George Friedman on The State of the Union Address (Agenda)
Video Transcript:
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, Stratfor cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Video Transcript:
Colin Chapman: It sometimes sounded like a campaign speech, and Barack Obama's first State of the Union address as the re-elected president was mostly aspirational and about domestic economics, but there were a few flourishes that touched on foreign affairs. I'm Colin Chapman, and in Agenda this week we'll explore four of the most important issues.
Thanks for joining us as we welcome back Stratfor's founder, George Friedman. George, right at the top of the speech the president announced most of the troops are coming back from Afghanistan. Here's what he said:
"After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home."
What are the best and worst scenarios you now see for Afghanistan?
George Friedman: Well the best scenario is the United States leading the country, which it's doing, the Taliban agreeing to enter a coalition government with the existing government and life going on happily. The worst-case scenario is the United States leaves Afghanistan, which it will, and a full-scale civil war breaks out on all sides and the Taliban wins and we have a simply Taliban-dominated government running the country, as was the case prior to 2001. In either case, the one thing that is now almost certain is that the United States is leaving Afghanistan, except for a very small residual force. And so it would be between a coalition government and what would be for the United States a very unpleasant outcome -- a Taliban government.
Colin: What do you make of the peace deal that the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan say they'll make soon?
George: Well obviously, Pakistan is the great power now. And Iran is another great power and Afghanistan is sandwiched between them with the Russians in some way to the north. This is their historic position. The Taliban of course is heavily dependent on Pakistan for its survival. But once independence takes place it will be very interesting whether the Taliban wants to maintain that relationship. We have to remember the example of Vietnam, where Vietnam depended on China for the delivery of goods, then a few years after the fall of Saigon, fought a war with China. So these coalitions change and whether or not there's going to be one with Pakistan remains to be seen, but certainly one of the clearest scenarios would be to have Pakistan become sort of the big brother to Afghanistan. But in speaking to people, not only in Afghanistan and the government but those who are opposed to the government, there's a great distrust of Pakistan and I'm not sure that's going to happen.
Colin: Let's move on to North Korea. The president had this to say:
"The regime in North Korea must know they will only achieve security and prosperity by meeting their international obligations. Provocations of the sort we saw last night will only further isolate them."
Weren't these words a bit hollow, like all the U.N. resolutions that Pyongyang ignores?
George: Well the only effect you can have on North Korea is to attack North Korea's nuclear weapons development site. That would get us involved in a complex situation because the North Koreans have a great deal of artillery and has the capital of South Korea, Seoul, within its range, so if we did that we would also have to attack that artillery. It could get very complicated very fast and therefore we're in a situation that we deplore, but really don't have very much we can do about it except deplore it. So the president did the only thing he could -- an appropriately hollow gesture that has very little meaning, because it's very bad to threaten someone with serious consequences when you're unable to carry out those consequences.
Colin: What about China's role in this? China chides North Korea for staging these tests, but it's reluctant to act against its neighbor. Doesn't China really hold the key?
George: Well everybody presumes that China holds the key. I think it's true, but they're plenty of reasonable people who say that China doesn't have much influence over North Korea. In my mind however, China does have influence over North Korea. And one of the things that it sells to the West is that influence, so when North Korea explodes a bomb, the United States, Japan, South Korea approach China to do something about it; China does, but it wants a quid pro quo. It maybe wants the Japanese to be less aggressive in the East China Sea. It could be that it wants the United States to be less aggressive on trade negotiations. It's not clear what it wants. But I think it uses North Korea as one of its goads to position itself in terms of negotiations: "I'm doing something for you, you need to do something for me." But bear in mind that some very serious people, including some people at Stratfor, really think that I overestimate Chinese influence, really think that China has less influence in North Korea than I think.
Colin: Right. The president also talked about engaging Russia in further reductions of nuclear weapons. This is what he said:
"We'll engage Russia to seek further reductions in our nuclear arsenals and continue leading the global effort to secure nuclear materials that could fall into the wrong hands."
George, what are the hurdles before progress can be made on this?
George: The threat of nuclear war at this point does not come from the existence of nuclear weapons in the hands of the United States and Russia. There is no political reason for this happen. It's not going to happen. Nor will it by reducing it in half its size make that much difference. The real issue of nuclear weapons is no longer the balance of power between the United States and Russia. Very obviously, it is Iranians, North Koreans and others possibly acquiring nuclear weapons. In that sense, the president really raised an issue that sounded very good and that everybody would agree with, including me, yet was not really relevant to the world we're living in right now. Whether we have 2,000 warheads, or 1,000 warheads or 500 warheads, the threat of nuclear war is not there between these two countries -- it's with others.
Colin: Toward the end of his speech, Obama talked about the threat from cyber attacks:
"America must also face the rapidly growing threat from cyber attacks. Now, we know hackers steal people's identities and infiltrate private emails. We know foreign countries and companies swipe our corporate secrets."
George, I think it was about 20 years ago when you predicted this in your book, "The Future of War." It's now a reality. Who is the enemy, and how do we fight them?
George: Well, as Stratfor knows better than anyone else, who your attacker is is not clear. We have a situation in which a mission-critical system -- the Internet -- is very difficult to protect your assets and relatively easier to attack them. I think the point is not who the enemy is; it's the point that you don't know who the enemy is. And more to the point, the danger of dealing with the enemy, dealing with the threat, is that the valuable underpinning of the Internet -- its freedom, its anonymity -- has to be undermined if you're going to really defend against the threat. So we have to be very careful when we talk about cyber warfare because we have to really think about what it means to be effective in cyber warfare. And even as someone who has been attacked, I assume by civilians, I would really hate to see that kind of clampdown on the Internet that a cyber warfare regime would imply. At the same time, we have to protect ourselves against state actors, such as China, which has been accused of being a state actor. So we're caught in an extraordinarily difficult position across of the board on the Internet. I don't want to be attacked again; I don't want to lose the freedom of the Internet; I don't want the Chinese to be able to steal secrets. There's a bunch of things I don't want and it seems to me that I can't have all of them. And the president didn't address that.
Colin: Of course, the State of the Union address was notable by some of the global issues that didn't really get a mention. One of these was of course Syria, another was what former Secretary Clinton frequently referred to as the refocus on Asia.
George: Well this really represents the United States at this point. The president was far more interested in domestic issues; so is the American public. The question of Syria is a question that Washington speaks about and thinks about a great deal but the American public spends no time on it. As for the refocus on Asia, it is a very distant thing. There is no refocusing outside of the military. The United States is now in a phase where it is inwardly looking. What will be interesting is since many people condemned the United States when it was in more of an aggressive, assertive phase, they are now getting a United States that really doesn't intervene in Syria, doesn't intervene in Mali, doesn't take unilateral action. It'll be very interesting how the world's attitude toward the United States changes. And if it changes, then I suspect having been condemned for being unilateral and aggressive, the United States will now be attacked for not taking care of its moral obligations.
Colin: It's already happening George, I've heard it. George Friedman, there, ending Agenda. Thanks for watching, see you next time.
