The Next 50 Years│George Friedman (Geopolitical Futures, Founder and Chairman)｜WKF 2020

einstein was right that to understand the future is to first understand the past otherwise you have no grounding no shape so what i'd like to do to begin this is take some time and take you through the 20th century 20 years at a time and talk about what was expected there and what reality turned out to be so if you go to 1900 europe rule the world uh it was vastly wealthy creative it was the center of everything and the one certainty in 1900 was that this was going to last a very long time in 1920 europe had torn itself apart uh close to 100 million people total died in the war the economy was shattered and germany the leading power that had emerged was now crushed one thing was certain however which is that germany was finished as a major power in 1940 germany occupied france germany occupied norway uh it seemed on the way to conquering the world and the one thing that everyone was certain of was that world war ii was over one way or the other that germany had won it could not be resisted 1960 germany was occupied country divided into two parts crushed in the war and the reality was that two powers the united states and the soviet union faced each other and the expectation 1960 very much was that these two powers would wage a nuclear war against each other the united states it was conceded was more powerful yet both would be obliterated we moved to 1980 there was a war it wasn't the nuclear war was vietnam the united states was defeated the american economy was in shambles partly because of oil prices partly because of failures of management of the system and in 1980 it was seen very clearly that the united states was in decline in fact the united states made its reach reached out to china to try to find a partner to contain the soviet union which was clearly in the rise we go to 2000 the soviet union had collapsed the world had decided that now we had entered a period where with the united states at the lead we would shape the world in a peaceful place it would be about economics not geopolitics as one author put it we are now in 2020. in 2020 we know that what we thought would happen certainly didn't happen it was not an era of economic peace and stability but over time declined and what we know today is that china is the emerging power and that china would be certainly the one that we would be facing you will notice that in these 20 years segments that we can do in various times the one thing that's almost always true is that conventional wisdom is wrong even though it appears to have grasped exactly what it should be like it wasn't we moved from 1900 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2020 what we see is that our expectations the way we normally approach them is simply extrapolation that what is happening now will happen in the future only more so it will be more intense more the same so the european uh empires would be the same as before uh the cold war would end up where it had to end up the idea of discontinuity being built into the system wasn't accepted and therefore and this is from this analysis where i began thinking about well how do we discuss the future we can say one of two things we can say what shakespeare said it's life is a tale told by an idiot idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing or we can look for a deeper order than the one we're using was that clearly is it right and the order that we look at is a rule that i call being stupid i insist all my staff be stupid when you become too sophisticated when you become too immersed in the complexities you fail to see the flow that's developing okay what is the flow nations rise and they fall how long they are up there well that varies and you have to take a look at something other than the public opinion so when we look at the question of china today for example what do we see we see that china is the largest exporter in the world it exists off of exporting and we know other countries that have lived that way the china of the 90 of the 1890s was the united states a massive exporter to europe highly dependent on europe's ability to buy and sell and when europe couldn't buy and sell it fell into a depression the problem of any exporter is he depends on the ability of his customers to buy and the problem of china is that its biggest customer is the united states the united states is the largest importer in the world and china is a country that would like to develop internal consumption but given the vast poverty of the interior of china that's very hard to do and certainly very hard to do at a time when it's a major customer is refusing to buy unless china changes its own terms of how they buy we speak about china's growing military power well what is it that they have well the united states has a strong alliance with japan a strong alliance i hope with south uh south korea a relationship with taiwan something or other with philippines is hard to figure out a decent relationship with indonesia with vietnam a decent relationship with india now and of course australia china has one formal international um ally pakistan most of southeast asia except for cambodia distrust it south korea distrusted japan distressed it so the alliance of the united states has isn't shaped like nato but has enormously powerful the economic power of this alliance the military power of this alliance is significant china faces these all alone now china alone is a lot of people but it has to be understood that china uh must export to maintain the stability of its economy and its financial system and if it can't then it's terrified and this is why it's so interested in the south china sea china's fundamental fear is that the united states will blockade its access to the world this is why it is trying to figure out a land route to europe very difficult to do the chinese want the united states to push back to get back away from the boundaries of the of the ocean east it wants the united states to cede this region the united states sees no reason to do that it doesn't feel under threat from the chinese military it doesn't believe that china can possibly mount an invasion of taiwan amphibious assaults are extraordinarily difficult to do because the ships can be bombed in the port on the way there they then have to land everybody and have them fight forces and they have to go back in all these places the six amphibious vessels the chinese have are highly vulnerable and china is not a country that wants to take a risk on this china is in a difficult position in relationship to the united states the united states has placed essentially an embargo of on some goods not all by any means the united states has not blockaded china but potentially could blockade china and so when we look at china i see it by being stupid pardon me a country that's embattled internally it is facing crises in its borderlands xinjiang now inner mongolia problems with the indians problems in hong kong of course that you've all seen we see a significant problem on the part of china yet the public opinion is that china is on the rise and the united states is declined so china has a fraction of the american gdp uh china has a fraction of america's financial capabilities and a fraction of the military so why do we see china is declining rather than the united states falling because the united states is a mess when you look at it internally we are in one of our periodic periods of chaos and it's assumed that that period of chaos translates itself into a reality but the reality is aircraft carriers that won't dissolve because we have silly things being said by politicians we have an appetite for product that won't disappear because we have sydney politicians and so on we have to look at the objective characteristics of national power obviously no nation is eternal but here we're dealing with the assumption of 2020 that what we will see in 2040 is going to be a china that has risen beyond the united states what i'm pointing out to you is it could happen but it is very unlikely given the circumstances and so in the same way that in 2000 we thought we would never have to worry about serious wars again that we had created a single integrated system well that wasn't right and it may have been good idea but it didn't happen and the united states declining in the minds of many people is a very good idea but good ideas don't rule history and so my point that i want to drive home is that the future is very hard to define unless you immerse yourself in the past and then you see the patterns and the patterns that can lead you to errors or to correct your errors or even look at a particular circumstance such as i did not give any justice to the chinese situation but you can look at china and say okay is this a country that can overcome the united states is the united states given its political chaos a country in decline and when looking at that then you can also look at previous declines of other countries and of the united states of previous countries that were about to overwhelm us like the soviet union and you begin to see a model of what not to do and that allows me to say that in my view there will be rising and falling nations as there is an ancient century and i don't regard china as a rising nation it is a nation that has risen it is done beautifully given the fact that it was starting as a maoist country it was hard not to do better than that but still we have to understand its weakness the most important thing in forecasting is the weakness of countries not the strength the strength always lose itself until you add in the weakness and so if you look at china there is weakness if you look at the united states there is weakness if you look at every country in the world there is a weakness but nobody noticed the weakness of great britain in 1900 everybody was talking about his glory and that there was the mistake if you will that they made over and over again and i would urge you in thinking about the international system to go beyond the common knowledge because the common knowledge the consensual wisdom is historically wrong that's not the way it turns out thank you thank you the world knowledge forum

Channel: World Knowledge Forum

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Keywords: #George Friedman, #The Next 50 Years, #COVID19, #geopolitics, #george friedman 2020

Id: zShYE18avNc

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 16 2020

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[u/540tofreedom]

Who is this guy?