Talking Geopolitics

Middle East expert Hilal Khashan wrote in his January 23rd piece titled ‘The Middle East as a Powder Keg’ that resolving the region’s issues will be on hold pending resolution of the conflict in Gaza. In a recent ClubGPF live discussion, Dr. Khashan was joined by GPF Chairman George Friedman to discuss current conditions, why Israel is reluctant to make any kind of deal, and what a Palestinian state could look like if one was created.

For the full recording, and to join the next ClubGPF live discussion, visit www.geopoliticalfutures.com/clubgpf.

How do intelligence failures happen? What are the ramifications for such failures? In our recent ClubGPF discussion, GPF Chairman George Friedman examined the different types of intelligence and why they’re important, applying the various intelligence strategies to the current geopolitical struggles in the world, including the Israel-Gaza conflict and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

To learn more about ClubGPF and to join the next live discussion, visit www.geopoliticalfutures.com/clubgpf.

Chairman George Friedman and host Christian Smith recently sat down to focus in on the big picture of geopolitics. There is a new order coming, but unlike the reordering that took place after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this bonus clip, Dr. Friedman examines the patterns emerging between today's global crises. 

For the full episode and much more including our first two episodes on Tensions in Eurasia and The Rise of Geoeconomics, go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast and click 'Subscribe'.

The pandemic in many ways caused shifts in the global economic system. Are we still living in pandemic economics? GPF's Antonia Colibasanu broke down the concept of geoeconomics and where we are at now for our podcast series on Geopolitics in the 21st Century. For the full episode and much more including our final installment with GPF Chairman George Friedman, go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast and click 'Subscribe'.

As the world reels from the shocking violence in Israel and Palestine, Geopolitical Futures brings you a special edition of Talking Geopolitics. GPF Chairman George Friedman joins Christian Smith to discuss why the attacks took place, why Israel’s intelligence failed, and how the conflict will put pressure on Arab nations - and not in the way you may think.

For more analysis from George and the GPF team, go to geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast.

Talking Geopolitics host Christian Smith recently sat down with GPF Chairman George Friedman for a deeper look at the current movements, motives and potential outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the ongoing friction between the US and China. In today’s bonus clip, Dr. Friedman explains how US- China relations and US-Russia relations are in many ways interconnected. For the full episode and much more, go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast and click 'Subscribe'.

Talking Geopolitics is back with a subscriber-only limited series on some of the key issues in geopolitics today. Today we're sharing a clip of this month's episode where Chairman George Friedman joined host Christian Smith for a deeper look at the current movements, motives and potential outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and the ongoing friction between the US and China. For the full episode and much more, go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast and click 'Subscribe'.

What are the geopolitical impacts of natural disasters? On this free preview of our ClubGPF podcast+, Dir. of Analysis Allison Fedirka and COO Antonia Colibasanu join host Christian Smith to discuss the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, last year’s flooding in Pakistan, and the ongoing drought in Argentina. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com to join ClubGPF for more exclusive podcast episodes like this one.

This week we are revisiting one of our most popular episodes to date. Chairman George Friedman explores China’s relationship with both the United States and Russia, as well as its tendency towards isolation. East Asia Expert Phillip Orchard breaks down the geopolitical imperatives that drive China’s behavior. Director of Analysis Allison Fedirka gives us an update on the tension at the Colombia–Venezuela border. Hosted by Christian Smith. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more. 

A year removed from a massive explosion in Beirut, Middle East expert Hilal Khashan discusses the dire situation in Lebanon and its larger impact on the region’s geopolitics. Analysts Allison Fedirka and Phillip Orchard share insight into the forecasting process here at Geopolitical Futures and lay out a midterm report card on this year’s forecasts for Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

Chairman George Friedman discusses the recent protests in Cuba and dives into the past, present, and future of its geopolitical importance. Analyst Ekaterina Zolotova takes us on a tour of Central Asia and explores its potential for destabilization. Also, East Asia expert Phillip Orchard explains why the Chinese foreign minister’s visit to the Middle East is on his radar. To read George’s recent article on Cuba go to: http://ow.ly/37Jl50FAczC. 

Chairman George Friedman analyzes the debate surrounding the future of the European Central Bank’s emergency coronavirus bonds program and how it strikes at the core of the EU. East Asia expert Phillip Orchard explains the tensions between India and China in the Himalayas. Head of Analysis Allison Fedirka explores how NATO’s withdrawal from Afghanistan has teed up a new round of the Great Game in Central Asia. To read George’s free weekly articles go to http://ow.ly/wrIk50FqqCz. 

How secure is the new Middle East power balance ushered in by the Abraham Accords? How much does the U.S. care? Chairman George Friedman explains how two recent events can help us find answers. Head of Analysis Allison Fedirka explores Africa‘s increasing importance in today’s multipolar geopolitics. To read George’s article mentioned in this episode go to http://ow.ly/ttwD50FgHqb. 

Chairman George Friedman explains how, following the defeat of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna shaped an entire continent and why its reflection can still be seen in European geopolitics today. Editor Ryan Bridges explores US attitudes towards an integrated EU army. Dir. of Analysis Allison Fedirka discusses the implications of extensive government programs and support packages brought on by the global COVID-19 crisis. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

Chairman George Friedman explains why necessity is the mother of alliances for the US, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines in the Pacific. Eurasia expert Ekaterina Zolotova helps us understand the commandeering of a plane over Belarus. Head of Analysis Allison Fedirka explores the future of Mercosur. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

Chairman George Friedman and Senior Analyst Hilal Khashan explore the geopolitics behind the violence in Gaza and its potential strain on the region. To read George’s recent analysis go to http://ow.ly/eZXn50EPLj0.

To mark the anniversary of VE Day, Chairman George Friedman discusses his recent article on Germany and explains why the nation’s desire to fly under the radar cannot last forever. Senior Analyst Hilal Khashan tells us why the ongoing US-Iran nuclear talks in Vienna are less about nuclear weapons and more about Iran’s proxies in the Middle East. To read the article discussed in this episode go to http://ow.ly/eyFd50EMY3a.

Talking Geopolitics dives deep into Russia’s geopolitics. Chairman George Friedman explains modern Russian foreign policy and the historic attitudes still driving it. Russia expert Ekaterina Zolotova lays out the building blocks of Russian geopolitics. Also, analyst Phillip Orchard explores the future of US-Turkish relations in the wake of President Joe Biden’s acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. Hosted by Christian Smith. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

Chairman George Friedman explores China’s relationship with both the United States and Russia, as well as its tendency towards isolation. East Asia Expert Phillip Orchard breaks down the geopolitical imperatives that drive China’s behavior. Director of Analysis Allison Fedirka gives us an update on the tension at the Colombia–Venezuela border. Hosted by Christian Smith. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

Managing Editor Cole Altom and Director of Analysis Allison Fedirka discuss the Alhambra Decree and its ties to Colonialism. Chairman George Friedman discusses his book ‘The Storm Before the Calm’ and explains America’s socioeconomic and institutional cycles and the coronavirus’ negligible impact on them. East Asia expert Phillip Orchard tells us why Myanmar’s anti-coup protests have been on his radar. Hosted by Christian Smith. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

On this episode of Talking Geopolitics, host Christian Smith discusses Geopolitical Futures’ Chief Operating Officer Antonia Colibasanu’s new book, Contemporary Geopolitics and Geoeconomics 2.0, and how an update was in order after 2020; Director of Analysis Allison Fedirka and Eastern Europe expert Ekaterina Zolotova tell us what’s been on their radar in the world of geopolitics. Chairman George Friedman explores the consistency in U.S. foreign policy across party lines. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more. Download Antonia’s new book at www.libris.ro.

On this episode of Talking Geopolitics, host Christian Smith discusses the geopolitics of rare earths with East Asia expert Phillip Orchard; Managing Editor Cole Altom, and Director of Analysis Allison Fedirka tell us what’s been grabbing their attention in the world of geopolitics. Chairman George Friedman ponders power and the rise and fall of nations. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for more.

Geopolitics is our bread and butter. It's also a term easily thrown around without accurately conveying its meaning. On this first episode of the new Talking Geopolitics podcast, host Christian Smith talks with the founder of Geopolitical Futures, George Friedman, about the fundamentals behind the company's work. He also speaks with Director of Analysis, Allison Fedirka, on how Cuba's poor economic condition has helped propel the island back in to the spotlight. Go to https://geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast for details.

Talking Geopolitics is a bi-monthly non-partisan podcast brought to you by Geopolitical Futures, an online publication founded by internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster George Friedman. Launching this week.

For more information, go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com/podcast. 

NewsTalk NZ's Leighton Smith talks with Geopolitical Futures Chairman George Friedman on his new book, The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond. 

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Since the end of the Cold War, Germany and Russia have tried to balance a robust economic relationship with contradicting political agendas in Europe. However, recent strains in Eastern Europe have put the relationship into question. On this free preview of Geopolitical Futures’ ClubGPF podcast+, we explain what lies ahead for the German-Russian relationship. Go to www.geopoliticalfutures.com to join ClubGPF for more exclusive podcast episodes like this one.

GPF founder George Friedman, Hezbollah expert Hilal Khashan and analyst Caroline Rose examine the ramifications of the US escalating tensions with Iran through the killing of former IRGC General Soleimani.

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Jacob Shapiro and Xander Snyder are back at it to talk climate change, water scarcity in India and Iran, and the future of the Arctic.

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Newstalk ZB’s Leighton Smith brings GPF Chairman George Friedman back on his podcast to discuss the latest geopolitical events in China as push comes to shove in the US-China trade war, updates on Brexit, and the future of the U.K. Does it even matter anymore whether Britain leaves or remains?

Join Cole, Jacob, and Phillip on this auspicious April Fools' Day for a discussion of the Geopolitics of Deadwood. No unauthorized cinnamon.

To read the report, click here: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/geopolitics-deadwood-cold-war-black-hills/

Our previous April Fools' pieces on Game of Thrones and Dune are here:

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/geopolitics-ice-fire/

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-geopolitics-of-dune/

Intro+Exit music by Jason Shaw, "Hoedown" and "Serenity."

Cole hosts Phillip, Jacob, and Ryan to talk about the latest developments on the Brexit soap opera. Other exciting topics include Turkey's economy and everyone's favorite -- Chinese banking reform. 

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CEO George Friedman joins the podcast to talk about whether democracy is failing in the United States and in Europe.

This week, Jacob, Cole and Xander discuss why the Belt and Road Initiative isn’t China’s Marshall Plan, what is and is not boring about Brexit, and how the Caspian Sea could solve some of Iran’s economic problems.

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After focusing on China in Part I, George and Leighton are at it again, this time talking about the US, Brexit, and a host of other important geopolitical issues. 

Part one of a conversation between GPF CEO George Friedman and Newstalk ZB's Leighton Smith. They discuss GPF's 2019 forecast, China's shortcomings, and New Zealand's place in the world. 

Cole and Jacob discuss the latest on Venezuela, Brexit, and Afghanistan. 

Jacob and Cole wrestle with whether or not the United States and China are fighting a new Cold War. Then, they take a look at events around the world, including the recent coup attempt in Gabon, a potential roadmap for peace in Afghanistan, and future prospects for Ukraine and Belarus. 

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George joins the podcast to answer your questions about geopolitics. What did he get wrong in "The Next Hundred Years"? How will China's economic woes affect the global economy? How is President Trump shaping US foreign policy compared to other US presidents? Tune in for answers to all these and more.

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Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of all troops from Syria, a move that has obvious implications for everyone involved in civil war, including the Kurds, Turkey, Russia, Iran, Israel, the Islamic State and Syria itself. Who benefits the most from the departure? Or, is that even the right question to ask? On this week’s podcast, Jacob, Cole and Xander discuss the situation, try to separate fact from fiction, and get lost in semantic arguments.

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2018 is coming to an end, so there’s no better time to think about the future. Every year, GPF produces an Annual Forecast that lays out the trends that will shape the international system, and 2019 no different. The report, which publishes next week, will showcase predictions on the global economy, power politics in unlikely places, European disunion, developments in the Middle East and much more. In this week’s podcast, hosts Jacob and Cole will give you a sneak peek of what’s to come.

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2018 is coming to an end, so there’s no better time to think about the future. Every year, GPF produces an Annual Forecast that lays out the trends that will shape the international system, and 2019 no different. The report, which publishes next week, will showcase predictions on the global economy, power politics in unlikely places, European disunion, developments in the Middle East and much more. In this week’s podcast, hosts Jacob and Cole will give you a sneak peek of what’s to come.

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Geopolitics is slow and largely predictable, but anyone who claims to have all the answers for an international system as strange and as volatile as ours isn’t paying enough attention. Some countries are just plain difficult to understand, whatever the reason. For some, it’s a lack of data. For others, it’s unrealized potential. For others still, it’s overachievement. With our annual forecast on the horizon, this is the time of year when we revisit our assumptions about what makes the world go ‘round, especially the countries that are now the basis of political organization. So now is the perfect opportunity for Allison, Phil, Jacob and Cole to discuss the countries they can’t quite pin down.

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Description: GPF Director of Analysis Jacob Shapiro welcomes Dr. Andrey Sushentsov, founder and head of Eurasian Strategies, to the show to discuss US-Russia relations and what Americans and Russians don't understand about each other.

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GPF Chairman George Friedman joins Director of Analysis Jacob Shapiro to give thoughts on issues ranging from new alliances in the Middle East to US-China relations. Also: how bad is the societal divide in the United States?

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The heat is on Iran. Its economy is faltering. The currency is falling. The people are protesting. The government is threatening to close down the Strait of Hormuz. Renewed U.S. sanctions didn’t directly cause all these problems, of course, but they sure didn’t help. And they wouldn’t be an issue had U.S. stayed party to the Iran nuclear agreement. Is this the end of the reconciliation, or just a minor setback? If the deal is forever dead, will Iran now go nuclear? Would doing so achieve its regional objectives? Does deterrence strategy still hold? In this episode, recorded not-live but in-person, Jacob, Cole, Phil and special guest Ryan answer these questions and probably a lot of others you never thought to ask. And they do it without the comfort of an air conditioner.

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The U.S. and Turkey have a lot of big mutual problems (Iran, the Islamic State, Bashar Assad) yet seem to be preoccupied by much smaller ones (pastors and alleged deep state operatives). To help explain why this is so, this week’s episode checks in on the status of U.S.-Turkey relations. Also, what’s with the stories about Rex Tillerson preventing a Saudi invasion of Qatar?

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Is populism an ideology? Is it a political tool? A political weapon? The term has been bastardized over the years, so much so that it is nearly devoid of any meaning, and yet it is invoked nearly every day, levied against politicians of every political persuasion in every region of the world. In this week’s episode, the team digs into what it means to be populist and applies it to Mexico’s newly elected president.

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This week, the head of NATO wrote a column politely reminding everyone about the use of the military alliance. Can NATO continue to meet the needs of all its members?

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GPF Director Jacob Shapiro welcomes special guest Dario Fabbri, Senior Analyst at Limes, to talk about Italy's view of Europe. Along the way, they touch on Italy's relationship with the U.S., Germany's lack of strategy and France's double-edged demographic advantage.

Intro music: Antonio Vivaldi, Concerto No. 1 In E major, performed by John Harrison (violin) with Robert Turizziani conducting the Wichita State University Chamber Players.

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The unprecedented meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un raises an important question: So what?

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This week, Jacob and Cole stitch together a few separate recordings that were made throughout the week. We have George Friedman with a special guest on war games, Phillip Orchard on Malaysia’s political drama, and Xander Snyder on the so-called Libya model. Also, basketball.

Music credit for this week's podcast: Paul Cantrell playing Frédéric Chopin's Prelude Op. 28, No. 4, and "Off to The Shaman For Ancient Medicines" by The Koreatown. 

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In this bonus episode, GPF Chairman George Friedman sits down for a short conversation with Limes magazine director Lucio Caracciolo in Genoa, Italy. George and Lucio discuss Italy's perspective on U.S. foreign policy in Europe, Germany's true nature, and the future of the European Union. Exit music is a recording of Italian baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli's Concerto grosso, Op. 6, No. 4, graciously provided by the Advent Chamber Orchestra.

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After two weeks off, it’s time to catch up on the world’s events – perfect timing, considering this week may prove to be such a geopolitically consequential one. Jacob and Cole discuss Putin’s continued tenure in Russia, Israel’s combat readiness, Xi’s Marxist beliefs, the Iran deal and more.

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Russia and the United States have been convenient strawmen for each other for some time. It makes sense for two powerful countries to be a little adversarial, but are they in the throes of another Cold War? The answer to that question requires a top-to-bottom understanding of Russia. Jacob Shapiro and Cole Altom explain why.

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Domestic politics always play a role in international affairs. But do they do so now more than other times? After previewing the week ahead, Jacob Shapiro and Cole Altom take discuss how Iran's potential instability shapes its behavior abroad. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/GbC7yB

GPF Podcast returns after a week off to address what promises to be a busy few days ahead. Plus, Jacob Shapiro and Cole Altom pore over GPF's new special reports on The Geopolitics of London and The Geopolitics of Dune. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

With so much drama in the Middle East, it’s nearly irresponsible to focus on just one actor – emphasis on nearly. At GPF, we’ve long maintained that Turkey was a country on the rise, and the things we see it doing today are exactly the things a country on the rise would do. Time will tell if it will reach its full potential, so in the meantime, Jacob Shapiro, Xander Snyder and Cole Altom take a step back and reflect on how it’s faring right now. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

The United States has always had a peculiar relationship with just about every country in the Western Hemisphere that isn’t Canada. The reasons for this go back as far as the Monroe Doctrine, of course, but the Cold War – and the associated coups and insurgencies etc. – left an indelible mark on the ways these countries interact with one another. After Jacob Shapiro and Cole Altom take a look at the week ahead, Allison Fedirka stops by to discuss why this is the case. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula tend to overshadow Southeast Asia, a geographically confounding region that was, until very recently, also home to our very own Phillip Orchard. Now that he’s back, he, Jacob Shapiro and Cole Altom will discuss this oft-overlooked area. But first, they address the elephant in the room: the meeting in May between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

Now that Germany has finally formed a new government, the de facto leader of the EU can get back to being the de facto leader of the EU. But Italy has just elected into power parties that are less-than-friendly to Germany's agenda. Jacob Shapiro and Cole Altom discuss how this peculiar era of nationalism is just one chapter in a much longer story about Europe.Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

Syria is a mess. New alliances form as quickly as they fall apart. Cease-fires are agreed to and summarily ignored. Russians, Turks, Americans, Iranians, Kurds, Lebanese, Saudis and, of course, Syrians all have vested interests in outcome of the war. Jacob, Cole and Xander lay out what those interests are and catch up on what proved to be a very eventful week in northern Syria.

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The accuracy of a media narrative depends on the motives of the agency that spins it. After previewing the week ahead, Jacob L. Shapiro and Cole Altom dissect Chinese media to get a sense of China’s military ambitions – and explain why Beijing has a lot of work to do before it can supplant Washington as the world’s leading power. Sign up for free updates on topics like these. Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

Why do we write about Romania but not Rwanda? Why don’t we cover the successes and failures of SpaceX? Director of Analysis Jacob Shapiro and Managing Editor Cole Altom return to talk about the things that don’t quite make it into our analytic framework. Sign up for free updates on topics like these. Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

Director of Analysis Jacob Shapiro and Managing Editor Cole Altom discuss the rise and fall of one of the more brutal jihadist groups the Middle East has ever seen. Sign up for free updates on topics like these. Go here: https://goo.gl/zt6tzx

Jacob Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss the short and long-term strategic implications of Turkey's invasion.

To see a map of the region being discussed click here: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/syria.jpg

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Jacob Shapiro, director of analysis, and Xander Snyder answer your questions about the world. Sign up here for free updates on topics like these.

Allison Fedirka and Xander Snyder discuss the evolution of the most recent protests in Iran. Sign up here for free updates on topics like this.

Kamran Bokhari and Xander Snyder discuss the Islamic State’s presence in Afghanistan and its implications for South and Central Asia. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/j7gFyE

This week, GPF released our 2017 Report Card, complete with results on our forecasts from across the globe. Xander Snyder and Jacob L. Shapiro dive in to review our hits and our misses. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/j7gFyE

Xander Snyder and Kamran Bokhari explain how traditional rivalries are returning now that the Islamic State is in decline. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: https://goo.gl/j7gFyE

Jacob L. Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss why the Trump administration is moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and the implications for the Middle East. To see maps of the region discussed, click or tap here: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/middle-east.jpg and here: https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/israel.jpg.

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Allison Fedirka and Xander Snyder explain the importance of this often overlooked region. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: http://goo.gl/j7gFyE.

Jacob Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss the frenzy of developments in Saudi Arabia. Later, they explain why a tiny region in Georgia is back in the news. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: http://goo.gl/j7gFyE.

Jacob Shapiro and Xander Snyder review three political theories being discussed in the media, and what to look for when making historical analogies. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/j7gFyE

George Friedman answers your questions. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/j7gFyE

Xander Snyder and Allison Fedirka discuss U.S. strategic use of force in Africa. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/2aknAv

Jacob Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss what matters most to our readers, from the larger picture of the Kurdish referendum to the geopolitical interests of nation-states, like Catalonia. Stay tuned for your next chance to ask our analysts what you want to know about geopolitics and world events. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/2aknAv

Xander Snyder and Phillip Orchard discuss the possibility of a transfer of power in the U.S.-South Korean alliance structure, and the damage that North Korea's artillery can cause. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/2aknAv

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder discuss the future of Syria, the prospect of US-Russian cooperation in the Middle East, and whether ideology defines geopolitics or vice versa. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Xander Snyder: Hi, and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures Podcast. I’m Xander Snyder. I’m an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures, and I’ll be chatting with Jacob Shapiro, the director of analysis here at Geopolitical Futures. How’s it going Jacob?

Jacob L. Shapiro: Nice to be back, we’ve been on hiatus it feels like for a couple weeks.

XS: Yeah, and today we’re going to dig into a subject that’s probably more on the forefront of people’s minds than many others in the world of international affairs. We’re going to be talking about the conflict in the Middle East and U.S. and Russian interests, and how they’re affected by what’s going on there now. So just for the sake of context, let’s lay out the current lay of the land for what’s going on in the Syrian civil war right now.

You can either just look at this as a single conflict, but really it’s more complicated than this and the nature of the fight is that there are multiple fronts or fights all built into one. How would you describe the nature of those different individual conflicts Jacob?

JLS: Yeah, it’s really difficult to talk about Syria and the conflict that’s going on there in the first place because Syria really doesn’t exist anymore, and we don’t really have the vocabulary for talking about what actually exists in its place because nothing has emerged. I don’t think that anything is really going to emerge.

I was looking into this for a research project lately, and I sort of knew this intuitively, but I think of Lebanon and Syria as together. I’ve always thought of them as part of the same sphere of influence and usually it was Syria always interfering in Lebanon, but you could also think of Lebanon as a model for what’s going to happen in Syria. And Lebanon is, it’s a much smaller country than Syria, and yet it fought a civil war for 15 years. So the idea that Syria is going to calm down and that Syria is going to remerge as a single country at some point in the near future seems to me to be mostly folly in the same way that thinking that Iraq is going to be able to pull itself back together is simply folly.

But in thinking about all the different sides that are in this fight – I mean, it started as an internal Syrian conflict and in some ways, it still is. It’s the Assad regime, which is the Syrian Alawites, and also a lot of Sunnis bought into the Assad regime and the Syrian Kurds and the more secular opposition and then all the opposition groups that are various flavors in terms of Islam, some of which are more moderate in the way they want Islam to govern daily life and some of whom are like Islamic State, who are sort of on the religious totalitarianism end of the spectrum.

So there’s the local fight, there is the sectarian fight in general between Sunnis and Shiites for which Syria and especially Iraq have become huge battlegrounds. There’s the problem with Syria now being really a way for different powers in the region to position themselves. The Turks have their interests in Syria, the Iranians have their interests in Syria, Saudis have their interests in Syria, the Israelis have their interests in Syria, and then you zoom an even bigger step out and it seems like almost every Western power in the world is somehow participating in bombing Syria or attacking ISIS in some way. I mean, when you read down the list of countries that have actually participated in military actions in Syria, it’s a pretty impressive list.

So it started as an internal Syrian conflict, but as most conflicts in the Middle East go, it quickly morphed into all these different levels, and I think that’s one of the things that’s going to keep it going for a long time.

XS: Yeah, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to imagine any sort of coherent Syria, in the way that we’ve come to know it, emerging out of this is in part due to what Syria was defined as most of the 20th century anyways, right? You had a number of countries in this region that were drawn basically specifically to allow outside … powers to maintain some degree of influence over these countries. So just like it’s hard to imagine Syria with its borders before 2011 emerging again, it’s hard to imagine Iraq coming out of this with similar borders.

And what is it that has changed in the last 25 but also hundred years that has weakened the powers that existed in the 20th century that maintained these borders and has driven it to what it looks like today? I mean certainly, the rise of Islamism in the last 30, 40 years and the decline in the Soviet Union play some role in that. But what’s really sparked the deterioration of these borders?

JLS: I would say two things. First of all, it would’ve been better if the outside powers that carved up the Middle East had thought about it in terms of how are going to best control or influence these particular countries. I think it wasn’t even that thoughtful. I think it really was they were just carving up the region, and they thought of the region from a sort of, “what are the resources that I can access here or what does owning this particularly territory versus this particular territory give me for my power.” So they didn’t really think about where different local communities were, and how to divide things in such a way that these states would be more manageable.

It’s a general trend of homogenization, right? Even if you look at a place like Eastern Europe today, Eastern Europe is now a collection of states with a lot more homogenized populations than they were even a century ago. You had large pockets of minorities in these different states, and that’s less so. That’s also true of the Middle East, the Turks are now in Turkey. Well, you can’t really speak about Iran because Iran is such a cluster of different things, but people are self-segregating themselves into their little groups and the previous multinational way of dealing with things has sort of broken down. The Ottoman Empire was a multinational empire, there was no real nationalist impulse there.

And this gets to the second question that you posed, which is: What has changed? And I think that the thing to think about there is to remember a lot of the ideas that led to the political ideologies that created nationalism – and not just nationalism in Europe but helped organize Europe into the nation-states that exist today – I mean, those started bubbling up around the Enlightenment, right? So we’re talking really even by the 1600 and 1700s, a lot of those things are beginning to develop.

They didn’t come to the Middle East really until the Ottoman Empire collapsed. So the Middle East really encountered the Enlightenment and modernity and nationalism and all of these ideas when the Ottoman Empire fell apart after World War I. And they had to integrate these new ideas with their traditional notion of how things should be governed, and Islam was obviously a big part of that. There was a big rush at first in the embrace of nationalism, and you had all different kinds of nationalism flourishing in the Middle East in the 20th century. You had Turkish nationalism, Iran rose as a national power, certainly Israel is an example of that, Zionism is just a fancy word for Jewish nationalism. And then you had Arab nationalism. And Arab nationalism I guess we would say didn’t quite work.

You know, there was a sense that the Arabs are a group as a whole, but then they also created these subidentities. Egypt was one that made more sense because Egypt has always been sort of separate and unto itself. But especially Lebanon, Syria, Iraq – these were countries that were really trying to create a national identity essentially out of nothing, and it worked for a while. It was seductive for a while, Nasserism and Baathism and all these things certainly gave a lot of these countries meaning.

But in the long term, they were viewed as bankrupt by the populations. They didn’t bring economic prosperity to the region. They didn’t bring greater choice in representation to the region. They sidelined Islam to a great extent because they were afraid that Islam was a threat to their power. And they couldn’t defeat Israel. Israel was one of the major political issues for these Arab nationalist powers, and I mean, to be frank, they got their butts kicked every time they tried to engage with Israel. So I think all of those things led people to look somewhere else and the only real organizing principle that has ever worked in bringing the peoples of the Middle East, the Arab people of the Middle East, together has been Islam. Besides Islam, there’s never been a unifying sense of what’s going on.

So in that sense, it’s a reversion to the previous organizing principle of the region. Now, the problem is that you have people using Islam for their own political purposes, and everybody’s arguing that they have the one true path, and they all have to fight each other.

XS: As an American and someone who’s obviously observed how U.S. media and U.S. society has attempted to interpret the events in the Middle East over the last six years – you know, you mentioned a moment ago how the ideas of Enlightenment didn’t really even get there until the early 20th century, and it seems like so much of American identity is defined by our relationship to Enlightenment principles.

And it seems to me that part of the reason that a lot of folks here didn’t really truly understand what was going on during what’s come to be called the Arab Spring, is just this sense of optimism that, you know, the rest of the world is finally going to come around to this idea of democracy, and this kind of led a lot of commentators and analysts to really miss what was going on there, right?

It wasn’t that you had huge percentages of these protestors ascribing to liberal ideas or philosophies. The more powerful subgroups within them turned out to be or many of them turned out to be jihadi. Is there more to it than just optimism? Why did so many people miss the nature of the uprisings that began in 2011?

JLS: Well, I understand why people wanted to interpret the events of 2011 in that way. There was some reason for it. First of all, the vanguard of the protestors, there were liberals among them. There were people who wanted greater political representation, and they were certainly at the forefront, especially in Egypt. I mean, it wasn’t by any means even a majority of the protestors probably, but there was a significant contingent that wanted real reform.

But when you think about how things set off in Tunisia, that wasn’t a result of any kind of democratic rising. That was a vegetable salesman who couldn’t make ends meet, and he got accosted by a female police officer, and he felt humiliated and embarrassed, and it set off a bunch of protests. We’ve got more protests in Tunisia now, the military has actually now intervened, which is a little out of character for Tunisia because the military has never played that big a role. But I am getting a little off track in answering your question.

I’ve written before about what people got wrong when they were dissecting the Arab Spring. I don’t blame people for getting it wrong. There’s a reason to hope that these things would happen. What I think happened though was a complete lack of self-awareness because even in Europe, even in a place like the United States that has this allegiance to the principles that you talked about, it took many hundreds of years and a great deal of bloodshed before the present-day reality emerged, and these things certainly aren’t perfect. There are Enlightenment principles, and there are nationalist principles, and in Europe those two things combined together to create World War I and World War II and some of the greatest horrors the world had ever seen.

So I understand that there was this sense of optimism and that, you know, the Middle East was ready, and I think also there might have been some residual guilt on behalf of the parties that had been colonial powers in the region and had really not set them up for success. They wanted them to succeed, and there’s nothing really wrong with wanting them to succeed. But when you got down to it, there was really no deep tradition, not even tradition but there was no real political organization for the ideas that we’re talking about right now in the Middle East.

The groups that were the best organized were the Islamic groups, whether that was offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood or different ones because they were able to speak directly to the people to engage them. And over time, they were able to come to dominate a lot of these protest movements which we’ve seen, Syria is a great example.

The initial protests in Syria were a result of, you know, there had been a big drought, and the government had not been providing the level of goods and services necessary. And the people looked out and saw that things were changing ostensibly in Egypt and changing in Tunisia, and they asked for more. Assad did not do what his father did in similar situations and just completely crack down, but he tried to sort of give them what they wanted piece meal, and it wasn’t enough. And you had a bunch of different groups with a bunch of different interests, and eventually the ones that were able to carry the day were the Islamist ones because they were the best organized, and they were most willing to die for the things that they were pushing for.

So I guess I don’t know if that actually answers your question Xander, but that’s sort of how I see how we got the wrong impression of what was going on there.

XS: Do you think that if there was any optimism involved in the misinterpretation of these events, has that optimism been beaten out of us? Is the U.S. beginning to look at the world less from the perspective of spreading democracy and more in terms of what’s good for us?

I mean, when I was growing up, you know I was younger during the 2003 Iraq invasion, for example, and I remember this idea of “spreading democracy” not really being debated too much, at least in the mainstream. I mean, it was somewhat taken for granted that this was a foreign policy goal worth achieving, worth exerting forces on achieving. Now it seems more taken for granted, at least by many that this just isn’t a tenable model for forming U.S. foreign policy strategy.

Have we lost this optimism? The last six years of events in the Middle East, is this pushing us to change how we look at the world or was this change in ideology inevitable?

JLS: Well it’s funny, and it’s a good question because and I’ve written about this before. I don’t remember the last time I wrote about it for GPF, but you know, after the Cold War ended and the U.S. emerged as the really only dominant global power in the world, there was the Clinton presidency, but after that came the Bush presidency, and they were the ones that had to respond to 9/11 and also carried out the 2003 Iraq invasion. They were neoconservatives, and this was a political ideology, which basically equated the national interests of the United States with ideological goals. So the spread of things like democracy and human rights came to be identified directly with the national interest. And then the other important part of neoconservativism was that the U.S. would intervene when it needed to, to promote those values because that was in the national interest.

The funny thing that people often forget is that, in that sense, neoconservatism really is a cousin of liberal internationalism because liberal internationalism says the same thing. It also equates the national interest of the United States with the spread of particular liberal principles. The main difference between the two is that neoconservatism is willing to have the United States unilaterally intervene in different countries to push those principles, whereas liberal internationalists would rather do it through the U.N. or other multilateral institutions.

So this has always been part of the United States, the spread of American values has always been embedded within U.S. ideology and U.S. foreign policy frameworks. And certainly coming out of World War II, there was a real sense that liberal internationalism the way Roosevelt defined it was the way to help make the world better and also make the world safer from the prospective of the United States.

As the Cold War really ratcheted up, that all fell aside and realism and pragmatism, which I have always argued are the great American philosophies, asserted themselves, and you had people dealing not so much with the ideologies – although they certainly dress them up in the guise of those things – but there was a larger enemy to defeat. And those ideological concerns had to be subordinated to the goal of defeating the Soviet Union.

So what I am saying there is I think the United States goes back and forth depending on how powerful it is, and when the U.S. is feeling particularly powerful, and its challengers are particularly weak, the United States has the luxury of saying, “well yeah, we should push our values because that’s what’s best for the world and that’s what’s best for the United States.” When you enter a situation as the U.S. did after really the failure of the Iraq intervention, you get into a place not only where there’s political fatigue in the United States with those ideas but where the United States is spread too thin.

There’s no one power that is challenging U.S. dominance in the world right now, but there are so many smaller conflicts, all of which seem to require U.S. attention that the United States is spread too thin and it can’t think in terms of making the world a better place and convincing itself that that is what’s going to be best for United States policy. It has to define a clear set of objectives and then pursue them and have a larger goal but deal with the people you have to deal with no matter what your ideological differences are with them.

So I definitely think the U.S. has moved more towards a realist view of the world, and I would note that this shift happened under the Obama administration, the administration that from a rhetorical point of view was probably more hopeful and more internationalist than many previous administrations. Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize because the Europeans were so happy that somebody who spoke their language got into office. But he got into office and the challenges were laid in front of him, and then he had to make compromises. And that’s where we are today.

XS: I think that raises sort of an interesting question that’s really at the core of any sort of social studies, which is trying to understand the direction of causality – what leads to another thing, right? I think it’s almost common sense that ideology influences a society in a state’s actions and that just makes sense because what someone thinks influences what they do. But to a degree, it seems like ideology is also influenced by the constraints that a state finds itself in at any given time.

For example, with the U.S. after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was essentially supremely powerful I think. It was the global superpower, so to an extent it could afford to think that neoconservatism in that constant global intervention was in its national interest because it could make the mistakes essentially that the U.S. has made over the last 25 years without having its core fundamental interests threatened in a way that a state with a lower margin of error would encounter. How do you think about causality in this context?

JLS: Yeah in this sense – and you and I have argued about this before – I am on the side of saying that reality determines ideology and that ideology very rarely goes the other way. I use the term ideology very broadly. So we were just talking about neoconservative ideology – neoconservative ideology is a product of the Cold War, the way the Cold War ended, U.S. military economic power in the 1990s. You can’t have neoconservative ideology, be a convincing ideology, if you don’t have all of those other things first.

Islam is a really interesting example of this question. Is Islam an ideology? What are the factors that have led to this birth of Islamism throughout the Middle East, and is it the factors there that led to Islamism or is Islamism driving regional actors to their current situation? You know, if I’m going to stick to my guns then I really have to say that, no, I think that there are actually hard objective political and social realities that then lead people towards embracing Islam and its various manifestations.

One of the things that I get asked often is, is it even possible for a Muslim country to be a liberal democracy? Can Islam coexist with liberal democracy? Does it make any sense to want these types of political regimes in the Middle East? And I would say that just in terms of principles, there’s no reason that Islam can’t coexist with liberal democracy, there’s no reason that Christianity or Judaism can’t coexist with liberal democracy.

The problem comes in understanding the objective political realities, and there, to have the types of regimes that the United States wants, there has to be a certain level of wealth, a certain tradition of rights. And if it’s not there, you can’t just create it. So the U.S. found that out in Iraq when it tried to engage in state building there. And in some ways, I am not sure that U.S. policymakers have learned the lesson because when they talk about what they want after the fighting in Syria ends, whenever that’s going to happen, they think about reconstituting some sort of federalist system in Syria and a federalist system in Iraq, and as I said at the beginning, Syria doesn’t exist anymore, Iraq doesn’t exist anymore.

These countries are not going to get put back together, and trying to put them back together and believing that federalist principles or the right separation of powers in the government is going to achieve that to me is really wishful thinking. If you want to engage with the reality on the ground, you have to engage with the fact that you live in a world where people want to take care of their own and identify with their own and trust their own and they are going to fight and die for their own. You can’t put people who hate each other and who have a history of hating each other in the same country and expect that overnight they are going to sign a piece of paper and going to trust each other.

Again, there’s nothing really that outside powers can do in a situation like Syria and Iraq, there’s the illusion that the United States or the illusion that Russia, in its talks in Astana and wherever else it’s having its talks, that they’re going to be able to accomplish something at the diplomatic level that will fix things in a place like Syria. It just won’t. It doesn’t matter what ideology you have, it doesn’t matter what people say far away from the conflict, this is a civil war. And it’s a civil war that nobody can win except the actors that are in it, and they’re going to have to fight it out. Most countries in the world have gone through these upheavals. I think it’s hard to see yourself in other parts of the world, but it’s something that should be better understood.

XS: So how then have the U.S. and Russia been engaging in these difficult or thorny, prickly realities that they’re encountering in the Middle East? Is there room for overlap of interests between the global superpower and the European regional power, Russia, or are our interests fundamentally divergent in the Middle East or can we find and have we found ways to cooperate with Russia?

JLS: I was listening to George give a speech a couple weeks ago, and one of the things he said was that he wrote his book “The Next 100 Years” – and if you go back and read “The Next 100 Years”, it’s pretty incredible how accurate George was in a lot of the predictions that he made. But he said in the speech the one thing that he really got wrong, was he really got the Middle East wrong. He didn’t realize that Islamism was going to be a force and that jihadism was going to be a force and that the U.S. was going to have to commit so much energy and so many resources to the region. He really thought that there was going to be a pullback on the part of the United States and that it would be focusing on other parts of the world.

So I say all that to say that when I heard George making that point that one of the things that stood out to me was he was still thinking about the Middle East through a Cold War prism. And the Middle East was one of the real main battlegrounds between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Middle East had a great share of global oil production, it’s less so today and the proxy conflicts that were happening in places like the Middle East had a lot more, there was a lot more at stake in them then there currently is today.

We talked a little bit about ideology. I actually think that inertia is a more difficult thing for both the United States and Russia to overcome in their relations when it comes to the Middle East than any ideological things. There’s no capitalism versus communism anymore, it’s really Russian nationalism versus United States national interests. So the place where Russia and the United States can get bogged down in a place like the Middle East is to get used to dealing with each other as if they’re adversaries.

When you look at what the actual hard interests are in the Middle East, the United States and Russia first of all share some general interests, and second of all, this region is of little importance to both of them honestly. Russia has much bigger fish to fry in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Central Asia. It has real differences with the United States in a lot of these regions, particularly in Eastern Europe. That was part of the reason that Russia intervened in Syria in the first place, to try and create some leverage with the United States with the Ukraine crisis.

And for the part of the United States, it has been trying unsuccessfully to get out of Iraq really since 2007. The surge that Bush administration put through was one strategy to try and finish off the conflict and get out, that didn’t work. Obama just tried to pull everything out and hope that everything was going to be fine, that didn’t work. Trump seems to be going back to more of a surge kind of mentality of, you know, let’s commit a couple more forces now and knock out these ISIS guys, and then we’ll finally leave.

At the end of the day, what do the United States and Russia share in common in the Middle East? Neither one of them has any interest in ISIS being a powerful force. It’s a lot closer to home for Russia, there are a lot of Chechens fighting in the Syrian civil war, and the Caucasus is a fertile ground for the types of radical Islamist ideologies that have developed in the Middle East. So Russia has that in mind.

And I think the other thing that Russia has to think about is containing Turkey. I know that everybody sees that Putin and Erdogan seem to have buried the hatchet, but Russia and Turkey are historical enemies. And Russia is a declining power, and Turkey is a rising power, and Turkey is historically a U.S. ally, but it is also beginning to have problems with the United States that we’ve seen in recent weeks really become clear.

So for Russia, it’s really about containing radical Islam and then making sure that a country like Turkey or a coalition of powers with Turkey at the head can threaten Russian interests in places that are more important to them like in the Caucasus or the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe.

The United States shares a similar concern with ISIS. It can’t tolerate ISIS mostly because I think when the United States looks at ISIS, it worries about – is this or could this be some kind of unifying Sunni Arab state that would be completely hostile to the United States? That’s the fear.

And then the second part is that the United States is trying to build a balance of power. The United States wrecked the balance of power when it invaded Iraq in 2003. The Iraq-Iran standoff was a major part of that balance of power. The United States has been trying to restore some order to it ever since, so in that sense, the United States also doesn’t want Turkey to become too powerful. Certainly, the United States would like Turkey to take a greater role in managing ISIS.

But at the same time, as Turkey becomes more powerful, you are going to see more and more clashes between the United States and Turkey, and in that sense, this weird U.S.-Russia-Turkey triangle is going to be a constant maneuvering of different sides against each other.

So I think that overall the Middle East is not that important to Russia and the United States, but they both find themselves there, and they both share some tactical goals there. We’ve said in our 2017 forecast that we expected that the U.S. and Russia would find some quiet ways to cooperate and coordinate their activities in the Middle East. I still expect that to be the case. I don’t necessarily expect it to be friendly or even cordial, but I do think that when you look just at the hard interests and you put away the baggage and when you put away the history and when you put away the ideology and you just look at what both countries want in the Middle East, there is some room for cooperation.

XS: Right and at Geopolitical Futures, this is really how we try to interpret and analyze what’s going on in the world, right? It’s not so much what one country says, its rhetoric or even what it wants but rather what’s in the realm of possibility. And at least as it relates to U.S. and Russian overlaps of interests in the Middle East, I mean there are places for cooperation despite the tension between the two countries that probably isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

We’ve written a good deal about both U.S.-Russian relations as well as their role in the Middle East and the developments in the Middle East on our website http://geopoliticalfutures.com. Check it out, you can navigate directly to analyses by region if you are interested in learning a little bit more about our net assessment on any particular region. We’ve written large-scale long-term forecasts, and we update these regularly with our Reality Checks and Deep Dives, so if anything on this episode interests you, go to http://geopoliticalfutures.comand you can learn more there. Thanks for chatting today Jacob.

JLS: My pleasure, and if folks out there have comments, please also we love comments so let us know how we’re doing. If you even have suggestions for topics, we’re here, we’re listening.

XS: And you can reach us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com Thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder take stock of two months of developments on the Korean peninsula while exploring the unique challenges North Korea poses to GPF's geopolitical method. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

Xander Snyder and Kamran Bokhari talk about the distinct goals of different jihadist groups and how those differences influence the geopolitics of Middle East. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

Xander Snyder and Jacob L. Shapiro talk about the geopolitical consequences of new U.S. sanctions against Russia, North Korea and Iran.Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: goo.gl/hfTxMX

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello, everyone, welcome to another Geopolitical Futures Podcast. I’m Jacob Shapiro. I am joined once more by Xander Snyder. Xander, it’s always good to talk to you.

XS: Thanks, good to be here.

JLS: We’ve been trying some different things with the podcast in the last couple weeks. Last week, Kamran and I had a little discussion about democracy and geopolitics. We appreciated all your feedback on that. Before that, we were doing some talk about history and battles and geopolitical contingencies.

This week, we’re going to go in a little bit of different direction. We’re going to just try and take a sense of what’s been going on this week in geopolitics in 30 minutes and try and talk through some of the major issues and the things that have happened this week that might actually have staying power beyond the week itself. Because some many of the things itself, so many of the headlines and the things that happen in the news really don’t matter that much once the headline is out there. So we’re going to try and get to the deep stuff that we think is going to matter in the long term.

And the major thing I think, Xander, that really affected this week was not just the House but the Senate also apparently has just passed sanctions not just on Russia – although that’s getting most of the attention – but also on North Korea and also on Iran. Just this morning as we’re recording before we went live, I saw that a bunch of different news organizations were reporting that North Korea also tested some kind of missile this morning too. We don’t know whether it was an ICBM or something else. But it seems to me the real magnetic issue of this week has been sanctions, would you agree?

XS: Yeah seems like a lot has been revolving around sanctions this week. And very quick timeline of it is back in mid-June, the Senate overwhelmingly approved some form of sanctions and then it kind of got negotiated between the House and the Senate for another month. And then the House earlier this week passed sort of a new and improved version that both houses had agreed to by I think it was like 419 to 3, an overwhelming majority, and then the Senate passed it again with an overwhelming majority of like 98 to 2.

And one of the big changes in the new version of the sanctions bill – well compared to the sanctions that were passed against Russia in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea and took control of that area of Ukraine – basically ties President Trump’s hands in a lot of ways. So the way that some of these clauses were phrased in the original sanctions bill was saying the president “may” choose to implement one or several of the different measures that are provided for in the sanctions bill. And in this new one that just passed both houses essentially an amendment was proposed that changes the word “may” to the word “shall,” so the president shall implement all of these sanctions.

And what that does is it removes a certain degree of power from the president to decide who sanctions who or what corporate entity sanctions are going to be levied against. And it also reduces his ability to issue waivers against individuals or individual entities that do have sanctions levied against them. So that’s just kind of like the starting point for how a lot of activity has revolved around these sanctions over the last week.

JLS: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things to point out is that both President Obama and President Bush tried to really reset relations with Russia in a more positive direction. That was definitely something Trump wanted to do as well. And Trump has encountered the same types of geopolitical obstacles externally that both Obama and Bush did. I mean, there are just interests that are divergent between Russia and the United States and no matter how much Putin and Trump may or may not like each other, those issues seem to come to the forefront.

But Trump also seems to have on top of that, a domestic situation in the United States that is blocking him from doing anything even in some of the foreign policy realms, right? You talked a little bit about how it’s enforcing and making Trump raise a bunch of sanctions that were only there through executive order in which he had some options with. But so Congress is basically forcing his hand in that bit.

But there are also some parts of the sanctions that relate to energy and I know that you did a closer look at some of the energy-related stuff, especially in terms of where Russian energy goes, so do you want to talk a little bit about that?

XS: Yeah, I think the point that you make speaks to one way that we look at the world, which is leaders always encounter constraints and frequently they encounter constraints that they were not anticipating on the campaign trail. So they’re able to use boastful rhetoric and you know say almost anything that they want to. Either not realizing or maybe recognizing but not playing up the fact that they’re not nearly going to be able to do as much as they say they’re going to when they get into office. And this has just been sort of another one of these constraints in the foreign policy world that Trump has run into when he’s been in office.

Now, the European Commission and Germany in particular have taken umbrage, they’ve been a little concerned with the set of sanctions that were passed this week. This is because the sanctions bill provide for measures to be taken against companies with residents in any country really that have a certain degree of involvement with Russian energy companies, and I think the threshold is something like 30 percent investment in a joint venture project. Antonia, one of our senior analysts, wrote a Reality Check on that earlier this week in a little bit more detail so you can go read up on that there.

But the idea is that since the sanctions can potentially target companies that are not Russia, and Germany has some energy projects that they’ve co-invested with Russia because Germany gets a lot of their both natural gas and oil from Russia but especially their natural gas. And now they’re concerned that potentially both their companies and potentially their energy securities to a certain degree can be threatened by these sanctions. And they’re saying, “Well, you know, the U.S. shouldn’t have the right to target non-Russian companies when the point is to go after Russia with these sanctions.” So that’s been one of the other issues that’s kind of arisen surrounding the sanctions bill.

JLS: Yeah. And I think one thing to point out there is that the sanctions themselves I don’t think are the major story. Sanctions have been levied a lot of different times by a lot of different countries and I wrote a piece the other day that sort of talked about how sanctions are usually, not always but usually a fairly ineffective obstacle. It’s not the sanctions so much that are interesting. I don’t think the sanctions are going to compel Russian behavior one way or another. It is though I think from the Russian point of view, a provocation.

So especially with the sanctions that are being levied against Russia in this particular case, Russia’s not going to be able to not respond in some kind of way. And we’ve already seen in the last couple days, I would call it weird stuff happening in the Ukraine. Just electricity being cut off to one region, the stuff about Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia who became a Ukrainian citizen and was a governor of Odessa in Ukraine. His citizenship has been revoked. There have just been some signs that Ukraine seems to be feeling a little bit more willing to push back against Russia.

And of course, the big thing was that the new special representative to Ukraine that the State Department appointed suggested that the United States would look into arming Ukraine with defensive weaponry. So all of those things mean not that sanctions are going to do what the United States wants necessarily. I think Russia is going to perceive this as a challenge and Russia’s going to have to try and push back if not in the Ukraine, probably somewhere else along the periphery and I think that’s why this issue is going to be important going forward for a while.

XS: Yeah just before I hopped on to do the podcast, I was reading that Russia has begun to retaliate a little. They’ve basically begun kicking out some U.S. diplomats and reduced the number of U.S. diplomats in Russia to the number of Russian diplomats in the U.S. which was fewer and have begun to seize some U.S. diplomats’ vacation properties and some warehouses I guess that were used to store U.S. diplomats’ goods.

So that’s something sort of short term but another way you can look at sort of Russia’s flexibility in terms of how they can retaliate in a larger way, I mean one way you could look at that is in the energy world because a lot of Europe is dependent on Russia for its supply of energy. Europe imports really a lot of its energy needs. I think Germany in particular imports approximately 60 percent of its energy consumption. And something like 55-plus percent of its natural gas consumption comes from Russia. So there is some deeper structural dependencies on Russia in the energy market that actually gives it the ability to retaliate at least against U.S. allies in a somewhat more serious way than just kicking out a couple of diplomats.

JLS: Yeah, absolutely. Moving on from Russia, though, Russia is not the only player in the sanctions regime. I think that it’s getting the most attention because of the complicated and convoluted relationship between Donald Trump and Russia and the United States, but the bill originally was not designed as a sanctions bill for Russia. It was designed as a sanctions bill against specifically Iran. And you know both Russia and North Korea were things that were added on later. Iran and North Korea are both countries that the United States has been having trouble with for a long time and has been trying to use sanctions with for a long time. And it seems that Congress is trying to reinforce that method but I’m not sure it’s going to work.

You know Iran really was able to come to terms with the United States not so much because of sanctions I think but really because the Islamic State rose and broke Iranian strategy. And Iran really had to measure what was the more important enemy and I think that they prioritized defeating the Sunni Arab force in the Islamic State over basically the nuclear program that they were developing and when you see Iran testing and still using missiles. I don’t think they’ve necessarily abandoned that program. They may not be enriching uranium and I think they are probably abiding by the terms of the deal. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t working on other parts of a delivery system.

And on top of that we have North Korea which seems to not be going away and I know that a lot of listeners probably have been hearing us talking for a while about how the situation in North Korea is deteriorating and the tensions are high. But we continue to see it that way. You know, I think one of the things that we’re doing is there’s probably some kind of negotiation or diplomatic process going on there. And you know, I think there’s a lot of misdirection coming out of the U.S. right now. On the one hand, you get the three carrier battlegroups there. Then the carrier battlegroups disperse and you have the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying, “We’re going to give the diplomatic route a couple months.” And we’ll see from that so. You’ve looked a lot at North Korea, Xander, what is your sort of current read on U.S. posture towards North Korea and how do you see it going forward in the next couple weeks after this test, especially if it turns out to be an ICBM that was tested?

XS: Yeah, we are still waiting on confirmation on whether it was or not. If this most recent launch was another ICBM, that would appear obviously a lot more threatening because it could potentially show that North Korea is making progress on developing a delivery system that could potentially deliver some sort of nuclear warhead. We don’t believe that they’re there yet even though they may have missiles that can fly further now as we saw earlier this month.

As far as North Korea generally goes, sanctions like you said they generally don’t work. When we say generally, we don’t mean never. I think you cited a report from the Peterson Institute in your piece that said something like two-thirds of the time sanctions prove ineffective. And North Korea has been sanctioned repeatedly for 20 years and all we’ve seen them do in that time is basically start a nuclear weapons program, develop it, get to a point where they are very close to, you know, within a year or two having some sort of miniaturized nuclear warhead, potentially having intercontinental delivery capabilities.

So sanctions just don’t really seem to work a whole lot about North Korea and if you try to put yourself in the mindset of the North Korean regime, it kind of makes a little bit more sense. You know, a lot of people think that Kim Jong Un is just crazy and that the Kim regime is insane, that you know it’s this terribly oppressive autocratic regime, and it is an oppressive autocratic regime. But a perspective that doesn’t get out there as frequently, is that this is a regime that’s been around for 70 years. They’ve withstood the collapse of their biggest patron, the Soviet Union, for several decades. And they’ve gotten through increasing pressure placed on them from the United States and arguably China recently, although those numbers are a little bit harder to read.

I think it’s difficult to claim that a regime that’s been around and has stayed stable for that long is truly insane. They have to be acting at least to some degree rationally. And if you look at the effects or lack of effects of sanctions on North Korea, you know, the regime believes that it is at constant threat from the United States and if it gives on some of the things that the United States wants it to give on, that it’s going to be at even a greater risk of if not collapse then losing its control on the governing institutions in North Korea. So for a regime that feels completely threatened for survival, it seems like sanctions are, they’re going to be more willing to just accept that their country will be hurting than to just give up control, give up reins of power on their country.

JLS: Yeah, and I think that the other side of this is that sanctions are probably not going to compel North Korea to give up its program. Like you said, if they haven’t given it up already with the sanctions that have been levied against them, it’s doubtful that this new batch of sanctions is going to be the one to do it. But I think the other thing that this brings up is that everybody is wondering what is China’s role in helping manage North Korea and how much can they actually do?

And one of the things that we looked at this week was new data out of Korea that said that while Chinese imports from North Korea have decreased by about 25 percent year-on-year, their exports to North Korea have gone up quite a bit, almost 20 percent that way. And so that’s not a new thing, we’ve seen data from China itself confirming that earlier in the year and Donald Trump even tweeted, you know, about how China wasn’t living up to its end of the bargain in terms of taking care of North Korea.

But I think this is a good way of showing also the sort of ineffective logic of sanctions because, OK, so you’ve sanctioned North Korea, but the hard thing with sanctions – it’s also the hard thing in getting something like an OPEC agreement to work – is making sure that everybody does it in the exact same way. The problem is that everybody doesn’t have exactly the same interests. So you can’t necessarily expect everyone to carry out the sanctions the same way or to be completely 100 percent consistent.

So maybe China, it’s dealing with North Korea in the way that it’s dealing with it, perhaps not in the way that the United States wants. Are you just going to go and sanction China then? Like where does it stop? The problem at the end of the day is that North Korea is developing a nuclear weapon that can strike the United States. And you can sanction North Korea all you want and you can sanction China all you want, you know, unless those sanctions are going to compel someone to stop developing a nuclear program or are going to compel China to do something to stop North Korea from developing that program ­­– and I am not convinced China can do anything to stop that – it’s not really going to work, right?

XS: It seems unlikely, yeah. One thing that we are focused on that we’ve talked about before, certainly internally, I think maybe we’ve written some Watch List items on it, is whether or not the United States will be effective in obtaining sanctions on imports of crude oil to North Korea. Late last year, there were sanctions placed on North Korean coal exports to China, and that was seen as a significant or at least sort of a milestone in the development of the sanctions regime against North Korea because that’s one way that North Korea receives a lot of hard foreign currency from abroad.

But it seems like their supply of crude oil hasn’t technically changed that much, and Tillerson mentioned a couple weeks ago that that’s one thing that they would be seeking through conversations with China. But North Korea, there’s some reports, some data that seems to indicate that they get a lot of crude oil both from China and Russia. It’s hard to know because those numbers are no longer officially published by China and I don’t think they’ve ever been officially published by Russia so they come through like North Korean defectors who supposedly have been dealing with imports from Russia.

So that might be one area of sanctions where, if somehow the U.S. could pull that off, it might change the game a little bit because it could impact North Korea’s ability to wage a conventional war. But there’s no reason, or I can’t see any reason at least, why China would get in line behind that or certainly why Russia would. It seems like they would want to extract pretty significant concessions from the U.S. in other parts of the world in order to actually implement a sanctions regime like that.

JLS: Yeah, and then of course, the last piece to the puzzle of these sanctions here is Iran. And I think Iran has fallen a little bit by the wayside in terms of people’s attention and in terms of even the U.S. attention. You know, before he was secretary of defense, James Mattis was very, very focused on Iran in general when he was thinking about U.S. foreign policy. And I think that Iran is going to become more and more of an issue for the United States. I think the Middle East is going to become more and more of an issue for the United States, not necessarily because of Iran itself but because the battle against the Islamic State is progressing. I don’t think that it’s imminently over. I think the Islamic State is going to stand and fight for quite a while longer. But you can sort of begin to see the end game for the Islamic State and for defeating this particular iteration of the Islamic State.

And I think that you’re not going to get peace out of that. What you’re going to get is that the coalition that formed against ISIS is going to break apart and there’s going to be a lot of power vacuums all over the Middle East that different countries are going to be looking to fill, and I think Iran is the one that is most aggressively pursuing those things. So we’ve had a couple years here with a very uneasy understanding between the United States and between Iran. I don’t expect the nuclear deal to fall apart anytime soon or anything like that. And like I said, I think we’re still looking at another year maybe two of the Islamic State being a major actor.

But I think if you start thinking about the Middle East five years, 10 years out, and you think about what’s going to happen once the Islamic State loses some of its what core territory is left remaining to it. Iran and the United States don’t see eye to eye in the Middle East. The United States is trying to reconstruct a balance of power there and Iran is trying to set itself up as a regional hegemon. It is expending a lot of money and a lot of even its own soldiers in Iraq, in Syria, even in Lebanon with its relationship with Hezbollah to try and make that come to fruition.

So I don’t think that these sanctions themselves will be that consequential in terms of the relationship between the United States and Iran, but I think that relationship overall is probably trending in a negative direction. I don’t think that we should think for a moment that just because the nuclear accord happened a couple years ago, that things are going to stay rosy there.

XS: You mentioned a couple of minutes ago that your of Iran’s acquiescence to the nuclear accord was not due to the prior sanctions regime implemented by the U.S. but rather the regional challenge it faced by a potential Sunni leader, ISIS. Could you explain a little bit more what you mean by that?

JLS: Sure, and I don’t want to fall into the fallacy of saying that one thing is the most determinative or deciding thing, right? Like obviously all these things were working in concert together. And I do think that the sanctions that the U.S. carried out against Iran in 2010, they certainly hurt the Iranian economy. We have plenty of evidence in terms of shrinking GDP and people not buying Iranian oil across the board that indicated that Iran’s economy was hurting and that average, everyday Iranians were hurting.

Again, though, when you have a country like Iran that has for so long been a U.S. enemy and frankly has some reason to think of the U.S. as an enemy. The U.S. was involved in trying to – I mean, not trying – helped a military coup in Iran in 1953. This is not a country that has a reason to trust necessarily United States motives. So I am saying that to say in the same way that we were talking about North Korea and we’re saying, “Well, are sanctions really going to affect a regime that has already sacrificed so much and which has such a level of sort of autocracy and dedication in the population itself?”

I sort of see Iran the same way. Iran is a very proud country with a very well-defined national identity, and I don’t think that Iran is going to bend just because the United States or the West even is trying to make Iran feel things economically. I think what Iran did was, I think that before 2010, they saw a very real chance of extending their influence from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean Sea. Iraq was in shambles and that’s a majority Shiite Arab country, so they thought that they could dominate there.

You had Syria, which was under the control of Bashar al-Assad and that was another Iranian – I don’t want to say client state, but another Iranian ally in the region and definitely looked towards Iran for guidance and money and things. And then you had Hezbollah, which had basically taken over large parts if not all of Lebanon and is that rare militant group that has gone from militant group to governing group, and has done that fairly well. That was the story in 2010.

There was an arc of Shiite influence going to the Mediterranean and things looked very good for Iran. That all fell apart because ISIS rose in Iraq and significantly challenged the Iranian idea of stability there. Bashar al-Assad faced rebels in his own country, which ISIS eventually came to capitalize on. Brought Hezbollah into that fight, so Hezbollah can no longer focus on annoying Israel or doing any of the other proxy things that it does. It’s committed to almost a conventional-style war in Syria.

So you had all of these strategic things just fall apart on Iran, and you have to understand that for Iran, it’s Iran’s Ukraine, basically. You know we talked earlier about how Russia has such a deep interest in Ukraine. Iraq and the state of things beyond the Zagros mountains in that direction is the same type of thing for Iran.

So I think sanctions played a role, and I think sanctions hurt the Iranian economy, and I think it would certainly be hard for Iran to go back to where it was before. We’ve seen very high GDP growth numbers out of their economy, and I think that both Iran and some of the Western companies that are partnering with Iran would make real sanctions hard to enforce.

But overall, when I look at the deciding factors over why that deal had to be made, the United States decided that it needed to defeat ISIS and it needed to defeat ISIS first and then it could deal with other problems later. And I think Iran sort of saw the same thing. They were worried about ISIS not just taking over Syria and knocking out one of their client states along the way to the Mediterranean but also significantly threatening Baghdad, and it’s not an idle threat and it’s not something that they were imagining. I mean Saddam Hussein – the Sunnis were ruling but it was not only a secularist regime – but the point is that was Iran’s mortal enemy. They fought one of the worst wars that’s not talked about I think in the 20th century between 1980 and 1989.

So that’s kind of what I meant about that. I think that the United States and Iran, the sanctions stuff is all surface level. The deeper problem there is that the United States wants a balance of power in that region, and Iran wants to be the power in that region. And for as long as that’s the case – and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon – they are going to butt heads, and sanctions aren’t going to do anything to change that underlying reality.

XS: So despite these conflicting long-term divergences in national interests, countries can still find ways to cooperate on short-term security interests?

JLS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean the United States and Russia are definitely at odds against each other in Ukraine. They’re tacitly cooperating in Syria. I mean that goes underreported, I think. I mean there’s no way that the United States could have the assets running around that it does in Syria and Russia could have the assets that has running around in Syria and there not be some level of coordination. And when we look at the U.S.-backed forces in the region, especially the Syrian Kurds and the Syrian Democratic Forces, and we look at what the Syrian Army is doing, which is backed by Russia, you can see a coherent strategy of basically trying to cut the ground out from underneath ISIS. And sure maybe there’s not a formalization or maybe they’re not having tea and cookies in the afternoon together, but there’s definitely some level of communication between the United States and Russia on that issue.

So yeah, it’s very rare that you have a relationship between two countries that is just totally hostile and has no bounds for cooperation. I would say one example, though, of where there isn’t a lot of – there’s really no grounds of cooperation that I can think of between North Korea and the United States. Can you think of anything there?

XS: I mean not really. North Korea’s core security imperative is to deter an attack from the United States, which requires developing a weapon which would violate one of the United States’ core security imperatives, which is keeping North Korea from having a deliverable nuclear weapon.

JLS: And I mean one of the results of North Korea being such a closed regime to the rest of the world is that North Korea really does not on a global stage have a lot of power that it can play with or bargain with, right? There’s nothing that North Korea can do for the United States in East Asia if the U.S. did want to make some kind of deal. Whereas Iran is a powerful country and has power over a lot of different actors that the United States sometimes has trouble interacting with.

In that sense, Iran is much more like China. China is trying to present itself as an actor that can help the United States or can find common ground with the United States so the United States should cooperate with it. North Korea doesn’t really function that way. North Korea really is shut off and is really crouched into a defensive posture. Mostly because I don’t think there is any other real way for them to do it. And in some sense, they’ve succeeded. They have created a situation that is incredibly difficult even for very powerful countries like China and the United States to deal with.

XS: So if you’re interested in this stuff, we’ve written a lot about sanctions but really about how sanctions sit on top of a lot of deeper, underlying structural causes for why we see nations acting the way they do. We’ve written a lot about that this week. You can check out the RC that Jacob you did yesterday. Antonia published one on sanctions earlier this week. I will be having a piece that will analyze Europe’s energy dependency on Russia and perhaps give some sense of how Russia could retaliate there and that will published on Mauldin Economics, our partner’s website, on Monday. And that should give you a bit of a deeper understanding of what’s really going on behind these sanctions.

JLS: Yeah, and I think it will be an interesting exercise of maybe 3-6 months from now, Xander, we sit down and we start a podcast and we see where these sanctions are and what impact they’ve actually had over the course of the last 3-6 months.

XS: Let’s do it.

JLS: Yeah. On that note, thanks, everyone, for listening. We’re glad you are enjoying the podcast, we will catch you next week. See you out there.

Jacob L. Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari think about the relationship between power and ideology, and whether political forms are predestined. Learn more about our methodology with our free report: goo.gl/KbkUpp

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. It’s a beautiful day here in Austin, Texas. I think we’re going to hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Kamran, how’s it going in Washington?

Kamran Bokhari: It is hot and muggy here, Jacob.

JLS: Well we are going to try and cool things down here with a little bit of a podcast. So, we’ve been experimenting with different kinds of podcasts of late. Sometimes we go around the world and sort of talk about the week in geopolitics. We’ve been doing some interesting stuff about history and contingencies especially in old military battles lately.

Today, Kamran is joining us on the podcast because Kamran has been thinking about democracy, one of those topics that I think everybody talks about and maybe people don’t understand quite as well as they think they do. Obviously the most famous quote about democracy is the one that is ascribed to Winston Churchill when he said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

So we don’t exactly know where we’re going to go in this conversation quite yet. This is more going to be a conversation and opportunity for Kamran and I to talk out some of the things that he’s been thinking about and struggling with in his analysis and hopefully that will be useful to our audience listeners. I will say that this type of stuff, the relationship between ideology and between the form of government and then how that relates to geopolitics which really thinks a lot more about things like geography and interests and things that are hardwired into the system rather than things like forms of government that can change is a constant struggle for anyone who is trying to understand international affairs or who is trying to understand geopolitics.

So I don’t expect us to come up with some kind of answer here or even conclusion. But maybe we’ll raise some of the right questions. So Kamran, tell me and tell the audience a little bit about what you’ve been thinking about lately and what’s been tripping you up.

KB: So Jacob, I’ve been really fascinated by the sort of duality when it comes to democracy. So on one hand, we in the West, we love democracy. It’s a norm for us. It’s a cherished value. It’s not just a political system that provides for stability and economic development and improvement. It’s something that we live by. It’s almost religious for us.

But if you contrast that with the view of the democracy, say, sitting in Moscow or Beijing or Tehran or any of the other hostile hotspots in the world, they look at this and they say this is a weapon that the West uses to undermine our regimes. They think of colored revolutions, they think of CIA-backed uprisings, Ukraine being the most prominent of the point of view of the Kremlin. So, I find it really fascinating that something is both a value and a weapon at the same time.

JLS: Yeah, let’s let that develop in the oven a little bit more. So it’s a value. It has become a value that’s for sure, and it certainly can be interpreted as a weapon. But ultimately what it is, is a form of government and when you talk about countries like a China or a Russia and you think in terms of their approach to democracy, I think one of the things that you have to keep in mind is that in these places that democracy is dangerous and in fact, I would say that in most places democracy is dangerous.

That Churchill quote that I said at the beginning I think gets brushed aside and is sometimes used as a joke. But I mean one of the things Churchill was saying in that quote was that democracy is incredibly problematic. The rule of the people without any kind of constraints quickly becomes the rule of the mob and pretty much every political theorist in the history of humankind has been worried about what happens when you turn over political authority to a large group of people that the people themselves get to decide.

So even in a country like the United States, which has a certain set of what we call liberal values and which in recent decades has tried to use those liberal values to expand its own definition of the national interest. At the same time, even the United States, when you read the founders and when you read the Constitution, when you think about the Federalist Papers, the United States was founded as a republic not as a straight democracy and if the United States had been founded as a democracy, I am not sure that the political project would have worked.

The thing I always come back to with this, one of the major mistakes that the United States made when it was trying to rebuild Iraq, the United States almost misunderstood itself and misunderstood its own beginnings. It thought that if it gave equal voice to Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds based on their segment of the population that democracy was just going to carry the day and everything was going to go fine. Obviously, that didn’t happen. In Iraq, democracy was a recipe for civil war and for the birth of ISIS. That’s not the United States thinking about democracy as a weapon at all. That’s the United States thinking that democracy is the healing salve for all problems.

So I think it’s a little more complicated than that. To think of it in terms of a weapon and to think of it in terms of China and Russia are against it but the United State is for it, I always have to complicate that a little bit because the United States is not as democratic as sort of the vulgar explanation of the United States is. And for China and Russia, I think there are elements of democracy in China and Russia for sure and at the other end of that spectrum is that they are trying to preserve a sense of regime stability and greater good. That’s not that different from what is happening in the West either. How would you respond to all of that?

KB: I think you raise a fair point and I don’t disagree with you but I’d like to take this to the next level and I would say that, I look at it in terms of how much control do you have over or does one civilization, one country have over the democratic process versus another. So on one hand, democracy in the United States is something that’s tried, tested. There are mechanisms that have been in place for over 200 years and they continue to be improved upon and so it’s become something that’s known as synonymous with stability and prosperity.

But when countries like Russia, China, Iran and others look at it and they say this is a recipe for disaster because what they have in mind is regime preservation and when we say regime preservation, it could be ideological purity, it could be that as well as the desire to see a particular elite remain in power, the incumbent system maintain its hold over people.

If you look at it from the point of view of political freedoms, these systems – the Chinese, the Russian and the Iranian and the like – they see this as very subversive, as something that is infectious and it will turn their people against their regime and that dynamic is somehow manipulated by the United States and other Western countries.

So I got thinking and I said, though it’s very interesting that on one hand these civilizations, these nations look at it and say, these political freedoms are a bad thing, it’s something that will subvert whereas political freedoms have been internalized in the West where it doesn’t affect or it doesn’t have that subversive nature. Political freedom in the United States and in the wider Western world is a source of strength as opposed to weakness.

JLS: Yeah I am going to push back a little bit there Kamran because I see what you’re saying. The relationship between the form of government and the actual physical geographic entity is a good one to raise. Is the United States a republic and a democratic republic because it was a settler nation that the settlers came to and were able to create sort of out of nothing and the way they wanted it? And is say a Russia or a China or Iran all of those countries are large countries with very difficult geographies to govern with a lot of different ethnolinguistic groups and religious groups and everything you could possibly imagine.

We don’t think of those countries that way, we think of Russia as everybody’s reading Tolstoy and we think of China as just the Han Chinese and we think of Iran as Ancient Persians but if you actually look at ethnic maps of all those countries, when they’ve been empires, they’ve subsumed large numbers of different groups. And if you’re going to give democratic rights to the entire society, you risk undermining the stability of the system, like you said.

But the thing I would push back on is you say they would look at it in terms of infectious and I really would hesitate to use that language. It almost breaks into not being objective because again if you go back and you read the Federalist Papers or even if you read Locke and the people who inspired the Federalist Papers, those theorists were afraid of people. They set up systems of government specifically because they understood that or they thought that democracy was destabilizing. When a China or a Russia or an Iran are trying to accomplish things for the greater good of their society and they see democracy as something that can hinder that, they’re not wrong.

You know, right now in the United States, we’re in a battle royal for health care which has been a battle for so long. And one of the problems of health care is that it’s a huge hot button topic. It’s incredibly complex. Everybody cares about it and has a different agenda. Somebody who is 70 years old is going to have a completely different priority than somebody who is 50 years old, is going to have a completely different priority than somebody who is 30 years old. And the way the United States system is set up is to create a very inefficient system so that no one group can dominate. There is something to be said for the greater good and governing from a place of the greater good even if that means less democracy or individual rights.

And the other thing I would just throw at you is to say that even in the Western world, there has always been a difference in the conceptualization of these types of ideas. I am grossly oversimplifying here but continental Europe I think of really in terms of Rousseau and more of collectivism, and a lot of that has to do with the national will and what is best for the nation and there’s a social contract.

But there is also an expectation that the government will do what is best for everyone whereas in Great Britain and the United States that became much more focused on an attention to individual rights. And obviously the collective will was still important but not in the same way that it was in continental Europe and I think if you watch the development of democratic politics or just politics in general in continental Europe versus say in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in the United States, it’s different. And even there, we can talk about geography and how maybe something about how being island nations or settling nations and stuff like that affects things.

So, I would just caution us from going to the value level statement because so many of those things are dressed up in language that is designed to make people feel things. But at the same time all of this is coming down – and I am not creating a moral equivalency, I don’t think there’s a moral equivalency and am not a nihilist – I don’t think that everyone is the same morally. But I do think that this idea that ok well the West is completely democratic and a country like Russia or a country like China sees democracy as completely infectious and as a weapon, I don’t know, I begin to hesitate a little bit when I hear that kind of talk.

KB: I guess I am not disagreeing with you. What I am trying to say here is that in the Western world, we have come up with mechanisms to manage dissent whereas in these other parts of the world, dissent is negative. So new ideas are seen as hostile. I mean let’s look at the United States. Homosexuality as a concept, as an idea, as a way of life, you know we have now incorporated it through various means and I don’t mean to say that the debate is over, far from it. But it’s something that we have accepted as a reality of life and we have now tried to find ways in which to have that form of sort of dissenting view of how the majority of people conduct themselves in sexual terms.

Now if you compare that with let’s say other places, there’s a big uproar in Chechnya and the Chechen government is a Muslim-led government but it’s not Islamist, it’s very pro-Kremlin and yet they’re cracking down on homosexuality as if it’s something to be afraid of and to suppress. So I am looking at sort of how different systems manage dissent, allow for political freedom, allow for new ideas. New ideas are not necessarily seen as negative and detrimental and an existential threat so I think that is sort of at the heart of what I am trying to compare and contrast here.

JLS: I hear you but again I’ll push back and say, yes so in the West, there’s certainly more freedom of expression and certainly today, there are better ways to express dissent. That is certainly an ideal that the West has tried to live up to but other forms of managing dissent in the Western world or other examples of managing that dissent could be the United States Civil War in which over half a million soldiers died not even counting all the civilians. World War I, World War II, we could even throw the troubles in the United Kingdom not so long ago in there. That wasn’t the type of managing dissent that you are talking about and the notion of different ideas.

So freedom of expression is one thing but even in the West when you have groups that are demanding rights or privileges that a central government doesn’t want to give them, you are still having violent clashes. It’s not like these things don’t happen in the West.

KB: You are absolutely right. I mean if you look at the issue of racism and this latest incarnation in the form of Black Lives Matter, that movement. So I get what you’re saying. I am not saying that everything is hunky-dory and things are very smooth. There are bumps but I am looking at it in terms of whether we in the West look at these things as existential or do we welcome dissent and we say, okay, let’s figure out a way to internalize this. How can we use the existing parameters of our political system? How can we manage this? How can we allow for these differences to coexist?

I mean look at immigrants. One of the biggest things is immigration these days and how immigration could potentially subvert countries. So the French are very worried about the French Republic and the effects of immigration and how 10, 20, 50 years from now, what will the French Republic look like? We have the same concern in the United States. At the same time, in Britain and places like Canada, we have the idea of multiculturalism and ok you know immigrant communities, they come in, they accept the mainstream culture but they also retain some of what they came in with. I mean those cultural norms and values and somehow it gets integrated into the larger whole.

You contrast that with a country like Saudi Arabia or a country like Iran and China. Again, I go back to the usual suspects but you don’t see that same sort of, okay, let’s figure out a way on how to manage these different peoples. I am not saying it’s black and white but I can’t help but sort of recognize that on one hand, I am not saying there’s no discomfort in the West. Discomfort exists but the discomfort does not equate to the sky is falling. In these other non-Western systems, it’s a very existential threat. These are things that are seen as hostile to the very existence of the nation.

So women can’t drive in Saudi Arabia. I mean driving has nothing to do with a particular norm but it’s seen in power relations. It’s seen as the current elite whether it’s tribal or whether it’s religious or both. They see this, that if they allowed women to drive, then somehow the world as they know it would change and they would lose power. So I am looking at this as more of a power dynamic in the sense that, power is not maintained, stability is not maintained. But it will be lost.

JLS: Well for our listeners right now, I’ll just point out that so we’ve talked about homosexuality, immigration and women’s rights already, so I am sure we’ve pissed some people off already. I think those are the things you are not supposed to talk about when you are trying to make friends with someone, right? But joking aside, Kamran you put a lot in the oven there.

I think an interesting way to pivot from what you’re saying is to think about the relationship between the forms of government you are talking about and power because I think one of the ways that I would also push back at you is to say that a lot of what we’ve discussed right now, when you’re thinking in terms of geopolitics, doesn’t matter that much, right? So you know, you’ve talked a little bit about democracy and sort of the double-edged sword of it.

But I think you also at least alluded to earlier in our conversation that you thought that democracy created stable political regimes and you thought this increased power. And I don’t know that I necessarily agree with that. I think that power probably is based a lot more on geographic advantage and things like economic assets and military assets and, as the last couple podcasts we’ve done on military battles focused on, maybe sometimes just some dumb luck. I mean, we like to think that there is a rhyme and reason to the universe that is based on reality but one of the things that we track all the time is that well things work in terms of how things function and that ideology is really something that people use to justify whatever they are doing.

So Saudi Arabia – not a lot changes geopolitically for Saudi Arabia, whether women can drive or not. And no matter what the political ideology there is or not, what changes things for Saudi Arabia is their petro-economy with nothing besides oil to fund all the tribal affiliations and loyalties that they have to keep the regime together. And oil’s going down because the U.S. is pumping. And that’s the basic hard frame of Saudi Arabia; nothing’s really going to change that.

KB: I mean look again, we’re on the same page. I will say that yes it’s demography, geography, resources and how they interplay between those three that will shape geopolitical outcomes. There’s no disagreeing with that. It’s just at a lower level, slightly lower level, we have these other variables in play as well that really different peoples, if we can use that term, see very differently. And going back to dissent or political freedom, which is sort of the topic that we’re trying to unpack here today, we see that being received very, very differently and in very sharp and contrasting ways. And so I would say, I would sort of flip this and say sometimes, while in the West – and I started with this – that in the West, democracy is good, political freedoms are good, everybody should have them. And at the same time, it’s a way to essentially manage hostile regimes: North Korea, China, Russia, Iran and anybody else who’s hostile. But at the same time, there’s the flip side too and this is probably where you and I can begin to agree is that even from the Western point of view, outcomes matter.

So if democracy produces something that is hostile to the United States and to the West, then that’s not a good thing. So if you have elections that bring to power a group of people that are hostile to democracy as we understand it, they use elections to gain democratic means and power and then they turn around and they control that system and it was just a means to an end. From that point of view, yes democracy isn’t necessarily a weapon; it sort of cuts both ways but in a different way.

And so I am not saying that these are black and white things. That in the West, democracy is good and in the non-Western world, democracy is seen negatively. In the non-Western world, a lot of people, especially in the Third World, from their point of view, they’re very bitter when outcomes do not jive with or mesh with Western expectations. The West isn’t so eager to promote democracy. A lot of Egyptians will say, “Why is the United States supporting President Sissi who came to power through a military coup?” And so there is that dynamic as well. So yes, there is the weapon versus value. But I think that there’s far more to that as well and I think that we are kind of saying the same thing here.

JLS: Kind of but Kamran I disagree with you on a couple things that you have said so far and that didn’t convince me about some of the other things you’ve said. I think we agree on the geopolitics of some of these things but again like in a country like Russia, Vladimir Putin has very high popularity ratings and Vladimir Putin returned a sense of pride to Russia that wasn’t there before he came to power.

Xi Jinping in China is thought extremely well of. You can say whatever you want about him – about him centralizing control and his presidency and becoming a more authoritarian government – but the stuff about corruption is real. I mean he really is, on the one hand those are political purges but also like he is taking an aim at corruption.

The same is true about Duterte in the Philippines. When the West reports about him, it’s that he’s this loud mouth who says all these crazy things. But in the Philippines, he has a tremendous amount of appeal even though he has some of these quote, unquote authoritarian tendencies and again when it gets down to ideology for me, the more I think about this stuff and the more I say this stuff, the less it really matters.

I think that all countries and all people, need ideology to justify their systems of beliefs and the things that they do to protect their countries to themselves. I think that’s one of the main ways that ideology manifests itself. But I don’t think that there’s some sort of qualitative difference necessarily between a China and a Russia and a United States.

I think that geography determines a lot of the challenges and history determines a lot of the challenges that these places have had to come up with. And it’s interesting that democracy has become a value. It makes sense if you think back in history and go back to when the monarchies in Europe were falling apart and you had the Enlightenment going on and people thinking about the nation in new terms. You know, democracy made sense because basically the old system had been upended and that idea coming out of Europe was infectious, it really has spread all over the world. And the ideas of nationalism and the national collective will being most important really is the basis for the international political system, right?

So it is that democracy has become a value but in the sense that democracy has become a value, a country like China and a country like the United States actually share a lot more in common with what you’re putting forth in this argument. And again, democracy in a country like the United States, I am not sure that is the main reason there was stability in the United States. Ambiguity about democracy is sort of what led to the Civil War in the first place. I think a lot more has to do with economics and politics and military history and cultural values and things like that.

KB: That is true but going back the popularity of Putin, the popularity of Duterte and Xi Jinping, yeah I mean we can find evidence of their popularity. But I am pretty sure that, I mean these are societies in which – polls in general the world over, polls as Brexit has told us, as the recent U.S. election has told us, polls are unreliable.

JLS: Yeah but you can’t dismiss that point by saying polls are unreliable. When the numbers are that far ahead and like I mean yes, the Brexit polls were unreliable, that was like the margin was 52 to 48 or something like that and it was dancing around there. But like I don’t think it’s fair to cast aspersions on the type of polls that are being conducted in those senses because a Brexit vote was wrong.

KB: That’s not what I am saying. What I am saying is that while there will be evidence to suggest that Putin and Xi are very popular, I am pretty sure that we can find polls where people will and these two things may not contradict each other, there will be those who look at the West and say, “Well I’d like to be able to live like that, I’d like to be able to have that kind of prosperity, have those kind of freedoms, have that kind of lifestyle.” So those things go hand in hand, so there’s something to be said about that.

And therefore, they look at their own systems and say, “Ok these systems don’t provide us with that.” And this is sort of the globalization effect and the popularity at this point in history where the world over, people like things Western. I mean that’s the reality. Yes, they’re nationalistic; yes, they’re simultaneously very, very territorial about who they are and what their identity is and they’re religious and they’re nationalistic and they have ethnic values. But at the same time, we can’t dismiss the fact that the world over, people look at the West and say, “Well gosh I wish we had that kind of system here.”

JLS: The line “people like things Western” – I don’t exactly know what means. Certainly, people look up to the great powers in the world. You know that was Great Britain and that was the United States. But during the Cold War, some of the world liked the United States and some of the world liked the Soviet Union and there were even pockets in the West that liked the Soviet Union so I don’t know that I would reduce it that simply. But I would put back at you Kamran: so what does this have to say about geopolitics? What conclusion do you make about the relationship between nations based on the thing that you’re talking about?

KB: I think there’s an innate human desire to live in political economic terms that provide them with a better life. I mean there’s no denying that and I think that…

JLS: But that has nothing to do with democratic freedom necessarily.

KB: It may not necessarily. I would still argue that geopolitics as we discuss it internally and we converse with our audience and we say geopolitics is politics, military affairs, economics all in an integrated form. So I would say if we talk about the political realm, then we can’t just say democracy doesn’t shape the political level in which geopolitics operates. We do have autocratic regimes; they have their problems. I am not saying democracies don’t have their problems. They do. But there is a qualitative difference. And there’s something to be said about it and I don’t have a solid answer for our listeners.

But I can’t help but consider that there is a reality. Look at immigration patterns. People are not flying off to China. They’re not trying to go and live in Russia. Where are they coming? They’re coming to Europe. And that’s why we have an immigration problem. So, I think there’s something to be said about that.

JLS: There is and there is a qualitative difference between every nation. But I still am not clear on the leap you’re making from political ideology in terms of politics to national power. What is the relationship there that you are positing?

KB: I am just saying that there is something to be said about – and not necessarily calling it ideology or political systems. I am just saying that there is something about the West in general that people want to be like Western people. And sometimes they want to do that in their own context while remaining in Russia, remaining in China, remaining in Iran. And sometimes people just give up and say, “Ok you know what? I am just going to leave my place of birth and I am just going to go and try to find my way. You know, if I’m successful, good. If I am not, well we’ll live with that.”

So I am not necessarily making a connection here or elevating politics or ideology and saying that it’s different from geopolitics. I am saying that geopolitics is a function of these things. So when we talk geopolitics, I am saying that this is something we need to consider as well.

JLS: Yeah but Kamran what I am struggling with here is you’re talking about a very, very Western-centric view of the world. And then it’s not tying into any sort of explanation for the relationships between nations themselves. So I am just not clear about what you’re driving at so what is the point that you’re driving to at the end of all of this?

KB: I think that the point that I am making is that when we talk about geopolitics, when we step down one level and just talk about politics and even economics, I think systems do matter. And that’s what I am trying to say here. I don’t have a solid answer and as we said in the beginning, this is a topic that we’re trying to explore.

So I don’t necessarily have a definitive conclusion here on the role of politics, the role of ideology, the role of political systems. What I am just saying is that when we talk about geopolitics, I think these things have a role and it may not be as big or as small. I am just saying that there is a role and these various factors that we’ve been sort of discussing, they do shape geopolitics at the end of the day.

JLS: Well here we may just have to disagree because I think geopolitics shapes them. And this is something that I’ve written about before and I’ve said it before and I am sure people will write in and tell me what they think about what I am going to say here but I’ve always said that ideology comes after the kind of hard things that define political realities for me.

So I really don’t put a lot of stock in ideology. I think it’s important to understand ideology and there are times where if you want to understand a country’s national priorities or the way that it’s going to manage itself or its relationship with others, you need to understand some of the ideological underpinnings.

But I really do think that, what you have first is you have basic things like well how are we going to govern and how are we going to protect ourselves and how are all of these things going to work? And ideology gets grafted onto that and ideology is incredibly malleable and it can change depending on the situation.

And ultimately when we think about the relationships between nations, I think these ideologies generally speaking don’t have that much import. You know, Nazi Germany was a reprehensible regime. If I can remember the Churchill quote on that was, you know, most lamentable crime or something in the history of human crime or something was how he described Nazi Germany.

But when you look at Nazi Germany and when you look at Kaiser Wilhelm and German in World War I, it’s the same geopolitics at work there. It’s the same strategic interest that is driving Germany to go to war with the European continent because of the issue of Germany. And we can say that the issue of Germany is still not settled today.

It really doesn’t matter ideology-wise when we’re talking about the relationship between the United States and China. The United States is a democratic republic. China is nominally a communist country although as I have pointed out before Xi Jinping now wants to use supply-side reform so he basically wants to use Reaganomics to try and fix the economic problems of its own country. And China really hasn’t been a communist country since Deng Xiaoping opened up it in the 1970s and 80s.

What defines the relationship between the United States and China are things like the trade deficit, are things like the United States increasing imports of Chinese goods. On the one hand, that increases Chinese dependence on the United States because of how important trade is to their economy. On the other hand, that is bad for jobs and employment in the American middle class even though people can buy cheaper goods probably than they could otherwise from China. Those are the things that define the relationship between the United States and China and certainly both sides like to ding each other over the heads with their various ideological points.

But I don’t pay a lot of attention to that. And in general at GPF, we don’t pay a lot of attention to that because ultimately at the end of the day, that is the stuff that people say in order to justify what’s going on, on a much deeper level. And it’s that deeper substrate that we’re constantly trying to get to. And the thing about that is that ultimately every nation is different and every state is different and they behave in different ways.

But human beings are ultimately all human beings. So, on the one hand, you have to understand the differences between these things. But on the other hand, if you can understand the basic wants and needs of a human being, you can begin to tease out maybe how different political forms emerge in the different places that they did.

So maybe you need to sit with it and think with it a little bit more. But I would say that for me, I have a pretty well-defined – a lot of people talk about ideology and interests as chicken and the egg. For me it’s not a chicken and egg situation. At least to me, it’s very clear that interests and geography and things like that come first and that ideology gets grafted on afterwards and I spend much more of my time dealing with the former rather than the latter.

KB: I don’t disagree with you. I am just saying that from my point of view, ideas shape interests and vice versa and so I don’t how know much. I can’t quantify it. It’s something that I am not qualified to speak on. But I think that there’s a bit of more complexity and it’s a two-way traffic. I guess that’s what I am trying to say here.

JLS: Fair enough. Well I think Kamran, I think we’ll call it a day there. Thank you everyone for listening. We hope you enjoyed us sort of pulling the hood back up and me and Kamran batting things around a little bit and arguing. But as always, you can leave us commentary and feedback. You can just leave comments on Soundcloud here or you can email us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. We’ll be back next week probably with a little look around the world for the podcast. So I am Jacob Shapiro. This is Kamran Bokhari and we will see you out there. Thanks Kamran.

KB: Thank you.

George Friedman and Jacob L. Shapiro talk about playing an old Avalon Hill board game of D-Day and what these types of games teach us about the nature of war in general. Get a free weekly email from George Friedman here: goo.gl/GxbSu8

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast, I am Jacob Shapiro. George Friedman is joining us this week. Thanks for making the time George.

George Friedman: My pleasure.

JLS: And we’re broadcasting live from George’s dining room table where George just kicked my butt in a war game. We played a board version of D-Day made by the Avalon Hill game company. It’s copyrighted 1961 but we used some newfangled rules from 1977, which were a little different than you remembered them, weren’t they George?

GF: Well I spent my youth instead of doing drugs being totally stoned in war games and in those days, they used to have these wonderful war games that were historically real and realistic I should say and they came in boxes and I would play them endlessly. And the one I played incessantly was called D-Day. It was a recreation of the invasion of France and the war in France and I just played it over and over again. And the young Jedi next to me tried to take me on for the first time and I played the Germans and I must say that I kicked his butt deservedly.

JLS: Yes, I don’t think I can claim to be a Jedi. I am still in the Padawan stage based on how I did and even that I might not be worthy of the title. So the way you start the game is the Germans of course deploy first so why don’t you go through a little bit about what you did when you were deploying before you went off and left me to my own devices to try and figure out how to break through.

GF: Well the German problem is strategically they don’t have enough troops by 1944. They’re fighting the Soviets, they’re fighting in Italy, they’ve been defeated in North Africa, now they have to defend France. They have enough troops defending part of the front, not all of it because the way they really have to defend the front is to smother the Allied landing as early as humanly possible. Because the one thing that can’t afford is a battle of attrition. They can’t trade man for man or even two to one on the battlefield.

So in order to do this, they have to ideally from their point of view create a layer defense, which they didn’t do because Hitler decided the attack was coming from Pas-de-Calais and he concentrated troops there and Rommel really wanted to engage them on the beaches which was a bad idea because what this game showed was they needed to have a broad defense. Now that defense ends, they can’t keep that kind of depth going and somewhere around Normandy, as history showed, they get thin enough. Jacob chose for reasons of his own not to attack at Normandy but to attack at Pas-de-Calais, which meant that his air drop was completely annihilated. Most of the forces that landed were knocked out and he was stuck inside of two fortress cities where he was safe but he wasn’t going to launch an attack.

The reason why you don’t want to attack at Normandy is it’s so far from where you want to go, which is to Germany. It’s hundreds of miles farther away and yet, as Eisenhower understood, that was the place to go. But not only because it was a place where they can still get to France but it was the place they could force the Germans into a battle of attrition. Many people talk about the hedgerows of Normandy and how it caught the Americans up and not only laid them up and imposed heavy casualties. What they forget was it really wrecked the German armies. It caused tremendous casualties until finally they were so weak that Patton could break out with the third army and rescue Germany.

Now that’s kind of too much information. It’s the kind of information you get out of careful modeling, and modeling is a critical part of geopolitics. Military modeling is one kind, economic modeling and so on. But you have to build a model of the world. And when you do that, you lose your friends, your wife considers leaving you and so on. Because you keep mumbling about battles and things that I think never happened, happened long ago or are supposed to happen, and at that point you don’t really become the most friendly and pleasant person.

JLS: Or you’re lucky enough to find somebody who likes playing these things with you and will go to Normandy with you and walk around, yeah?

GF: Well it is true that Meredith did stand here in the dining room watching this happen and enjoyed watching my rare victories.

JLS: Well just to justify my position a little bit. One of the things you had pointed out as we were going is that you had played this game literally hundreds of times and this was my first time. And even though I visited Normandy myself a couple months ago and even though I’ve thought about this battle a fair amount and I’ve had the opportunity to study the rules for the past couple months, it was very different actually sitting there trying to figure out what odds were best for me.

And I was looking at every single possible situation that I could go with and I honestly threw up my hands and said, “You know what? I’m just going to be very American about this and I am going to punch through with as much force as I can right in the center of things and see how it goes.” And at first, I thought I was kind of doing okay because I had some lucky roles of the dice and as you said I got to my fortresses. But you were very easily able to surround me afterwards.

GF: Well the whole point of modeling is it allows you to test out various strategies and various theories, to think things through. And you do that over and over and over again. And a good general, after he’s done these games in all sorts of circumstances, it becomes intuitive for him. I just was reading a book that I mentioned today in the booklist where I talk about what is intuition. Intuition is not what it appears to be some – sort of great subconscious leap. Intuition is the human accumulated experience.

And how do you gain accumulated experience? If you’re a general and there aren’t wars, the answer is to model it. To build a false image of what that looks like and get it better and better and better until you understand it, and amazingly I won’t tell you how many years later, I haven’t played this game in a long time and my son gave it to me for a Father’s Day present and I am just having the chance to use it. And it’s amazing; it all comes back. So what is this intuition? What is this knowledge? What is expertise? It is the constant repetition and re-examination of events.

JLS: Well one thing you might even want to talk about with people because I know that this has been important for you is the fact that for those of you who don’t have this board, I mean imagine a map of France and imagine that France has been divided up into a bunch of different tiny hexagons and you’re having to position your forces around different cities and different rivers and stuff like that, that everything is moving on the hexagon level and you have to move across these hexagons to move across the terrain. I know for you, the hexagon is a big thing, right?

GF: Well I was involved in developing an early computerized war game for DOD. It was called IDA Hex and it was developed by the Institute for Defense Analysis. I played a minor role but I will claim to have suggested to the designers that we ought to use a hexagonal mapping system, you know divide the country into hexes because you need some sort of polygon for the computer to be able to model it. And I pointed to the Avalon Hill games as the example to be used. Now there are many other people who will claim responsibility for that and will deny that I had anything to do with it. But I can assure you they’re wrong; that was mine.

JLS: Well I guess one of the other things to point out though is you set up the German side of the board and then went into the living room to read your iPad for a while. And I got to try and plan my attack knowing exactly where all the German forces were. So Eisenhower when he was sitting there trying to figure out what he was doing – I failed miserably even knowing every single piece of information I would have needed to know to successfully plan a battle, right? Like Eisenhower didn’t really have a sense really of all the intelligence that he needed to make his decisions, right?

GF: Well he had a pretty good sense. He didn’t have a perfect sense but because of the intercepts, Enigma intercepts, they had a pretty a good idea of where the Germans were and the Americans had air superiority over France and they had reconnaissance flights. Even so, I mean there were important tactical mistakes made. We assumed that there were guns at Pas-de-Calais; they weren’t there. We assumed that a German division that showed up at Omaha Beach wasn’t there.

But in war, mistakes are inevitable. You’re constantly adjusting for errors in intelligence and judgement and so on. War is the ultimate imperfection. And what Eisenhower was able to do is trust his subordinate commanders to deal with the tactical imperfections, trust that the plan that had been laid out and war gamed and analyzed over and over again for a year was not just going to work but there was no other choice. You couldn’t really freelance this and if you’re going to freelance it, it had to be at a much more junior level.

So one of the ways to look at it was that the lesser generals really won the battle. I’ll say the sergeants did, the sergeants that held together their units or regrouped their units and who were able to think through the tactical situation protecting their men as much as possible, fighting the enemy. For me, the power of the American military is never rested in the staffs or the generals; it is always rested in the sergeants who from the Civil War and before were the ones who held it together. There’s a story about Normandy about not being able to break through the Hedgerows. These Hedgerows where hedges that grew taller than a human being in the ground underneath them. And a sergeant took a look at this and he apparently had been a plumber at home and he took two pipes, stuck them in the front of the tank and they were able to plow through.

Now this is an amazing story and I think one of the great virtues of the American military. Not merely sergeants but the fact that at any level you can innovate. Sometimes the U.S. military has lost that. They’ve created such a complex process for everything that innovation is lost within it. Process is great until it strangles you. But in World War II at least, that process – and Eisenhower is partly responsible for that. That sergeant, his good idea went viral so to speak. It became the way we broke through. And there are some militaries in which that was the case. The German military during World War II, whatever else you say about them, they had that innovative capability. The Russians didn’t. They supplemented it with overwhelming manpower to fight their battles.

Each country has its own military culture but it’s interesting to bear in mind that military culture always spins over into civilian life. The guys at Pas-de-Calais, at Omaha, at Utah, the Americans – came home, took the G.I. bill, became the first professional middle class and transformed America. It was a period in the 1950s and ’60s with magnificent transformation of the United States from the depression that had been before the war to what it was after. And one of the things that you have to understand about what was called the Silent Generation is these were the guys who’d been to war. They weren’t silent; they just wanted to live their lives.

But the definition of living their lives was constant innovation and constant change. And we owe a tremendous amount to the military. There is an unpleasant paradox I think for human beings which I’ve written about, which is that war is an opportunity for tremendous innovation. And many of the things that we have today had their origins in the military and warfare. But certainly, it was the mindset of these things that in retrospect I was totally amazed by. I am not sure we still have that. I’m not sure we have in the way they had it. We think today that we’re very innovative because we come up with Tinder or some insane application. These guys changed the face of America. They transformed it and they didn’t make speeches about it. These are the sergeants.

JLS: How much of that has to do with the fact that they were faced with what they were faced with, right? I mean certainly not me and I don’t think you have ever been faced with the task that the men who were charged with taking Omaha Beach and Utah Beach and all those things, we’ve never faced anything like that in our lives.

GF: I think you’re absolutely right and the thing that I am trying to point out is we see war as pathological and it’s a horrible thing. Yet it’s ubiquitous. For something pathological, it is so commonplace that after earning a living, it seems to be the second most common thing and forges things out of it. You know, the Roman War had forged not just an empire but a road system that exists today. It’s extraordinary. Whether we like it or not, being for or against war is kind of a meaningless thing. It is. And we have to understand what it does. It creates a level of discipline in those who survive it, both civilian and military, that when translated to everyday life can – not always is, but can – be transformative.

JLS: When you think about the land at Normandy in particular, I mean you’ve written a little bit, you’ve been writing these weeklies lately about different battles in World War II and I am sure you will have turned your attention to this one at some point, but the last one you wrote was about the Battle of Midway and about how it sort of all hung in the balance in there and there was a certain amount of fate and chance.

And yet the board that we’re looking at right now and the game we just played, you were making the point to me that at the same time, it’s really mathematical. This was a mathematical problem and you had to figure out the mathematical problem and it only left you with one real choice if you were the American commander. So how do you think about Normandy in terms of predictability and things like fate. I mean, if they had gotten the weather forecast wrong for instance, it might’ve been completely different.

GF: Geopolitics suffers from a basic disease. It can forecast and forecast well. And somehow embedded in the forecast is something it didn’t understand. It was easy to predict the Japanese were going to be defeated by the Americans. In a Midway, it wasn’t obvious. Some reader sent in saying that it really was, but from my point of view, it’s not clear that the war in the Pacific would’ve been won if we’d lost our three carriers in that battle.

When I look at D-Day, the answer is the Germans are spread so thin that even if the invasion at Normandy would’ve failed, the Soviets would’ve been able to break the Wehrmacht’s back and that may be true. But the heart of war is an eccentric resistance to mathematics. Much of the way I approached war was mathematical. Some of the math was good, some was questionable but in all the ways that I did it, there always turned out, in the battle I looked at, to be a moment where it could’ve gone either way, where the outcome was unpredictable, and that makes me very uncomfortable because I like predictability.

You just wrote something on the Civil War where you spoke about Pickett’s Charge. See to me, that battle was lost well before Pickett’s Charge. Because it wasn’t a battle that should have been fought. This was the opportunity to go east to swing between Baltimore and Washington to isolate Washington and bring it down. Now from an analytic point of view, I think I’m right. The key to this was Washington. The Army of Virginia was in a position to isolate Washington. Lee discarded that chance in favor of an engagement of unfavorable circumstances with the Union.

Now the question in that battle is to me, from my point of view, is Lee simply didn’t listen to Longstreet, which he should have. And he didn’t listen to Longstreet because he was caught up in a Napoleonic vision of war, of grand attacks, of open ground and didn’t understand the strategic foundation. Okay, if Lee had listened to Longstreet and had swung to the east, would the Union have been dissolved? Would the North American geopolitical situation have been wildly different? Would all of history been changed? I hate those moments, I hate those moments that depend on judgement.

And on the other hand, reconciling the geopolitical concept of necessity with the strangest events. And then saying well don’t worry about the strange, this will happen anyway. It’s one of the things that at this point in my life, I am struggling with. There is too much eccentricity to the world. And yet there’s an order and I don’t understand how these two fit together.

JLS: Yeah the one thing I would respond with is that you’re right that by the time it’s Pickett’s Charge, the battle is over and that was the wrong mistake. And for some, that’s one of the reasons I think Pickett’s Charge is interesting because I rate Lee’s ability as a strategic thinker rather high and it was obviously the wrong decision. I mean it was, you could almost compare it to me trying to punch a hole through your German defense here on the board right where you were strongest rather than thinking about it for a second and trying to do something.

But you know the point at which you’re saying that Longstreet told Lee to move towards Washington, there were two main problems there or at least two main reasons that I can think of that Lee was thinking. The first was that he had come so close on the first day and it really was within his grasp. But the second and more important thing was that he still didn’t have his cavalry; he still didn’t have Jeb Stewart there to tell him how big the Union force was and how far they extended.

And if he had wanted to take Longstreet’s advice, he wasn’t sure exactly where the disposition of Union forces were. And that entire campaign was cursed from the beginning because Stewart went on his ride around the Union to try and make up for getting caught on the way up to the north and in so doing, Lee really lost all of his intelligence and Lee proved to not be flexible enough to shift his plans once he lost his access to what he thought was his perfect intelligence.

So I would say that in some ways, he was boxed in because he had to command the entire force and he looked at Longstreet and said, “Yeah that would all be well and good but I have no idea where they are and I am not going to try and make that kind of move if I don’t have the cavalry to skirmish along that side so we’re going to try and whip them here.” For me the bigger question is why not after you fail on day two, why don’t you pull back and why don’t you check about the fact that you’re low on ammunition now and that you can’t actually stand against the battle in the Union and they’ve reinforced themselves and that now is the time to get defensive and to crouch into your own defensive position rather than to make that attack.

GF: Because people have a tendency to double down. After they lost, if you ever sat with a bad poker player and just taken him apart and he doesn’t understand why, he’s going to go big. And that’s what Lee did. But I would put it this way. The South was at a strategic disadvantage. The North had all the advantages. Lee’s move into Pennsylvania was a Hail Mary. He desperately had to win the war.  Now the question they should ask is, if he’d won at Gettysburg, would the Union have collapsed? And I would argue that the Army would’ve dispersed, it would’ve regrouped and the North had resources. However, if he threatened Washington from the North, if Washington can no longer communicate effectively with the rest of the country, that would’ve mattered. So the Hail Mary was called for, he was throwing one but he didn’t go for the jugular.

Now, there’s a way to explain this, which is that Lee was trained at West Point in Napoleonic tactics. Grant later was also trained in Napoleonic tactics, he just didn’t buy it. Grant understood that the North’s advantage was resources and he was going to stand on that line all summer if he had to, grinding the enemy down. Kind of like we were talking about how Eisenhower did in the hedge country.

So partly, it’s the training that you receive and partly it’s your ability to overcome that training. To learn from it. And it’s interesting because I’ve never been able to find that explanation of how Grant learned what he did. And in some ways, Grant is more interesting than Lee. Lee’s a gentleman. He’s very much someone that you want an officer to be. Grant isn’t. He’s an alcoholic, he’s nasty, he’s brutal. Yet Grant managed out of the same school to leave with an understanding of contemporary warfare, where Lee never grasped it.

So for me, I keep coming lately back to the question of learning because if I am going to understand the role of accident in history, then I have to understand how people deal with accidents and in dealing with accidents, I keep coming back to learning and unlearning and it gets very complicated. So what I want is an elegant vision of how the world works. And it keeps becoming disorderly so I want to explain Lee’s mistake, and in trying to explain Lee’s mistake I have to reach back into his training at West Point but then I’ve got Grant, same training and not making the same mistake.

JLS: Almost all the officers in World War II on both sides were West Point graduates and stuff like that. And I mean Grant also had a superior advantage, right? I mean he had the numbers. You were talking about whether if the South had won at Gettysburg, would that have meant that the Union was going to fall apart. No, I don’t think so. You might’ve been able to get a pro-peace candidate in there in the next round of elections and stuff like that.

But I mean, remember that you know if the South would’ve won Gettysburg, it would’ve won on July 4, 1863. They lost Gettysburg but they also lost Vicksburg on July 4, 1863, and you’ve written before about how important the Mississippi River was and you couldn’t lose both of those things and even have a chance. You probably couldn’t even lose Vicksburg by itself; like you said it was a Hail Mary and probably the South was already done at that point.

GF: I think that if he had gone east to Taneytown and blocked the roads to Washington further east, it might have had a different end. Maybe not and that really is what I am talking about. But it’s interesting, you know we talk about Grant understanding it’s all mass. And really from the Civil War, which was in the world of military history the first modern war in which industrialism and mass played a critical role. Right down to World War II, the mass was everything and therefore destroying the means of producing, of mass production. Bombing cities, crushing the enemy in various ways. We seem to be back almost to an older time sort of warfare where the age of industrial warfare, of vast armies facing vast armies isn’t there. This is a war of sparse global forces arrayed against pretty sparse global forces.

When you compare what is going on in the jihadist wars, both sides are actually fighting a minimalist war. And also as terrible as terrorism is, it’s not the casualties of World War II but the stakes are just as high. For the jihadist, it is creating a caliphate. For the U.S. and Europe, it is preventing the rise of a radical Jihadist state entity. Everything’s at stake and yet given modern weaponry, drones and so on which people dislike, it’s actually vastly reduced the amount of casualties. Not the mistakes – the mistakes are still there – but I think one of the things that in watching and playing these war games, I am not sure I am ever going to see a war this massive where the math overrides everything. In the kinds of wars we see today, it is much more small forces against small forces, much more intelligence orientated, much less mathematical therefore.

JLS: The obvious question to you though then is to talk about what you’ve been writing a lot about recently, which is North Korea. Do you think that North Korea is also that kind of minimalist war or does North Korea look more like something that you’d have to model on a board like this with huge numbers of ground troops even.

GF: Well on the surface, this should be the ideal sort of war for the United States. We’re not very good at counterinsurgency. I don’t care how many manuals are written. We just don’t do it well. Occupying a country that’s hostile to you is very tough. What we are good at is technology on technology, and overmatching them. In this case we are facing the danger of a potential ICBM, nuclear tipped, coming to the United States. Secretary Mattis has said that can’t be permitted. So you have a problem. One, locating the nuclear sites. Two, eliminating the artillery deployment north of Seoul, knocking out the nuclear facilities. All this should be done from the air.

And yet how will you make certain that you’ve knocked out a hole in the ground? How do you know what was in it? And how do you avoid the air defense systems that the North Koreans have around their artillery. While you’re suppressing that air defense system, they’re shelling Seoul. So again, somewhat unlike World War II, it has a tremendous complexity. Now part of that is the North Koreans created that complexity over the past 15 years. While they have been looking to develop nuclear weapons, they’ve also clearly gamed out the crisis point over and over again to create a situation where, when there’s sufficient uncertainty, potential casualties, the Americans grow shy of it.

I’ve spoken to several extremely intelligent and experienced military officers who make the case we’re just going to have to accept North Korean nuclear weapons because we don’t have the means of eliminating them without devastation to Seoul. Now the counterargument is, if we don’t have devastation of Seoul, we may wind up with the devastation of other cities. So you pay now or pay later. But I understand the argument. But it still doesn’t have the feel of mass warfare. We’re talking about small quantities, small uncertainties, great predictabilities. It’s not like the German invasion of Russia, the Soviet Union, that was planned with meticulousness based on industrial-strength forces facing industrial-strength forces. This is highly technical but it also has so many unknowns built into it, that even people who normally would be vigorously in favor of an attack are shying away from it.

So I think we’ve reached a new kind of warfare among the jihadists but another new type of warfare in which the technology on both sides has become so complex that this vast range of uncertainty that political leaders really don’t want to engage in if they don’t have to. The counterargument to what I just said is every war has been uncertain and in every war the certainty of success has been followed by uncertainty, possibly failure. So war is something that we’d always imagine and is always imagined to be easier than it is.

But certainly the North Korean thing is turning from, okay this is what we know how to do and we’re going to do it well to, I don’t know if we can do this. And there’s no question but the president is going to have to make some decisions and it’s going to be important to bear in mind that whoever he listens to, only the president can make this decision.

JLS: And as you said no matter what he does, that in the end he won’t be able to be sure about exactly what’s going to go on because once you’ve make these decisions, everything is actually completely unpredictable as uncomfortable as that makes you feel.

GF: Well it depends what kind of bracket you put on it. Would World War II have been won without a Normandy invasion? I think yes. Would post-war Europe look the same? No. But the war itself I think on a broad bracket was predictable. I don’t know that a jihadist war is predictable. And although a couple months ago, I was pretty certain how that war would look, I now – I shouldn’t listen to people because they confuse me – I now reached a point where if these guys are nervous about it, why am I so confident? Naturally my son who’s in the Air Force would be very happy to say that the Air Force can take care of this entire matter without any help. The Air Force has said that in every war we had since World War II. It’s never been the case. I hope he’s listening.

JLS: I am sure he is and on that note, I think we’ll sign off here but thank you everyone for listening. As always you can send in comments to comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. I am Jacob Shapiro, again this was George Friedman and if you guys enjoyed this episode, we might do this a little bit more, these types of war-gaming things and thinking about historical battles so we always welcome your feedback. Thanks George.

GF: Thank you. Thank you for listening.

Xander Snyder and Allison Fedirka explain the purpose and utility of the GPF report card and discuss why some forecasts were not entirely accurate. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Xander Snyder: Hi and welcome to the Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m Xander Snyder. I’m an analyst here at Geopolitical Futures and I am joined today by Allison Fedirka, a senior analyst here at Geopolitical Futures. How’s it going Allison?

Allison Fedirka: It’s going well Xander, how are you?

XS: Doing good. So today we’re going to talk about something that really makes Geopolitical Futures what it is, which is our annual forecast and specifically our mid-year report card on that forecast. So Geopolitical Futures publishes every year a forecast on what events we believe will transpire throughout the year and we also have a long-term forecast so you can understand how those annual forecasts fit into larger trends in the world. And then we evaluate our performance both mid-year and at the end of the year. So Allison, why do this? Why have a report card?

AF: So we have two report cards, we’ll have a mid-year report card and a year-end report card and in both cases the purpose is to keep us honest. We need to maintain our intellectual integrity and we have always said that we have a model and that we strictly adhere to it and our forecasts are based on that. Every once in a while, we may not be accurate with our forecasts and this is one way that we can check in, see where the accuracy lies, pat ourselves on the back when we’re right, acknowledge when we’re wrong and then course correct if it’s needed so that our model and our understanding of the world stays consistent, stays accurate and we can make sure our understanding is the correct understanding and developing as needed as the world continues.

So we’ll have things that are on track, we’ll have things that are complete, we’ll have things that are not on track at all, we’ll have things that we haven’t foreseen that we probably should have put in our forecast initially but failed to do. So it’s really a comprehensive project that goes through all of our forecasts and tell us where we’re right, where we’re on track and maybe where we need to rethink things and course correct a little bit.

XS: Right and we’ll assign a letter grade to each discrete forecast we’ve made, right? ‘A’ is it has come true, ‘B’ is trends are moving in the direction to make it true, ‘C’ is there are no immediate indications that trends are moving in the direction to make the forecast correct, ‘D’ is we got it wrong and ‘F’ is we forecasted just entirely the wrong thing. So this mid-year report card will be published tomorrow and you’ll be able to read the full rationale for all of them as well as a little blurb if you just want to get a high level summary.

So one of the things that I really like about these forecasts and the report cards that I think distinguishes Geopolitical Futures’ work more as an analysis than news is the model for publication holds us to statements that we’ve previously made, right? A lot of news sources will publish one thing and then you can kind of just move away from it. But at Geopolitical Futures, we are constantly following events as they develop and we have to always refer back to, well it’s a constant interpretation of what’s happening in the world, but we’ll be referring back to statements we’ve made previously. So it always sort of fits in the context of our model for interpreting world events.

And what we’re going to do on this podcast is take you through some of the more significant forecasts that either went our away or didn’t go our way as of now, as of mid-year.

So maybe we should start in, well North Korea is on everyone’s minds and that seems to be one of the ones that we struggled with. We didn’t really anticipate North Korea shaking the global geopolitics as much as it had. What do you think contributed to that Allison?

AF: So there’s a few different factors, first we should clarify that basically our forecast was that North Korea would continue to develop its nuclear program, that there would be no war and that 2017 would look very similar to 2016 and North Korea would not really occupy a major role in the geopolitical events of the region or even the world at this matter. That’s obviously not the case.

So we’ve needed to course correct a little bit, we’ve written some of our analysis and Deep Dives throughout the last two to three months that helps kind of go into that in-depth of where we think things are going now. And one of the main reasons for North Korea is the development with their missiles has changed more than I think we initially anticipated. So the information coming out, the assessment of their military capabilities is very opaque. And the United States now needs to react to the potential threat of a North Korean missile and that is very different from having a North Korea that couldn’t attack the United States. And so a red line has emerged that we did not see coming and that has forced the U.S. to take action and deal with this issue head on as opposed to just kind of placating the situation and calling on China, for whenever there’s a rally or some ruckus going on, calm North Korea down and then walk away and wait for the next round of excitement to begin.

I know you have actually done some of our more in-depth work on the actual missiles and weapons systems of North Korea so in terms of like technical things and actual red lines and threats, I think you might be able to kind of add a little bit of where those things come from.

XS: Yeah, I mean the first thing you notice when you start to dig into the research that’s been done on really any aspect of North Korea’s military is a lot of experts making best guesses just because this information isn’t publicly available, right? So, I think they’ve just launched what a lot of folks are saying was an ICBM earlier this week on July 4. Before that, experts have been tracking engine tests of different types of rockets that they believe conceivably could’ve been engines for ICBMs as opposed to intermediate-range ballistic missiles and so I mean there’s two aspects of this, right? One is the missile side and one is the warhead side. And there is still confusion, or uncertainty rather, about their missile capability even though they’re claiming now that they have a missile can strike the U.S. Ultimately, it didn’t fly quite that far, right? It flew at a trajectory that was about 45 degrees which made it go higher and not further, so in theory it seems like it can reach a lot further than it actually did but we’re not sure.

On the other side is the idea of both miniaturizing and ruggedizing a nuclear warhead that can fit on the end of one of these ballistic missiles. Because on one hand it needs to be small enough and that’s an engineering challenge in and of itself and the next is it needs to be able to withstand re-entry into the atmosphere. Because the way ballistic missiles work is the engine will power them up to the apex and then they follow a parabolic route and they’re just pulled down by gravity. The engine doesn’t need to take them the rest of the way. But that means that they need to go quite high in order to achieve the range that – or hit a faraway target.

So there has been – I think experts are saying now that they believe the consensus is that North Korea does have some degree of a miniaturized nuclear warhead. They are still uncertain about the ruggedized aspect of it. But even with that one bit of uncertainty, you have consensus moving towards the idea that they have a miniaturized nuclear weapon and now it seems like they are getting closer to having a ballistic missile that can hit the United States. And Geopolitical Futures has said before that the U.S.’ red line is gonna be North Korea actually getting to a point where they can deliver that nuclear weapon and James Mattis has basically said as much publicly. That we’re not going to let the North get to that point.

And we’ve done other podcast episodes and we’ve done a lot of written pieces on North Korea’s conventional military as well – how Seoul plays into the calculations on the peninsula right now and how the U.S. needs to consider that if a war were to break out. But I mean the two-second summary here is when you’re dealing with secretive states like this, there’s only so much information that’s available and so I think as we made this forecast, we’re doing our best to navigate a gray zone and we missed it.

AF: Which is a learning experience and as we pay more attention, we get a better sense of how the government will behave as well as patterns of their behavior and imperatives, so that in the future, we will hopefully have a better read and grasp on the situation.

Another item that we discussed and we’re slightly surprised with and therefore not as accurate as we would’ve like to have been is Italy. And Italy in this case is not quite as opaque but we did have some surprises there in terms of what we were expecting and what we actually thought would happen. So our forecast with Italy was that the banking crisis will continue and also that it will turn into a political crisis and cause the confrontation of Italy with Germany and the European Union.

So one thing that we try to do at Geopolitical Futures is to be precise a little bit more with our language.   It’s very easy to sound smart when you use abstract language without quite specifying what it is that you’re talking about and that was one component that was really important with our Italy forecast in terms of what did we mean by banking crisis, what did we mean by continue. One of the easiest things that you can do in a forecast is just say everything is going to stay the same and the challenge is to say well what’s going to stay the same, what’s going to be different.

And Xander, we expected the crisis to continue and that there would be some political crisis and tension with the E.U. and it wasn’t exactly how we had imagined. I know you’ve looked into this and can probably explain a little more of how the situation changed from what we were expecting based on previous behaviors of the other European Union countries dealing with their financial crises with Brussels versus the Italian approach.

XS: Well just for a little context, what were the problems and what are the problems that Italy’s banking has been facing? Perhaps the most ominous is the rise in non-performing loans, or NPLs, and all of that basically means is that the borrower has gotten to a point where for whatever reason their business is struggling or they’ve lost their job, their loan payments are greatly delayed or they’ve just stopped making them entirely. And obviously, this is dangerous for banks because they expect to make their money and be repaid and if they start encountering a lot of loans that are not being repaid then you have to start worrying about a liquidity crisis and you know bank runs and all that.

So the trend of NPLs in the Italian banking system had been increasing for a number of years. It got to about 18 percent of all loans outstanding in the Italian financial system. And we were expecting that trend to continue, get worse and for Italy to continue struggling implementing any sort of solution to their NPL situation. Since we had watched Greece and Spain and Ireland deal with a similar problem, although in different ways, we thought you know that would be a good rubric for evaluating Italy. Which basically meant that Italy was going to have to work with Germany in some way or another for a large bailout to help recapitalize their financial system, which is essentially what Spain did.

And since we believed that Italy has a larger economy than these other countries who have dealt with NPL issues and it has different interests than Germany does, that those interests will clash and there would be no compromise. And this is not exactly what we’ve seen play out. Italy has begun to solve its NPL issue. The NPL ratio is no longer increasing. They’ve kind of topped out over the last year or so and now are slowly starting to decline. Some of Italy’s biggest banks have implemented successful restructuring initiatives, which basically means firing a lot of people and cutting costs and reducing the size of the bank so that they can continue to get to a point where they’re profitable in the future with fewer assets. Italy’s two biggest banks, Unicredit and Intesa Sanpaolo, have both been successful in this regard and they haven’t needed any bailout.

So that is what some in economic jargon have come to call the decentralized approach, which just basically means the banks have been able to somewhat successfully solve their own problems. Now it’s not like this with all of Italy’s banks. Monte dei Paschi di Siena, which is I think the third largest Italian bank by assets, had the highest NPL ratio. However, they were able to reach some accommodation with the European Central Bank that allowed them to receive state funding from Italy, not from the ECB but from Italy itself. And there’s another acquisition by Intesa of two smaller banks that the ECB also allowed Italy to provide some state funds for.

So the question is, we’re seeing some degree of compromise, does that mean that Italy has essentially been able to get what it wants? And since Italy has been following all of the EU’s rules, it’s hard to tell if one side has really bent to the will of the other, but it has been enough off the mark that we labeled that particular forecast a C and will continue to monitor and see if the solutions that are currently in process that are being implemented are successful.

AF: Well that makes sense and I would also take the moment now to just explain the nature of a mid-year report card is that a lot of the information we have to fully judge the accuracy is incomplete. The Italy forecast I think is an excellent example of how we can judge a situation about where we stand now and where we could potentially see the situation going. And where we are in July will obviously be very different than where we are in December, so it will be very interesting six months from now to compare the different grades in progress from some of our forecasts now that may seem way off track or a pipe dream will end up being perhaps, coming to fruition or being more on track now than it was in the past. And Italy is a great example of that, where it’s not exactly what we were expecting but there’s still six months left in the year and we shall see where things take us.

Another interesting thing about our forecast would be the I would say the timing of things so sometimes the accuracy of our forecasts tend to not be so much with the actual material or forecast itself but the timing and I know one of the forecasts that is on track but tracking a little bit faster than we were anticipating is one of our items with the U.S. economy in general. Our U.S. economy forecast dealt with both trade and with the potential for a recession and I know Xander that we’ve been observing some signs of recession in the U.S. economy and where that fits in with our forecast.

XS: Yeah, so the specific wording of that forecast was the U.S. will not experience a recession in 2017, but will show signs of one by the end of the year. And we’ve seen a couple indications that those signs are already showing themselves. One, the unemployment in the U.S. is as low as it’s been in years. And that might sound good but the question then, is how much better can it get. And when an economy is at full employment and you factor in that the U.S. economy sees a recession every eight to 10 years or so on over average and this is a cycle that repeats itself, usually the best unemployment figures come right before a recession starts because there is just not a lot of room to improve.

Another indicator we’ve seen is the VIX metric, which measures global volatility, it is at an all-time low which is a sign that there is some complacency in the market, that people are just very comfortable with where things are and that is also usually something that occurs right before a recession.

Another perhaps more immediate indicator that we’ve seen recently was a monetary policy decision by the U.S. Federal Reserve. They’re increasing the federal funds rate by another 25 basis points, which is not particularly remarkable because they’ve been increasing rates since the end of 2015. However, for the first time since the end of the ‘08-‘09 recession, the Federal Reserve will be selling longer-term Treasuries. And this was, when it was buying longer-term Treasuries through a number of programs called Quantitative Easing, it was essentially the Fed’s way of trying to support the market through less conventional means because the Fed will usually attempt to manipulate shorter-term interest rates.

So the fact the Fed is now selling off long-term bonds is, well there’s two ways to look at it – one, a sign that the economy looks like it’s doing better, but if you think a couple years down the road, it’s also a sign that the Federal Reserve is recognizing that if it is too in monetary policy, it needs to do it now. And it would want to tighten monetary policy so that it has room to lower it in the future in any sort of contraction.

So we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the U.S. yield curve at relatively flat levels compared to the last 10 years which is also often an indicator of a recession coming in between six and 18 months or so. So that’s something that we anticipated that appears to be developing earlier in the year than we were anticipating.

AF: But bottom line, still keeping the forecast on track, we do not foresee the recession actually starting this year?

XS: Right yeah that was a B.

AF: Gotcha. There is also one major component left. We’ll talk a little bit about this and then to wrap I want to include some places where we’ve done quite well with our accuracy. The purpose of this particular podcast is to increase the transparency that we have with our forecast and our grading and our methodology for why we come to the conclusions that we do and acknowledging the areas that would like to explain better for why we were not as accurate as we thought we would be.

And the main remaining one left would be Turkey and Iran, which we foresaw a larger role of Turkey in the Syria crisis. We also foresaw a lot of confrontation between Iran and Turkey emerging this year. It also appears to be one of those situations where we’re only halfway through and there’s lots of maneuvering room between now and Dec. 31. And it’s good to recap what we’ve seen so far because that is one of the pillars that we have in our Middle East forecast that is not quite on track and is not happening as fast as we thought it initially would.

XS: Right, so what do we think would happen with that forecast Allison?

AF: Well what we anticipated was that Turkey would be drawn into the Middle East conflict, that the regional powers would start to compete for influence as a result of all the chaos going on in Syria and Iraq. We foresaw Turkey and Iran becoming the most active competitors. Turkey primarily in Syria and Iran primarily in Iraq either directly or through proxies. And that has essentially just not been the case. Iran really has not come into competition with Turkey and the main reason for that is because Turkey has not engaged in Syria to the degree that we initially anticipated. The Turks’ primary concern right now in Syria is the Kurdish presence and that is because they see it as a threat to their domestic security and national integrity.

Right now, they don’t need to worry about the security of their borders and the Kurds crossing over or anything like that. They’re still plenty occupied in Syria. On top of that we still have a government recovering from a coup that took place about a year ago. They had referendums and changes to their political organization. There were major changes to help consolidate power so the government is still working on that. Their economy is not performing as strongly as it was a few years ago and so they still need to address several economic concerns and we’re really seeing these items take up a lot of the time and resources of the Turkish government, and it is much more inward-looking than we anticipated.

And it also is at a point where it can afford to be inward-looking. They don’t need to worry about any threats along their border at this point and time and that is also keeping them out of confrontation with Iran, who is under much more pressure to actively address the ISIS presence and chaos and fighting that’s going in Iraq and Syria because those activities are starting to directly affect Iran. And I know that we’ve seen some developments just in the past couple of days that, Xander, maybe you want to speak to a little bit in terms of where we see this going and where things are at the present moment of who’s talking to who and where there might be some room for engagement in the future.

XS: Sure, an item that actually went out on our Watch List today had to do with Turkey, Iran and Russia stationing troops at different demarcation lines for de-escalation zones in Syria that have already been agreed to. And there is disagreement between Turkey and Iran, where their troops are going to be stationed. Turkey’s fear is Iran may station troops along a demarcation line that is too close to Turkey’s border and it seems like the disagreement in those negotiations may be an early indicator that some of what we were anticipating in our forecast is beginning to develop. But what did we end up giving ourselves on that forecast, Allison?

AF: Well with that particular forecast we ended up giving ourselves a D, because we severely underestimated the amount of confrontation because of Turkey being so inward-looking. Which means that we’re much more off track than we anticipated, however, as I mentioned, it will be interesting to compare the final results at the end of the year with the ones that we have this year.

XS: Yeah so even despite those early indicators, we just said we didn’t call it as of now in the year but obviously all of the issues that we discuss in our mid-year report card we will continue to track throughout the year. So those are some of the forecasts that we could’ve done better on that we missed outright. Allison, what about some that we were more accurate with?

AF: So right now we’ve been accurate with several things. Some of the major ones would include the U.S. seeking to enforce and renegotiate trade deals like NAFTA and not pursue other multilateral trade agreements. The U.S. pulled out of the TPP in January. NAFTA negotiations are expected to start in mid-August this year. There’s been no more pursuit of the TTIP. These are all things that indicate that forecast was an accurate forecast and completely on track. Our forecast with Brexit in terms of the U.K. maintaining economic ties and business ties to the EU is still on track. Obviously, that depends on how things will change throughout the rest of the year with the negotiations and final terms of the Brexit. But that is something that is on track and actually is of importance in that initially they were one of the few people that were actually saying, hey this isn’t a big deal, this is business is going to continue as normal, these ties and relationships are too strong. So that’s notable in that sense.

Our predictions with NATO and the U.S. pursuing closer ties with Eastern Europe are on track. Our forecast with oil prices not rising, especially as it relates to the Russian economy and not being enough to satisfy the budget and financial needs for the government to deal with social unrest, that’s on track. We’re still seeing protests throughout the country, wage arrears are continuing, the government is having financial issues.

And then also some more upbeat economic forecasts that we have, which include East African countries having the high growth rates and really identifying some of the more emerging markets where there is a high growth potential, especially at a moment and time when the global economy isn’t growing as fast as it was say prior to 2008. And that would be economies like Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda. We have so far been accurate on Brazil returning to growth this year, albeit very mild. It’s something that we see as notable in that it is South America’s largest economy and it just went through two years of recession where it contracted by more than 7 percent so even if we only see 1 percent, half a percent of growth this year, it’s notable, and that forecast is very much on track.

So there are a lot of hits and if you take the time to read the entire report card, you will see that there are multiple items that are very much on track, some of them that are completely accurate that we would consider As, as well as lots of Bs. Those are easy to talk about, those are nice little pats on the back. And it was really important for us today to take the time to kind of address some of the more outstanding misses or misinterpretations of how we foresaw the world events evolving this year, to address those at this time.

XS: So remember to check out our mid-year report card, it will be published tomorrow which is Friday, July 7 and the format will be sort of a graphic with shorter descriptions of each forecast and showing the grade right next to it and then if you scroll down further on the page, you’ll see a more detailed explanation of each of those forecasts and that will be available tomorrow.

Jacob L. Shapiro and Xander Snyder reflect on some key historical battles and whether they challenge GPF's model of how the world works. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m JLS, your usual host. I am joined by Xander Snyder, and Xander I believe you are all the way in Iceland, aren’t you?

XS: Coming at you live from Reykjavik.

JLS: How about that? And today, we want to do something a little different than we’ve been doing. Instead of going around the world and recapping some important part of something happening in geopolitics, we want to take a little bit of a different direction. So George a couple weeks ago wrote a piece about the Battle of Midway and thinking about what would’ve happened if the Japanese had won the Battle of Midway and the United States had lost it.

And one of the reasons George wanted to look at this particular battle, and one of the reasons he talks about this battle all the time, especially to us, other employees on GPF staff but just in general if you ever meet George because for him it’s a major challenge to everything we do at GPF. Our whole premise is built on the fact that you can predict things because there’s a certain order and logic to how geopolitics develop. There are imperatives and there are constraints, and the broad impersonal forces of history are what shape events.

But then you have things like the Battle of Midway in the middle of World War II. Probably World War II would have worked out the same way in the end. But the Battle of Midway was really decided by chance, by nothing that you could have predicted or nothing that was completely rational. The Japanese outnumbered the United States and even with the U.S. breaking the Japanese code, there’s some argument there to say that this is a moment where all the broad impersonal forces that we deal with on a daily basis in our writing and when we talk on these podcasts, didn’t mean that much.

I think this is actually a moment that all people who are in this line of work have. I know that when I was talking to Xander right when Xander started, one of the things Xander you brought up was that for you the Battle of Waterloo was this thing that always fascinated you. For me, it was the Battle of Gettysburg and I actually just wrote a piece that will be coming out on July 3 that sort of talks about that thing.

So what we thought we’d do on the podcast today is that Xander and I would spitball a little bit about, you know, Xander telling us a little bit about the Battle of Waterloo and me talking a little bit about the Battle of Gettysburg and then trying to take a step back and thinking about how the geopolitical model that we work with deals with events like these, whether it’s understandable or not or whether this is just something that we have to somehow build in to how we’re thinking about the world.

So Xander maybe the first question that I could just start you out with is why Waterloo? Why was Waterloo a battle that caught your attention and made you want to learn more about it?

XS: Yeah, when I was first discussing with George Midway, the way he describes the evolution of the battle was a moment when this one air squadron, I think Torpedo 8 is what it was called, had you know a couple minutes basically to fuel up before they could turn to try to figure out where the Japanese were in the Pacific near Midway and the squadron commander decided to turn one way and found basically the entire Japanese fleet. And that let one squadron distract some of the fighters, the Torpedo squadron dove down, distracted the fighters and basically all got annihilated but that left the high-altitude bombers basically completely wide open to begin to just annihilate the Japanese fleet.

And if that hadn’t happened, if Japan had in fact been able to basically win at Midway, that would’ve put a lot of pressure on Hawaii because they would’ve been able to station long-range bombers and that could’ve radically changed the way the war on the Pacific developed and therefore how the entire war developed.

So I started thinking about Waterloo which is the battle that I’d studied somewhat recently, and basically this battle evolved after Napoleon came back from exile in Elba in 1815 and all of the French troops that were sent by the Bourbon king to arrest him ended up joining up with him because he was their emperor. And he decided that the only way that he really had a chance to break the allies, which were Britain, Prussia, Russia, the Dutch, was to attack them quickly so that he could divide their forces, drive the British back to the sea and hopefully at that point sue for some sort of settlement that worked in France’s favor because in the long run if it turned into a battle of attrition, he was going to lose. He didn’t have the forces to compete with the massive Allied military of something like 800,000 troops.

So he went north very quickly, he fought the Prussians at a place called Ligny, I am probably mispronouncing that. But this was several days before Waterloo. He drove them back, he won that battle and the Prussians kind of retreated and tried to regroup. And Napoleon though they were going to go to the northeast. And so he sent this one guy named Marshal Grouchy with a detachment of about 33,000 French troops to pursue him. Turns out the Prussians actually regrouped much further to the north, which was important and I’ll come back to that.

The next battle he fought was at a place called Quatre Bras, which was against the British, and he was able to push them back there too. Again he was hitting each army individually before they could group together and he pushed them back. Wellington regrouped at this place called Waterloo. The Prussians, instead of going to the northeast, went north to a place called Wavre. And by the time Marshall Grouchy, the guy who was sent off to Napoleon’s right flank to basically pursue them, recognized where they were, it was kind of later in the game. They were able to regroup, and Napoleon sent later on sort of a follow up dispatch saying, “Ok, yeah, keep pursuing these guys as I initially ordered you to, but try to link up with us to the west so that you’ll actually be involved in this big battle that’s coming.” This is a great summary.

But before he got that dispatch, he was kind of at this moment where he heard the cannons begin to go off at Waterloo, and one of his inferiors basically said, “Look we should march at the sound of the cannons.” And so Grouchy found himself in this position where should I strictly follow Napoleon’s orders, basically just to pursue the Prussians rear and to keep them distracted, or should I pursue them in a way that would allow me to link back up to where I think this battle is going to be.

Now take all of that, and now think just about the Battle of Waterloo where really the tactic for Napoleon was to break the British center at this place called La Haye Sainte before the Prussians could link up on the east, and if you could do that, he could basically win that battle and keep pushing the English or the British north before the Prussians linked back up to him.

And he was finally able to do this at the very end of the battle, but by that point, it was too late; the Prussians had come and linked up and the game was over for Napoleon. Now if Grouchy had been able to link up with Napoleon, many historians think it’s fairly likely that he would’ve been able to break the center earlier.

So the question kind of comes down to either one misinterpreted order or miscommunication, some people say a bad decision by Grouchy but others will defend him saying he was following orders as strictly as he could. But you know, then the question is, if Waterloo is where Napoleon was ultimately defeated, what would have happened had he won that battle? And that’s kind of why that came to mind when George was talking about Midway.

JLS: You raise an important point, and this was one of our colleagues on staff raised this to me the other day, which was that when you are talking about warfare especially in the 17th and 18th century even into the 19th century, you seem to always have these stories about orders that either weren’t delivered or orders that were ambiguous, were not followed directly. And if the regimental commander or whoever it was had just followed the order, then maybe things would’ve gone well.

But the problem of course was there were no cell phones, there was no quick way to get in touch with people. You were dealing with large masses of people and you had to delegate an awful lot of authority and an awful lot to the commanders underneath you. So it’s nice to imagine that Napoleon was this romantic genius sitting on top of this army and that he was pulling all these puppet strings and if everybody had just marched to his beat, everything would’ve been fine. But the reality in battle is that it doesn’t exactly work that way. If you go to Gettysburg and visit the confederate lines at Gettysburg, it will take you the better part of a couple hours to walk up and down what the entire confederate line was. It wasn’t the type of thing where the general who was sitting on top of everything could just go and order everything.

So I think one thing to think about is that, a lot depends in these types of battles where you have large groups of men facing off against each other, a lot depends on the decisions that are made by the commanders and whether the general, the overall commander of the force, has trust in the people that are underneath and whether the people that are underneath him understood what they were supposed to do and when they were supposed to pursue one part of an order or maybe pursue another part of an order.

XS: Right. You can look at Napoleon again. Like you say, he’s supposed to be seen as this romantic military genius and in a lot of ways he kind of was, but he sent these ambiguous orders and that kind of in a way might have been his undoing at Waterloo. Now, we can get into how that particular battle plays into the geopolitics of the Napoleonic wars but I think before we do that, it’s worth talking about your case with Gettysburg because then we can compare and contrast the two and see what we can draw and what we can bring back to this larger theory that we use to broadcast events.

JLS: Yeah before I dive into it, the issue of ambiguous orders and even orders in general figures hugely into Gettysburg at multiple points. First of all, it was the Confederacy’s and Lee’s second campaign into the Union. The first campaign was in 1862 and ended at the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Sharpsburg, and what happened there was famously that General Lee’s orders got lost and the Union got them. General McClellan got his hands on dispatches that showed where the Confederate Army was actually going to be and that was what allowed the Army at the Potomac to find the battleground at Antietam and really caught Robert Lee off guard the first time that he came north.

The second time Robert E. Lee comes north to fight, it’s 1863, the war is not going well for the Confederacy, the longer the war went on, the worse it was going to be for the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant was putting a great deal of pressure on Vicksburg, and Vicksburg probably wasn’t going to be able to hold and so Robert E. Lee goes to Jefferson Davis and to the Confederate leadership and says, “I need reinforcement so that I can take the Army of Northern Virginia north into the Union once more.” And he does and at multiple times throughout the battle you have this issue of orders being somewhat ambiguous.

On the first day, for instance, Richard Ewell is pushing into Gettysburg and he whips the Union forces. He’s got them pretty well managed and they go into the town of Gettysburg and there’s a chance there where Ewell can send maybe 2,400, 2,500 troops to take some high ground at Culp’s Hill where there were only just a few hundred Union defenders. They were exhausted from fighting all day and Ewell had more people coming in.

He could have very easily taken that ground on Culp’s Hill. And the thing was that Lee sends him an order that says something like pursue the enemy but don’t bring on a general battle because on July 1, the first day of Gettysburg, Lee still doesn’t exactly want to fight at Gettysburg. He hasn’t decided that that’s where he’s going to fight yet and he doesn’t want to again get caught in a battlefield that isn’t of his own choosing. So he gives Ewell what Ewell interprets as a contradictory order. So, “should I actually send my troops to take Culp’s Hill or should I not bring on a general engagement? I don’t know what to do.”

One of the what ifs that historians throw around with Gettysburg all the time was if Stonewall Jackson hadn’t died months before Gettysburg and he had been the one commanding those troops, not Richard Ewell, Jackson would have absolutely understood exactly what Lee meant and would’ve known that that was the moment where, forget about the general battle thing, here was a chance to take the high ground. And they didn’t. And that really defines the rest of the battle of Gettysburg because at the end of the first day, even though the Confederacy does very well, the Union has all the good defensible positions.

The second day, Lee tries to attack again. They get very close to winning. They don’t actually win in the end and then on the third day, Lee commits his catastrophic mistake and maybe this is the one where its different than Waterloo or even different than Midway. Because the way I see it, the Battle of Gettysburg was in the end decided because Lee made a catastrophic error and he let himself not see what was in front of him. He saw what he wanted to see in front of him, and he didn’t see what was actually in front of him.

And this question of questionable orders comes back in a little bit. One of Lee’s top commanders General Longstreet didn’t want to make the assault on the third day and therefore there’s a disconnect because Longstreet thought that Lee was going to tell Pickett to get his troops ready for a charge first thing in the morning, and Lee thought that Longstreet was going to do it. So nobody actually told Pickett, who was supposed to lead the charge and who did eventually lead the charge, that he should be ready in the morning. And because he wasn’t ready in the morning, the Confederate forces weren’t in sync so one group of forces attacked in the morning, Pickett wasn’t even ready in the morning.

So it took them all morning to get to the point where Pickett was ready, and then they get to the afternoon and Pickett’s charge begins and 15,000 Confederate soldiers march a mile over territory that I can’t even imagine. I’ve been to Gettysburg and I’ve walked Pickett’s charge and it’s incredible. It doesn’t make sense that men could march slowly and methodically – which all the history accounts sort of talk about how the Confederates marched on the Union’s positions – through a field with no cover, with artillery coming at you every which direction, straight into a well-defended Union line and the Confederates just get massacred. And it’s the highwater mark of the Confederacy and really it’s even amazing that the Confederacy is able to fight for another two years after that.

But it all turns on Lee ordering Pickett’s charge. He could have withdrawn, he could have taken a defensive posture and let the enemy come to him. I don’t think that the Confederacy would have won the Civil War even if the Battle of Gettysburg had gone differently but certainly a major part of the way the war developed and the way peace developed afterwards all came down to Robert E. Lee’s decision to order a charge that by any logical or rational metric that I could come up, he shouldn’t have ordered.

XS: Yeah now and in this piece that you wrote – and one of the perks of working at Geopolitical Futures is I get to read some of these big pieces before they get published, right? And in this piece, you mention a couple of things that just seem like someone should be aware of this, right? Like Lee did not check his ammunition stores before he ordered the charge across this milelong stretch of field which in theory could have at least provided some degree of cover for the men going across. And up to that time in the war, Lee, really with a great lack of resources compared to the North, had been able to pull off some really astonishing victories.

So what do you think lead Robert E. Lee to make that decision? What could have happened if he had been more collected, if he had thought differently? I certainly don’t want to criticize a guy who was so successful up until that point because, as we’ll come back and mention, one of the great weaknesses of thinking through these events in retrospect as well, all human beings make some errors at some point, right? But how could this have played out differently?

JLS: Yeah so I think there’s two different ways to answer that question. The first is to realize that while we are here talking about individuals and individual choices that happen, those broad impersonal forces that we discuss all the time are still extremely relevant. One of the reasons Lee and the Confederates won the victories they won was because they were much more desperate and they had to take many more risks than the Union had to take and that meant high-risk, high-reward maneuvers.

Now Lee was facing an army, the Army of the Potomac, that the leadership structure was in complete chaos. Lincoln could never find a commander that he really trusted. The top was being shifted around all the time. And you know they were technically fighting on enemy territory, right? They were fighting in the South, they were fighting in Virginia and they were fighting in the places that Lee’s soldiers called home. All of that I think matters a great deal.

But the other thing was that Lee had to take risks that McClellan and the other Union generals didn’t have to take. And so that puts him in a position to win certain battles and go on the aggressive in Virginia that maybe doesn’t work quite as well once he moves into Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second thing to point out though I think – and this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the orders and about what it means to command that many men at the same time – Lee relied on the commanders underneath him to understand his orders. He delegated a great deal of authority to them.

And one of the reasons the loss of Stonewall Jackson was so important to the Confederacy was because Stonewall Jackson understood Lee. He knew what Lee wanted; he knew what he was thinking. Longstreet was another one who really understood Lee. So when he lost Jackson, he lost one of his main lieutenants. And then on top of that he had to replace Jackson with people he wasn’t completely confident in. But this goes back to the artillery question, right? Because there is no way that a general like Robert E. Lee or even Napoleon could know every single thing that was happening on a battlefield. You know, we’re talking about armies that are 100,000 people large, even larger in some cases, and you can’t expect that general to know the disposition of every single company and brigade and how many artillery is in this here and how many artillery in that here.

In some sense, they are supposed to sit on top of it and they are supposed to organize it all. But when Lee is talking to the person who is in charge of his artillery and the person who is in charge of his artillery isn’t very good and says that everything’s fine, Lee doesn’t have time to go check that. Lee has to depend that his subordinates know what they’re talking about and will raise disagreements with him.

This is another part and I wonder if there’s any of this with Napoleon. I think another part of Gettysburg was that Lee by that point had won so many battles and the men trusted him so much and believed in him so much that they lost a little bit of the will to question him. I’m not saying that Longstreet and the others didn’t question him but you know the day before Pickett’s charge, the night before Pickett’s charge, Longstreet’s criticism and his concerns were not nearly as vocal as they were the morning of the actual charge. And once it’s the morning of the actual charge, Lee sticks to his guns.

If Longstreet had felt able to speak up the night before or even some of the other regimental commanders had or Pickett had the sense to say, “General Lee, this isn’t a good idea, there’s no way that we could do this,” maybe things would have been handled a little bit differently. But the ironic thing is that the more battles Lee won, the more the men trusted him and believed in him such that when it came time to order Pickett’s charge, those men were more afraid of disappointing or saying no to their order than they were to marching across a field with certain death at the end of it. Those are two things to think about.

XS: Yeah hubris definitely played a role at Waterloo too. The day of the battle or maybe it was the day before the battle, one of his inferiors said to Napoleon, I think as it related to sending Grouchy off to his right flank to the east, “Is this a good idea? Should we be dividing our forces right now as we get ready to go up against the British?” And I am paraphrasing Napoleon’s response but it’s been recorded and it’s very close to something like, “You’re not listening to me when I tell you this. Wellington is a bad general. He is not a good general.” Like, “Shut up, I know what I’m doing,” right?

And one of the things that Napoleon really perfected in his military tactics in the 19th century was moving artillery rapidly in conjunction with infantry to support infantry. And a tactic that Wellington had developed and used several times before was just hiding men behind a ridge so that they were out of range of the artillery. They just couldn’t hit them because they were behind.

So by the time the infantry marched up and they had tried to battle these positions with artillery, not much had happened because they were completely protected. So Wellington was recorded as saying afterwards, again paraphrasing something like, “Napoleon marched right in the same old way he always did, and we beat him the same old way we always did.”

JLS: Yeah, there’s a similar thing happening in Gettysburg. I mean, Lee was not wrong to think that the Union commanders were bad. He had time and again beaten the Union because people like McClellan or Burnside just hadn’t done very well and General Meade, who commanded the Union forces at Gettysburg, had only been put in place very recently. Lincoln had removed Hooker and put Meade in place.

So really when Lee went North, he thought he was going to be facing Hooker. It turned out he was facing Meade and he didn’t see there was any great difference between the two. And he was wrong about that. Meade was a solid general and a had good sense of what was going on and in general had made the right decisions there. So there is certainly an element of confidence that has to happen there.

But I would also say that, I think in general for military leaders and things like this, you also have to have that confidence. Once you make that decision, you have to trust that you’ve gotten through everything and you have to act with a certain amount of confidence. You have to have flexibility to respond to changes as they happen on the battlefield.

But it really, in a case like Lee’s or in a case like Napoleon’s, we start talking about things like tragic flaws because the thing that makes them so good also ends up being their Achilles’ heel sometimes in a situation where things aren’t going the way that they did before for them. So I think that’s another thing to think about.

XS: Yeah now when we talk about these moments in history – and I’ve kind of come to call them Midway moments just because George really emphasizes the element of chance in the Battle of Midway – I think that the three that we have talked about in this episode all are slightly different, right?

With Gettysburg, it was really the decision of one man that kind of swung the pivot one way or another. In the case of Waterloo, it was basically the decision of two men: both Napoleon and Grouchy could have acted differently. Grouchy could’ve figured it was his role to – he was delegating responsibility; he could have moved his forces in a way that linked back up with Napoleon. Napoleon could’ve been clearer, right? And in the case of Midway, it was really kind of just chance. Do I turn left or do I turn right? And turning the right way lead them to the Japanese fleet.

Now, I think if we tried to put these Midway moments in the context of some of these larger personal trends that we talk about. Looking at Waterloo, Napoleon let’s say he could have won Waterloo. With some consideration and after a conversation that I had with George on this topic, I really don’t think that there is any way for Napoleon to have won the war that he started in 1815. There was at that point simply too many resources on the other side. Even if he had achieved his sort of midterm strategic objective of driving the British to the ocean, getting them off a continent and blocking off the Prussians from their allies on the west, the Russians were still mobilizing. They were just doing it a lot slower, which is why they weren’t involved in the Battle of Waterloo.

So it was kind of a matter of time before Napoleon was going to be overwhelmed by incredible force and he could’ve at that point attacked the Russians, tried to push them east. But so long as the Prussians retained supply lines all the way back to home, they can pull back and hold a defensive position until the Russians came. So I think in that case the balance of resources was just so overwhelmingly on the side of the allies. They also had more troops available to them. I mean Napoleon was really – France had already been just completely wiped out of military-aged men almost by that point from the first almost 20 years of Napoleonic wars. There just weren’t that many military resources, both men and materiel, that he could pull from at that point. And that was not necessarily the case on the allied side.

So I think we can talk about Waterloo as a Midway moment and still recognize that in that case, impersonal trends probably in this what if scenario probably would have led to a very similar historical outcome. What do you think about Gettysburg?

JLS: Well I think that your point is well taken and I think that even though it’s a lot of fun to talk about these things, and I really do believe some of these things could have turned out differently depending on the individuals that we are talking about, but the side that basically should have won on paper in terms of resources and impersonal forces and geopolitics and all that other stuff, won in each three of these cases. The United States overall was a greater power than Japan in the long run and it prevailed in the end. In the Civil War, the Confederacy was not going to be able to defeat the Union.

Their only chance of defeating the Union, at first, it was to try and inflict a couple really harsh defeats and hope that that would cow them into negotiation. Once the war was going on this long, their only hope was to try and prolong the conflict and make the Union see that it wasn’t going anywhere such that they could get international recognition and maybe some help and some resources from outside and maybe even get a pro-peace candidate to replace Lincoln in the next Union presidential election. But everything was relying on using the battles to influence political conditions to make it more amenable to some kind of settlement. And as you just said in Waterloo, Napoleon didn’t really have the troops to make it work against the allies that he was fighting against.

So yeah, the answer to that is that I don’t think if Lee had won at Gettysburg, I don’t think the Confederacy would have won the Civil War and I also don’t think that we would’ve then lived in this alternate universe where the fighting spirit of the Union had been broken and there would have been some kind of negotiated settlement and you have had a Union and a Confederacy for some amount of time before they joined back together. I think in the end, the odds were very much stacked against – and this is where sort of the sheer-force statistics makes it work. The Confederacy had a very, very small margin for error. It could not afford to make the sort of catastrophic mistakes that happened at Gettysburg; the Union could.

The reason that Ulysses S. Grant succeeded as a general was because he was willing to take the casualties and knew that the Union could replenish itself and the Confederacy couldn’t. And this is actually a concept that we think about often when we’re thinking about geopolitics today. When we talk about American power, the United States has not fared well in many of its recent wars. It lost the Vietnam War for all intents and purposes. I think we can say that the second Iraq War it lost. It will lose the war in Afghanistan. These are not wars where the United States is going to be able to achieve its political objective.

I should say right now that doesn’t mean that the U.S. didn’t fight courageously or that it didn’t win a great number of battles, but if the definition of victory in a war is to carry the political objective that you wanted, the U.S. couldn’t do that in Vietnam, it hasn’t done that in the second Iraq War, it has not been able to do it in Afghanistan and the U.S. can survive that. The U.S. can survive losing wars and making mistakes because of the depths of its power. A much smaller country can’t survive those kind of mistakes. And sometimes if a smaller country makes those kind of mistakes, it ends up in the outright destruction of those countries. I am sure we can think of multiple instances in history where a small country because of whatever reason loses a great deal of its sovereignty because it tries to do something that doesn’t work.

So again in all of these situations, I think that Lee’s decisions and Napoleon’s decisions and Torpedo 8, I think that’s all a part of the fabric of history and one of the things about studying wars is that geopolitics can take you most of the way to understanding how a war was started and why it was started and what the objectives are, but at a certain point, war is complicated and messy and relies on the actions of individuals.

At the same time, even when those individuals’ actions are the most important and everything hangs in the balance, those individuals are still there because the impersonal forces that we always talk about brought them to those points. We can map out exactly why Lee was at Gettysburg and we can even map out why he felt a little bit desperate probably and how that influenced his decision-making. I am sure you can do the same for Napoleon.

XS: Yeah he had absolutely no margin of error just like you said with Lee.

JLS: So at that point it becomes are we really talking about individuals shaping history or is this the broad geopolitical forces that we talked about shaping the individuals and the individuals marched along to their own drum? For me, I think that Gettysburg is such a compelling test case for this because I really do think that Pickett’s charge was just a mistake. It was not the type of thing that you could’ve predicted because it didn’t make sense. It still doesn’t make sense to me with all the evidence that we know that Lee had in front of him, it does not make sense to me why he ordered it.

The only way it makes sense to me is if I can think back to moments in my own life or moments in human history where I’ve been blinded by passions or I’ve been blinded by something else instead of the thing that was in front of me. But if you’re talking about as a sober, rational military tactician, and that was what Lee was, he was a very disciplined general, making that decision, it doesn’t make sense. He let himself get caught up in the moment and he didn’t see what was going on and he didn’t know what he didn’t know.

And for me trying to explain how a man got that far and then makes that mistake is the challenge and in some ways, it will yield an unsatisfying answer because I don’t think I have an answer beyond the fact that he was human and he made a mistake. Maybe a mistake that we can empathize with and understand based on what he was. But at the same time, that particular thing on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg just comes down to Lee making a mistake and his men following orders.

XS: Yeah so in all of these circumstances you can imagine how with a different decision made by an individual or a couple of individuals, the outcome might have still looked somewhat similar. However, the process to get to that outcome might have played out entirely differently. For example, in World War II, if the U.S. had lost Midway, if they wanted to stay in the war, they would’ve beaten Japan in the long run, it just may have taken much longer. It probably would’ve taken many more lives, it probably would’ve taken a lot more resources and it probably would’ve taken a focus away from the European theater to focus on the Pacific theater first.

And what might have happened to Russia while it was basically trying to beat back the Nazis on its own at that point? And would the U.K. have received American arms? It’s hard to tell but it seems likely that the Allies still would have won. It’s just the process to get there would’ve looked entirely different, right?

JLS: Yeah, it would’ve looked entirely different, and this is again one of the things we talk about a lot internally and which I talk about all the time, and it’s one of the more interesting things to talk about which is, the shorter your time horizon, the more the individual matters. I think sometimes in GPF writing, we have a tendency to dismiss the individual and that’s because in the broad scheme of things, we do think individuals are less important.

But when you think about history 50 years, 100 years out, these forces that we’re talking about and just the magnitude of the number of the decisions that have to be made by human beings sort of settles into something of a logic that you can predict. But the shorter and shorter and shorter the time horizon, the more important the individual gets. You know sometimes, people ask us, “Well you didn’t predict X was going to happen.” And I think one of the things to say there is we don’t presume what’s going to happen tomorrow. If you can predict what’s going to happen tomorrow, you have an incredibly high degree of intelligence about what’s going on with a particular set of actors.

What we can say is that, you don’t really need that intelligence to understand the most important things that are going to develop over the course of years and decades and perhaps on the magnitude of a century. But again that’s what makes this all so difficult and what makes this job challenging is that you can’t just sort of plug everything into a formula. You can make a model of it, and you can hope that it works the way it does. And we’ll be putting our 2017 forecast report card which is a really good way of thinking about this tension, right? Because we’ve made a set of forecasts for the year and every day we’re tracking them.

So we have to decide, well this happened today – how good are we doing? How bad are we doing? Should we call this an incomplete? Should we call this a failure? Should we call this a whatever? And that gets back to the exact same questions that we’re talking about here, right? Well this particular thing happened on this particular day. We didn’t see that Saudi Arabia was going to engage in this diplomatic offensive against Qatar and was going to try to isolate Qatar. We certainly though knew that Saudi Arabia and Iran were going to be competing more this year. And we said as much.

So it’s this weird space, and I think we are all individuals, all of us are individuals, so we get seduced by stories like Robert E. Lee and like Napoleon and like Torpedo 8 because we can wrap our brains around that. We can imagine the Civil War is a massive conflagration that happens because of a lot of different geographic and political forces and the same is true with Napoleon. World War II is like the mother of all things in that regard just because of how complicated it was. But it’s very easy to think of yourself as ok, well I am General Lee and I go visit the Battle of Gettysburg site and I can walk the line and I can walk Pickett’s charge and I can put everything in front of me and I can think on a tangible basis, well what did it mean to be here?

And in some sense that becomes very important, and it’s very important to think about that stuff emotionally if you’re going to empathize with the stuff that we’re analyzing. At the same time though, if you let that be all that you’re seeing, you’re going to miss sort of the broad sweep of history.

XS: So if you’re a fan of the Civil War, be sure to check out Jacob’s piece that will be coming out on the Battle of Gettysburg. It’s on July 3, it will be published, right?

JLS: It will and maybe if it does well and if people enjoy this conversation, we’ll let you take a whip at the Battle of Waterloo and maybe we’ll even think about trying to do maybe every once in a quarter or once in a blue moon, doing some of these pieces.

XS: Definitely and on that point, please do let us know, readers and listeners, what you are interested in hearing more of. You can reach us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. We do our absolute best to respond to all of them, and we look forward to hearing more about what you want to receive from us.

JLS: Well thanks, Xander, and we’ll see you out there next week.

Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss some recent anomalies in the Middle East and consider the relationship between sectarianism and nationalism in the Muslim world. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hi everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m sorry that we missed last week but we’re back this week and I am joined once again by Kamran Bokhari, who is one of our senior analysts. Nice to have you back Kamran.

Kamran Bokhari: It’s good to be back Jacob.

JLS: And we’re going to pick up a little bit where we left off last week, or not last week, two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, we were talking about the situation between Saudi Arabia and Qatar and we thought we’d just have a more general conversation this week about the Middle East, Islam, maybe some nationalism to throw in there. And but Kamran before we get started, we just noticed a report before we were recording that the al-Nuri mosque in Mosul, Iraq apparently has been destroyed in some kind of explosion. This mosque is important because it’s where the ISIS founder and leader al-Baghdadi actually declared the caliphate years ago. You were telling me that it kind of struck you as weird. Why was it weird to you, what’s going on do you think with this report?

KB: We’ve seen ISIS and other jihadist groups attack mosques of Muslims that they don’t deem to be “true Muslims” or from their point of view deviant Muslims. But this is anomalous in that ISIS would actually blow up a mosque that it has been using and it’s been sort of a place from where they declared their caliphate and something that they’ve used. Now, it could be that there may be things or something that’s in that mosque that they didn’t want coalition forces to get their hands on, so they decided to go ahead and destroy the facility. But it’s still very odd that they would take a risk like that because they are already on the defensive and why would they do something that could potentially cause them great backlash.

JLS: Yeah, I think one of the things I was thinking about though was according to the reports Iraqi security forces were approaching the mosque and they blew it up as sort of a way to defend themselves and not let the mosque fall into enemy hands, necessarily. But I think this is an example of how ISIS has a very pragmatic ideology. We think of them as religious fanatics, and they are religious fanatics, but they also deal with things pragmatically, especially the defense of the territories and places that they defend and it’s something that just popped into my head.

It’s also strange that fundamentalist groups like this also always seem to have an aversion to anything resembling idolatry. ISIS was famous for blowing up a lot of these antiquities in Palmyra and other places that they’ve been or taking the antiquities and selling them on the black market. They don’t really care about big beautiful structures or things like that. I think in some ways they think of structures as something that the Saudis are building. You think about the Saudis and all the stuff they are building around the Kaaba in Mecca, that sort of comes to mind. And ISIS has always been more spartan, has always been not attached to I don’t know larger images or beautiful mosques, that’s not really what it’s about. So yeah, don’t you think it could just be a symbol of their pragmatism in general?

KB: I think you are onto something here that’s important. I think that what you said in the beginning is that we tend to look at these groups as very rigid in their interpretation of religious text and whatnot, which is true on one level. But on another level, they display a great deal of, for lack of a better term, pragmatism or they make things up as they go and they change interpretations and they adopt interpretations that normally would not be the case. And I think that given the way that ISIS has evolved and grown, one of the key things in their toolkit has been that you don’t stick with necessarily the old formulations or understandings of religious texts.

As far as buildings are concerned, I think they look at it from a utilitarian point of view. And then of course, this is war, and I think that in war they tend to be a bit more casual about things and because what is at stake is being able to protect themselves as an institution and so buildings may not necessarily be of importance. And again, we’re speculating because just not a whole lot of information as to how ISIS blew this up – was it booby-trapped, were there fighters holed up there and they blew themselves up because they didn’t want to get caught or wanted to achieve “martyrdom” and especially given it being Ramadan or the tail end of Ramadan. And so there are just too many unanswered questions.

JLS: Well another report I wanted to ask you about Kamran, and I haven’t raised this with you before but we’ll see what you think about it, is that I hadn’t realized this but I read a report today that there are actually a number of polio cases in Deir el-Zour in particular but also in Raqqa and other places that the Islamic State and even in other places that the Islamic State is not controlling in Syria and in Iraq right now.

And for some reason that really struck me on sort of a symbolic level. I think there maybe is not a better symbol for Western science than vaccines. And in some ways vaccines have had a little bit of a troubled history in the Muslim world, right? There were all those allegations of CIA agents posing in Pakistan as doctors who were giving polio vaccines and that ruining trust in Pakistan for doctors. And Pakistan remains one of the places where polio still exists and – in part because of that distrust.

And I don’t think that ISIS meant for polio to sprout back up in Syria. I’m not even saying that it’s really their fault. We know that you know in a lot of these war-torn places, things like basic hygiene are some of the first things to go. We’re seeing a cholera outbreak in Yemen right now, which is affecting tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. But I just wonder how you react to that. On the one hand, ISIS is really staked some of its legitimacy on behaving like a state and on providing basic services and the Assad regime has done some of that too.

But at the same time, I think we’re really beginning to see both in Syria and some parts of Iraq and Yemen where these wars have been going on for so long, we’re beginning to really see the total breakdown of bureaucracy and some of the basics that we’ve come to expect of 21st century society. So, I just wonder what you think about all of those things that I just threw at you and whether it was as striking to you as it was striking to me.

KB: It is striking, and what’s striking to me is that wherever there’s a jihadist entity that is taking control of an ungoverned space and set up shop and declared an emirate or a caliphate – I mean the parallel with Pakistan is very apt – that we see these diseases that we thought had been largely eradicated from the rest of the world like polio and cholera, they begin to emerge. And obviously it has a lot to do with the lack of governance, sanitation being very poor quality, hygiene not being maintained. A lot of it just may be because of the lack of resources.

And it really speaks to the idea that somehow the caliphate was a place where people should migrate to in terms of the recruits of ISIS, people who were inspired by ISIS. One of the things that ISIS was saying to people all across the world was come join the caliphate, you know, you need to come to the land where the caliphate exists. And so that’s really a blow to that idea that life is so harsh and we can only speculate as to the availability of food supply and other basic services that we have taken granted for in pretty much the rest of the world. I mean even in Pakistan, even in Syria, there are places that do not have this kind of situation. In fact, these are really small pockets of territory where you have the outbreak of such diseases. In Pakistan, we did have that whole thing about the CIA and the conspiracy theory amongst the jihadists, amongst the Pakistani Taliban and their supporters that we should not allow our children to be immunized by doctors because somehow this is a CIA plot to undermine fertility or trying to gain intelligence through the dispensation of vaccines.

But at the same time, it really speaks about how really primitive society and governance becomes once jihadists take over. It speaks to the lack of facilities and the lack of resources and you know utter lack of sophistication when it comes to statecraft or just dispensing basic services – collecting garbage, dealing with cleanliness, having a place where people can be treated for you know injuries or wounds. After all, one of the major enterprises of groups like ISIS and the Taliban is warfare. You would think that they would invest in hospitals. But it seems like this is the place where they were at the very least cutting corners.

JLS: Yeah, that’s fair enough. Well that was a curve ball to start off with but I want to take us back to something that some of our readers have written in to ask us to talk about. And there’s not a better person to ask this question than you Kamran. Tell us the difference in a short group of words about what is the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, what is the big deal, why are Sunnis and Shiites always fighting each other throughout the Middle East and where does this go from here?

KB: So initially when it all started, it started right after the death of the prophet. And at the time, there was nothing called a Sunni or a Shia. These were categories that developed many, many years later – many decades later and became full-fledged sects, rival sects over centuries. But at the time, the question was, who is going to succeed the prophet because the prophet himself is reported to have said that when God sent one prophet to the children of Israel and would take him away then he would be replaced by another prophet but after me there are no more prophets.

And then his companions and his followers asked, “Well, prophet who will guide us and who will lead us?” And he said there will be caliphs and there will be many, some of whom you would love and they would love you and some of whom would despise you and you would despise you in return and that was sort of the end of that story. But the unanswered question was, well ok, who succeeds the prophet? So those who became later on Sunnis decided to go with an individual by the name of Abu Bakr who was the closest friend of the prophet and an associate and he was an individual of advanced age.

But those who later on became Shia, and much later on, said no, the cousin of the prophet and who also happened to be his son-in-law, Ali, is most deserving of the position because he spent so much time, he’s young, he’s energetic, he’s demonstrated his capability as a top aide and also on the battlefield. And eventually that whole dispute over time led to a divide and there was a very early civil war issue on this as well during the time of the third caliph, I would say in the ’50s. Eventually, jurisprudence that differed between the two sects didn’t emerge until well after, I would say 300 years after, the prophet migrated from Mecca to Medina and established the first Islamic polity.

But really the sect, as in full-fledged sects, they didn’t emerge – the Shia and the Sunni – in the theological sense until well into the 16th century when the Safavid Empire in Iran adopted Shia Islam as a state religion and expected people to be or subscribe to what became Shia Islam and then Shia Islam is broken down into subsects just as the Sunni side is fragmented.

JLS: How would you describe the relationship in terms of its relationship to nationalism currently right now? So there are a lot of different nation-states in the Middle East: there’s Iraq, there’s Jordan, there’s Saudi Arabia, there’s Egypt. There’s a certain level of national pride for the different groups that live in these states. But then the sectarian stuff when you overlay it doesn’t always line up exactly with it, right? Because in Iraq there’s a majority Arab population and on the one hand because of the sectarianism, they feel closer to Iran. But there are also Arabs; they’re not Persians so in that sense they feel closer to Arabs and it’s just this whole mess of things so what do you think is the relationship between nationalism and sectarianism?

KB: So I think what you’re asking is sort of the geopolitics of sectarianism because when it becomes geopolitical, when you have major states or empires as we had back in the Medieval times when Shia/Sunni – I mean the Shia/Sunni conflict is not new. It’s been raging and it has assumed different forms in different time periods so the geopolitics of sectarianism, when sectarianism becomes geopolitical, it’s no longer simply a religious divide. It is, no you pray differently, you believe in different things and you have a different view of collective history and shared memory.

It really becomes ethnic categories so it’s almost like a form of nationalism where the Shia identity becomes very primary and the Sunni identity also becomes really highly sensitized and that happens because in the here and now, especially after the late ’70s and early ’80s, it’s because of the rise of Islamism on both sides of the sectarian divide. You have Iran becaming the first Islamist regime in the Muslim world but it subscribes to Shia Islamism or it’s an Islamism or Shia variant.

At the same time, you have Islamism on the Sunni side and because of this heightened religiosity, the sectarian identity has become almost the primary identity for at least those people who are waging war against each other. So Saudi Arabia looks at Iran and says we don’t like Iran because they’re Persians but more so because they’re Shia and they want to subvert Sunni orthodoxy. And conversely when the Iranians look at the Saudis they see an entity that is trying to undermine the Shia religious creed and mind you the Shia being the minority have mostly been on the receiving end throughout the history of Islam. So there is this sense of minority status that also kicks in and therefore the Iranian identity sort of gets subdued or exists parallel to the Shia identity.

Likewise, on the Sunni side, yes we’re Saudis, we’re Arabs and people in Lebanon are Lebanese and Iraqis have their national identity but as these nation-states are in meltdown mode and there’s growing geopolitical sectarianism, it’s the sectarian identity that has become the primary thing. I mean those who are fighting the Assad regime in Syria, they’re largely driven by the fact that they see an Alawite Shiite conspiracy to destroy Sunnism in Syria and they’re defending Sunni Islam against what they deem as a form of deviants, the Alawite Shiite creed. Same thing in Yemen between the Houthis and their opponents. And so the nation-state is still in somewhere; people haven’t completely discarded it. But at the same time, because the nation-state has become weak, this sectarian identity has taken center stage.

JLS: Is it fair to say that there are less subcategories of Shiites than there are of Sunnis? Like there are more Sunnis in the Middle East than there are Shiites, but would it be fair to say that the Sunni community throughout the entire Middle East is actually much more fractured and has a number of different subsets? Whereas, because maybe there are less Shiites, that camp is more unified? Or would you say there are actually, when you actually look into the camps themselves, there’s actually a lot of subdivisions and internal rivalries that maybe don’t even bubble up to the surface or that aren’t obvious to the casual observer of news in the Middle East?

KB: You are absolutely right and you have pointed to a key characteristic of this sectarian conflict that’s brewing. So on the Sunni side, you have not just multiple subsects but you have, as I mentioned earlier, the nation-state or the national identity hasn’t completely gone away. And you have multiple claimants who represent Sunni Islam. Saudi Arabia has since its founding tried to position itself as not just a leader of the Sunni world or the Arab world but the Islamic world in general.

And in recent times with Turkey moving away from a Kemalist version of secularism to a more religious version of secularism, a more religious society not necessarily a religious state, it also sees itself as the leader of the region, the Middle East and of course the wider Islamic world. And ISIS is doing the same thing; al-Qaida claims the leadership of the Islamic world, the Sunni world as well. There is no unified coherent Sunni camp if you will.

Now in contrast and in sharp contrast, because the Shia are a minority, their divisions – so the Syrians aren’t mainstream, the Syrian Alawites aren’t mainstream Shia. They’re a heterodox offshoot of mainstream Shia Islam but yet they’re close with mainstream Shiites in Iran, in Iraq and in Lebanon. Likewise, you have the Houthis who are Zaidis, who are another form of Shia Islam, which in a way from a doctrinal way is actually not so close to mainstream Shia Islam. It shares a lot more with Sunni Islam, but nonetheless, it is a form of Shia Islam, so therefore we see this alignment with Iran and that Shia camp.

And so what we’re seeing is a more coherent Shia camp because the Shia are a minority and they have this collective memory that they hark back to, when they have historically been suppressed at the hands of Sunni powers. And now that Sunni Islam has fragmented along multiple lines and one of the things that has really accelerated this fragmentation is the so-called Arab Spring phenomenon or what we call at Geopolitical Futures the hollowing out of the Arab world. You’ve written about this yourself.

And so that has exacerbated the fragmentation on the Sunni side and the Shia look at this and say this is a historic opportunity and I would go on to say that if we look at the history of sectarianism in the Muslim world, it runs on a 500-year cycle. So around 1000 when the Sunni world was fragmenting, we see the rise of Shia policies such as the Fatimid empire in North Africa extending into the Levant and the west coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

You had the Buyid empire in what is Mesopotamia and Persia and as time goes on other Shiite polities emerge. But then the Ottomans come back and they reclaim the Sunni center and Sunni Islam once again begins to thrive until the rise of the Safavid empire, which poses a challenge to the Ottomans, and now 500 years later today, we are once again seeing the rise of Shia Islam because Sunni Islam or Sunni Muslim territories are at war with each other.

JLS: Kamran on a practical level, is there any significant difference between a Shiite country and Sunni country? Is that going mean anything for the way that particular country acts? Or are those countries just going to act in their geopolitical interest and whatever sect that country happens to be really doesn’t play that much into it? I guess to even sharpen the question, does Iran act the way it does in some cases because it is a Shiite country or is that not really something that you can see?

KB: At a practical level, different states, different types of states, you know operate more or less the same. You know, you have interests that are material interests and it doesn’t matter whether you are Shia or whether you are al-Qaida or ISIS or Sunni or Turkey or whatever. I think that from a practicality point of view, the sect doesn’t matter. You have to pursue your imperatives and deal with your constraints like anybody else and actually you’re very similar to your rivals.

But sect does come into play in terms of behavior, so I’ll give you an example. So Iran realizes that it represents a minority sect and a minority ethnicity. They’re Persians and they’re Shiites in a Middle East that’s largely Arab and largely Sunni. And therefore, that creates limitations and so yes they want to expand into Iraq because the majority of Arabs are Shia there. It has developed and cultivated Hezbollah because a majority of Lebanese Muslims are Shia. It’s aligned with the Shia because the Alawite regime or the Alawites have dominated the Syrian regime for a long time. It’s playing into Yemen to a certain extent because of the Houthis.

But it can’t go into Saudi Arabia just yet because that’s a stronghold of very hardcore Sunni identity and ideology and they won’t find so many converts there or supporters. So the Shiite and the Sunni thing does place constraints and limitations in terms of behavior. For example, ISIS only recently, a few weeks ago, was able to stage an attack inside Iran. It’s been cultivating, I am pretty sure that it took a long time for it to cultivate the assets to pull off that attack on the shrine of the founder of the Islamic Republic and the Iranian Parliament.

But you don’t see the volume of attacks that you see even next door in a Shia majority country like Iraq and of course the list goes on and on. So I think that the sect does place constraints in how far a particular power can expand its tentacles and its influence.

JLS: The follow-up question to that is I mean really this sectarian battle is focused in the Middle East mainly around the Levant, maybe extending a little bit outwards. But once you get into North Africa or once you get more to South Asia, countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, you don’t have the same type of sectarian rivalry and we see IS trying to expand outwards into these regions especially as it comes under so much pressure in the caliphate itself. Do you think that IS will have trouble finding the same type of equation that allowed it to rise in Syria and Iraq because there isn’t that sectarian divide to join on or is there enough subdivision within Sunni Islam and some of these other countries that those are de facto sects already, if that question makes sense?

KB: No absolutely and again this is another important point that you raise. What really made ISIS into the jihadist regime it has become, and controlling territory, having a very sophisticated military force and intelligence service and wreaking havoc all across the region and beyond even in the West, is the fact that it was able to consolidate itself in Iraq and Syria because of the sectarian divide. It exploited heavily the Shia/Sunni anxieties on both sides and created space for itself and essentially took over the leadership of first the Sunnis of Iraq because they’re a minority in their country and they were disenfranchised after regime change in 2003 that toppled the Saddam regime. And then in the wake of the civil war and uprising against Assad, it tried to take over the leadership of the Sunnis who were trying to battle the Assad regime and trying to topple it. And it really gave them a boost, and exponentially, we saw the growth of ISIS.

Now those things as you just mentioned do not exist in North Africa, those conditions. There aren’t that many Shia beyond the Levant and beyond the Arabian Peninsula and that sort of heart of the Middle East, no matter which direction you go. You can even go into Central Asia and you won’t find the same sectarian polarization, much less Southeast Asia like Indonesia and the Philippines. But I think that having said that, it may not see a major boost; it may take longer for ISIS to develop itself in a place like Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are already a saturated jihadist market if you will. Much less Bangladesh and Indonesia and Malaysia and the Philippines, but there is sufficient chaos in these other countries and internal divides within Sunni Islam and the question of who speaks for the religion.

I was speaking to a journalist who’s been doing a lot of work in Indonesia and she was telling me about how a version of Wahhabi Islam or Salafi Islam is really growing by leaps and bounds in a country like Indonesia, which was insulated from this ideology for the longest time. And I think that political conditions, the growing religiosity in Muslim societies across the world, these provide for that fertile ground or these are the conditions with which ISIS can latch onto and then begin to expand. So the scale may be different, the timeframe may be different, but I think that there are enough conditions on the ground in these various areas where there aren’t any Shiites that will allow and become enablers for ISIS or other groups to expand.

JLS: I want to ask you one more question Kamran before we wrap up and it might be an involved question but I think that it’s an important one and it’s one that I’ve been thinking about a lot. The sort of smaller version of this question is: Is it possible for nationalism and Islam to coexist? Are those two ideas that can actually be held at the same time in a person’s mind and that they make sense or are they mutually exclusive?

And if you zoom out a little bit, I would ask that question of all religions. Do you think it’s possible for all religions and nationalism to really work in the same type of way or is it that nationalism is sort of at its core, I don’t want to say atheistic because it’s not that nationalism is going to say that there is no God, but nationalism is going to say that the nation is the most important thing. The defense of the nation, protection of the national interest is the most important all abiding thing that a state must provide for, whereas religion, if you really get down to it and if you want to be ideologically consistent, religion is not going to tolerate anything being the most important thing besides God.

They might be willing to have the nation as a subset of that or a caliphate or something like that as a subset of that, but the most important thing is going to be God and if there is a disjuncture between what is interpreted as what God wants versus what is best for the nation, you know usually what God wants is going to win out or what God wants is going to be reinterpreted such that it is in the best interest of the nation. So we started with this strange report of ISIS potentially blowing up one of their own mosques and we’ve danced around the subject but I wonder if you could sort of speculate for a second about whether nationalism and religion just can’t actually fit together or if they can?

KB: Well I mean first of all, any religion emanates from a core text or texts that are considered sacred by the believers and those texts are simply texts collecting dust unless the believers operationalize them and it depends on the context, so there is text without context. And those contexts vary over time and we’ve seen historically – take the case of Islam. Islam has manifested itself in very, very diverse ways and this is not in the here and now, it all goes back to the very earliest centuries of Islam and you see rival groups practicing Islam in very different ways. Yes, there is a core belief that there is no God but God and Muhammad is his last messenger and there is something called a prayer and fasting and charity and pilgrimage and the list can continue depending on what your sectarian persuasion is.

But at the end of the day, if we look at the period of the Umayyads, the first dynasty to rule over the Muslim lands and this dynasty took power very early on in 661 and they ruled until the mid-700s and then beyond that in the Iberian Peninsula. That was a dynasty that was built around a clan and it never really – yes it behaved in a religious way, it was motivated by religion but what was dominate was the power of the dynasty, the ruling clan. You had to be from the Umayyad clan. It was father, son and grandson and so on and so forth and it became an imperial dominion and therefore it became a nationalistic entity in some respect. This is obviously pre-nationalism as we understand in a modern world, post enlightenment. But nonetheless, it was not very religious as we understand religion. It wasn’t solely religious.

And you move through history. You have the various polities that existed. They were geographic and we had multiple competing caliphates. Some of them didn’t even call themselves caliphates; they were sultanates. So the Ottomans never really referred to them on a day-to-day basis; the Ottoman emperors referred to them as Sultans. They called themselves the Ottoman Empire; there was an Ottoman identity and Islam was there but it wasn’t really in the forefront. And you had divisions, so there is this sort of understanding that somehow the Middle East and the wider Muslim world has adopted nationalism because of the import-export of European thought and through the vehicle of colonialism and then decolonization. Well that’s true, but it’s not as if the Muslim world was united on the basis of religion. I mean you had multiple competing entities, all throughout history.

So I think that nationalism exists in various forms. In the contemporary world, it exists; it manifests itself as the nation-state. The nation-state is the biggest sort of or the most profound expression of nationalism as we understand it. But nationalism has evolved over time so I don’t think that Islam is somehow separate or cannot exist. I think that Islam is operationalized in different spatial, temporal settings and they can vary so who is to say which one is pure Islam and which one is veering towards more nationalism. I think it’s a hodge-podge and a complex mixture.

JLS: I agree with you, although I think just the last thought that I’ll close on which came to me as you were talking was that, and you sort of talked in the beginning about how the main split between Sunni and Shiite really happens after the prophet passes away and some people want Abu Bakr to take over as caliph but then others want Ali to take over as caliph and one of the main reasons for Ali was that he was in the family of the prophet, right?

So in some ways we might say that for the Shiites the blood has always been a little bit more important than it was in the Sunnis. I know the Umayyads were also – I mean they were a Sunni type of regime if we can even talk about Sunnis existing back then. But they were on that side of the split, right? They believed the chain went through Abu Bakr and that was the legitimate right of succession.  But the Shiites think that there is something about being in the prophet’s family that is very important, and there is this aspect of blood tied into the religion that maybe isn’t there in Sunni Islam.

KB: You are absolutely right. I would just sort of modify that quickly and say that for the Shia, leadership of the faith and the community and the Muslim community, the ummah is divinely ordained, so the imams, they are divinely ordained and they follow from the family of the prophet. Whereas Sunnis believe that this is a political position that comes about through political ways and in many ways it could be, some would argue it could be democratic, some could argue it comes with the power of who has the stronger military force. But ultimately, it’s a political position for the Sunnis and a more religious position for the Shia.

JLS: Yeah so if we were going to grossly over simplify, we might say something along the lines of Sunni Islam is more democratic whereas Shiite Islam tends to more nationalistic principles.

KB: The Iranian government would beg to differ with us [laughs]. They would say that we have achieved a hybrid between religion and politics. We have elected officials, even our clerics have been popularly elected. I mean, they would make that assertion.

JLS: Yes, but not the supreme leader, correct?

KB: Not the supreme leader. Although they would argue that he could be removed by the Assembly of Experts, which is a body of popularly elected leaders or clerics.

JLS: Well when they do that, we can talk about it. But in the meantime, Kamran thanks for joining us. It’s always a pleasure. For listeners out there, thank you for listening. We’re sorry we missed last week but we’re back on and we are going to keep doing these once a week and maybe even increase them more.

As always, if you have comments and critiques: comments@geopoliticalfutures.com or just leave comments here on Sound Cloud or whatever your medium you’re listening to us through and we’ll see you out there. Thanks.

Jacob L. Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari make sense of the numerous geopolitical developments that occurred in the world's most volatile region this week. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am joined this week by Kamran Bokhari, thanks for joining us Kamran.

Kamran Bokhari: Good to be here.

JLS: What we’re going to do this week is we’re going to try and sort out some of the mess that’s been going on in the Middle East. It’s been a very chaotic week in the Middle East and we thought we’d take a step back and try to explain it to listeners in about 30 or 40 minutes. It’s a tall task but we’ll see how we go.

Kamran, I think the first thing that you might be able to help out with our listeners understanding is understanding a little bit more about the history of Qatar – the history of Qatar’s relationships in the region, how it’s always sort of been on the outside looking in – but what exactly Saudi Arabia, and the states that Saudi Arabia’s convinced to go along with this diplomatic isolation of Qatar, are seeing that upsets them so much.

KB: So ever since 1995, when the father of the current emir of Qatar took power, his name was Sheikh Hamad Al Thani, and he actually overthrew his father in ’95 and ousted him and took power. Qatar has been on a strange trajectory. I say strange because it’s not normal for the Arab world or more specifically the Persian Gulf Arab world, the Khaleejis, to behave in this way. I am referring to an openness for lack of a better term. I mean Al Jazeera was started by the current emir’s father and it became sort of the standard bearer of 24/7 news in the Arab world. That made a lot of traditional Arab leaders, both Republican regimes and of course the monarchies, particularly Saudi Arabia, very, very uncomfortable because it was not the way that they had ran their political economies. There’s no concept of having discourse.

But to make matters worse this new regime post-1995 began with a very what I would call pragmatic approach to the region. It could afford to do because it is the world’s largest LNG exporter, that brings in a lot of money. The population, those who are Qatari nationals, is very small – less than 300,000 people. In fact, there are more expats in that country, which is also true for a number of other GCC states.

But in the case of Qatar, what happened is that this allowed for the regime to flirt with all sorts of radical political forces ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to more radical elements along the Islamist spectrum. And even give air time to what we used to call secular left-wing Arab nationalists and it began a policy of opening to Iran, developing a relationship that was out of step with the GCC consensus, if you will. And steering towards an independent foreign policy. And a lot of people say, Qatar has been punching above its weight when it comes to foreign policy. It’s a tiny, little state. But it’s been trying to play major league geopolitics. That’s a fair assessment. But I would say that the Qataris are cut from a different cloth if we are to compare them to the rest of the Arab regimes.

JLS: Yes, although I think one thing that you perhaps left out was that there’s a regional headquarters for U.S. Central Command in Qatar and that Qatar is for all intents and purposes it’s sort of in the U.S. camp in the region, or generally has been. And that the U.S. has been able to use Qatar at times in order to have unofficial dialogue with some of these groups that are considered beyond the pale for normal political discourse, right?

KB: Absolutely, that’s important to note that when Qatar is reaching out to these unsavory characters, from the point of view of the region and the international community, it’s not doing so in defiance of the West, it’s doing so in concert with its great power ally, the United States. And mind you, that base at Al Udeid where the U.S. Central Command has a major hub in the region, in fact, the regional hub is based in Qatar of Central Command, and that happened after 9/11 and the decision of the United States government, the Bush administration, to pull out of Saudi Arabia. There was a huge base in Saudi Arabia, and Qatar offered space so it was just a minor relocation.

At the same time, there are relations between the Qatari government and Israel. There are a lot of rumors about the nature of it. Nobody officially denies or rejects it. But it’s well known that there’s some form of relationship there. So, Qatar has been reaching out to all sorts of entities and Qatar is the one Arab state that also sees eye-to-eye with Turkey in the region. And so it’s had a really diversified foreign policy portfolio.

JLS: I want to bring it back to Turkey in a minute but I’ll just ask one more thing about Qatar which is that you know you’ve pointed out that they’ve always been reaching out to these different groups and they’ve always had a more independent foreign policy. I think that one of the things that we were discussing internally was that it was very hard to read whether Qatar had simply done something that had gone too far beyond the pale for Saudi Arabia or whether this had sort of been planned for a while and that this is really more of a reflection of the Saudis weakening and not being willing to tolerate Qatar breaking ranks.

I noticed recently that Qatar actually asked a lot of people from Hamas, who nominally are based in Qatar, to leave. And it seems like Qatar has actually done some things and has been very open to trying to solve of this diplomatic spat, especially in terms of the United States. So do you think that Qatar actually did something, that it flirted with Iran in a serious way, that both Saudi Arabia and even perhaps the United States didn’t mind Saudi Arabia sort of dinging Qatar on the head and saying, nah, that’s too far? Or do you think that this really has more to do with Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia trying to consolidate control at the diplomatic level in the same way that Saudi Arabia wasn’t going to tolerate internal unrest in a country like Bahrain in 2011?

KB: I think it’s the latter. I don’t see the Qataris doing anything new. The Iranian relationship has been there, there’s more made out of it in terms of the public discourse than there is actually. The whole idea of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, that’s old stuff, that’s been going along for a long time.

I haven’t seen anything fresh that would suggest that the Qataris crossed some sort of red line. I think it’s a lingering dispute and if we go back to 2014, for the better part of that year, the Saudis and the Bahrainis and the UAE, they downgraded diplomatic relations in that year in the spring. And it was not until the fall that they had an agreement of sorts, which was never made public, but according to the reports Qatar had agreed to scale back its involvement with all these groups and not encourage them to where that damaged the interests of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and others.

And so, I think that that’s a long-standing dispute and I think that now Saudi Arabia is getting desperate because things are not going well for Saudi Arabia. And the last thing it wants is one of its own GCC members doing things that undermine its collective efforts. So, number one, and I think this is foremost, is Iran. If you go back to the Trump visit that was like three weeks ago to Riyadh and there was a gala event attended not just by Middle Eastern leaders but also from the wider Muslim majority countries. It was very clear that Saudi Arabia had finally got the United States to where it wants to be. Remember that under the Obama administration, the Saudis had a terrible relationship with Washington. Under Trump, they know think that they now have Washington where they want it to be and they want to move forward in isolating Iran. And Qatari dealings with Iran really poke holes into the Saudi strategy.

So, I think that this is a case of the Saudis not being able to take it anymore and saying you know enough is enough. If the Qataris are not behaving, we have to up the pressure to twist their arm.

JLS: Yeah and I think this is a move that could really backfire on Saudi Arabia. You already see it backfiring a little bit in the sense that they were able to assemble an impressive coalition of countries in this diplomatic offensive against Qatar, but they have not really been able to extend the diplomatic offensive outside of its immediate vicinity and outside of those countries that are immediately dependent on it. And even some of the other GCC states have not gone along to the same extent that Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis and the others have gone to.

But you bring up good points with Iran and Turkey and this is another reason why I think this might backfire on the Saudis, which is because if Qatar is looking at this and if Qatar is trying to establish some kind of independence of action, Saudi Arabia is really on a downward slope. Especially when you consider that oil prices right now are continuing to go down and that Saudi has basically proven ineffective in getting the price of oil to come back up and that really is the source of Saudi power.

Qatar, as you said, has a close relationship with Turkey. Qatar as you also said also has a closer relationship with Iran than perhaps any of the other Arab countries in the region. You brought up the specific point of the fact that Qatar and Turkey have seen eye to eye for a while right now. I know that there’s a lot of stuff there in terms of the political ideology that both Qatar and Turkey favor that you can shed some light on. So how about you go a little bit more in depth into how Turkey and Qatar see the region in the same way, and what is the way in which they’ve been trying to reshape the region, not just recently but for many years now?

KB: From the point of view of the Qataris, they’re not so much in ideological sync with the Islamists, they take a more pragmatic view. Unlike Egypt, unlike Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab states, the Qataris say, look, you know we can’t dial the clock back. And what do I mean by that is that the Saudis are using tools that used to be effective back in the day, pre-Arab Spring, where there was no opposition of any sorts to the regimes in the region.

And Qatar looks at that and says that thing, that tool kit, that approach is useless because it only makes matters worse. Qatar says, look, these forces, the Hamases of this world, the Muslim Brotherhoods of this world, they are a reality and we can’t wish them away and we can’t suppress them because it only makes matters worse and we need to somehow reach out to them in order for, and this is based on my conversations with Qatari officials over the years, their view is that these are realities and if we don’t control them, if we just leave them to their own devices, then they will do things that will undermine the interests of the region and the security of the regimes. So it’s sort of flipping the Saudi argument on its head. The Saudis say well you need to keep them under lock and key and that’s the way to go.

As far as Turkey is concerned, Turkey is more ideologically in tune with the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas because the ruling AKP party comes from an Islamist heritage although it’s not an Islamist party, its roots lie in Islamism. So there’s a meeting of minds. And Qatar realizes that it’s a small country and the rest of the Arab states are not really getting it. And they realize that if there’s going to be a counterweight to Iran, it’s going to be Turkey. And the Qataris have accepted the fact that the Arabs do not have any intrinsic power of their own in the region and therefore they must piggyback on Turkey and hence that relationship. So it’s a convergence of interests and ideas.

JLS: Yeah, although I want to push back a little bit because I think you’re right that Qatar reaches out to a lot of different groups that other countries in the region and most countries in the world wouldn’t do business with, right? But I don’t think when it comes to more Muslim Brotherhood-oriented groups that Qatar sees them sort of as redheaded stepchildren that it’s going to let into Qatar. I think there, Qatar has actually more of an affinity to some of those groups and has used some of those groups in order to push Qatar’s influence throughout the region, which is why I suggested that perhaps Turkey and Qatar see more eye to eye ideologically. Do you think I am taking that too far or would you agree with that assessment?

KB: I think that your argument has some merit to it, and actually a lot of merit to it, but when I was saying ideologically I was meaning the ideology of the ruling family or the regime in Qatar. They’re not Islamists. They don’t share those ideologies. If you go to Qatar you know it’s fairly Westernized and it’s fairly open and so it’s not necessarily Islamist but they see these actors as, what you just said, tools to pursue their foreign policy agenda, to be able to have influence.

And in my conversations, I did feel that the Qataris really believe that there is no way around these actors. Qatar has sort of, in a self-styled manner, appropriated this task of bringing reconcilable – what they call reconcilable – Islamists to the mainstream. And so that’s also a foreign policy offering that Doha sort of says that this what we can do for the world. And they find reception in circles in Washington. Back in 2013, the United States Department of Defense dealt with certain Islamist factions within the Syrian rebel landscape in order to find common ground because of the fear that we’re not going to get secular Syrian nationalists under the banner of the Free Syrian Army. And that was mediated by Qatar. And if you look at the Taliban relationship, clearly that was very openly Qatar helping the United States deal with the Taliban. It didn’t go too far because of other complications, but nonetheless, it’s a great example of how Qatar is trying to say: this is our value proposition that we bring to this region and to great powers who are stakeholders in this region.

JLS: Yes, although the flip side of that is it means Qatar is playing with fire. I mean I really, I was really struck by what you said that the ruling family is not Islamist. But that Qatar thinks of using the Islamist groups as tools in order to develop Qatar’s power or to protect Qatar’s position. I cannot think of a more secular entity that used Islamists that didn’t have the Islamists come back to bite them in the end.

We have seen over and over and over, whether it was the United States, whether it was Saudi Arabia, whether it was Turkey, it doesn’t really matter if the country itself was Muslim or if it’s Western or not. It’s very, very difficult to control Islamist groups once they get going. So the idea that Qatar is going to be able to use these Islamist groups when they want to use them and is not going to face backlash from them, especially because Qatar is playing such a dual game and is really dealing with all sides. It seems to me that that’s, I don’t want to say shortsighted and I don’t even say it’s not going to work. I just can’t think of another example of that actually working in the long term for a country’s foreign policy. Can you come up with any examples?

KB: I can’t, and you are absolutely right. I mean this is almost like they are holding up and trying to balance two parallel universes. And it’s difficult. But I think that, if we look at it geopolitically, from their point of view, they have no other choice. They have to do this and I think what gives them a bit of hope is that they’re a small country. They have enough money to where people don’t indulge in politics so this is not going to undermine them domestically anytime soon.

But yes, for the region, this could all blow up in their face. And I actually believe that it will. Because there’s just no way, given the scale of chaos in the region, that somehow the Qataris will be able to fine tune these Islamist proxies to where they will live in a Muslim democracy of sorts. I just don’t see that happening. So you are absolutely right. I don’t disagree with that. I was just trying to explain the perspective of the Qataris.

JLS: Yeah, but that also explains the perspective of not just the Saudis but even the Emiratis and Bahrain and some of these other groups, for whom, they see Qatar messing around with the Islamists and are sort of asking themselves what on Earth are you doing? We’ve already seen what happens when we mess with these things and now is a time to close ranks and tighten up against this, not to invite them into our own space.

But that’s a good segue way into a second…

KB: I just want to point out one thing and for our listeners, the UAE making this case is more genuine. But the Saudis accusing the Qataris of doing this is like the kettle calling the pot black or vice versa. The Saudis are still playing with this fire, so they don’t have the argument. So yes, they are not with Hamas, they’re not with the Muslim Brotherhood, but they are the biggest exporter of Salafism and jihadism on the planet.

JLS: Yes, and it’s a good segue way into you know sort of the other major developments that have been changing things in the Middle East this week, which is ISIS, which Saudi Arabia you know you can’t directly prove that they had a role in helping ISIS develop, but certainly Saudi Arabia and some of the groups that it was funding and some of the things that it was doing when it was involved in Syria supporting different proxies, had a role in the Islamic State coming to the prominence that it has. But you know we saw two major things from the Islamic State this week.

We saw, first of all, that the Islamic State is finally coming under some serious existential pressure in its self-declared caliphate. Raqqa has really been the capital and center and focal point of ISIS operations, but you’ve got the Syrian Democratic Forces, who are made up mostly of Syrian Kurds under the YPG group (there are so many acronyms here that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of) but we’ll say the SDF, those are the Syrian Kurds and they are U.S. backed, and then we’ve also seen, surprisingly, the Syrian army has been moving on multiple fronts to get closer to Raqqa. The result of all this is that the Islamic State’s position in Raqqa is pretty weak and we’ve seen them pulling back and we’ve seen some relative successes for the U.S.-backed forces as they get closer to the city.

That was one major development we saw this week. And then the other major development was really the unprecedented IS attack they claimed in Iran. So, I want to tackle both of those things. Maybe let’s start with the second one first because I know you were looking at this very closely. Talk about why this is such a big deal and why this isn’t just another ISIS terrorist attack in the region. What are the greater implications of ISIS hitting Iran the way that they did?

KB: I would begin by saying that this is not something that ISIS just sort of said – oh, well I want to attack Iran tomorrow and let’s do it. This is something that speaks to the sophistication, especially as an intelligence entity, of ISIS. The Islamic State has been cultivating these assets for a while, and not just in Iran. We see this happening in as far-flung areas as the Philippines as well. So this is something that’s been in the works for a while.

They’ve devoted a certain amount of resources to this project. I suspect that over the years that they’ve been based in Iraq and they’ve had proximity to Iran that they were cultivating this. And they saw an opening in Kurdistan, and I am talking about the Iranian province of Kurdistan, and there’s more than one province where Iranian Kurds live and they’re mostly Sunni and over the years what I’ve learned is that is Salafism and even jihadist ideology has made its way into the Iranian Kurdish community. And the Kurds are, there’s an alienation that they feel, as an ethnic community as well, from Tehran and there is this sort of deep resentment that ISIS really exploited and was able to set up at least this cell. I suspect that this isn’t just one cell. There are probably others that ISIS has in its tool kit and will activate at some point in the future, so this is not the last attack in Iran.

But what is significant is that Iran is not an Arab state. One of the biggest sectors of the Iranian state is the security sector. There are multiple organizations that deal with security. You know in my visit to Iran, I noticed these guys working firsthand, and they’re obsessed with security. They’re obsessed with security because they fear Israeli penetration, U.S. penetration, Saudi penetration and so this is not an open, if you will, arena where ISIS could just jump in and say, you know, we’re gonna send in suicide bombers. It had to do a lot of work to be able to penetrate that and that speaks to ISIS’ capabilities and sophistication.

As for the implications, I mean look, ISIS has gamed all of these things out. We tend to look in the open sources, when you read stuff there is this assumption that somehow these are all sort of disconnected attacks that are not linked to some strategic objective. And at Geopolitical Futures, that’s what we talk about is, we can’t look at events as sort of randomly taking place or taking place as some entity hates another entity.

There is a strategic objective. The strategic objective of ISIS is to, a) survive, especially now that it’s under pressure, that you just mentioned. You know it’s in the process of losing Raqqa. It’ll take a long time, but that process has begun. At the same time, so there’s that threat but there’s also an opportunity. The opportunity is that the sectarian temperature in the region is at an all-time high and this would explain the timing of this attack.

ISIS would like nothing more than for Iran and Saudi Arabia to go at each other because, a) it gives them some form of respite. You know, they’re not the focus, and it undermines the struggle against ISIS. And b) it creates more opportunity for ISIS to exploit. The more there’s sectarianism, the more the Saudis go and fight with Iran and vice versa, the more space there is for ISIS to grow. So I think that this attack in Iran has very deep implications moving forward.

JLS: Those are all good points and I want to draw special attention to one of the points you made and then ask you to play what you’re saying forward a little bit. First thing, I just want to point out is that you were talking about the Iranian Kurds and how they had somehow been radicalized and there was a sense of disenchantment, or disenchantment is probably not even strong enough, but an antagonism with the current regime in Tehran.

And I just want to point out that it’s very difficult to speak of the Kurds as a monolith. I think often times people say the word the Kurds and they think of you know just all the Kurds in the Middle East and they’re all the same. But we really have to think of in terms of – there are Kurds in Iran, there are Kurds in Iraq, there are Kurds in Syria, there are Kurds in Turkey. They have different religious affiliations, different ideological affiliations, sometimes are speaking different languages that are almost unintelligible to each other. So I try very hard in my writing and when I am speaking about these types of things to be very specific about when I am talking about the Kurds and I thought one of the things you did there was you brought up was just how complicated that situation is and that, of course, has relevance throughout the region.

We saw that the Iraqi Kurds and the Kurdistan Regional Government are talking about an independence referendum and maybe we can get to that in a little bit. But you gave a really good explanation of why this is extremely important from Iran’s perspective. But what do you think Iran is going to do? What response does this mean Iran is going to have to make? What is the next step for Iran both in terms of, you know, Qatar, which it had some sort of relationship with and it can certainly see this diplomatic offensive led by Saudi Arabia as a diplomatic move against Iran, and then second of all this move by ISIS. What are the practical concrete things that Iran is going to have to do to respond here in the next couple weeks?

KB: With regards to Qatar, what we have is a situation where its own GCC allies, its fellow Arab states, have shunned Doha. And so Doha right now needs a lot of friends. The United States has not de-aligned from Qatar and joined the Saudi bandwagon, so that’s good. It’s forging some sort of a relationship today, the Qatari foreign minister is in Moscow, so there’s a Russian angle to that as well. We’ve already talked about Turkey.

At this stage, it wouldn’t hurt, necessarily, for Qatar to reach out or benefit from Iranian assistance, but it has to be very careful. It doesn’t want to do something with Iran or get too close, especially now, and give a bigger stick to the Saudis with which Riyadh can beat Doha. And so, I think from a Qatari point of view, it’s essential that they strike a balance when it comes to Iran.

Conversely the Iranians, this is a great opening. And they would like to exploit this to the extent that it is possible. But I think that the Iranians are no illusion as to their limitations. They know that – they’ll milk this for whatever it’s worth. But they’re not under the illusion that somehow Qatar will join them and be part of their camp. That’s actually taking it too far. I don’t think that they can rely on Qatar. But from the Iranian point of view, so long as Qatar is at odds and defying Saudi Arabia, that’s good enough. They don’t need more from Qatar and they will milk that to the extent that it is possible.

As far as ISIS is concerned, I think that there are two things here. One is that both of them will benefit ISIS, both moves that the Iranians make will benefit ISIS. First is that there is an imperative for the government, for the security establishment, to make sure that this doesn’t happen again or at least begin to neutralize, before it grows. There’s a sizeable Sunni population in Iran. It’s not just the Kurds, there’s a sizeable Turkmen population in the northeast near Turkmenistan and there are some of the Arabs, not a majority, but a minority of the Arabs in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, the Ahwazi Arabs as they are called. They are, a minority of them and a significant one, are Sunnis as well.

And then you have the big province in the southeast, that’s Sistan and Baluchistan, and that province is majority Sunni and ethnically Baluch and already has a jihadist problem and there’s cross-border terrorism that takes place where Baluch jihadist rebels go to Pakistan and then you know from there they have a sanctuary that they come in and they strike at the Iranian security forces. They’ve been pretty successful over the years in killing some very high-ranking IRGC commanders.

So from Iran’s point of view, this is a lot of vulnerability. So the Sunnis are suspect right now after what happened. I mean it’s not easy and I’ve been to the Khomeini shrine and I can tell you that it’s not something, it’s not just a cake walk that you can get in there and do all this kind of stuff, let alone parliament. And so from the Iranian point of view, they feel very terrified right now because they used to think they’re safe. And this is sort of really a wake-up call for them. So they’re gonna go after the Sunnis. The more they go after the Sunnis, the more they are gonna create resentment, not just within their borders, but sectarian tensions are going to rise. And ISIS is going to say, see we told you, and they will have more recruits to go fight the “evil” Iranians and the “evil” Shiites.

But at the same time, the Iranians do not think that this is ISIS alone. They deeply believe, at least their security establishment, and I saw a report yesterday where the Iranian intelligence minister was urging caution, saying, let’s not jump to conclusions and let’s not accuse the Saudis just yet. Let the investigation finish.

But the security establishment and the hawks are convinced that there is, even though ISIS is involved, that there is a Saudi footprint in this attack and they’ll give you evidence and they’ll point to Saudi intent to undermine their country. And so they’re gonna go after Saudi Arabia. They’re gonna retaliate. It’s horrible to predict another bombing, but if a bomb went off inside Saudi Arabia, I would not be surprised that it, you know, Iran somehow retaliated in that shape or form. I am not sure if it will. But I’m just saying that if it does that, then I wouldn’t be surprised, because the Iranians, they’re not going to just accept this. They have to retaliate and respond. The more they retaliate, they set into motion, they trigger a broader conflict. I am not saying the two sides are going to go to war, but it’s going to an ugly proxy battle at least in the immediate future.

JLS: In many ways, that proxy battle has already been going on. I think what you are talking about is going to be a real worsening of the situation and unfortunately, that’s the way things are going in the Middle East right now. The last thing I want to touch on before we break is the Islamic State, because we’ve sort of been talking about them in a roundabout way when we talk about all these other issues, but for a long time, the Islamic State, and when I say long time I mean maybe the past two or three years, the Islamic State really has been the center of gravity I think in the Middle East. And I think one of the reasons we’re seeing all of these things happening on the periphery is that the force of IS as the center of gravity is actually weakening because IS itself is actually weakening.

Now I know that that doesn’t mean that ISIS is going to disappear, but I think it does mean that the Islamic State as a strong territorial entity that can threaten some of the different states in the region from a conventional point of view, is actually weakening. So can you talk a little bit about what it means for the Islamic State to have come under such pressure at its capital in Raqqa and what Islamic State’s activities are going to look like going forward? We know they’re going to pull back a little bit and try and get strength in numbers and some strategic depth but ultimately they are outnumbered and they’re outgunned. So they’re probably going to have to go back to some tactics of blending back into the population and waiting really for a lot these sectarian dynamics that we’re talking about right now to overwhelm the region once more so that they can take advantage of the power vacuum.

KB: So I would compare what is happening to ISIS to what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. They lost the cities, and for a while, they were an incoherent entity, but they weren’t decimated or eliminated, they just were lying low. And they were slowly rebuilding themselves. And now they are at a point where – and I would say it’s not just now, it’s been the case all along, at least since 2003 – that they exist in ungoverned spaces outside the cities. See we have this perception that if you don’t hold a city then you’re not a serious player. That may be true at one level, but at another level, it just means that you are operating in an area where the good guys can’t project power, at least not effectively, and you exist.

So I think – I don’t see necessarily just ISIS devolving into an insurgent movement or a terrorist organization – I think that the so-called caliphate is going to shift into a rural area. And this is not something that is a setback from an ISIS point of view, because I don’t think that ISIS ever believed – I mean it’s a serious player and they’ve been here before, it was not as big as what they have, I mean I’m talking about their holdings, but in Iraq, they have been driven out of cities before. They’ve been in the desert, in the rural areas, only to come back because the underlying political, economic, social circumstances really don’t get addressed and its enemies start fighting with each other, providing the room for ISIS to once again revive itself.

I think that it remains to be seen how quickly ISIS can be pushed out of Raqqa, pushed out of Deir al-Zour, into the desert. And even when it does go there, it’s going to still have a space and the time to continue its activities, perhaps not as effectively as it has since Mosul. I think that ISIS knew this would come, ISIS did not believe that – you know, now they have Mosul, now they have Raqqa, now they have Deir al-Zour – that they’re not going to see reversals. I think theirs is a very long game and they will go back and forth. And so I think that we need to be cautious when we talk about progress against ISIS.

JLS: Is there anything that can be done to solve the underlying political and social circumstances that create ISIS and give ISIS fuel to continue running?

KB: That would require the Iranians and the Saudis sitting at a table sharing drinks and having food, and you know that’s not happening. So, if that’s not happening, and I don’t think that there’s any power on Earth that can fix those underlying sectarian tensions. I mean if you just look at the Sunnis in Iraq. I mean, there’s this big euphoria about how Mosul is no longer in ISIS hands. And I’m saying, well that is true and it is a victory and an important one. But I’m looking at a year, two years, three years down the line.

The Sunnis are completely a shattered community in Iraq. They fight with each other. ISIS existed because there’s no Sunni core, no Sunni mainstream in Iraq. Ωnd they’re losing territory, especially now if the Kurds are moving towards independence, they’ll lose territory to the Kurds. They have already lost ground to the Shiites.

This is probably the first time, the price of removing ISIS from Mosul is Shiite control over Iraq’s second largest city, which was majority Sunni and a majority of Sunnis and Kurds. Now you have a Shiite-dominated military force along with militias that are going to make sure that ISIS doesn’t come back, and they’re going to engage in some very brutal activities. And that’s going to pour you know gasoline on the fire of sectarianism that’s already burning. And that’s, from an ISIS point of view, another opportunity to exploit and they’re looking forward to it. And that’s sort of the irony in all of this.

JLS: Well it’s not a hopeful note to end the week on but unfortunately, it’s the reality. Thank you for joining us Kamran, and thank you, everyone, for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, I encourage you to visit us at geopoliticalfutures.com. I also encourage you to email us with comments, critiques, suggestions for topics and anything else you want. You can just email us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis, and we’ll see you out here next week.

Xander Snyder and Jacob Shapiro get down to specifics in what a potential war would look like, and ask each other why the US always seems to fight its wars in the same place. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone, welcome again to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m the director of analysis. Xander Snyder, one of our analysts, is joining me again today to talk this week. Xander, how’s it going?

Xander Snyder: It’s going well Jacob, how are you?

JLS: I’m doing alright. We’ve been very busy at Geopolitical Futures. There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world and the first thing we wanted to do was follow up – George joined us on the podcast last week to talk a little bit about certain indications that we’re seeing in terms of a potential U.S. strike on North Korea in the coming weeks.

The USS Nimitz, which was in port in Washington state, actually left yesterday and is headed for the Western Pacific. There were some reports that the USS Vincent, which is actually currently off the coast of the Korean Peninsula, might be leaving the area, but as of now it doesn’t seem like it has left. The USS Vincent and the USS Reagan actually had some joint drills yesterday where they actually lined up next to each other and were doing things. So tensions still remain pretty high on the Korean Peninsula.

So we thought we would talk about a study really that Xander led with us here at Geopolitical Futures which looked at what a potential military conflict looks like between North Korea and the United States. Xander, I know a lot people are thinking about missiles and nuclear weapons, but one of the points that your piece made that I found particularly informative was that there’s actually a lot of other variables here that if there is a conflict will become much more important.

And I think artillery was one of the ones that you focused on most closely. How about you lay out for listeners here why it’s so important to think about artillery when we’re talking about a potential military conflict between North Korea and the United States.

XS: Sure. Well, like you mentioned, a lot of the headlines in the news really focus on ballistic missile development, nuclear warheads, nuclear tests and missile tests, right? That’s what has been going on lately that’s been receiving the most attention.

However, North Korea has a really conventional military, and a lot of this is rounded out by something like 21,000 artillery guns that it has, a combination of tube shell artillery guns which is generally what you think of when you think of artillery guns like big World War II cannons, you know stuff that’s actually firing shell. And then they also have another type of artillery device called multiple rocket launchers or MRLs, which is exactly what it sounds like so instead of firing a shell, it fires rockets of different sorts.

And this is important because basically since the end of the Korean War, North Korea has been amassing this conventional arsenal and Seoul, one of South Korea’s major cities, sits within range of a lot of these weapons that are stationed on the Demilitarized Zone. So the reason this piece focused not entirely on artillery but largely is because North Korea is able to maintain a fairly substantial threat against a major U.S. ally, against South Korea, using normal weapons, not nuclear weapons, not ballistic missiles.

JLS: Yeah it’s an important point, and it also dictates what a potential U.S. strike is going to look like against North Korea, right? Because it can’t just be that the U.S. is going to go in and pinprick certain nuclear sites with whatever big bombs that it has in its arsenal. One of the points you made is that the U.S. is going to have to also devise a strategy for knocking out a lot of this artillery to try and protect Seoul from the inevitable backlash that would come from the North Koreans.

XS: Exactly. In the event of a U.S. strike against North Korea’s nuclear facilities, essentially two battles begin. The first is the attempt by the United States to eliminate the North’s nuclear capabilities while at the same time minimizing the amount of damage that can be done to Seoul and other populous centers in the north of South Korea, mainly with the North’s conventional artillery force. So both of these battles will be waged at the same time.

Now the U.S. would engage in a first strike because of the nuclear program, because if North Korea were to develop a ruggedized nuclear warhead that could be affixed to a ballistic missile that would be a threat that would be intolerable because even right now some of the North’s ballistic missiles could reach U.S. allies, and in time, the threat is they could develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, an ICBM, that could reach the U.S.

So, this would be the reason the U.S. would strike, however at the same time, the U.S. would have to find a way to either on its own or cooperating with South Korea essentially neutralize the threat of that artillery as quickly as possible. And the reason that the piece focused so much on artillery was because the North would not need to launch any sort of major ground infantry invasion at the outset of hostilities in order to pose a major threat. The artillery can actually reach quite a long way as it is.

JLS: Yeah and I think this actually brings up one of the things – some listeners who are familiar with war and who study war will be more familiar with this but other listeners who are not – the issue of artillery really brings up one of the most important parts of talking about military activities that is often overlooked, which is simple things like logistics. So you spend a lot of time in the piece discussing not just what kind of artillery they have and what the potential moves of the actors are going to be but also where the stockpiles of ammunition are and what that means about North Korea’s ability to communicate across its firing lines and to actually make its attacks effective and to protect itself against the types of strikes that the U.S. is going to use to try and take out those artilleries. So can you talk a little bit about also specifically the issue of ammunition and how some of the resources that you found indicated some of what’s going to happen if the strike does indeed happen?

XS: In the piece, what we tried to show is one potential way or several considerations that can be made that can constrain the conflict to look or to behave in a certain way if it were to actually break out. But as we mentioned in the piece and as anyone familiar with war knows, once it actually begins its very difficult to actually know what can come up so we do our best to understand the constraints in the situation based on the arsenal that North Korea has available to itself, that North Korea has available to it, while understanding that making an exact prediction of these things is actually very difficult when the violence begins.

That said, there are certain things that you can attempt to game out. And one of these is recognition that the other side is aware that you are aware of its own weaknesses, right? So one of the things, I know it’s kind of like a lot of back and forth and you know what I know that you know what I know, right? It’s one of those things. And one of the things that we looked into was the command structure of the North Korean military. And I came across some papers published by the U.S. Army War College talking about how it is essentially a very centralized, probably understandably so, a very centralized military structure – something that borrowed a lot from Soviet military structures during the Cold War. And one of the ways that the Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un maintains control over the military is with a parallel reporting structure so there are military officers but there are also political officers, and he uses this dual reporting structure to assure that no military officer at any given time can acquire too much power to rebel against him or pose any sort of serious threat.

So the conclusion that some of these papers have drawn is that, well because it is such a centralized command and control structure that will actually provide for a lack of flexibility in the event of conflict. If the North Korean military actually has to wage a war, if the supreme leader must direct everything himself, well that’s a very inflexible structure.

So we recognize that conclusion. But we also try to expand on it a little bit because North Korea, they’re not dumb right? And I think this is another narrative that gets tossed around out there, it gets picked up on because it is difficult to rationalize a lot of their moves. But a country that’s capable of a nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles, they’re not stupid, right? They know that the United States has planned for the outbreak of war, and if they have, we’ve considered their command and control structure. So they’re thinking, “Ok well, the U.S. is going to think that we have a fairly flexible command and control structure, so we need to account for that to a degree because if our communications get cut off and we can’t actually direct artillery fire in the outbreak of hostilities, we face a serious problem. We can’t control the war, and that will decrease our ability to, you know, actually achieve some sort of strategic objective that we would want in this conflict.”

So it makes sense then to think that there’s actually some system even if it’s not publicly available that would allow for devolution or decentralization of command to a degree that would allow unit-level artillery commanders to continue fighting if they lose communication with the centralized command. So that’s one indicator that you can look for to get a sense of whether or not this is true. And it’s certainly not slam dunk evidence, it’s more like a mosaic you are putting together a lot of different pieces to try to corroborate this idea.

So one thing we looked at in the study was the prevalence and location of decentralized ammunition stores. And the reason this matters is because supply and logistics is everything in war. If artillery commanders can get ahold of things to shoot, well a gun is not very effective without a bullet, without a shell right?

Now it turns out that for decades the North Koreans have been developing hardened artillery sites or HARTs is the cute acronym for it, H-A-R-T. And these are stationed all along the Demilitarized Zone from coast to coast in North Korea, and it’s impossible to know the locations of all of these but some of them have been postulated and we put together sort of a representative of like a best guess that we came across for where some of these HART locations can be.

And that’s an indication that the North Koreans have prepared for a scenario in which if communications get cut with centralized command, there is no need to depend on like the centralized supply depot, so they can continue to fight, these artillery heads can continue to fire and pose a real threat to Seoul on a localized basis. They will still have access to ammo even if they are kind of shut off and by themselves.

JLS: One thing that you said in particular that struck me which is that the media picks up on this narrative that North Korea is stupid or that they’re crazy, and I think it’s a point to be emphasized because the worst mistake that either side can make in a military conflict is to underestimate one’s enemy. I think one of the reasons that the Korean War back in the ’50s dragged on as long as it did was because the United States actually miscalculated and underestimated a lot of the factors at the beginning of that war, and it probably prolonged a conflict that didn’t have to be as long as it was.

I think the other thing to point out, which is the flip side of some of what you are saying, is that North Korea suffered a great deal in the Korean War with the United States in the 1950s, and it is terrified of the United States. There is a very real fear on the part of North Korea about what the United States is capable of and what U.S. unpredictability is. That might be strange to hear for a U.S. audience or for an audience that is more Western-oriented, but I think that’s also true, and I think it animates a lot of North Korean’s actions.

But I want to take a step back for a moment and ask you, so Secretary of Defense Mattis gave his first public interview I guess last Sunday now on Face the Nation on CBS, and he got a question about North Korea, and he said two things about North Korea. He said, number one, that North Korea was already a national security threat to the United States, and the other thing he said and this got picked up quite a bit was that the fighting that would happen in North Korea if there was a military conflict there would probably be the worst that many Americans would have seen in most of their lifetimes.

So I wonder if you know having really dived deep into the details and thought about all this, how you rate Mattis’ statement? Do you think that this really would be some of the most destructive and catastrophic fighting the United States has done in the last 50, 60, 70 years, or do you think that’s a little bit of hyperbole?

XS: Yes, I think definitely it would represent a very violent conflict. There would be a lot of destruction, a lot of death, and that is in large part because of the capability of the North Korean military to wreak such damage based on the weapons they currently have. I mean, while it is true that a lot of their conventional weapons are outdated, a lot were acquired from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, some are natively built, and there are a few newer weapons systems that we talk about in the piece that have been developed more recently, but ultimately the vast majority of their guns are relatively old, but old guns still shoot. They might have, you know, a slightly higher rate of failure, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t do a lot of damage.

Now, there are some reports saying if the North Koreans start firing on Seoul, they will completely flatten or level the town. And I read some reports that challenge that to a certain degree, but even some of the more conservative papers that said, “Well, maybe they wouldn’t flatten Seoul,” had really very high casualty estimates in the first couple of hours in the outbreak of a conflict.

One of the estimates was that if North Korea targeted population centers in Seoul with its artillery instead of, say, other military targets at the outbreak of a conflict, something like 30,000-60,000 people could die in a first three hours of a conflict. So, you know, we’re talking really high amounts of casualties. I mean something like 58,000 soldiers died in the entire Vietnam War, so that’s very violent.

So I think the question you want to ask yourself after hearing those numbers is, well, would North Korea actually use its artillery if it would be wreaking such destruction and the potential for a retaliation that it would cause? And I think that the answer has to do with the credibility of deterrent, right? Everyone talks about nuclear deterrent, and it’s an important subject to talk about, but right now North Korea also has a conventional deterrent and has had one before it began developing its ballistic missile technology and nuclear technology, which is its conventional artillery deterrent. Now, if it is struck and does not implement an artillery barrage against the South, then it’s effectively saying to the world that this deterrent, this conventional deterrent, this threat is not really there. So I think it’s quite likely that if attacked, North Korea would feel compelled to retaliate against the South and that it could be quite destructive.

JLS: Yeah your point is well taken though, which is that a deterrent is at its most powerful when it’s actually deterring. Once a deterrent has had to be triggered, it automatically takes the power out of the hands of the country or the state entity that is doing the deterring and forces it make an offensive move that it doesn’t want to make. The whole point of deterrence is to try and prevent it from making that move.

I think another thing maybe to also point out is that some of the stuff that you’ve pointed out here is one of the reasons that at GPF we really don’t pay a lot of attention to the political drama and back and forth about THAAD, which is that U.S. anti-missile system that finally is going to get stationed in South Korea. But there’s a lot of domestic opposition to it being stationed in South Korea. China really hates that these U.S. anti-missile systems are going to be in South Korea. But the point is that doesn’t actually help the South Koreans solve the problem that arises if there is a significant military conflict because as you say the issue here really is artillery, and if you have 21,000 pieces of artillery or whatever you said it was, the THAAD missile defense system is not going to be able to block those things, right? There’s really nothing that South Korea can do if it gets that far.

XS: No, I mean at that point all they can really do is hope that the U.S. can – well it would be the U.S. and South Korea. I mean, I don’t want to make this sound like the U.S. would be doing all the fighting, right? If the North opens on the South, the south also has artillery pieces and as soon as a large gun fire it exposes its position, right? I mean right now, they’re hidden to a certain extent. Some of these HARTs that I talked about are deep underground caves or tunnels, fortified positions where pieces of artillery, sometimes even planes, are hidden to protect against the barrage. But as soon as their position is exposed, the South has artillery too and can respond in kind.

But it will take a lot more time to eliminate all of the artillery pieces with a counter barrage than it would with say a strategic bombing campaign. And there, the U.S. would probably be taking charge with a lot of its strategic bombers located at Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

JLS: No but that’s a good point, and it’s good that you brought up Andersen Air Force Base in Guam because I think that this is another part that is not well recognized, because the United States wants its aircraft carriers there because that sort of became a U.S. military doctrine when it comes to fighting war but actually a lot of the heavy lifting that’s going to happen on the U.S. side is going to happen out of Guam. That’s one of the places that we’re watching most closely, right?

XS: Yeah absolutely, it would come from either B-52s or B-2s or B-1s, all of which are heavy strategic bombers, one of which is stealth, B-2 is stealth. Some folks believe that the B-2 bomber would be able to take out a lot of these artillery positions while at the same time avoiding North Korea’s anti-air defenses. And in theory that’s true, it’s difficult to really play out again just because war is unpredictable.

JLS: Yeah. And just taking a step back for a second from the very tactical perspective that you’ve offered here about North Korea, it’s also very telling to think if we just look at everything that we’ve actually written this week at GPF and to see how it all fits into a larger picture.

Obviously, we had, you know, your deep study of this issue in North Korea. We had one or two other pieces that dealt with North Korea. We had a couple other pieces that dealt with the problem of ISIS. And some of the comments that Secretary Mattis made about how the U.S. is accelerating its strategy against ISIS.

Then we also wrote about NATO this week in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump going to Brussels and meeting with NATO leaders. And these are all actually very connected to each other. You know, the major military conflicts that the U.S. seems to be involved in right now are this fight against the Islamic state in Syria and Iraq and dealing with the potential threat of a nuclear North Korea.

I don’t mean to minimize those conflicts. But they are not sort of on the level of challenging the United States from an existential perspective, right? Like it is a national security interest that North Korea not develop a nuclear weapon, but the future existence of the United States is not in play there. The same is true of ISIS. The United States doesn’t want a radical Sunni Arab entity to rise in the Middle East and throw off the balance of power there, but at the same time, what happens in the Middle East or what happens with these horrible terrorist attacks doesn’t actually challenge the U.S. from an existential point of view.

And then you have the U.S. also going to NATO, and a lot of people have, you know, been talking about Trump’s manners at NATO and I don’t really feel like getting into that. I’ll just point out that Secretary Mattis has been for NATO from the beginning, and Donald Trump picked him as secretary anyway. And Mattis himself has been a NATO officer so you can see the U.S. trying to find the right balance of what conflicts is it going to engage in, what is it not going to engage in, what alliances is it going to use, what alliances is it not going to use.

And I think that one of the things that is striking to me in particular about North Korea is that, you know, unlike with ISIS where at least it has built some kind of nominal, even superficial coalition to deal with ISIS, the U.S. really is the one pushing this issue with North Korea and is going to be providing a lot of the impetus for it. They’ve been pushing China to do something on this issue, but China so far hasn’t really been able to get North Korea to calm down and seems to be just repeating itself over and over again.

The South Koreans have elected a government that is a little more peace oriented when it comes to North Korea. Obviously, if there is a fight, they are going to have to be involved. And Japan, which we sort of see as really the main player in East Asia, hasn’t really had much to say. So in some sense I think from the United States’ perspective, it’s got to be a little bit…, on the one hand it shows how powerful the U.S. is, but on the other hand it shows how limited that power is because the U.S. can’t really depend on anyone when it’s dealing with the situation in North Korea.

XS: I think you make a great point, and it is challenging when investigating one part of the world or any one aspect of the world to get caught up in the details, which to some degree matter, right? Because details reveal truth about a matter, which are difficult to see from a high level. We talk about geopolitics and ultimately that is events in the world and how they impact one another. It’s impossible to look at one part of the world without recognizing how events in other parts of the world are related to it, especially when talking about the United States, which as the sole global superpower right now has interest everywhere. So, therefore, what goes on in one part of the world, in the Middle East, impacts the amount and types of resources that it can devote towards approaching other challenges in other parts of the world.

So the amount of military resources that it commits to the Middle East impacts the amount of military resources that it can commit to conflict in the Western Pacific. So, you know, I’ve had people approach me with everything that’s going on now with the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, and they’ve said, “So do you still think that the U.S. is going to be the major power in the rest of the century looking at what’s going on now?” And the only answer I can really give them is yeah. I mean, the U.S. is immensely powerful economically and militarily, and like you said, none of the challenges that it’s facing that we’ve talked about in this podcast, that we talk about at Geopolitical Futures really threaten it from an existential perspective.

I mean, even if you want to imagine this hypothetical scenario where tomorrow North Korea develops the capability to deliver all of its nuclear warheads, which I’ve heard estimates about 20 – well not nuclear warheads that it can attach to a missile but nuclear devices – if it could tomorrow find a way to deliver all of these somehow to the U.S., that still wouldn’t be an existential threat. I mean if they could wipe out portions of 20 different cities, it would be devastating, but the U.S. would still be around and still have the strongest military by far.

So there are threats, but it’s important to, when digging into the details of the challenges U.S. is attempting to deal with either with economic or military strength, keep them in the context of how much damage they can actually do to the U.S., right? And whether the scale of those challenges really confront – well if they really pose the existential risks in the way that a lot of people often talk about them doing.

JLS: Well Xander, I want to ask you one more question before we wrap up, and it’s a little bit of a curve ball, and it’s something I’ve been thinking about. And actually I haven’t asked you this before, and I haven’t actually come to it in my mind so we’ll see if it works or it similarly stumps you. There was something that George actually has said to me a couple times since the time that I’ve known him, and it’s – I forget the exact quote, but it’s something like the great wars are always fought twice. You know, like World War I, there was a World War II. Like the really important wars in the world are always fought twice.

And when we think about the current conflicts that the United States is involved with right now, I mean we’re basically on the third iteration of the Iraq War, right? Because we had Desert Storm and then we had the invasion in 2003, and then technically all U.S. troops were out of there under the Obama administration, and then Obama had to recommit them because of what was happening with ISIS and ISIS going into Mosul and dealing with Yazidis and stuff like that. And with Korea, obviously the United States fought the Korean War in the 1950s and that was part of the Cold War.

But it has really struck me that when we look at the places that the United States is committing most of its military resources right now, they are old conflicts. They’re vestigial conflicts. They were there before and maybe sort of weren’t carried out in a way that brought them to some kind of resolution. Maybe they can’t be carried out in a certain way that can bring them to some kind of resolution, and these will be constant little conflicts that the United States will have to be going through all the time. I guess I don’t necessarily have a question there, but I wonder if there’s anything in your analytical toolkit that can help explain why the U.S. seems to go back to fighting not just a lot but in the same places in the world over and over again.

XS: It’s an interesting question. I think if you look at conflicts isolated as individual events, it’s maybe harder to see that connection, but if you try to dig down to understand the causes of those conflicts, sometimes the underlying causes are more difficult to solve, right? What do I mean by that? If you look at World War I and World War II, they were both about the same fundamental issue, which was Germany’s role in Europe and that had always been a question. I mean, even the Thirty Years’ War to a degree was about German states’ role in Europe, and it only really became a pressing issue after the unification of Germany, and that’s what lead to the massive scale of these conflicts.

So while the circumstances might have changed with Korea – you know, the Cold War is no longer going on, they no longer have support from the Soviet Union – there are some aspects that remained unchanged. And those remain longer-term geopolitical causes, right? So, Korea has always been unified. Almost always throughout its history for thousands of years, and it became divided as a result of the Cold War, and we’re now dealing with the underlying causes – the relationship of Korea with itself and that’s not something that has changed on some level since the Korean War. So I think there are ways to dig down beneath isolated events and try to see what those causes are. That doesn’t mean that major wars will always be fought twice, but I think that sheds some light on why they sometimes are.

JLS: Yeah and it just strikes me that one of the ironic things is that, so if we take what you said and play it a step forward, the issue in Korea is that there is a division there that is somewhat unnatural when you think about history and the Korean Peninsula overall. In the Middle East, it’s sort of the opposite, right? The unnatural thing is trying to join together states that never actually existed. So on the one hand, in Korea, you have this really arbitrary separation that has now taken root over half a century and creates its own host of dynamics. In the Middle East, because of colonialism, because of the way that the Ottoman Empire fell apart, you had these groups that were smushed together in way that perhaps didn’t make geopolitical sense, and now all of that stuff is playing out. So that’s just an interesting little aside. But Xander thank you for taking the time to join us on the podcast today. Again, I’m Jacob Shapiro, I’m our director of analysis. If you have any comments, feedback, critiques, we also love topic suggestions, you could actually write to us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com. And we will see you all out here next week.

George Friedman joins the podcast this week to talk about indicators that suggest the U.S. is gearing up to attack North Korea. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone from Orlando, Florida. I am here with George Friedman this week who’s joining us for the podcast. Hi George, how’s it going?

George Friedman: I get by, how are you?

JLS: I’m doing alright. We’re here for Mauldin Economics’ Strategic Investment Conference and we decided to take a step away and put out this podcast this week for y’all. So the main thing that we want to talk about today is North Korea. George actually started off the conference proceedings here with something of a bang when he laid out some intelligence that we’ve been picking up from North Korea that seems to suggest that the United States is more likely than less likely to strike North Korea so George how about you lay out for podcast listeners exactly what you’ve been seeing?

GF: Well to begin with, Business Insider published something that I said the war was imminent, which I didn’t say but Business Insider wanted it to be. What basically we saw last week was first another carrier, the Reagan which is based in Japan being deployed toward the Korean peninsula. We also some very heavy exercises, some of which were scheduled, some not, in South Korea. We also saw some very heavy brass including the Chief of Naval Operations had been back visiting Guam. Guam is a very important because Guam is the strategic base for the bombers: B1s, B2s, B52s – will be coming out of there if there is an attack.

And finally, we saw something, which is interesting, which is that the Guam Chamber of Commerce on May 31st will be getting a briefing from DHS people, Department of Homeland Security, on civil defense. Now, what really struck me is I haven’t seen the term civil defense since I was a kid and suddenly it shows up in Guam and oddly enough all the other different movements that were taking place while not insignificant were not as significant to me as this. Why would they be holding briefings in Guam on civil defense? And that really stuck with me and then I went back to what I saw happening in February.

In February, there was a kind of fundamental shift in U.S. policy toward Korea. What had happened was the Koreans appear to have launched a missile fueled by solid state fuel. Now that’s important, because if it’s liquid fuel then satellites will have some warning time that it’s being fueled and getting ready to go. You don’t get that warning time with solid fuel. It’s ready to go from the very beginning and you won’t even know that it’s fueled.

Now there’s a question obviously of what state the development of a warhead is because it’s not easy to build a nuclear warhead. It’s pretty easy to detonate a device on the ground, much harder to build a warhead that you can fit on top of missile that can survive the launch and the reentry.

So, when the solid fuel issue emerged, suddenly the United States had to reevaluate its position. And if everyone recalls back in March, we started having all sorts of meetings, pronouncements on both sides, hysterical threats coming out of North Korea, just all the operatic things that lead up to a conflict. Then, the Chinese President Xi visited and Trump tweeted that if the Chinese help us with our problem with Korea, we would be much more forthcoming on trade issues. Now this has always been the case in U.S. policy going back for years but interestingly enough no one has ever tweeted it before, which I thought was charming. I thought isn’t that nice? You know, it was very nice to let us all know what we already know.

Things went quiet and were quiet until very recently. But either the Chinese didn’t help or the Chinese were unwilling to take the step you needed and in the end, we wound up in the last week with some significant movements of weapons into position that remind me at least of the kind of buildup we had during Desert Storm and other things of that sort. This is sort of the way we go to war. Sometimes, we’re hoping that they will accept this and capitulate. Saddam Hussein didn’t. We’re in a position either to bluff or play as the other side wants.

JLS: I want to push back a little bit against you to drill down deeper into this and one question I asked you yesterday was that when we think about North Korea and in general when we think of all regimes, we think of regime survival as being the most important thing. So first of all, why would North Korea get to a state where it would do something that they know would threaten the United States, they know that the United States is going to see this and it’s going to react in a particular way.

And then the other side of that equation is, what is in it for the United States to actually intervene here? Why not just let them have it? Are the North Koreas really going to fire it and risk mutually assured destruction because if they did fire something at the United States obviously many people would die but the United States would respond with overwhelming force and if you think through your method, it’s always said that actors don’t do things that are going to lead to their outright destruction. How do you respond to those two questions?

GF: Well that’s a shockingly good question, and don’t let it happen again. (laughs). Ok so first of all, the North Koreans and every country in the world is aware that the United States has a nuclear fetish. If you have a nuclear program, we’re going to negotiate with you. If you have a nuclear weapon, we’re not going to mess with you. The North Koreans badly want to reach a stage where they have a nuclear weapon. They survived very improbably the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China into a quasi-non-Maoist country. That they survived has been an extraordinary achievement. That they will continue to survive is their fundamental goal and they understand that South Korea really doesn’t want North Korea to collapse. Because then they would have to do what West Germany did with East Germany and this would be very expensive.

The Chinese are happy to have a buffer between them and South Korea. And very frankly, they use the North Koreans as kind of a tool. Every time, the U.S. presses the Chinese, North Koreans do something insane, the Americans go the Chinese and say “Hey, help us out.” They do, they come back to the table, we say now let’s get back to those trade talks and they say what? We just bailed you out and you want to talk about trade talks? It’s a good game, it’s not an iron clad game, but it’s one that they’ve been willing to do.

What the North Koreans want to do of course is to move from having a program to having a weapon. The United States is actually fairly content in letting them have a program. But they don’t want them to have a weapon. You asked why? First because once they have a weapon, we really can’t take steps against that. Even if they are not going to hit us, they might hit the Japanese or parts of South Korea or something like that.

And second, once that they have that cover, they can build ICBMs that put us in reach. Now, the probability of them using it is extremely low. But if you’re the president of the United States and you are facing something that is unlikely but catastrophic, you have pledged to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. That’s a very serious oath to take. And you know all military men do, I am not sure the president’s oath has that in it but it should. In any case, the president of the United States is going to look at very differently, what kind of risk can he take?

I think that North Koreans decided, looking at what appears looking from the outside chaos in Washington, that if there was a time to slip this through, this was the moment. The chaos from Washington is real but it doesn’t really define the posture of the American military. They remain fairly aware of what’s going on in the world. So, what happened is that with the evolution we saw with the missiles, the questions arose, how confident are we in our intelligence that the Koreans aren’t approaching a viable, nuclear weapon? And the answer comes back, if you are sitting at a coffee shop and BS’ing with the gang, not a chance. If you are secretary of defense, that kind of confidence can cost you.

So, they entered into the zone of uncertainty where we aren’t quite sure what they have or what they don’t have and that pushes us to make a decision. And the problem is that if they end up having the weapon, options are closed off. So for many, this is the last moment to exercise those options. And so, a carrier began to move, exercises were held. Two other carriers on the West Coast of the United States, they haven’t moved yet. If they move, that will be more of an indicator. But certainly, we’ve moved into a more aggressive posture.

Plus, the new President Moon of South Korea took a day off. This should not be such an exciting event except in South Korea apparently taking a day off is really a big deal for the president. You don’t do that. What he did is he went sort of incommunicado for 24 hours. Now personally, he might have wanted to get drunk, I don’t know. Or he went into some serious consultations of various sorts. It’s hard to tell. But the indicators are upticking to the United States at least establishing the possibility of an attack and possibly prepare for one.

JLS: Do you think this is going to be the nature of threats to the United States going forward in the next decades? I mean when we look at the things the United States has been involved in the world most seriously, it’s you know the Islamic State, North Korea, things that threaten the United States in some fundamental way. But it’s not the Soviet Union, it’s not even Russia or China, it’s not even going toe-to-toe with any kind of big power. I know you’ve written about the United States developing imperial power, developing imperial power, trying to develop any kind of self-awareness about its kind of imperial power. So do you think this is what U.S. conflict is going to look like in the coming decades or does this distract from some of the real state-on-state issues that the United States has with bigger countries?

GF: During the 20th century, the United States had two major systemic wars, the first and the second World War. And I would define a systemic war as when the entire international system destabilizes and you have large scale conflicts between nation-states, sometimes called peer-to-peer conflicts. We also had lots of minor interventions, we went into Mexico, we involved ourselves in the Philippines and had quite a civil war there, intervened in a civil war. We intervened in Nicaragua, in Haiti.

So, in fact the two types of war, one has a very limited political objective, sometimes attainable, sometimes not. The other is a systemic war whether there’s an unlimited possibility of disaster or triumph, where the world is changing its entire shape, I call that systemic wars because the entire system is reshaping itself. Every century has had some form of systemic war because nations rise and fall and they destabilize it.

When we look at the 19th century, it was Napoleonic wars where literally everything was on the table. In the 18th century, it was the Seven Years’ War which once again everything was on the table. So, the question is not is this way wars are going to be? The answer is there’s always two kinds of wars and my assumption is that the 21st century is not going to be the first century in which there is not a systemic war.

So, we will have large-scale war fare. We’ll also have more limited political wars, these are the ones we can afford to lose and we don’t do very well in these. Vietnam was an example of a limited war that we lost and the republic survived very nicely and moved on and the Soviet Union collapsed. Iraq has not yet been lost but it’s doing a very good imitation. So too Afghanistan. These are the regional wars that a great power may engage in. And let me say something about imperial wars before everybody gets upset.

An empire in my mind is not a formal entity like the British Empire was, like the Roman Empire was. It can be an informal reality. It is a situation of overwhelming economic presence throughout the world and great military power. The United States is one quarter of the world’s economy. That means that everything the United States does anywhere in the world is going to affect somebody.

The United States is also the only global military power. It became that in World War II when it invaded Europe and the Japanese Empire simultaneously in 1944, which was an enormous achievement. The United States doesn’t really want to be an empire. It’d rather watch the Super Bowl. But empire is a condition, it is not a decision, it is not a formal structure. It is simply that everything you do is going to tick somebody off. And sometimes they are going to try to do something against you.

The United States is in that condition. It really hasn’t accepted what it is, it has no ongoing operating system for managing it. It is now in the process of understanding the limits of this power but also understanding the reality of that power.

So, I think we will have wars like in the Middle East. We will probably have less than that as we get more prudent in what we select. But always the war that matters is the systemic war, that’s the one you can’t afford to lose. So, if you lose in Vietnam and you lose in Iraq and you lose everywhere and probably if you lose in Korea, life goes on. World War II as the Japanese and the Germans learned, this was not good to lose this war. It really meant a great deal. The Russians understood that and the British and the Americans as well, although the probability of being defeated was slight.

Still, we must understand that the idea that because you’re having these wars there will never again be a systemic war is unrealistic. And the idea that because we have systemic wars, we should ignore the political challenges is also unrealistic. We have both kinds of wars. And the military unfortunately will frequently prepare for all the political wars and then have to suddenly reorganize for the systemic war.

JLS: So, taking us back to North Korea a little bit, you actually said at one point that you thought that there was maybe a 70 percent chance around that of war breaking out between the United States and North Korea. If we’re wrong, what does that look like? What do these movements then mean and then what happens afterwards?

GF: Well the nice things about these movements is you can turn around and go home. Which is to say, if this is a bluff to unnerve the North Koreans, at the same time that they are launching missiles, if that’s what this is, you can decide what to do later. If you wait with a deployment, then a window opens that you can’t close because they are not there. So, it’s a prudent move that gives you options.

Now, one of the things to remember is that we’re unsure of what the North Koreans have. We do know that the North Koreans have a very powerful counterpunch. They have masses of artillery just north of the DMZ within range of Seoul which is a city of 25 million people, which we are partnered with through alliance and which we have responsibility not to destroy their capital and 25 million people.

The North Koreans may estimate that we will be restrained because of the deterrent threat that they have toward the city. They may also assume the United States remains convinced that they don’t have nuclear weapons and will wait. And that may be true. But they’re betting at this point that they can bluff a nuke well enough to say: you don’t know if we have one or not, you don’t know if we got it in a missile or in a boat heading to San Francisco harbor, you don’t know. And so that achieves for them, the primary goal: don’t mess with us.

Their primary goal is regime survival. And do not think of them as stupid, and the kid may be fat but he’s not crazy. He’s enjoying life and he’s also not oddly enough the sole ruler of North Korea. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a complex mechanism. It has a leadership that lives extremely well, does business around the world under very different circumstances. They have shown no suicidal indications. This is not Japanese kamikazes, and this is not ISIS. These are people who survived and want to continue to survive. They look at the United States as extremely irrational and totally unpredictable.

So what’s interesting in this is, they look at the United States as a dangerous country. They still haven’t figured out why we bombed Kosovo. I am having trouble, I’ve always had trouble understanding this, but they don’t look at us as a rational actor. They look at us as a country torn internally, externally incomprehensible, extremely dangerous and powerful, that they have to manage and manipulate. And that’s what they’re trying to do.

The Americans look at them as if they were ISIS, that they want to die. That they are so committed to the fat boy that they just wanna die. And that’s also a kind of crazy view but it leads us to have very extreme reactions to their behavior. They have extreme reactions to ours. Neither side understands each other, which is at this moment why the United States within its own parameters may choose to become aggressive earlier rather than later.

JLS: I want to ask you one more question, it’s going to be a little bit of a curve ball. Would you say that North Korea is the last totalitarian state in the world from the age of totalitarian states or do you think it’s just something completely different from the totalitarian states that ruled in the 1930s and 40s?

GF: Let’s define that, the totalitarian states, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany particularly had overarching ideologies and part of the regime was that everything was turning around that ideology and what made them totalitarian is that there was a totalistic view of the world that the public absorbed, much of them believed. And those that didn’t were killed. That made it this way. This is more like what Karl Marx called an Oriental despotism and by that it is ruled by a family, not by a political party. It is ruled by a family that fights among itself apparently. But also has an infrastructure under it and it is infinitely more corrupt than Stalin or Hitler.

So one of things you have to remember about totalitarian societies is the incorruptibility of the leader. Stalin really didn’t steal very much. He didn’t need to, but you know he didn’t. Neither did Hitler, he was a very frugal person. Personal luxuries didn’t apply to them because they were, like Robespierre, ascetic, they didn’t do it.

No one will ever call the North Korean leadership ascetic. No one will ever claim they actually believe in anything beyond survival, although they may claim. They do have a reign of terror. Now, the reign of terror must be distinguished from totalitarianism. It can be very good, it can be very efficient. There are other countries where it is terrifying to disagree. Saudi Arabia is not one that I would, you know, run feminism up the flag pole.

So is it the only one? It’s a wonderful example of Oriental despotism. It’s not the only one but they do a mighty good job.

JLS: Fair enough. Thanks for joining us George and thank you all for listening. As always you can write into us at comments@geopoliticalfutures.com if you have any suggestions for topics or any critiques or other things that you’d like us to take up in this podcast and we will see you all next week.

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