Original subtitles

And now, to close our event, please welcome to the stage the founder and chairman of Geopolitical

Futures, Dr. George Friedman.

I can't think of a more dangerous or thankless task than to be the American called to explain

America to the Europeans.

The only thing worse is to be a European called to explain Europe to the Americans.

This is because we are profoundly different.

The United States is not a European country.

Its political system doesn't work like a European system.

Its perception of the world is not European.

Its perception of itself is not European.

It looks like a European country in many respects.

We have a president, but he's not that important.

Congress is much more important, and a judge in Hawaii can shut down his entire program.

But more important, the government isn't that important.

The United States was founded on the distinction between the public and the private.

And the public was held in suspect.

The idea of the United States was that government was dangerous, and therefore we should make

a government that was so incompetent, so incapable of making decisions, that it would

leave everybody alone.

An example is we have now become the largest oil producer in the world.

We will shortly become one of the largest exporters.

No policy by the government, no planning by the government, no conception of the government

was involved in that.

It happened.

It happened because two guys in Midland, Texas, invented a way to increase production,

and the city of Houston, the true capital of oil in the United States, just as San Jose

is the true capital of tech in the United States, Minneapolis is the true capital of

food in the United States.

So I say to my European friends who have spent their time in Washington with think tanks

and gone to congressional hearings, it's time to visit America.

Because Washington is as unlike America and as much like Europe as you can get.

But in the end, the decisions that create American policy are not made in Washington.

They're delivered to Washington by congressmen, and congressmen don't care very much about

think tanks or policy papers or the State Department or anything.

They care about being re-elected.

I live in Texas, in Hayes County, and I can promise you that my congressman spends more

time worrying about what I think than what NATO thinks.

This is important.

The structure of power in the United States is frequently misunderstood in Europe.

You see Trump.

He is not a prime minister.

He is merely a president.

He faces two parliaments, now divided, and a judiciary system that can shut him down.

There is a vast difference, therefore, between what he says, which is really crazy stuff.

I enjoy it tremendously.

How can I, where else in the world can I wake up in the morning on Sunday and see psychotic

episodes in the newspaper?

Wonderful.

Do not confuse that without a relentless, realistic, ruthless American foreign policy.

What I'm here to speak to is not that Donald Trump is weird.

Yeah, credit.

What I'm trying, what I want to talk to you about today is the continuity of American

foreign policy, the way in which the United States actually looks at the world, and where

NATO and Europe fit into this.

It has to be remembered that for the United States, World War II was not about the Atlantic

alone.

It was a Pacific war, and the stakes in both wars were the same, command of the seas.

For the United States, in the 1930s, we speak of isolationism, only from Europe.

America was deeply involved in China, deeply involved in Indonesia, the Philippines, facing

off with the Japanese.

It chose not to get involved in Europe on the assumption that the European balance of

power would maintain itself.

This was a miscalculation.

No one thought the French would collapse in six weeks, but it was not a stupid miscalculation.

The United States has never been isolationist.

From its founding, which was created by its alliance with France, through all its history,

the United States has been deeply involved with the global system, but not all of it

at the same time, and shifting depending on circumstances.

During the Cold War, we were both an Atlantic and a Pacific power.

We were fighting in Vietnam, we were fighting in Korea, we were deployed in Europe, we were

stretched to our limits.

After the Cold War, the world reshaped itself, and so did our foreign policy, which is by

definition flexible.

So do not expect the United States to be, in 2018, what it was in 1968 to Europe.

It was a different time and a different place.

To give you a sense of the fundamental difference between us, the United States is a global

power.

Europe is a regional power, and in fact, when I say Europe, I don't even know who I'm talking

about, because surely Portugal's foreign policy and the interests of Hungary are not

the same.

So when we look at Europe, we have no idea.

We keep speaking about our relationship to Europe, but in fact, as I'll try to say, we

don't have equal relationship with all countries of Europe.

We have different relationships with different countries, because we don't have an institutional

structure that will allow us to have...

Well, you have no foreign policy, you know, EU does not have, well, it sort of has, but

not really, and that's the way we look at it.

It doesn't really have a foreign policy, sort of, maybe.

Right now, we are involved in dealing with Korea, a situation which developed under the

Clinton administration, and which is currently being followed in precisely the same way.

Avoid direct combat, try to induce or pressure North Korea to limit its nuclear program,

but not really eliminate it, but be prepared to go to war if that is the only option.

And therefore, on Guam, we have standing by a substantial amount of our strategic bomber

force, perhaps to strike.

In China, we have an issue that was in place since the Bush administration, that China

does not practice free trade.

It doesn't have tariffs, but it has any number of mechanisms to block American goods, informal

and otherwise.

For a very long time, we have been able to get the Chinese to adjust.

It's not in their interest to adjust, they didn't expect us to do it, and we finally

did what the Obama administration threatened.

It's important, because people dismiss all this, oh, Trump having a heart attack, forgetting

that Obama was trying to head this off, and failed.

This has had huge consequences on China, and relatively little consequences in the United States.

Germany exports 50% of its GDP.

The numbers from China are all over the place, but 25-30%.

We export 16% of our GDP, about half of that to Canada and Mexico, to our free trade North

American partners.

We are not vulnerable to trade wars.

You can't hit our economy that hard.

We can hit theirs, and we've chosen to do that, and that is an obsession now.

The Chinese want to gain control of the South China Sea.

Why?

If you look at the string of islands around the South China Sea, the United States could

easily blockade that, and the Chinese are afraid that we would, and who knows, we might.

On the other hand, we cannot let the Chinese take those islands, because then they can

move into the Western Pacific, and we bled for the Western Pacific.

World War II and the defeat of the Japanese Navy, Guadalcanal and all of these battles,

are burnt into our soul.

They're not burnt into your soul.

Iwo Jima is not something that endless films are made of, but it's ours, and so the option

of allowing the Chinese to enter the Western Pacific is not there.

We are trying to build an alliance, Quad Four, which would include Japan, Australia, the

United States, and India.

The Indians practice, they don't want to join, they're dancing around, we know that.

This is the alliance structure we care about, because that alliance structure would bring

four navies to bear, along with the Vietnamese Navy, against the Chinese.

So if you ask me where are the Americans obsessed, as they were in the Cold War, it's the Pacific.

What we spent our blood for, and we're not about to give up.

We can't invade China, that's out of the question, won't, and the Chinese can't take

us on at sea, so we're in a stalemate with an economic war going on.

In Afghanistan, we were negotiating an exit with the Taliban, where the United States

leaves Afghanistan.

We lost that war, we have to leave.

In the Middle East, the Iranians have expanded to dominate Iraq, dominate Lebanon, have a

significant role in Syria, and be operating in Yemen.

The United States has helped engineer an alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the United

Arab Emirates, and Oman.

That's a pretty extraordinary alliance.

Can it hold together?

Well, Khashoggi's killing didn't help at all, but somebody hit exactly where they had to

hit to take that alliance apart, but we are maintaining it.

These are the things that the Americans wake up to every day when I do my work.

I look at China, I look at Korea, I look at what's going on in Southeast Asia, what's

happened in the Middle East, and then I get to Poland and Romania, because I care about

Poland and Romania.

Because we have troops in Poland, an air force base being built in Transylvania, I

know you'd like it back, but that's your problem, and then we'll take it back and we'll have

an air base in Hungary, it's fine.

So the basic point that I'm making here, and it's an important one, is we devote attention

to NATO to the degree required, which is not very much.

The Europeans speak about their security interests.

What security interests?

Who's about to attack you?

What security interests do you have in mind?

We have security interests.

Are any of your countries coming to the South China Sea?

Are any planning to join the Quad Alliance?

Are you deploying special forces in Saudi Arabia?

No.

NATO is structured to protect Europe.

We understand that.

But the United States has interests far beyond Europe, to which NATO is inherently irrelevant.

So there's an asymmetry in the relationship that we have, and the asymmetry really goes

to the fact that NATO is designed to defend Europe.

The only threat to Europe is Russia, and that's a questionable threat, and the place you have

to defend them from is Poland, Hungary, and Romania.

When we make this case, the Germans have said to us, well, we don't have to build a military,

we give foreign aid.

They've actually said that.

To have a military alliance, you must have a military.

If you have no military, there is no military alliance, and NATO is a military alliance.

The United States and Britain have the overwhelming military capability.

Germany has virtually none, and I understand that.

Germany does not see itself as in danger militarily.

It does not see any purpose in diverting resources to building a military force,

but somewhere in the back of the mind it assumes the United States will come under any circumstances

should something happen.

Well, perhaps we will, perhaps we won't, but in what sense does NATO exist?

The American view is that the Europeans have betrayed NATO.

I know the Europeans think that the Americans have, but the American view is,

during the Cold War, where I served as Chief Technical Senator,

where we sat there and the Dutch knew what they were going to do,

the Danish knew what they were going to do, the Germans knew what they were going to do,

we were a team.

Today I cannot even predict that the Germans will permit American forces to pass through its space

on the way to Poland in the event of war.

Probably they will, but an alliance in which the best you can say is probably

is not the sort of guaranteed thing we had.

When Trump said NATO was obsolete, this is what he meant.

He meant first that it was built to resist the Soviet Union,

and that level of effort is no longer called for,

and obsolete in that each nation is not capable of fielding a military.

I'm not here talking about the 2% number.

That's a number that politicians and diplomats come up with.

I mean divisions, brigades, aircraft.

I don't know if you need 2%, 3%, 1%, I don't care.

How many brigades can be deployed into Poland if the Russians attack?

So from the American point of view, NATO is a trap.

It's a trap because if we go through the NATO process,

we can be blocked by 14 different committees.

And so much of what we do in Romania and Poland may be through NATO somehow,

but really is a bilateral relationship.

The idea that the United States has abandoned Europe is untrue.

We are deeply committed to Poland and Romania, and they to us and each other.

This is what is left of NATO.

The rest are dinners with fine wines.

It is not something that we want to get involved in.

We are sending our forces, to the point I want to make, and I always make.

In the United States today, there are about 25 million Americans

who served in the armed forces, veterans.

In my own family, I have two children who served.

Down the block, more.

The U.S. military is a very personal thing.

It is not what it's become in Europe.

And we are very, very picky about our lives on a personal level.

Those of us who were in the Cold War and stood in front of the Fulda Gap

remember our allies.

And they really were allies.

And it really was an alliance.

We don't know where they are anymore.

Let's back off the question of NATO for a moment

and understand that the United States follows a strategy,

a global strategy, that has been in place for 100 years,

with absolute rigor.

It has two elements.

First, North America is an island,

and the United States must control the waters leading to those islands.

At least.

Second, the United States cannot tolerate any one power,

Germany, Russia, Montenegro, whoever,

from controlling both the European peninsula and the Russian mainland.

Why?

Because the combination of technology and natural resources

could build fleets that threaten our interests.

The United States intervenes whenever it appears that that is about to happen.

In the First World War, three weeks after the Tsar fell

and the Germans started moving its forces west,

the United States declared war

and in seven months sent a million men to France

to stabilize the front and win the battle.

In World War II, the United States intervened in Europe in large mass in 1944

to prevent the Germans from surviving

or the Russians from seizing everything.

In the Cold War, we remained here, standing on the line for 40 years.

Because you say Americans are, how should I put it,

you know, they have no patience.

But for 40 years we stood on the line,

not just here, but in Turkey, Iran, throughout the periphery.

This policy remains in place in the United States today.

In 2014, when the Ukrainian events happened,

Obama deployed American forces to Poland and Romania.

And that deployment is not only continuing, it is intensifying.

So when you look at American policy and you say it's all over,

yes, we've had many strange events.

The British had the Boer War, the Germans seized Pacific Islands,

you know, we all do strange things off the map.

But there is a consistent and specific thing now expanded to China.

We control the waters leading to the United States

and will under no circumstances bend to that

and we will prevent hegemony in Eurasia.

I began by talking about Donald Trump and how strange a man he is.

And I'm trying to make the point it doesn't matter.

We're not a European country.

The strategy of naval presence is built into our DNA.

Our response to any power threatening Europe is built into our DNA.

We will have an ideology, you know, avoiding communism,

avoiding fascism, whatever.

But the truth of the matter is we have a consistent,

ruthless and fully understandable foreign policy.

Now, with this foreign policy at the moment,

the American position is our primary threats are in Asia

but can easily be managed.

Other view is that Russia can be managed.

Russia is a declining power.

It is a third world power that lives on the export of natural resources.

It does not control the price of those natural resources.

So when I looked a few minutes ago, oil, West Texas Intermediate was $53 a barrel.

The Russians need at least 70 or 80 to balance their budget.

This is a country in trouble.

We're all in trouble, that's theirs.

Russia also has a borderland that it must have.

Like the United States, it has imperatives.

It needs above all else strategic depth.

In the West, the strategic depth was provided by the Baltic States, Belarus and Ukraine.

The second entry point is the Caucasus.

There it used to be Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia.

Now it is Dagestan, Chechnya, Ossetia.

But so long as they hold the high Caucasus, they're okay.

Over the past years, the Baltics have been included in NATO.

St. Petersburg is now 100 miles from NATO, where previously it was 1,000.

They did not like this.

It didn't bother me they didn't like it, but they didn't like it.

Then the Ukrainian events came.

From the Russian point of view, the Ukrainian event was an American coup d'etat.

They think in these terms.

Coup d'etat or not, a pro-Russian government was replaced by a pro-Western government.

And the Russians said the United States had no reason to do this in Ukraine

and they did not intend to threaten the viability of the Russian Federation

because it was a flat rush to Moscow.

It came close to war.

Russia said we can't live with this line, with you here.

And the Americans said, and we can't live with you on the Carpathians.

We can't.

If you press the Carpathians and you're pressing the North,

we don't have the forces, we don't want to have the forces to balance you.

And a deal was made.

Never published, never signed.

We accepted that Ukraine was a frozen war.

American forces did not move out of Romania.

We did not let the Romanians go to Moldova.

We did not let the Poles go to Lvov.

And no, you guys can't go to Carpathians.

We don't want that because that will force the Russians to act.

The Russians understood they could not go into Ukraine.

And so we had a buffer.

Now, all buffers built this way are inherently unstable.

They're unstable because they depend on the power inside the buffer

to remain stable and coherent and accept its position.

Which is, we didn't have a signed treaty

because then we would have to decide what to do with Crimea.

And we really don't care what happens to Crimea, but we didn't want to say that.

So, left there.

We would have to discuss the little green men in the East.

And frankly, if you want to send little green men into the East, we can live with that.

We can't live with main Russian force, armored divisions, on the border to Romania.

But we can live with the rest.

The problem that we have now, and this is symptomatic of both the NATO question

and the American strategy question.

Whether the Russians are trying to destabilize Ukraine

or the Ukrainians are doing it for themselves

is a theoretical problem I can't solve.

But there is two major threats on the buffer zone.

And the biggest one is Belarus.

Look at the map.

Belarus has as its border city Smolensk.

To the West, it opens a front in Poland.

Lukashenko has kept it steady.

But as I said in a conversation with a senior official,

any time I have to depend on the defense of my country,

on the life of one man,

in the 60s,

this is not the foundation of stability.

So now we have Ukraine,

which the Russians genuinely believe will destabilize.

Which the Americans don't know how to restabilize.

Nor do we understand what will happen if it destabilizes.

So the Russians are picking.

Picking in the Kerch Straits.

The Russians cannot forget the borderland.

We cannot return to the Cold War.

So the question is, and this becomes a dangerous thing,

if either of these countries destabilize,

and we think the Russians are coming in,

do we go first?

If they think we're coming in, do they come first?

This is the worst of all military gambles.

It's a non-nuclear nuclear game.

You must strike first.

Now, this is a serious matter,

for which the United States has committed our children,

if I want to be sentimental,

and they are in Poland,

they're in Romania, where it's snowing,

my son's in the Air Force, and the Air Force is building bases.

All right, we've made the commitment.

Where are our allies?

What is NATO's position on this?

What is Germany's position?

They wrote a very strong statement condemning the Russians.

Well, certainly the Russians will retreat in fear.

Is there a NATO?

What is its policy on the Eastern Front

in the event of destabilization?

Knowing that by the time it destabilizes,

it's too late to do anything.

So this is the divergence

of the United States and of NATO.

We've done something.

We didn't ask NATO's permission.

We have the permission of Poland.

We have the permission of Romania.

I would welcome the permission of Hungary one day,

and perhaps we'll get it.

Each country plays its own game.

It has its own consequences of the game it plays.

For us, the consequences are the possibility of a conflict

that we don't want.

But given my description of American strategy,

you know why we're in Poland and Romania.

We do not know what Germany's national strategy is.

We do not know what Italy's national strategy is.

We have no idea what the French are doing.

No, we once did.

When NATO was the bulwark against the Soviet Union,

we knew what the national strategy on all sides was.

Now it is no longer clear.

Who's with us?

Who's not with us?

Who's working with the Russians?

Who's not working with the Russians?

We can all have a coherent policy.

We can all say, look, we need to reach out to the Russians

and help stabilize them to give them confidence.

But what we're doing is moving against each other.

Germany wants to give them confidence,

and we're flying very large aircraft in the Black Sea.

We have to get together and talk about it.

These are the conversations that NATO doesn't want to have.

Because if they have it,

they have to have a resolution on the table.

And if they have a resolution,

they have to say yes or no.

And the NATO position on anything is ambiguous.

So when we talk about very concrete military problems

with NATO,

two things will happen.

First, you Americans are cowboys.

Okay? Fair enough. I like being a cowboy.

The second is that you Americans are cowboys.

Okay? Fair enough. I like being a cowboy.

The second is that you do not understand

the complexity of the situation.

During the Cold War,

we understood the complexity and we had to simplify it

by placing forces in a blocking position.

The situation is complex.

The situation is always complex.

You can use that complexity to paralyze yourself

or you can say, let me simplify this.

This is a grenade launcher.

It goes 400 feet. It's simple.

I don't mean to be light on war.

We have fought wars now for 17, 18 years

and all of our children in my country

have been somehow exposed.

What I am saying is that we need some clarity

between us, but we do not even have

a common understanding of the threat.

We do not even understand

what we are obligated to commit.

At the same time,

we would love to have some European help

in the Pacific or in the Indian Ocean

or in the Middle East,

but we don't even expect it.

We would at least like to have some European help

in Europe.

Even that is not forthcoming.

The point that I want to make

is that there are two perceptions of NATO.

One is the American and one is the European.

The European perception is

that NATO exists

for European security.

They state this without telling us

what the threat to European security is

so we can't prepare for it.

Therefore, they don't have to allocate forces

to deal with it.

Security has become a metaphysical concept.

You need to read Kant

to understand what the Europeans mean

by security.

We don't understand it.

We do understand that we have a military

but we don't understand it.

The American view is

that NATO has become a trap.

You will not find this in Washington

and you will not find this in Boston.

You will find this outside of there

in the rest of America.

What you will find is a feeling

that what NATO will do

at the moment you cannot afford to be slowed down.

This is not because we are gunslingers

or we are looking for wars.

It is that if the Russian situation deteriorates

which I hope it doesn't

which I don't think it will

but who knows?

We will not have time for discussions.

NATO used to have a single

integrated strategic plan

which told us all the contingencies

if this happens

if the Russians move into Norway

if the Russians move into Norway and Turkey

there are people who spent their entire lives

with these plans and came out very crazy

because they had to imagine every contingency.

What if the Hungarians decide to break with the Russians

and attack on their own?

That was really a plan.

I said these guys were crazy

but that's what they were supposed to do.

There is no plan. There is no coherent plan.

There is no coherent understanding of what the danger is.

There is no alliance except for the meetings.

Would the United States be prepared to have an alliance?

Absolutely.

European GDP is the same as American GDP.

There is no reason why the European military

should not be as large and capable as the American.

None. Except that the Europeans don't want to spend the money.

Got that?

I understand.

But then we cannot permit ourselves

to be trapped into commitments

that we cannot succeed on our own

because we have no allies.

We've learned what it's like to have such commitments

in Iraq and Afghanistan.

These are bad ideas.

So from our point of view

it is Europe's move to tell us.

Now, when Trump said NATO is obsolete

and Merkel said we are on our own

and we have no hope

I thought she was insulting the Americans.

We were happy. You are on your own. Go!

There is the idea now of a European military.

We wholeheartedly endorse this.

Because nobody doesn't want it in the United States.

Who will command it?

What language will you use?

What is the strategy?

And how long will it be

before you replace American forces

in Poland and Romania so we can go home?

This is a wonderful idea.

Now, you know it's not going to happen.

I know it's not going to happen.

I know that your Prime Minister has said it should happen.

He's right. But it won't.

Because who is going to put themselves under the command of a German?

What army is going to put themselves under the command of a French?

I mean, how are you going to do this?

An alliance structure works

because your troops are all under your command.

But you have obligations and commitments.

And this is the fundamental question.

It is not a European illusion of an army.

It is each country

that chooses to be part of

the security zone.

Benefiting from the security

and paying for it.

Not in money, but in the children.

In their commitment to the military.

I'm not inventing something new.

This was what it was.

So the thing that I would ask as an American is

I understand that we Americans are very unsophisticated

and we don't understand the true complexities of the world.

Because I've been to Europe and they've told me many times.

But somehow we manage.

And in this particular case, your eastern front

is being held by a coalition of Romania,

Poland and the United States.

And this is NATO today.

This is NATO because this is European security.

These are the countries that are committed to it.

And these are the countries taking the risks.

So.

I'm sorry if this sounded like a political speech.

But why not?

It is not because I oppose a relationship with Europe.

I would love to have a relationship with Europe.

I would love to know what relationship the Europeans want.

I think I know.

Why don't I call them over to Romania and tell them

that we're going to do this.

We won't do that.

We will defend what we have to defend.

Remember when I said we have to defend the border.

The American strategy calls for that.

And we're there.

And we can, at the level of threat, there's no problem.

I mean, but if things fall apart,

that so I would urge the Hungarian government to consider if all hell

breaks loose we're gonna have to chat very fast it's gonna be a quick phone

call okay thank you very much

thank you very much dr. Friedman ladies and gentlemen that concludes our

conference I would like to once again thank our partners of think our speakers

for their insights our partners the corner donation of tongue and the

Danube Institute our sponsor the NATO public diplomacy division as well as all

of you for being here today thank you very much for your questions and for

your engagement with speakers we look forward to seeing you at future events

as well and thank you once again

you