Stratfor speech: "100 years of US attacks on German-Russian friendship"
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. February 4, 2015, Chicago, USA
My name is Nick Brand and I am the Director of Joint Programs at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
Thank you for coming.
I take this opportunity to welcome George Friedman here at The Chicago Council.
I think this is his first time here, thank you for being with us.
George Friedman: No place can remain peaceful in the long term.
Not even the USA, I mean, we (USA) are always accompanied (or affected) by wars.
I suspect that Europe will not return to the great wars, but it will return to human normality:
It will have its wars, its times of peace and it will lose its lives.
There won't be 100 million deaths like in the last war, but the idea of European chosenness will, I think, contribute to this.
There will be conflicts in Europe, there have already been conflicts in Yugoslavia and now also in Ukraine.
Europe's relations with the United States - we have no relations with Europe.
We have relations with Romania, with France, but there is no Europe with which the USA has relations.
Question from the audience: Is Islamist extremism the main threat to the United States, and
will it die down or will it continue to exist?
George Friedman: He is a problem for the United States, but not an existential threat.
We have to deal with this appropriately. We have other foreign policy interests.
The main interest of US foreign policy during the last century, in the First and Second World Wars and in the Cold War,
was the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united they are the only power that can threaten us.
Our main concern was to ensure that this did not happen.
If you are a Ukrainian, you will be looking for the only one who can help you, and that is the United States.
Last week, or about 10 days ago, the commander-in-chief of the American ground forces in
Europe, General Ben Hodges, visited Ukraine.
He announced there that the US military advisors would be officially arriving in Ukraine soon.
He actually distributed the medals to the Ukrainian fighters there, although US military
protocol prohibits medals being awarded to foreigners.
But he did that because he wanted to show that the Ukrainian army is his army. Then he left.
And now the United States is supplying weapons, artillery and other military equipment to the Baltic
states - the Baltic states, Romania, Poland and Bulgaria.
That is a very interesting point.
Yesterday, the United States announced that it intends to supply weapons to Ukraine.
This has been denied, but they are doing it, the weapons are being delivered.
And in all these actions, the USA is acting outside NATO.
This is because NATO decisions must be taken unanimously by all NATO members.
The point of the whole thing is that the US is building a cordon sanitaire, a security belt, around Russia.
And Russia knows this. Russia believes that the USA intends to break up the Russian Federation.
I don't think we want to kill them, we just want to hurt them or add damage.
In any case, we are now back in the old game.
And if you ask a Pole, a Hungarian or a Romanian, they live in a completely different world to the Germans, and the
Germans live in a completely different world to the Spanish.
So there is disagreement in Europe.
But I will tell you exactly what the Ukrainians will prefer: they will try to bring the USA into their country.
The United States, out of its fundamental interest, controls all the oceans of the world.
No power has ever done that.
That is why we are invading the peoples of this world and they can do nothing about it.
That is a very nice thing.
Maintaining control over the oceans and in space is the basis of our power.
The best way to defeat an enemy fleet is to prevent it from being built.
The way the British went about ensuring that no European power could build the fleet is that the Europeans fought each other.
The policy I would recommend is the one Ronald Reagan applied, in Iran and Iraq.
He supported both sides in the war, so that they were fighting against each other and not against us.
It was cynical, it was not morally justifiable, but it worked.
And that is the point: the United States is not in a position to occupy the whole of Eurasia.
The moment our boots touch the ground there, we are demographically outnumbered.
We can smash an army, but we are not in a position to occupy Iraq.
The very idea of 130,000 US soldiers occupying a country of 25 million people...
The ratio between the number of police officers and the population of New York is greater than the
ratio of US soldiers and the Iraqi population was.
So, we are not in a position to intervene militarily everywhere, but we are in a position, firstly, to support the powers fighting
against each other so that they can concentrate on themselves - to support them: politically, financially,
militarily, supplying weapons and sending out the US advisers.
And in extraordinary cases, as we did in Japan, no, in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan,
intervene with pre-emptive strikes (spoiling attacks).
The tactic of preemptive strikes is not intended to defeat the enemy, but rather to throw the enemy off balance.
We tried to do that in every war, for example in Afghanistan, where we knocked Al Qaida off balance.
The problem we've had since we were so young and stupid is that we keep enemies off balance instead of saying:
We've done the job well, now let's go home, we say:
Man, that was easy, let's build another democracy here.
That was the moment we were struck by the weakness of our minds.
Therefore, the answer is that the US cannot intervene militarily everywhere in Eurasia.
You have to intervene selectively and as rarely as possible.
For us, military intervention is a special case, the last resort.
We cannot send out US troops as a first step.
But if we send the US troops, then, and we have already clearly understood this from experience,
intervention must be limited and not reach gigantic proportions.
Hopefully we have understood that for this time, because it usually takes a while for children to learn in class.
But you are absolutely right, we as an empire cannot do that (intervene everywhere).
The British back then did not occupy India, they simply took the individual states of India and made them fight each other.
The British installed British officers in the Indian army.
The ancient Romans also did not send troops to remote regions outside the Roman Empire,
but instead deployed pro-Roman kings there.
These kings ruled for the Roman Empire in other countries, and they were responsible for
maintaining pro-Roman peace on the borders of the empire.
This was the case with the Parthian Empire, for example.
So, empires that try to rule directly in occupied territories, such empires fail, as was
the case with the Nazi empire, for example.
Because nobody has enough power to govern directly.
You have to be clever about it.
However, that is not our problem.
It actually means that we are an empire as such.
But we shouldn't think that we can relax, go home and stop worrying about anything.
We are only in about the third chapter of the book.
Next question from the audience:
Did I understand you correctly that the European currency, the euro, will not survive ...?
George Friedman: The question now on the table for the Russians is whether you want Ukraine to be a buffer zone between Russia
and the West that will at least remain neutral - or will the West push so far into Ukraine that the West (NATO)
will be only 100 km from Stalingrad and 500 km from Moscow?
For Russia, the status of Ukraine is an existential question.
And the Russians can't just walk away and let go on this issue.
For the USA, if Russia continues to cling to Ukraine, we will stop Russia.
For this, measures were taken for which General Hodges was appointed to be blamed.
It is about the prepositioning of troops in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and the Baltic states - the
Intermarium, the territory between the Black Sea and the Baltic, which was Pilsudski's dream.
This is the preferred solution for the USA.
And the thing we don't have an answer to is the question:
What will Germany do in this situation?
The real unknown variable in Europe is the Germans, if the US builds this security belt, not in Ukraine, but to the
West and the influence of the Russians in Ukraine will dwindle.
We do not know what the German position will be.
Germany is in a very peculiar situation.
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is on the Supervisory Board of Gazprom.
The Germans have a very complex relationship with the Russians.
But they don't know what to do themselves.
They have to export their goods, the Russians can take them off their hands.
On the other hand, they lose their free trade zone, which they need to build other things.
The main fear of the USA is that German capital and German technologies will be combined with
Russian raw material resources and Russian labor,
combine to form a unique combination that the USA has been trying to prevent for a century.
So how can this German-Russian combination be prevented?
The USA is ready to lay its cards on the table: it is the line between the Baltic and the Black Sea.
The cards have always been on the table for Russia.
For them, it is crucial that Ukraine becomes a neutral country, not a pro-Western one.
Belarus is a different matter here.
Well, anyone who can give me an answer as to what the Germans will do in this situation can also tell
me what the next 20 years of history will look like.
But unfortunately, the Germans have to make this decision again and again.
And that is Germany's eternal problem.
Germany is extremely powerful economically, but at the same time very fragile geopolitically.
And they never know how and where they can sell their exports.
Since 1871, this has always been the German question. And the question of Europe.
Think about the German question, which is now coming up again.
That is the next question we need to ask - but we don't because we don't know what the Germans will do.