George Friedman Quotes

A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.

The most efficient way to use military power is to disrupt emerging powers before they can become even marginally threatening.

Success looks like you sitting here pretty confident that an armed brigade isn't going to come pouring in here and blow your head off. Which I don't think is your major concern. Therefore, the United States' foreign policy is successful.

Islam invaded Europe twice from the Mediterranean - first in Iberia, the second time in southeastern Europe, as well as nibbling at Sicily and elsewhere. Christianity invaded Islam multiple times, the first time in the Crusades and in the battle to expel the Muslims from Iberia. Then it forced the Turks back from central Europe. The Christians finally crossed the Mediterranean in the 19th century, taking control of large parts of North Africa. Each of these two religions wanted to dominate the other. Each seemed close to its goal. Neither was successful. What remains true is that Islam and Christianity were obsessed with each other from the first encounter. Like Rome and Egypt they traded with each other and made war on each other.

Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in context and try to understand what has happened and why. From that, after the rage cools, plans for action can be made. Rage has its place, but actions must be taken with discipline and thought.

Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.

Presidents and other politicians manage the appearance of things, largely by manipulating the air and hope.

The events we have passed through form a coherent pattern and the political actors who have shaped the world are rational
if not necessarily moral or decent
actors. Americans tend to think of its leaders as fools and knaves and of its enemies as psychotic. This seems to comfort us. While America's leaders might be knaves, they are not fools, and while our enemies might have utterly different moral values that are repugnant to us, they are far from insane.

But smuggling people is a referral business, and you don't get good references by robbing and killing your charges. You may get away with it once or twice, but then business dries up.

Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.

... common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.

Europe is in an economic crisis. Germany is the wealthiest country in Europe and it benefits the most from Europe. However, the German public doesn't want to pay for what they see as Greek indolence and corruption.

Terrorism is an act of violence whose primary purpose is to create fear and, through that, a political result.

And from this story I learned about the geopolitics of taking out one's salami.

In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It

The first thing you have to do is understand what success looks like. And to understand what success looks like you have to understand the intent. If you understand that intent is to make sure the sea lines are secure, then suddenly bombing Kosovo makes sense, because you don't want Serbia to reemerge as a major power.

The American people must mature. We are an adolescent lot, expecting solutions to insoluble problems and perfection in our leaders.

Well what are our geopolitical objectives? First, that North America be peaceful, prosperous, dominated by the United States. Second, that no nation be able to approach the United States militarily ... Those are the goals. It's very simple. We achieve that by making certain that all conflict takes place in the Eastern Hemisphere so we don't have conflict here.

It is good, as I have said, to be neither victim nor victimizer. Unfortunately, it is not possible. What

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

In the end, the problem of Europe is the same problem that haunted its greatest moment, the Enlightenment. It is the Faustian spirit, the desire to possess everything even at the cost of their souls.

As the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won't have an appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support.

We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Balkan

The pursuit of universal rights requires more than speeches. It requires power.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

Presidents may run for office on ideological platforms and promised policies, but their presidency is actually defined by the encounter between fortune and virtue, between the improbable and the unexpected - the thing that neither their ideology nor their proposals prepared them for - and their response. The president's job is to anticipate what will happen, minimize the unpredictability, then respond to the unexpected with cunning and power.

Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.

Hitler believed nothing, so he was free to believe in anything.

Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire - there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on.

In the course of the century, so many individual decisions are made that no single one of them is ever critical. Each decision is lost in the torrent of judgments that make up a century.

And here's a fact that should get you thinking: when Social Security set the retirement age at sixty-five, the average life expectancy for a male was sixty-one. It makes us realize how little Social Security was designed to pay out. The subsequent surge in life expectancy has changed the math of retirement entirely.

Due to some incident, real or manufactured, Russians in a Baltic capital begin demonstrating, police use tear gas, and somewhere violence breaks out and Russians are killed. The Russian government demands the right to protect its citizens, the Baltic country rejects the demand. Violence mounts, and the Russians demand that NATO stop the fighting. The Baltic state insists it is an internal matter, claims that Russian intelligence caused the violence, and demands that Russian intelligence stop its intervention. A series of explosions kill a large number of Russians, and Russia occupies the country. For

There is no difference in a country between military, economic, and political affairs. It's useful for Business Insider to divide things that way. That's useful for a college program. But a country is a country. How do you understand China's economy without China's army? If you take these all into account you're ready to explain a question like, "How come the US doesn't have a debt problem?"

Because the US has control of the sea. Because the US has built up its wealth. Because the US is the only country in the world really not to have a war fought on its territory since the time of the Civil War ... Therefore we can afford mistakes that would kill other countries. And therefore we can take risks that they can't ... the core answer to why the United States is like this is we didn't fight World War I and World War II and the Cold War here.

But wishes don't make policy. Policy is made by reality, and the reality of what has been created, whether intentionally or not, can't be abandoned without breathtakingly severe consequences.

The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.

Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.

The European peninsula was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, its sovereignty compromised. Over the next decades its empire would disintegrate and its global power disappear.

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.

The threats that resurfaced in the past 10 years were not an aberration. Al Qaeda and terrorism or one such threat, but it was actually not the most serious threat that the United States faced. The president can and should speak of foreseeing an era in which these threats don't exist, but you must not believe his own rhetoric. To the contrary, he must gradually ease the country away from the idea that threats to imperial power will ever subside, then l lead it to an understanding that these threats are the price Americans pay for the wealth and power they hold.

I had a son in 1976. When I went to Europe, I met an Italian and we became friends. We would talk about what we would tell our families to do if the balloon went up. The conversation
strange and perhaps pathological as it was
bound us together. It was not war, it was not peace, but it was a place in the mind where the preparation for war and the anxiety that it generated created strange forms, such as plans for the movement of children in order to avoid a nuclear holocaust.

When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited.

There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.

It is difficult to decide what you mean when you say any of these words and easy to claim that anyone else's meaning is (or is not) the right one. There is a built-in indeterminacy in our use of language that allows us to shift responsibility for actions in Paris away from a religion to a minor strand in a religion, or to the actions of only those who pulled the trigger. This is the universal problem of secularism, which eschews stereotyping. It leaves unclear who is to be held responsible for what. By devolving all responsibility on the individual, secularism tends to absolve nations and religions from responsibility.

Ideals without power are simply words - they can come alive only when reinforced by the capacity to act. Reality is understanding how to wield power, but by itself it doesn't guide you toward the ends to which your power should be put. Realism devoid of an understanding of the ends of power is frequently another word for thugishness, which is ultimately unrealistic. Similarly, idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can be corrected only by a profound understanding of power in its complete sense, while realism uncoupled from principle is frequently incompetence masquerading as tough-mindedness. Realism and idealism are not alternatives but necessary complements. Neither can serve as a principle for foreign policy by itself.

If the cost of naming the enemy is diplomatically or politically unacceptable, then the war is not likely to go well.

The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us.

The reality is that the American people have no desire for an empire. This is not to say that they don't want the benefits, both economic and strategic. It simply means that they don't want to pay the price. Economically, Americans want the growth potential of open markets but not the pains. Politically, they want to have an enormous influence, but not the resentment of the world. Military, they want to be protected from dangers but not to bear the burdens of long-term strategy.

Italy spills over to everything. Italy is a huge banking system. It has been the major banking system in Eastern Europe. It's worked with Austria's banking system. There's all sorts of interplays there. So it's not the PIIGS one should worry about. Germany hasn't even begun falling yet. And when Germany falls, and it will, that's when the panic begins to set in.

The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.

Machiavelli wrote, "The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms. You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow." This is a better definition of realism than the realists have given us.

Long-term solutions are more attractive and cause much less controversy than short-term solutions, which will affect people who are still alive and voting.

Japan will need to foster deep

When I get asked the question, "Do I want to loan you money?" I want to know, how much do you earn? How much do you owe? What is your net worth? When people talk about countries for some reason they only ask how much did you earn and what's your debt?

Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.

Constraint theory asks: What is the price for doing this? Now one way around constraint theory is declaring your enemy crazy. Crazy and stupid are not concepts used in forecasting. When people say they're really stupid or they're crazy, that's laziness. That means I don't want to think through their position or about what they're really going to do.

President Obama dropped the term 'war on terror', and rightly so. Terrorism is not an enemy but a type of warfare that may or may not be adopted by an enemy. Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, an attack that relied on aircraft carriers, President Roosevelt had declared a global war on naval aviation. By focusing on terrorism instead of al Qaeda or radical Islam, Bush elevated a specific kind of assault to a position that shaped American global strategy, which left the United States strategically off-balance.
Obama may have clarified the nomenclature, but he left in place a significant portion of the imbalance, which is an obsession with the threat of terrorist attacks. As we consider presidential options in the coming decade, it appears imperative that we clear up just how much of a threat terrorism actually presents and what that threat means for U.S. policy.