Updated 2 years ago
George Friedman is one of my favorite historians and geopoliticians.
“[Ukraine in 2014] was now in {Putin’s] mind in the hands of the Americans. And in the minds of the Americans we were just being nice. We liberated the place! We had no ambitions!
But the Russian view was, you ALWAYS have ambitions. You ALWAYS pretend to be nice. You’re not nice! You’re Americans!
And once you invade somebody they have to say thank you!
This is overstating the Russian point of view but not very much. The degree to which the Russians believe Americans to be massive hypocrites constantly doing good while benefiting themselves is unanswerable.
The Russians cannot believe we’re not up to something. The idea that Americans say, ‘hey, it’s an oil company. It has nothing to do with anything.’ This they don’t believe. They cannot grasp the fact that there’s not some some central force guiding us. The idea of a society this powerful, this wealthy, that rises out of the primordial muck without ever having an organizational principle is beyond them.
So everything that they see has a meaning. Everything they look at has a purpose and somebody designed it and [Putin] set about to reverse it since 2020.”
This was the guy who said Poland and Turkey would rise again:
