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It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious.

George Friedman

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George Friedman
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: February 1
Businessperson
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Political Scientist
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More quotes by George Friedman

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Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.
George Friedman
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I'm not a journalist. So I didn't down and let Assad charm me. I didn't walk away and say my god he's got an Apple computer and he really likes Beyonce so he must be a liberal.
George Friedman
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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.
George Friedman
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Germany is the new pig. Germany depends on exports and its markets are drying up. When the Germans start getting 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, which is the real variable, how are they going to handle it?
George Friedman
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Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.
George Friedman
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When I went to war, I did not go making geopolitical calculations. I went to war with a lust.
George Friedman
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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.
George Friedman
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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.
George Friedman
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I cannot understand how something as ubiquitous as war can simply be dismissed as pathological. It is not clear to me that it is an unspeakable evil. If it is, I need proof of it.
George Friedman
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The most horrible sort of war is civil war.
George Friedman
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The British bombed German cities [during World War II] to keep the workers awake at night. So instead of dropping one bomb, we sent a thousand planes and, yes, we took out the factory sometimes, but we also took out the city. It reached the point where we wanted more efficient ways to destroy a city. The result was nuclear weapons.
George Friedman
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Assad's mother was a terror. He was terrified of her and she kept saying to him, you're not like your father. That's interesting, but it's useless information. It doesn't tell me anything about how the first and second armored brigades are going to operate.
George Friedman
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The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.
George Friedman
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Italy is the fourth-largest economy in Europe and the eighth-largest economy in the world, and its banking system is collapsing. And Germany is desperate. It must maintain its standard of living. It can only do that with exports and Deutsche Bank is very exposed to Italian debt. But so is the rest of Europe.
George Friedman
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We cannot anticipate the moral circumstances under which we will live. And therefore [I refuse] to say that I will not live in a moral circumstance that requires violence.
George Friedman
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The important thing in war is that there is an element of rage, but you must remain very distant from it.
George Friedman
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What is the great fear of the United States? That an Eastern power will build a navy to challenge us. How do you keep them from doing that? Keep them at each other's throats so they don't have any money to do this. This is why we fought the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.
George Friedman
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The warrior must continue to make decisions in the face of extreme circumstances. He cannot afford to get angry or frightened.
George Friedman
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What is American strategy first of all? So American strategy is to command the seas, right? The foundation of our power is sea control. Nobody can invade us, but we can invade them.
George Friedman
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In a way, we can have a much easier discussion about the future of technology than we can about why a young man kills another man in a war.
George Friedman