Video Transcript
David Judson: Hi. I’m David Judson, editor-in-chief at Stratfor. With me today is George Friedman, Stratfor’s founder and chairman. Thank you for making some time, George.
George Friedman: Pleasure.
David: We’ve had a lot of internal discussions now about what’s coming around the corner. Can you give us a glimpse ahead? I was really intrigued by a remark you made in one of the memos floating about here saying China is not going to drive American policy. The Middle East is not going to drive American policy. Europe will be at the center of the policy agenda in the near future. Can you amplify that?
George: I put it a little differently. American policy will be driven by what today’s news is. History is going to be driven by Europe. It is still taken all together as the most prosperous place on Earth. It is historically filled with ties to the Third World and everything else. It’s in terrific crisis, an economic crisis that’s turned into a social crisis and is becoming a political crisis. The crisis economically is its inability to find a solution to what happened to it after 2008. The social crisis is that one part of Europe — Germany and Austria — is doing relatively well. Southern Europe is in a catastrophic position. The political crisis is that there has been a tremendous decline in trust in the EU. Not only in the EU but in the European elite. The Eurocrats who believe so deeply in this project, there are opponents emerging, and that opens the door to the possibility of the re-emergence of real European nationalism, of which we see signs. When Europe gets nationalistic, the world gets nervous.
David: In the piece you wrote last week about the fall of the Berlin Wall, you spent a lot of time talking about the collapse not of the wall but of Marixism, of the new-left ideologies that really dominated your youth and mine in the 1960s and 1970s. The interesting thing in Europe is that while the right is evolving in doing its own thing, the left, if we want to call it that, really echoes back to the 1970s. The new political party in Spain called Podemos is calling for minimum income and a lot of ideas that would have made sense in the 1970s, but the contest is really between the center-right and this populist far-right, it seems to me. Is that too extreme an assessment?
George: I don’t think so. When we go back to the 1920s, which was the last time we had this sort of massive economic and socialist function, the Communists outside of the Soviet Union were certainly active, but the real power emerged in the hands of Mussolini and Hitler and other pretty right-wing regimes. There is a strand in European life that is anti-modern, that is highly nationalist, and there’s also racists, to some extent. At bad times, this strand emerges. The European left, divided between the intellectuals and the workers and so on, never quite coalesced into something that could, as Lenin did, seize control of Europe. When we look at these crises, there is a historical precedence for what we are seeing, which is the emergence of the far-right.
