Is World War III on Its Way? | George Friedman at Brain Bar

[Music] technology developed most rapidly out of war so the Romans in the conquest of goal had to build a wall to keep a tribe from Switzerland from interfering and they built this magnificent wall which can still be seen running like 40 miles to keep them out the building of these facilities allowed the building of roads and that's facilitated trade movement and so there was an intimate connection between a technological advance of the military [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] I was born in Budapest we left when I was six months old but I didn't speak English till I was much older seven because of my house or only Hungarian was used so my first language was Hungarian but I had no memory of Hungary until I came I discovered hunger again in the 1970s they lived on cousin suits ax before the war and after the war cousin to cities and it's very interesting that is now chic and very sophisticated because when we lived there it was a slum it was a very poor neighborhood his global war coming of course there's never been a century that didn't have a global war the twentieth century you know about nineteen centuries and the pollyanna horrors 18th century was the Seven Years War we can go back and back and back and back but if you don't think there's a global war coming then you're saying that the 21st century is going to be the first century in which there isn't a global war and I will bet against you any amount you want in fact global war all wars sitting with you right now it's sitting in your pocket I present to you the iPhone you've seen this it carries such superb tools on it as YouTube and tinder and all the essentials and you guys are so cool that you know that this represents the future and makes you completely different because well you're cool I studied German philosophy primarily I study the Greeks but it was German philosophy I mean there were things that I had to understand I had to understand the Holocaust and I couldn't understand it was a simple idea that men went crazy it was more complex than that so what was it in German philosophy but I also want to study Marx and I wrote some my early works on Karl Marx because he was the enemy so the Soviet Union was a Marxist State Hungary was a Marxist State I had to understand Marxism and so my first work was on Marx and trying to who was by the way a brilliant man except it was wrong but what would happen but he really understood some of the important things about modern capitalism when you read Marx carefully you realized that his idea of internationalism he doesn't mean that he understands that and he wrote on the Austrian Italian war that was not an important war but he understood nations he understood that the Germans are different than the French and so on and when you read it carefully you will understand why socialism turns into nationalism the Soviet Union in the end became merely an other nation that said it believes certain things but from the beginning when Lenin made his peace with the Germans when the Germans had taken him to see Petersburg it was the nations that mattered not the not the ideology so Stalin in World War two had one interest saving the Russian Empire the Soviet Union knew his clothes now and many of the ideological things that he said he was using primarily to create terror in the country but I'd learned that in the end all the ideologies all the beliefs of liberalism everything in the end without a nation-state that was yours they meant nothing you [Music] foundation of this phone is a microchip the microchip was developed to guide us intercontinental ballistic missiles against Soviet targets it had to have a small computer in it it had to be very light it had to be very accurate and the microchip was the solution and all of the weapons that we use during a Cold War the threatening dilation of humanity was built on the microchip and you now use it today because it's cool but that's what it is take a look at the other thing you have a camera in your phone the digital camera that was developed by the US National Reconnaissance Office for spy satellites probably had was that if you took regular pictures with film how do you get them to earth so you had to have a way to take pictures of targets of various sorts that didn't require you to drop a Kodak film pack down to the earth of course that's what they did at the beginning and they had to develop some sort of way to take pictures that could get back to earth fast just the way you send selfies to your mother or something and that was the digital camera it was driven by something called the CCD which I remember the name once but I can't remember what is about and what it did was it took digital pictures that could be beamed back to earth to target people your innocent little camera had its birth in spy satellites there's GPS you love it you walk around the street looking at it instead of the traffic you get killed it's a cool device GPS was invented by the United States Air Force was called Navstar to guide cruise missiles to their targets until our army units precision in their land navigation in others it was invented to let soldiers know where they were okay and it's the most dangerous thing you have in your device because if you don't get hit by a car you're gonna crash yours while you're staring at it so it has a violent nature the internet was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Project agency to move classified data from one secret lab to the other so something in Oak Ridge Tennessee labs there we've moved to Los Alamos and that would be moved to Brookhaven National Laboratories what were they doing in these laboratories doing research on nuclear wars because that was the big story then it was developed with only one thing in mind to make research more efficient and when you get on the Internet all the protocols you get and all the cool stuff to get you around we're developed by American scientists who were deeply involved in the Cold War the United States entered into a confrontation with the Soviet Union and then I'm late 1940s and the Americans and the Russians constantly thought about war with each other there are various ways of thinking about war but one of the ways was the idea of designing what the Germans called Kadesh beer warheads and what happened was that when I was young seventy-two computers became available so it was the pdp-11 of Digital Equipment Corporation it was the first computer that we used and what we tried to do was collect the order of battle with this what are all the units of the Soviet Army where are they located what equipment do they have and everything else so from this an interesting problem arose and intelligence problem if I would say how many times could a Soviet t54 tank fire the answer would normally two or three times a minute well the computer does not understand two or three times submits you know it says two three 2.4 whatever it is is a stupid machine we didn't have enough precision on Soviet capabilities because the kind of information of is cotton was the type that was appropriate two or three times is just fine but the war game needed specificity because it was a mathematical model so suddenly you had to find out how many times it fired so what a ways to find out is to go there and watch a fire one two three whatever you know and is your call as you recall that here and Hungary you may not record sorry that here in Hungary they had some of the major war games the Russians had maneuvers they were headquarters in Seiki Sherrod and that was their center and they would operate so here we could send people who could pass this Hungarian or what-have-you and observe and the Russians sent people to observe our so it was no big thing but we needed to know precise numbers no the war game that was designed was extremely sophisticated and got even more sophisticated later on but it became an interactive game between intelligence and mathematics and every time the mathematics got better the intelligence had to improve bottom line is there is nothing in this phone or if you're a religious fanatic in the Android there was nothing in this that was not created for war so you think about war as a distant thing you think about war as something that doesn't really have to do with you and then you pick up this phone and every bit of it is drenched in war in fear of war and everything else now the Americans are peculiar in the United States government they're not allowed to have patents basic rule is if the US government invented it and it's not secret it's yours for the taking it's an odd rule but it works for us it means that everything we do in preparing for Wars is on the aircraft everything else ultimately comes down to being available the one hand you have this enormous power of the United dates never had a complete unpredictability because there is no operating principle we're too young this is not different from the Roman Empire in the early days is no different from the British Empire I mean the British were defeated by a third world country the United States in a war crushed in or they survive they recovered we are in that position so the two things that came out of that book that I think are most relevant here is the power of the United States and the idea that the European Union couldn't survive that there was a contradiction between retaining the nation-state and creating Brussels and trying to reconcile these two things [Music] [Music] Steve Jobs who is so cool invented nothing he took other people's inventions for the government put them together and the only thing he invented was marketing that was pretty cool Bill Gates invented nothing ms-dos was a program he bought from someone that had originally been developed for the Air Force zuckerberg invented even less your whole generation lives in a fantasy of creativity the basic tools that guide your life that permeate you were developed by warriors or scientists of warriors it got to you at a bunch of really smart marketing guys put them together and convince you they were geniuses the real genius has made $50,000 a year in retired for how much of the American scientific development came from Hungarians you know the computer agenda right but not just hungry I mean I go to Lithuania good I have a company that works for me and I tease for Estonia so this is in the world this is the the most underdeveloped yet most intellectually capable region most underdeveloped countries you have to work to develop the capabilities here you simply have to work to harness them the problem is each of your economies is too slow so you don't need a European Union with Portugal this region is going to have a block a union there was then you have scaled we're polish and Hungarian and Romanian work together you have common political interests you have common economic possibilities so long as you are linked into a world where German exports the cost of them determine the dynamic of your lives you you can do anything when you accept the idea that and this is the hardest idea of all Eastern Europeans you're on your own there is no one whose way to help you when you accept this idea of self-reliance can hungry with 10 million people developed no can I do it with Slovakia please can I do it with Germany they lead you up can you do it with the Russians still steal your money who can you do it with suppose the Romanian stuff you have problems with Iranians I understand I'm also not interested I'm interested from my country's point of view in the political military economic bloc that exists here so I will predict it for Europe at least for this in this century Eastern Europe will be come what Central Europe was in the 19th century Russia is in decline Germany exports 50% of its GDP half of its economy depends on its customers buying and right now its biggest customer is the United States and we have a crazy president who doesn't like Merkel and he's capable of anything when you're as big as the United States you can make stupid moves and get away with it with all this rising and falling you think there won't be war well the world is filled with war right now you may disapprove it there may be a poll that says it should stop but it won't Merkel by the way said after being insulted by Trump well we've had enough we're going to defend ourselves thank God finally why she thought the United States would be offended at the thought of not having to defend Germany it's not clear but how does Germany exporting 50% of its GDP survive 10% loss and exports is a 5 percent loss in GDP which to put it in technical terms means they're screwed so what you have here is a declining power Russia a declining power Germany and a country in the middle that's not doing too bad Poland and that's how you figure who's gonna be there now it's Russia gonna go quietly into that good night I think that it's Germany gonna say oh well you know we'll be unemployed again 30% no that's not Germany style is hungry going to be once more as in all of its history quad that a great conflict that has no control over yeah you're only 10 million people and nobody cares about you it's hungry gonna wind up on the wrong side of the war we've had a perfect record so far [Laughter] and this is your lies will you live your life out till the end of the century as many of you might without war without death without suffering you're living in a fantasy world that's not how the human condition works in every generation young people have plans for their lives and just about every generation they're plying events changed lives they expect to have and that one of the most common things that does that is war and that war is not been abolished it is not something that happens far away it will occur and so the expectations of what your life will be like and what it is different so I'm sure that our parents grandparents so in the 1930s never expected their lives to be what what it was when we look at history gap between what will be and what people think it will be is the nervous so that's my face a position [Music] she too many and inside was a young marine right she [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] before World War one everybody thought Europe could not have a war because of interdependence the Germans of the French traded so much with each other Manuel Norman Angelle wrote a book saying the great illusion that there could be a war his very smart guy he was dead wrong I wish he had been like 21 in the trenches dead dead wrong but he didn't get to go the warning that I have to you is that war lurks in your life everywhere the output of the war and you can pretend this is an innocent harmless tool but every piece of it was designed to kill or to help kill again it's just true it also means that you're gonna have to face the fact that the odds are since it's been 70 years since the last emic war that's not going to be another 70 years before the next one when you feel safe this is the most dangerous period always be mature always be careful always enter into relationships is beneficial and not because the Messiah is going to come and softly your problem [Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Brain Bar

Views: 290,961

Keywords: brain bar, brain bar budapest, George Friedman, Geopolitics, military, war, Geopolitical Futures, Politics, Warring, global war, technology, world war 2, world war 3, friedman

Id: mxxmaWI02kM

Length: 25min 47sec (1547 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 11 2017