had been the place where the wealthy went, became a place for immigrants to go after World War II.
00:28:29.980 Harvard has to change.
00:28:30.980 Now, the engineering part of this is difficult.
00:28:36.940 And whether the president is engineering it well or badly or not, it's being re-engineered.
00:28:41.840 And the opposition comes from those who see no need for a change.
00:28:47.320 Yes.
00:28:48.220 Who see no need not to go into Ukraine.
00:28:51.300 Right.
00:28:51.900 But Biden saw no need to go into Ukraine.
00:28:54.240 So, it's not, we can't base this just on personalities.
00:28:57.700 Right.
00:28:57.940 It was Biden who established a strategy of not going into Ukraine, but sending every miserable weapon we had.
00:29:04.820 He used satellites first.
00:29:06.800 So, I tend to depersonalize history.
00:29:10.500 Every president is a eomaniac.
00:29:12.920 He has to be.
00:29:14.100 To believe you can be the president of the United States, you have to have an ego.
00:29:18.840 The difference between Trump and everybody else is he doesn't hide it.
00:29:21.660 Yes.
00:29:22.220 He celebrates it.
00:29:23.500 But I grew up around four miles from him.
00:29:27.640 We were living in Queens.
00:29:29.140 We'd left the Bronx.
00:29:31.200 And he lived in Jamaica Heights, which is a very nice place to live.
00:29:35.740 And I lived in Springfield Gardens, four miles away.
00:29:38.720 Not nearly as nice a place.
00:29:41.660 But that's how we behaved.
00:29:43.840 We strutted around.
00:29:45.740 We threatened people.
00:29:47.320 We didn't mean it.
00:29:48.600 We had a fist fight.
00:29:49.800 We became friends.
00:29:50.700 But it was, for me, his personality is not alien.
00:29:55.740 For my wife, who comes from upper class Australian life, it's horrible. 1.00
00:30:00.740 How could he behave this way?
00:30:02.780 Right.
00:30:03.780 For me?
00:30:04.740 The wasps don't like Trump at all.
00:30:06.300 Hey, I remember Dominic.
00:30:07.560 My buddy Dominic in Springfield Gardens.
00:30:09.860 Yeah.
00:30:11.160 He was the twin to Trump.
00:30:15.260 Was he successful?
00:30:16.960 Oh, yeah.
00:30:17.460 He's an accountant now in Long Island.
00:30:18.840 And so, I think you're saying that someone like Trump was inevitable in this moment.
00:30:28.680 He didn't have to have this personality.
00:30:30.600 Yeah.
00:30:30.860 Eisenhower, who was a very wealthy man, and I don't think he saw anybody who was poor who wasn't his servant,
00:30:38.520 cast himself as the champion of the poor, convincingly.
00:30:43.480 Presidents are actors.
00:30:45.600 Presidents shape themselves to the moment.
00:30:47.520 Abraham Lincoln was a cheap lawyer in Illinois.
00:30:53.160 He came from Kentucky.
00:30:54.700 He was practically a Southerner.
00:30:56.780 He crafted himself to be what he had to be.
00:31:01.680 The presidency is partly what you see inside yourself and then what you become.
00:31:07.580 That's all of us.
00:31:08.420 If all of us lived the life we think inside, publicly, it would be a terrible place in the world.
00:31:15.840 But presidents craft themselves at the moment.
00:31:19.320 And if you're smart enough to craft yourself, and it takes huge discipline to do that,
00:31:26.600 you can govern, but then you're used to governing based on reality.
00:31:33.380 So a presidential candidate is nothing but a realist if he's going to win.
00:31:39.920 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.
00:31:53.200 Well, I'm going to try this one.
00:31:54.760 Do you think that there needs to be a war or will be a war between the United States and China to prove dominance?
00:32:05.140 China can't go to war with us.
00:32:07.640 For China to go to war with us, it has to be a war in the Pacific.
00:32:10.360 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.
00:32:23.960 And there are only narrow passages through these islands.
00:32:28.200 The greatest thing we did was convince the Filipinos not to go with China, but go to the United States. 0.92
00:32:34.460 We now have four bases in the Philippines.
00:32:36.960 And these block all the exit routes.
00:32:40.360 So, for example, to invade Taiwan would be a very interesting thing for them. 0.87
00:32:44.280 It takes about 10, 15 hours for a landing craft to reach Taiwan from China.
00:32:50.420 And by the time our satellites will pick up the landing craft.
00:32:53.480 And if we're in mood, Guam will send a missile out to take it. 0.81
00:32:58.660 There's a reason why the Chinese Taiwanese always threaten to invade Taiwan and never do. 1.00
00:33:04.980 They can't.
00:33:05.740 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. 0.97
00:33:20.320 But they're not going to go to war with us.
00:33:23.200 And they may fight on the border with the Indians, which they have, and have lost. 0.96
00:33:29.320 So, China has bluffed an inside strait beautifully. 0.57
00:33:34.420 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. 0.85
00:33:49.200 Yeah, well, we thought about the Russians, the Germans, the Japanese, everybody.
00:33:53.380 One of our great powers is overestimating our enemy.
00:33:56.000 If we overestimate our enemy, it's enormous what we can do.
00:34:02.800 So, the Chinese can't lead, but there's one great threat that's buried beneath the talk about the financing and everything. 0.98
00:34:14.260 Remember the Arab oil embargo?
00:34:17.520 Of 1973?
00:34:18.460 Yeah.
00:34:19.460 Wrecked the American economy.
00:34:20.980 Yep.
00:34:21.240 The dependency on raw materials is one thing.
00:34:27.080 Dependency on manufactured goods to be the basic implements of our industry is a very dangerous place to be.
00:34:35.680 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.
00:34:46.780 And for me, because I don't have any money, financial crisis doesn't bother me.
00:34:54.000 To me, the essential weakness we had with the Chinese is we created China. 1.00
00:35:03.960 Chinese exports to the United States, American investment in China, American businesses moving to China created this.
00:35:12.360 And these businesses are, of course, under the control of the Chinese, as they should be. 1.00
00:35:18.340 My fear is that if China decided to really hurt us, they'd stop shipping those goods.
00:35:25.200 So, reshoring is not just a question of jobs.
00:35:27.900 That's there too, but I think that's the cover.
00:35:31.140 Reshoring is a question of national security.
00:35:33.060 We are so dependent for so much of our equipment, our aircraft and everything else, from China and nowhere else, really.
00:35:42.860 So, we are now moving rapidly into India, and we'll have later a problem with India.
00:35:48.620 But one of the reasons to have a domestic-based economy is you're secure nationally.
00:35:54.920 Right.
00:35:55.600 You're not depending.
00:35:56.340 And during the last period, remember that having a disfavorable balance of payments was a strategic issue.
00:36:07.640 It was a national security issue.
00:36:09.180 You wanted to make your allies stronger than the Soviet allies.
00:36:13.660 And we played the same game in China.
00:36:15.540 We made the Chinese dependent on the United States, excessively so, so that we're dependent on China. 0.98
00:36:21.260 So, it's interesting, not surprising, the president has raised tariffs on everybody, even the Canadians hate us, and pulled back dramatically, really.
00:36:35.740 Not in the Chinese. 0.99
00:36:39.000 But the Chinese haven't moved. 1.00
00:36:42.420 Chinese have nowhere to move. 1.00
00:36:44.040 This is where the corporations move.
00:36:45.420 The corporations are reshoring, but more important, moving to India, what they really have done, simply because their business is to make money.
00:36:56.420 It's cheaper to build it in China.
00:36:58.600 It's cheaper to build it in India.
00:37:00.960 Americans don't want to spend that much money on cell phones and everything.
00:37:06.220 But the problem is that, and this was a huge mistake, we did not diversify our industry overseas.
00:37:13.400 We wanted less expensive goods to be made available to drive our economy.
00:37:20.060 But we had a double focus on China.
00:37:23.800 One was to split it from Russia.
00:37:27.200 And two was to get cheaper products.
00:37:30.200 And we concentrated excessively on bringing China into a dependency in the United States, failing to see that we were dependent on them.
00:37:38.260 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'etats?
00:37:48.800 What if they have earthquakes, floods?
00:37:51.680 What if they can't supply us with the goods we need?
00:37:55.180 We are heavily dependent on a handful of countries for major resources.
00:38:00.780 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.
00:38:09.920 So I wonder if, I mean, what you're saying is so obviously true, and I think that smart people are concerned about that.
00:38:16.360 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.
00:38:28.480 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.
00:38:32.840 So they're now made in China, but we have to have them here.
00:38:35.660 Maybe our economic system changes with the realization that it hasn't actually served us very well.
00:38:40.540 Well, we have an example.
00:38:43.080 Our industrial plant grew tremendously in the 1890s.
00:38:47.380 We became the major producer of industrial products in the world.
00:38:51.500 We were China.
00:38:52.380 Yep.
00:38:53.220 And we sold them to the Europeans. 0.99
00:38:55.980 And that caused a huge boom through the 1910s and 1920s.
00:39:00.980 And then World War I happened.
00:39:04.200 And the Europeans wrecked themselves, as they do periodically, and they couldn't buy anymore. 0.99
00:39:08.140 And that was the first trigger of the Depression.
00:39:12.180 If you become too dependent on exports, you're highly vulnerable to not being able to sell them.
00:39:19.740 If you become too dependent on imports, your own economy can't function.
00:39:26.120 So there has to be prudence exercised.
00:39:29.200 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.
00:39:40.580 And it has to be a kind of prudent step where we balance the economic issue.
00:39:48.600 But what rendered us imprudent was the Cold War.
00:39:51.200 We were so concerned with Congo not becoming communist that we would have very favorable terms and aid and everything else to these countries.
00:40:06.140 And it made sense, given the Cold War and our fears about what would happen.
00:40:11.240 But when the Cold War, it didn't end with the fall of communism.
00:40:14.880 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. 0.98
00:40:25.720 That's when it ended.
00:40:27.240 But nobody rethought, because, you know, 10 years is not that much of a time frame, three years, whatever.
00:40:33.700 And we are now facing the fact of how exposed we become and how rational is the system now.
00:40:43.480 It wasn't rational 10 years ago.
00:40:45.960 It was pretty intensely this way.
00:40:48.740 But given that a nation is not just an economy, it is security.
00:40:53.900 The national security consideration outweighed, for the moment, the economic consideration, the financial consideration.
00:41:01.340 At this point, it has to be re-engineered.
00:41:04.920 So I look at history in two ways.
00:41:06.700 One, there is the path that it's going to take, that it has to take.
00:41:10.740 Yes.
00:41:11.020 Then there's how you engineer it.
00:41:12.500 That's what presidents do.
00:41:13.460 They're engineers.
00:41:15.180 Now, is this a good way to engineer it or not?
00:41:17.840 Well, he's following the Roosevelt model.
00:41:20.380 First hundred days, almost over, before any opposition can form against you, go wild.
00:41:27.200 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.
00:41:39.140 And, you know, the opposition is formed.
00:41:42.300 And then you moderate and you shift and you do politics domestically.
00:41:46.540 We haven't seen him do that yet.
00:41:48.220 But now the question will become, an engineering one, one, does he see another way?
00:41:54.420 And two, frankly, a personality one, does he back off?
00:41:59.540 But what Roosevelt did, and he was a very slick guy, is he pushed to the limit, challenging every court there is.
00:42:06.240 Every court was ruling against anything he tried to do.
00:42:10.040 Okay?
00:42:10.380 You can't do that.
00:42:11.960 And so he train wrecked for a hundred days.
00:42:15.060 And I think we have seven more days left for the hundred days.
00:42:20.180 And we're about at the same stage.
00:42:22.540 But Americans have no sense of history. 0.97
00:42:25.060 They don't ever say, oh, we've seen this before.
00:42:27.820 Right.
00:42:28.300 Because we didn't.
00:42:28.960 We weren't alive then.
00:42:30.040 Yes.
00:42:30.420 And we don't remember.
00:42:31.800 And we don't remember the Civil War.
00:42:34.200 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. 1.00
00:42:42.560 I'm not.
00:42:43.080 But, so, we don't remember that we've done this before.
00:42:48.640 So, it took a bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania for me to realize this.
00:42:53.840 A bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania?
00:42:55.860 I was teaching at a college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
00:42:58.720 And also the U.S. Army War College at the same time.
00:43:01.360 And I went out drinking with some colonels who drink well.
00:43:08.500 And, you know, they were moaning and complaining and all sorts of things about what America has become.
00:43:15.520 This was back in the 70s.
00:43:17.160 It was, you know, what the economy has become.
00:43:19.840 The troops under us are not reliable.
00:43:21.940 And it was terrible.
00:43:23.320 And I was sitting there wondering, because I was having a fine time in my life.
00:43:27.880 I didn't see what was any terrible.
00:43:30.480 Had this ever happened before in America?
00:43:32.120 That there would 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.
00:43:43.840 And I had a choice between picking up the waitress or going to my study and thinking about this.
00:43:53.060 The waitress turned me down, as they always do, and I went to study.
00:43:58.200 So, I started looking back in history.
00:44:01.240 This was back in the 70s, really.
00:44:04.740 And I started noticing patterns that I couldn't explain.
00:44:09.340 Patterns of deep crisis in the government.
00:44:12.140 And then I noticed, for some reason, that I can't tell you why.
00:44:17.340 It's about every 50 years.
00:44:19.080 Every 50 years, we have a social and economic crisis.
00:44:22.000 The last one being Reagan, the one he came in on.
00:44:25.640 After the 70s.
00:44:26.940 And every 80 years, we have an institutional crisis.
00:44:30.100 We founded a country.
00:44:31.100 80 years later, we have a civil war.
00:44:32.920 It determines that the central government is in charge.
00:44:36.080 The federal government is in charge of the states.
00:44:38.480 82 years after that, we invent the federal government.
00:44:41.120 And that was World War II.
00:44:43.440 So, it's about that time.
00:44:45.820 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.
00:44:56.280 Get ready.
00:44:56.720 And then I was actually managed to pin it down to their election at 24.
00:45:03.380 Wow.
00:45:04.140 Which was pure luck.
00:45:05.640 It was a guess.
00:45:06.660 It was no genius involved.
00:45:08.980 But it was apparent to me that we could not sustain the system as it was.
00:45:14.880 And there were two breakpoints.
00:45:16.960 One was the universities diverging from society.
00:45:21.320 Second, the technocracy of the government that could not collaborate and making sensible solutions, but were trapped.
00:45:30.640 And finally, the end of the Cold War, just like the end of World War II.
00:45:36.420 And with that, everything changes.
00:45:39.240 And in a few years, we'll be happy again.
00:45:41.500 And we'll forget all this.
00:45:43.240 You think so?
00:45:43.980 Oh, yeah.
00:45:45.460 If you forget the profession where 50% of the people at one point were unemployed, you can forget things.
00:45:51.700 You probably have no idea where the meat that you eat comes from.
00:45:55.380 Do you want to know?
00:45:56.440 You should know.
00:45:58.140 The overwhelming likelihood is that it passed through a massive industrial processing plant, possibly, probably owned by a foreign corporation.
00:46:07.020 It's foreign meat.
00:46:08.540 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 to increase its profits, what kind of drugs it was injected with.
00:46:19.860 That's all kept secret, meaning you can never really know what you're eating.
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00:48:07.960 It feels like, though, there's got to be some, like, hard pivot or something.
00:48:16.860 You know, there's some disaster that resets people's expectations.
00:48:20.440 It's called Donald Trump.
00:48:21.860 You think that's what it is?
00:48:23.720 What I'm saying is, whether he planned it or just is it, he's the man of the moment.
00:48:30.740 He's the wrecking ball that Lincoln was and the wrecking ball that Roosevelt was and Jackson 0.92
00:48:36.660 was, and he's shifting the country by emphasizing two things.
00:48:43.680 One, the world culture wars are untenable.
00:48:48.720 Yes.
00:48:50.660 Secondly, you can't keep inventing classes.
00:48:55.260 Yes.
00:48:55.560 Second, equal opportunity is not equal outcome.
00:48:58.640 Yes.
00:48:58.840 So, as Warren, the universities are, I was a university professor for a number of years,
00:49:05.080 and I'm happy to see them being wrecked.
00:49:08.240 Yeah.
00:49:08.760 I was not happy there.
00:49:11.580 But the president is also trying to restructure the federal government because it's become vast
00:49:20.580 and unknowable.
00:49:22.960 And that's really the problem.
00:49:24.220 The problem is that during the COVID crisis, Fauci ruled.
00:49:30.060 Nobody in the education department was listened to to say, you can't do that to the schools.
00:49:35.700 No one in the Department of Commerce said, we're going to have massive unemployment if you do this.
00:49:41.780 Okay?
00:49:42.460 So, there was no element of common sense.
00:49:45.200 And so, you come in, anybody who would come in at this point would have to say, look, we're dysfunctional.
00:49:55.220 We're arguing over issues of whether or not gender can be changed and whether it's an equal class.
00:50:02.620 What are we talking about?
00:50:04.840 We're looking at the situation in the federal government that no one really knows at the top
00:50:11.520 what in God's name is happening at the bottom.
00:50:13.560 We have to change that.
00:50:15.880 The Cold War is over.
00:50:17.040 Our foreign policy has to shift.
00:50:18.880 Yes.
00:50:19.360 As it is.
00:50:20.420 And whoever became president at this point might have better manners, but would be doing about the same thing.
00:50:28.640 And Roosevelt set the stage with the 100 days.
00:50:31.720 And what is now happening is the opposition is inevitably forming because we're a democracy and Noah's the king.
00:50:42.080 And now we're going to find out more about Donald Trump and his political acumen.
00:50:49.540 And we'll see.
00:50:50.020 But we're 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.
00:51:06.800 Look at how we adjusted ourselves after World War II to being a world power and were comfortable with it for decades and built our economy on that.
00:51:18.800 But when you take a look at the way we handled it after the Civil War, what other country had a Civil War?
00:51:27.460 That came back to fairly a decent, you know, okay.
00:51:30.960 You know, we had it.
00:51:31.740 We re-engineered slavery through that.
00:51:37.640 We made the South not just an agricultural area.
00:51:41.120 And we re-engineered the world in World War II and re-engineered it again economically.
00:51:49.160 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.
00:51:56.720 And so this is how we are.
00:51:58.560 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.
00:52:11.940 We transform ourselves.
00:52:14.600 And it's really not fun to live through that time.
00:52:18.860 But you don't think there's a danger of collapse, like total collapse?
00:52:24.640 There's never been one.
00:52:26.000 And we've been here for a long time.
00:52:28.560 And we've done this lots before.
00:52:31.640 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.
00:52:41.520 So it's just a way we change things, okay.
00:52:45.480 I remember my family, my father used to say, I need a new car.
00:52:49.000 And my mother would say, you don't need a new car.
00:52:51.740 You need this and that and the other thing.
00:52:53.500 And you're not buying a new car.
00:52:55.100 And there'd be terrible fights.
00:52:57.060 Who won?
00:52:58.380 My mother.
00:52:59.180 Yeah.
00:52:59.320 But it was, we are, I call it an operatic country.
00:53:08.200 Mostly we don't go to the opera.
00:53:10.200 But every 50 years we hold an opera that is amazing.
00:53:14.980 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?
00:53:26.920 I think not.
00:53:29.340 Because there is no power in the world that can still challenge the United States.
00:53:34.200 The Russians have demonstrated that their vaunted Red Army, now not Red, is incapable of overrunning a much smaller, weaker country.
00:53:46.820 That after three years of fighting, you only hold a small sliver of it.
00:53:51.260 And that goes in keeping with what I used to think.
00:53:56.200 It was taught by a man called Andy Marshall, who's did it off net assessments.
00:54:01.080 And he said, the Russians are not nearly as good.
00:54:04.200 As everybody believes.
00:54:06.720 So, I was once in Hungary, and I was born there.
00:54:11.160 And I was watching a Russian maneuver.
00:54:14.860 And the gas lines were leaking.
00:54:18.180 They were plastic.
00:54:19.360 And you needed them going forward on tanks.
00:54:23.720 And nobody seemed to care.
00:54:26.380 Six months later, I happened to wander back there to take a look.
00:54:29.840 It was still leaking.
00:54:30.480 You remember the line of tanks lined up in Ukraine, off the mountain, out of gas, waiting for days?
00:54:38.800 I think they were still using that same gas line.
00:54:43.980 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.
00:55:01.000 They took their bearings from World War II, the mass attack by infantry, backed by armor and artillery.
00:55:09.400 Yes.
00:55:09.620 And they didn't understand that the massing of troops was very, very dangerous, and that there has to be a different model of warfare.
00:55:21.160 So, they attacked Ukraine as if this was 1941, and they're at war.
00:55:29.160 And the Ukrainians were very agile because they had great intelligence.
00:55:33.680 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 the intelligence for the satellites of exactly where the Russian troops were, down to the smallest number.
00:55:46.660 So, the smaller Ukrainian army could mass against them and block them.
00:55:52.580 So, that was a really serious threat.
00:55:55.700 Yes.
00:55:56.260 And he did it for a day.
00:55:57.420 I don't think he really cut it off.
00:55:58.820 He just said he would.
00:56:00.700 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.
00:56:11.320 And so, Russia, unless it wants a nuclear war, and they can't have that, is not a viable power. 0.67
00:56:19.820 And it's not influential in the world either.
00:56:22.880 The Chinese, as I said, are blocked in by a very clever structure of islands we've built around them. 1.00
00:56:30.600 It's very hard to pass through them, and especially get back in.
00:56:35.640 So, a world war would indicate there would be another global power.
00:56:40.640 And China's not a global power.
00:56:42.960 It just doesn't have the forces to do that.
00:56:47.120 Russia's not a global power.
00:56:49.280 We're a global power, and we don't want to be one.
00:56:51.760 We want to come home.
00:56:53.380 And we are going to come home.
00:56:55.420 We'll still have relationships, and we'll still have forces scattered here and there.
00:56:59.840 But this massive commitment we made to the entire world to defend them against communism.
00:57:07.660 Well, communism died 10 years ago.
00:57:11.220 And Russia kind of, I suspect, U.S. and Russia will reach a good relationship.
00:57:17.360 Remember, we rebuilt Japan.
00:57:20.580 We rebuilt Germany after the war.
00:57:22.920 We made them great allies.
00:57:24.860 This is American system when we fight wars. 0.54
00:57:28.340 And I suspect that one of the things that Trump is trying to engineer with Putin is an understanding.
00:57:37.120 The Russians are in bad economic shape.
00:57:39.360 Their economy grew because the war and definite, definite, definite spending on the war machine built it.
00:57:47.800 But they're cut off.
00:57:49.180 The oligarchs are furious.
00:57:51.620 And there's a great argument going on in Russia between the nationalists, if you will, and liberals who want to become integrated.
00:57:59.340 And Putin is, look, Putin attacked Ukraine.
00:58:04.060 His forces were unable to penetrate.
00:58:06.200 So it took a mercenary army, the Wagner Group, to join them.
00:58:11.100 Now, the army and the Wagner Group didn't like each other.
00:58:13.840 So the Russian army didn't give them artillery shells.
00:58:17.100 So after a while, the Wagner Group came back and tried to do a coup d'etat in Moscow.
00:58:23.100 Now, tragically, they all died in an airplane crash.
00:58:26.740 I couldn't, my heart goes out to them.
00:58:28.420 But when you take a look at the execution of the war, as it actually was, it was a cluster something.
00:58:38.240 Yeah.
00:58:38.580 It was terribly executed and politically almost suicidal for Putin.
00:58:45.100 So Putin's opposition, Putin's under tremendous pressure to open up Russia to the West.
00:58:53.640 It's a wonderful investment opportunity.
00:58:55.740 And many hedge funds in the United States are gathering funds for investing in Russia.
00:59:00.200 Land is cheap.
00:59:03.480 Workers are fairly well-educated.
00:59:06.480 Work cheap.
00:59:09.260 Close to Europe.
00:59:11.020 All sorts of things.
00:59:11.760 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.
00:59:26.320 It was just fine.
00:59:28.340 And we got along with the Japanese.
00:59:30.600 It was okay.
00:59:34.080 And the Russians haven't done anything to us to be as pissed as we are at Germany and Japan. 0.55
00:59:40.140 So I think he looks at it as a huge investment opportunity.
00:59:45.560 He sees Putin as very weak.
00:59:48.260 And he's trying to maintain Putin with some credibility.
00:59:52.140 He's got a lot of enemies.
00:59:54.080 On one side, the right wing is furious at his performance in the war.
00:59:58.660 The left wing has had about enough.
01:00:01.740 They'd like to rejoin Europe or something nice.
01:00:05.260 And he must be under tremendous pressure for his performance in the war.
01:00:11.140 Well, I think Trump decided that a weak Russian president is much better than a strong Russian president.
01:00:18.560 And he's going to try to do everything he can to make Putin look good.
01:00:22.860 In the meantime, the rest of the world will think that Putin bought him.
01:00:26.700 A friend of mine said, no, Putin gave him money.
01:00:30.100 That's why he's behaving this way.
01:00:32.280 Okay.
01:00:34.580 In my view, he's a good negotiator.
01:00:38.400 He comes in first, the highest price.
01:00:40.440 You ever buy a house?
01:00:41.960 You come in with the lowest price you can think of.
01:00:44.880 The guy comes at the highest price.
01:00:47.620 Eventually, you buy the house.
01:00:49.280 Yeah.
01:00:49.740 But first, there's drama.
01:00:50.880 Your wife cries.
01:00:51.700 These things happen.
01:00:56.400 I think this is what he's doing.
01:00:58.720 He's a good negotiator.
01:01:00.440 He slammed the sanctions on, having no intention of keeping them there. 1.00
01:01:05.100 He knew he'd be stupid. 1.00
01:01:06.100 But I think he overreached anyway. 1.00
01:01:10.180 But he pulled back, kept him only on China.
01:01:14.900 And with the Russians, he's trying to give Putin maneuvering room.
01:01:18.440 For one thing, we're not going to go to war in Ukraine.
01:01:21.840 It's not going to happen.
01:01:22.980 But it's a threat that he has.
01:01:24.960 So if you open up the war again, you don't know what we're going to do.
01:01:28.520 So we deploy 20,000 more troops to Europe.
01:01:31.740 Being in Europe is a good thing for American troops. 0.94
01:01:33.940 Amsterdam is a wonderful town to visit.
01:01:36.100 If you're young.
01:01:39.840 He's making gestures to the Russians militarily.
01:01:43.520 Nothing serious.
01:01:44.980 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.
01:01:51.260 And Putin is not going to attack.
01:01:53.220 Putin has to come down having won something.
01:01:57.280 And can't appear to be capitulated in the United States, which he's going to do.
01:02:02.360 But he can't look that way.
01:02:03.540 And I think Trump is trying to engineer it in such a way that Putin survives.
01:02:09.080 Now, Trump will be despised for this.
01:02:14.660 And that's inevitable.
01:02:18.020 But I think he has an understanding of the situation just because he's negotiated with bankrupt people.
01:02:25.120 Yes.
01:02:26.340 And when you have a bankrupt person, be kind.
01:02:31.500 What happens in the Middle East?
01:02:32.840 Well, the Middle East really depends on what happened.
01:02:37.900 The decision to negotiate a summit, it was decided it was going to be held in Riyadh.
01:02:44.600 I thought it was going to be held in Budapest because Orban is friends with Putin and friends with Trump.
01:02:51.640 So I figured they'd get together, have a beer, and work this out.
01:02:55.760 But they pick Riyadh.
01:02:59.040 Saudi Arabia is opposed to the Islamic terrorists, as Israel is. 0.97
01:03:06.860 They're terrified of them. 0.78
01:03:09.360 And Saudi Arabia is a major power.
01:03:11.020 So, for example, it decided to fund, last month, the entire Syrian deficit.
01:03:19.420 You know, just pay it.
01:03:22.160 So money talks and other things walk in the Middle East.
01:03:26.240 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.
01:03:34.520 My daughter was a major in Iraq.
01:03:37.700 And, you know, it was very bad.
01:03:40.480 And I was mildly involved in Afghanistan. 0.98
01:03:44.940 And this was ridiculous. 0.82
01:03:48.200 We're fighting over a place neither of us really care about. 0.96
01:03:52.020 Iran, the Russians are more afraid of Iran than we are.
01:03:54.560 Remember the Russian opera house that blew up in terrorist attack?
01:04:00.640 So we have equal interest.
01:04:02.260 We share intelligence on those things with Russians.
01:04:06.100 So it's not that, oh, yeah, we let them know when we've seen something that might concern them.
01:04:11.520 They let us know.
01:04:12.560 There's collaboration.
01:04:15.000 But the problem of the Middle East is this.
01:04:17.920 There are really rich people who are really afraid of a bunch of mafioso, which I'll call Hamas. 1.00
01:04:28.240 Hamas is, at the same time, an enemy of Israel and a shakedown artist. 0.77
01:04:33.180 It's extracted the money from many countries.
01:04:36.280 The theory, I think, between the Russians and the Americans is if we bring the Saudis into a deal 0.99
01:04:40.420 and back them suitable and make them responsible for the region.
01:04:46.160 The Saudis have nothing against Israel.
01:04:48.320 They couldn't care less.
01:04:51.100 Okay?
01:04:52.280 The Saudis are much more interested in the states and the Gulf.
01:04:57.860 You know, Emirates, Qatar, these really wealthy places where they're interested in.
01:05:03.120 And the idea that a Russia or the United States is going to pacify the Middle East is insane.
01:05:10.860 There are two countries that can do it.
01:05:12.820 One is Saudi Arabia.
01:05:13.920 The other is Turkey.
01:05:15.540 If Turkey and Saudi Arabia are brought together with some encouragement from the Americans and Russians,
01:05:21.580 it's their problem.
01:05:23.960 And the Turks have bad relations with anyone, everyone.
01:05:28.660 The Saudis have great relations with everyone.
01:05:30.580 So it's a perfect alignment.
01:05:33.120 And I think what happens in the Middle East, forgetting the Israeli question for the moment,
01:05:38.600 is some sort of entente.
01:05:41.480 You know, much of what happened in the Middle East, much of what happened in Asia,
01:05:45.800 much of what happened in Africa was American-Russian competition.
01:05:49.520 Yes.
01:05:50.580 Latin America, Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela.
01:05:53.920 All of these things were this.
01:05:55.220 If that stops, and it's not miraculous, the Japanese and the Americans became allies.
01:06:02.760 And if the Russians and the Americans say, look, we want to make money, we want to have
01:06:07.140 decent lives, and we really don't care about the Middle East, and decide to empower, if you will,
01:06:15.700 countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia to handle it.
01:06:17.900 But we certainly don't want another Middle Eastern war. 0.81
01:06:20.980 The Iraqi war was really bad.
01:06:25.260 Especially now there are cell phones, and our daughter could call us every night. 0.96
01:06:29.200 That's what was happening.
01:06:30.740 It was bad.
01:06:31.820 You know, going away in World War II, and you don't see your son.
01:06:34.860 Exactly.
01:06:35.380 Two years.
01:06:35.820 That's okay.
01:06:37.880 But every night, a phone call?
01:06:41.500 You know, it was a terrible war.
01:06:44.480 It was not a mistaken war.
01:06:45.840 It was a necessary war. 0.97
01:06:48.560 But we have to find new necessities.
01:06:51.660 So I think a Russian-American entangent changes the way Africa operates, changes the way the 1.00
01:06:56.800 Middle East operates, changes the way Asia operates. 0.87
01:06:59.700 And you've already seen new players emerging.
01:07:03.960 India is exploding. 0.99
01:07:07.960 Okay?
01:07:08.980 Many of the European countries, the smaller ones, like Poland, are developing marvelously.
01:07:14.700 It's the manufacturing power of Europe now.
01:07:16.920 Yeah.
01:07:17.760 And so new powers are emerging.
01:07:20.560 And of course, in 50 years, we'll be raging at each other again.
01:07:25.440 And undoubtedly, there'll be wars, because humans have wars. 0.83
01:07:28.620 They seem to like them.
01:07:31.120 History goes on.
01:07:32.300 If there's one thing we've learned over the past couple of years, it's that when things
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01:09:58.380 Does Israel get peace with its neighbors?
01:10:03.260 Does it?
01:10:03.780 I mean, we're in a moment of maximum contention in the Middle East, it looks like.
01:10:08.040 Well, I think I would put it this way.
01:10:10.880 Israel by itself is an accident waiting to happen. 0.99
01:10:14.120 It's a small country.
01:10:15.880 It has a superb army, a much weaker intelligence system than it should have.
01:10:21.580 And even more importantly than that, one mistake by Israel, one mistake can threaten its existence. 0.72
01:10:29.860 Israel is a weaker intel infrastructure than it?
01:10:33.760 It failed to identify, in 1973, the buildup of Syrian tanks and Egyptian tanks in plain sight.
01:10:43.580 It misinterpreted them as an exercise.
01:10:45.660 In fact, there came war and almost overran Israel. 0.50
01:10:49.700 Hamas is a small terrorist organization.
01:10:52.660 Israelis know all about it.
01:10:54.680 I would assume that by now, Hamas had been penetrated by Israeli agents, so they would know it.
01:11:00.160 But the best part was, these guys were building little bridges over a waterway.
01:11:07.620 And Israeli intelligence didn't wonder what the hell they were doing. 0.63
01:11:12.600 What was that?
01:11:14.380 It was a complete break.
01:11:15.640 The Israelis published a report on it, finally.
01:11:19.000 Finally fired the head of intelligence and everything.
01:11:21.580 It was a massive, major Israeli intelligence failure.
01:11:25.240 That war should never have been allowed to start.
01:11:27.760 But then the Israelis also followed this very strange strategy. 0.56
01:11:30.940 They started bombing Hamas territory.
01:11:34.000 It failed to end them.
01:11:35.260 So they bombed them again.
01:11:36.160 It failed to end them.
01:11:38.360 So they had been repeating the same thing without succeeding, hoping for a different outcome each time they do it.
01:11:46.700 So I think Israel, I'm Jewish and I really care about it, really needs a new strategic relationship.
01:11:55.660 The Saudis are prepared to have the relationship.
01:11:58.620 Now, if Turkey and Saudi Arabia want Hamas to go away, they will go away very fast.
01:12:04.220 So far, Saudis have not had any motivation to do it. 0.98
01:12:10.020 But you notice how Qatar, which is a very important, tiny country, has become the main negotiating tool.
01:12:17.420 Yes.
01:12:17.720 Both for the Russians and the Russians, notice that they're using the same tool.
01:12:24.400 I think the Saudis have had it. 0.98
01:12:26.980 The Turks have certainly had it. 1.00
01:12:28.440 And they themselves are threatened by Iran.
01:12:34.060 Saudi Arabia is very close to Iran.
01:12:38.880 The Turks are wondering. 0.61
01:12:40.000 The U.S. has deployed a major bomber force in certain areas that are clearly intended to take out the Iranian nuclear capability.
01:12:55.700 But frankly, we want a missile.
01:12:59.100 We're telling the Iranians, we're planning carpet bombing, guys. 1.00
01:13:03.240 We had enough.
01:13:03.940 And the Russians are pretty much masked, too. 0.59
01:13:07.240 So the Russians are doing a lot of negotiating.
01:13:10.400 But they're doing it through the same agency, you will, as the Americans are.
01:13:15.180 Qatar meets with the Iranians.
01:13:16.680 Yes.
01:13:17.180 For the Russians and the Americans.
01:13:19.500 So when you spend your life, if you don't have a life, like I don't have a life, you know.
01:13:24.260 I spend my entire time looking at these little things.
01:13:26.640 Because you notice, Qatar is being used by the Russians and the Americans to talk to the Iranians.
01:13:33.780 Now, that's a wonderful thing.
01:13:35.800 What is that?
01:13:37.480 Well, the Iranians don't want to talk directly to Americans or Russians. 0.96
01:13:43.280 Okay.
01:13:44.400 They'll talk to the Qataris.
01:13:47.600 So the Americans go to Qatar.
01:13:49.840 They tell the Qataris what to tell the Iranians. 0.69
01:13:52.380 And they come back.
01:13:53.020 Russia had some message to deliver to Iran.
01:13:58.040 I don't know what it was.
01:13:59.400 They went to Qatar and told them to deliver it.
01:14:02.980 So if you're talking about unknown collaboration, here it is.
01:14:09.840 Qatar knows what the Americans are saying.
01:14:12.260 And they know what the Russians are saying.
01:14:15.180 Therefore, you must assume that the Russians know what the Americans are saying.
01:14:19.060 And the Americans know what the Russians are saying.
01:14:20.680 So the question of Iran, just because they both went to Qatar to be the intermediary, I'm saying they're collaborating.
01:14:30.080 And they are.
01:14:31.900 It's very difficult for Trump to be too close to the Russians because there is much anti-Russian feeling in the United States.
01:14:38.160 It's very difficult for Putin to be collaborating with the Americans because there's much anti-American feeling in Russia.
01:14:47.440 So each of them are trying very hard not to appear too close.
01:14:54.160 Occasionally threats are exchanged pro-pharma.
01:14:57.640 But they're not of any substance, really.
01:15:02.820 And I think we're already working more closely with the Russians on many matters.
01:15:08.060 I think the Ukrainian war is over.
01:15:10.480 I don't think the Russians, having failed miserably in the first war, would try it again.
01:15:15.460 You know, hoping for a different outcome.
01:15:18.300 I mean, look, they attacked them for three years.
01:15:20.520 And look what they have to show for it.
01:15:23.100 Yeah.
01:15:23.360 A tiny stretch of eastern Ukraine.
01:15:27.780 You spent many, many years at Stratfor.
01:15:33.820 And Stratfor is often described as like a private intel agency.
01:15:38.060 I don't know if that's fair or not.
01:15:40.340 Sounds fair.
01:15:41.200 What's your view of the role of American intel agencies in the world?
01:15:47.740 Can Donald Trump actually run the country without reforming them?
01:15:51.500 How powerful are they?
01:15:56.460 It's not that they're powerful.
01:15:58.200 They're an internal bureaucracy.
01:16:01.380 Very complex.
01:16:03.960 Made more complex for the fact security is necessary.
01:16:07.220 So the one hand doesn't know what the other is doing.
01:16:09.160 And everything else.
01:16:11.820 The idea that you could stage a conspiracy within the CIA against the United States is hilarious.
01:16:18.800 These guys couldn't stage a conspiracy against each other.
01:16:22.600 The institution's structure is a federal institution.
01:16:26.540 It's developed that way.
01:16:28.920 The problem is not their power.
01:16:30.600 How deeply do they see?
01:16:32.500 I think the field that operatives are excellent.
01:16:36.020 I think the Russian FSB is outstanding.
01:16:40.920 Does the intelligence get processed properly to get to the people who need to act on it?
01:16:49.520 And what happens in intelligence agencies, they become so security conscious that they don't even want the president to know.
01:16:55.880 Not because they're plotting a conspiracy or anything like that.
01:17:01.260 That's nonsense.
01:17:03.780 It's simply that security becomes a religion.
01:17:10.500 Need to know is something that's managed by the intelligence community. 1.00
01:17:18.680 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. 0.99
01:17:27.540 And I think that's the problem with the agencies. 1.00
01:17:32.360 It's not that they're involved in a conspiracy.
01:17:35.700 I don't know how many committees they'd have to have to have a true conspiracy.
01:17:41.780 The problem is that intelligence has to be classified, compartmentalized, limited.
01:17:51.240 And the ability even of the head of the CIA to know all of everything that they know is first their mental problem.
01:17:58.820 There's a lot to know.
01:17:59.560 And you can say we had the intelligence.
01:18:06.940 But where was it buried?
01:18:08.320 And how has it gotten out of it with security?
01:18:11.080 The problem is inherent in intelligence, which is that unless you have a small organization of people you trust completely,
01:18:19.300 a large organization of people on different levels of security,
01:18:26.120 the flow of information is very hard.
01:18:28.380 And the person who might be able to make sense of it, maybe isn't clear to have it.
01:18:35.620 So the inefficiency that you see in the federal department exists in the CIA as well.
01:18:45.220 But how do you reform an intelligence agency is very hard because you need that security.
01:18:50.540 You need that compartmentalization.
01:18:52.580 You need to protect your sources.
01:18:54.680 You need to protect your satellites.
01:18:57.020 You can't spread it around.
01:19:00.380 And so what the British always had was a very small intelligence agency.
01:19:04.880 Their view was with them, I was very limited in the capabilities they had, but very smart in making sure the information got to the people who had to have it.
01:19:18.020 And it was always odd that of the five eyes, the five intelligences share everything, which is a very important entity.
01:19:29.440 It's Britain, it's the United States, it's Canada.
01:19:32.700 I guess they're still playing.
01:19:34.360 It's Australia, it's New Zealand. 0.75
01:19:36.780 It might be called the English-speaking world, but we wouldn't call it that.
01:19:39.860 But sometimes they laterally trust each other at that level more than they trust the upstairs and downstairs.
01:19:52.820 So it's a very strange thing.
01:19:54.560 I mean, that describes a kind of government, actually, that exists independent from the governments it supposedly serves.
01:20:03.940 Well, the problem is the Department of Education was supposed to serve education.
01:20:08.640 Right.
01:20:09.040 No, that's right.
01:20:09.560 I don't know who it serves.
01:20:10.140 It's health and human services or so.
01:20:13.100 The problem is not a CIA problem.
01:20:15.880 The problem is that the federal government grew vast during World War II to manage it, if it needed to.
01:20:23.640 Grew vaster still by trying to micromanage America.
01:20:28.380 And they're very good people in the government.
01:20:30.160 It's not to question that.
01:20:32.220 And they did the same thing with the CIA.
01:20:33.420 It started as a very small organization called the OSS with a bunch of guys from Harvard and Yale.
01:20:40.140 So we went around.
01:20:41.820 And it grew into a massive entity.
01:20:45.480 And in that massive entity, information is fragmented.
01:20:50.380 The key to, since I was an analyst, I'll say the key to the CIA's analysis.
01:20:57.140 Collection is nice, but it's worth nothing until it's analyzed.
01:21:00.840 Right.
01:21:01.120 What is it?
01:21:01.520 If all the analysts can't see the information.
01:21:05.360 So, for example, I spotted the Russians speaking to Qatar.
01:21:10.140 And the Americans speaking to Qatar.
01:21:11.940 Well, it was in your time, so what the hell.
01:21:15.100 But can someone recognize it?
01:21:18.480 Well, when you're under such constraints of what you can see and what you can think and so on,
01:21:25.820 you're just another federal agency.
01:21:28.300 So it's not something unique.
01:21:29.840 It's not a government.
01:21:30.560 It couldn't govern anything.
01:21:31.540 It isn't even a conspiracy.
01:21:35.140 It couldn't organize one.
01:21:36.000 The problem with the CIA is the same thing as the problem with the other agencies. 0.99
01:21:41.440 And it's very easy to say, you know, if you want to say that this idiotic act was clearly planned by someone. 0.99
01:21:48.920 It had to be the CIA. 1.00
01:21:51.320 Now, they're idiotic things planned by the CIA. 1.00
01:21:54.060 Also, wonderful accomplishments. 0.99
01:21:56.240 But conspiracy is a very hard thing to keep quiet, especially if you need a lot of people.
01:22:04.720 So it's not a government.
01:22:06.280 It's a federal bureaucracy.
01:22:08.900 And it needs reforming.
01:22:11.860 And reforming the CIA is going to be a very complicated thing because you have to maintain security.
01:22:17.220 And firing a whole bunch of people, doing the Elon Musk routine.
01:22:22.220 Holy smoke.
01:22:24.480 Can you imagine all the irritated people that now have all sorts of intelligence?
01:22:30.260 And the CIA is not in danger of being shut down or even its budget examined.
01:22:34.760 Like, we have no idea what the CIA budget is, of course.
01:22:37.860 And everyone I know who's, you know, on, say, the intel committee is a loyal servant of the CIA.
01:22:43.100 So we're nowhere near anything like that.
01:22:47.220 But my last question is kind of a bigger question.
01:22:50.700 Do you think, as a student of history, that it's possible to wind down an empire without great suffering and humiliation?
01:22:58.920 Can you just sort of gradually pull back?
01:23:01.920 It's a very difficult thing to do because your own population takes pride in being Roman.
01:23:12.080 Yeah.
01:23:12.420 And our population doesn't take pride in being the dominant power in the world.
01:23:21.680 There's something unique and wonderful, I'll say that, about the United States.
01:23:27.380 I say this as immigrant, you know, having known the other.
01:23:30.500 However, we are the only nation that didn't take absolute pride in making war in Iraq and trying to make it an American colony. 0.62
01:23:44.140 We're fighting the Russians. 0.62
01:23:45.340 But we are proud of our country.
01:23:49.640 And our country is large enough to hold our contentment.
01:23:53.000 We're a continent.
01:23:54.420 We're a vast continent in which we can live in peace and happiness.
01:23:59.700 And the World War I we didn't want to be in because we didn't want to be involved.
01:24:04.080 And we didn't want to be in World War II.
01:24:06.040 I know.
01:24:06.800 And we really didn't want to be in the Cold War.
01:24:08.900 No.
01:24:09.140 The fact is that I served in Germany and I didn't like it.
01:24:12.680 I liked the Netherlands.
01:24:13.680 That was fun.
01:24:14.720 But Germany, no. 0.99
01:24:17.060 But we stood at the Fulda Gap, we said.
01:24:20.740 Well, I certainly didn't want to stand at the Fulda Gap.
01:24:23.120 I didn't really care about the Germans much myself.
01:24:28.720 I was happy to come home.
01:24:29.920 So, I think in the United States, the wish has always been that the Cold War be over.
01:24:38.920 That we could stop worrying about Belgium or the Congo.
01:24:43.940 For God's sakes, Vietnam, who cares? 1.00
01:24:46.640 Yeah.
01:24:47.480 So, I think unlike, we're not an empire.
01:24:50.700 We're a republic.
01:24:52.860 And an empire, Britain was an empire.
01:24:57.620 It was a monarchy.
01:25:00.880 And it's governed that way.
01:25:03.740 But we take no pride.
01:25:06.500 We took pride in winning World War II.
01:25:09.120 Sure.
01:25:10.340 But we took no pride in the Korean War.
01:25:13.320 We took no pride in the Vietnam War.
01:25:15.900 The best we could say is we had to do it.
01:25:19.440 And having all my children serving in the military,
01:25:23.040 I can also say that my son was in the Air Force and so on and so forth.
01:25:29.940 It was not a pleasant thing.
01:25:32.540 So, where in Britain being, you know, a general in the army was a matter of pride or serving as a private was,
01:25:43.340 here it was a duty.
01:25:45.080 But we'd much rather come home.
01:25:47.600 And so, I don't think we'll have that problem.
01:25:50.580 We have the ocean protecting us, the Atlantic and the Pacific.
01:25:54.480 We have Canada.
01:25:55.540 We should be nice to Canada.
01:25:57.020 You know, it's a nice place.
01:25:59.840 We have Mexico to the south.
01:26:01.760 All right.
01:26:02.840 All right.
01:26:03.860 We're a fortress.
01:26:05.300 We don't need the rest of the world.
01:26:07.340 Rome had to conquer the rest of the world.
01:26:10.040 The Byzantine Empire had to conquer as much as it could.
01:26:13.300 We don't have to conquer anything.
01:26:14.280 I don't think we'll have any trouble withdrawing our troops from the miserable third world countries you deployed them in. 1.00
01:26:22.360 So, if we had to, I think we're one of the few empires that really didn't want to be one.
01:26:29.740 We did okay.
01:26:32.100 But if my kids come home and they're well and they're healthy and they get decent careers, I'll be happy.
01:26:38.500 That's the best thing I've heard in a long time.
01:26:40.660 Church Friedman, thank you very much.
01:26:42.100 Thank you.
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