George Friedman started Stratfor in 1996.
Now they have 4000 clients.
Mr. Friedmans view on 'reality' must have relevance.
Weather he spills the beans or wants us to believe his spin, its up to you to decide !
Here is the whole 13 min video written out in black, except for 2,5 minutes which I summarized:
NOTE: The whole speech was 72 minutes. You find it here.
Friedman: No place is really pacific for very long.I mean .. neither the US .. we have constant wars. Europe will - I suspect- not return to the 31 years ( from 1914 to 1945 in which 100 million people died) but it will return to humanity. They will have their wars, their peqace, they will live their lives.
It will not be 100 million deaths. But the idea of European Exceptionalism is the one which will suffer the first death.. ( ??) There will be conflict. There was conflict in Yugoslavia. And there is certainly conflict now in Ukraïne. As to the relationship to the US: we don't longer have a relationship with Europe. We have a relationship with Romania, we have a relationship with France, there is no Europe to have a relationship with.
Question: Is islamic extremism really the major threat to the United States, and will it die on its own or will it keep growing?
Friedman: It is a problem to the United States. It is not anexistential threat. International terrorism is important, but not the biggest threat. It has to be dealt with. But ithas to be dealt with proportionally.
We have other Foreign Policy interests. So...
The primordial interest of the USA, over which for centuries we fought wars ( WW1 and WW2), is the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united they are the only force that could threaten us. We have to make sure that that does not happen.
( below in italics: summary. from 1.30 min to 4.0 min)
General Hodges pinned medals on Ukraïnian fighters, which foreigners normally don't do. To show this was His then announced that the US will bring in armour, artillery and other military equipment in the Baltics, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria,which is a very interesting point. Also it was announced that the US will be sending weapons to the Ukraïne (which was of course denied, but it will happen)
( 3 min.) In all of this the US has acted outside the context of Nato, as in Nato any country could veto this. The point is that the USA is prepared to create a 'cordon sanitaire' around Russia. Russia knows it. Russia believes that the USA is intending to break the Russian Federation. But I think it is more to hold the Russians back, not to break them. We are back at the old game ( a new cold war). The people in the Eastern countries live in a totally different universe from the Germans, and for the Germans life looks very different than for Spanish people. So there is no communality in Europe. If I were a Ukraïnian I would do exactly what they do: try to draw the Americans in.
( 4 min)
Friedman: The US has a fundamental interest. It controlls all the oceans and space of the world. No power has ever done that. Because ot that we get to invade people and they don't get to invade us. It is a very nice thing. Maintaining the controle of the seas and of the air is the foundation of our power.
The best way to defeat an enemy fleet is to not let it be built. The way the Brittish managed to make certain that no European Power could build a fleet is to make sure that they (Englands ennemies) were at each others throats. The policy that I would recomment is the one that Ronald Reagan adopted toward Iran and Iraq. He funded both sides so they would fight each other and not fight us. This is cynical. It was certainly not moral , it worked.. and... This is the point:
(5 min.) The US cannot occupy Eurasia. The moment first boots are on the ground .. the demographic differential is: We are totally outnumbered. We can defeat an army. We cannot occupy Iraq. The idea that 130.000 men would occupy a country of 25 million ...The ratio in New York of cops to citizens was greater than we had enmployed in Irak, so we don't have the ability to go across, But we do have the ability to support various contending powers, so they concentrate on themselves .. political support, some economic support, military support, advisors , and in extremis do what we did in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan: (have) spoiling attacks (*) . The spoiling attack is not intended to defeat the enemy, it is inteded to throw them off balance.
What we did in each of these wars, in Afghanistan for example is.. we threw Al Qaida off balance. The problem we have since we are young and stupid is that when we have thrown them off balance is that...instead of saying: OK, job well done, lets go home... we say: That was easy. Why don't we build a democracy here ? ".. this is the moment that dementia came in !
The answer therefore is the US cannot constantly be intervening throughout Eurasia.
It must be selectively intervening and very rarely. That is the extreme moment.
We cannot as the first step send in American troops.
And when we send American troops we have to totally understand that initiatives are limited to that and not start all kind of fantasies ... so.. Hopefully we will learn that this time. It takes a while for kids to learn lessons. But I think you are absolutely right: we cannot as an empire do that.
Brittain did not occupy India. It took various Indian states and turned them against each other. And provided some Brittisch officers for an Indian army. The Romans did not send vast armies out there.
It placed kings like ... eh .. various kings under the emperor and those Kings were responsable for maintaining the peace. Pontius Pilatus was one example. So empires that are directly governed by the Empire, like the Nazi Empire, fail. No one has that much power. You have to have a love of cleverness.
However our problem is not yet that. It is actually admitting that we have an empire. So we haven't even got to that point where we don't think we can kinda go home and it will be over and done..
So we are not even ready yet for Chapter 3 of the book.
( 8.10 min)
Question: I infer from your comments that the Euro will not survive....
Friedman: "The question on the table for the Russians is : Will they retain a bufferzone that is at least neutral, or will the West poenetrate so far in the Ukraine that they are 70 miles away from Stalingrad and 300 miles away from Moscow. For the Russia the status of the Ukraine is an existential threat. And the Russians cannot let go. For the United States, in the event that Russia holds on to the Ukraïne: where will it stop ? ( Does he mean: where will Russia stop? Or does he mean: where will the USA stop ? I think Friedman does not make a choice: both countries could refuse to blink. JV) Therefore its not an accident ( < difficult to understand) that general Hodges who has been appointed to be blamed for all of this, is talking about prepositioning troops in Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, and the Baltics. This is the intermarium ( the land between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea) that thew Polish leader Pilsudski dreamt of (**). This is the solution for the United States.
The issue, to which we don't have the answer is: What will Germany do ?
So, the real 'wild card' in Europe is that -- as the United States builds its 'Cordon Sanitaire, not in Ukraïne but to the West, and the Russians try to figure out how to 'leverage the Ukraïnians out'
We don't know the German position. Germany is in a very peculiar position. Its former president Gerhard Schröder is on the board of Gazprom, eh, they have a very complex relationship to the Russians. The Germans themselves don't know what to do. They must export.. the Russians can't take up the export ( JV: does he mean because of sanctions?) On the other hand if they loose the free trade zone they need to build something different. (JV: What Free trade zone will be lost? )
For the United States the primordial fear is German Capital, German Technology , Russian natural resources and Russian manpower as the only combination that has for centuries scared the hell out of the United States! ( This is exactly what William Engdahl writes in 'A Century of War' ; WW1 was started by the English/Americans to prevent Russia and Middle East oil coming to Germany and giving them a decisive power.)
So how does this play out?
Well, the US has already put its cards on the table.
It is the line from the Baltics tothe Black Sea.
Note: we see (at 11 min.) a line of countries that comprise from north to south: Poland, Checho-Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.
The German video has written on the map: "The USA build a ring of anti-Russian countries between Germany and Russia to split them from each other, to make them weaker.
For the Russians their cards have always been on the table: they must have at least a neutral Ukraïne. Not a pro-western Ukraïne. Belarus is another question.
Now, who ever can tell me what the Germans are going to do, is going to tell me aboput the next 20 years of history. But unfortunately the Germans haven't made up their mind.
And this is the problem of Gemany, always.. Enormously economically very powerfull. Geopolitically very fragile, and never knowing how to reconcile the two. Ever since 1871 this has been the German Question. The question of Europe.
Think about the German Question. Because now it is coming up again. That is the next question we have to address. And we don't how to adress it.(< Difficult to understand) We don't know what they're gonna do.
--------------------------- End at 12.52 min -------------------------------
(*) A Spoiling attack: Headquarters, Dept. of the Army, 5-166: Spoiling Attack, Army Field Manual FM 3-90 (Tactics) (July 2001), pp. 5-39, 5-40:
A spoiling attack is a defensive attack, undertaken to preempt or seriously impair an enemy assault by attacking the enemy while the latter is in the process of assembly or preparation for offensive operations.
(**)
( Note from JV: The intermarium of Pilsudski was larger. It included Belarus and Ukraïne
and Yugoslavia ! The countries that Friedman calls 'the solution' are now already part of Nato
Most of them entered Nato in 2004!)
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Note: There is a document which describes how the USA will wage war. In short:
The document states that the United States, for the foreseeable future, would primarily be engaged in unconventional warfare. The document contains a structured approach to the subversion of targeted nation States, beginning with an assessment of a feasible and cooperative opposition, the creation of events to polarize society, the establishment of armed groups and their development into a fighting force that is capable of fighting a civil war or unconventional war under U.S. supervision to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals.
[...] a de-facto blueprint for the United States’ and NATO’s involvement in Libya and Syria [....] and also represents a precise blueprint of the ongoing war in Iraq and the “crisis” in Ukraine.
( This is a summary from here)
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Note: The german translation on the video is sometimes wrong.
Hacker Jeremy Hammond found out that Stratfor is acting as a kinbd of private CIA, with no controle from the government, of course. Hammond was jailed for 1o years for discovering this illegal activity:
Jeremy Hammond (born January 8, 1985) is a political activist and computer hacker fromChicago. He was convicted and sentenced[1] in November 2013 to 10 years in US Federal Prison for hacking the private intelligence firm Stratfor and releasing the leaks through the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.[2][3][4] He founded the computer security training websiteHackThisSite[5] in 2003.[6]
16 nov. 2013 door
Nieuws - De Amerikaanse hacktivist Jeremy Hammond is veroordeeld tot 10 jaar cel voor het hacken van inlichtingenbedrijf Stratfor. Hij speelde miljoenen e-mails van het bedrijf door aan Wikileaks.
Hammond schikte vrijdag in New York met justitie en gaat 10 jaar lang de cel in. De hacktivist stelt dat hij ermee misstanden wilde aankaarten. In februari 2012 publiceerde Wikileaks de miljoenen gestolen e-mails van Stratfor. Uit de correspondentie werd volgens de klokkenluidersite duidelijk dat het bedrijf zich gedroeg als een soort inlichtingendienst met weinig toezicht van de overheid.
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