Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 23rd of October 2019 to The Sounding Line.

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Geopolitical Futures‘ founder and Chairman, George Friedman, recently spoke with Mauldin Economics about the state of globalism and geopolitics. In light of some notable economists and money managers like Ray Dalio recently comparing this period to the troubled 1930s, Mr. Friedman notes that this period is like most troubled periods in human history and that the real anomaly was the “Walt Disney fantasy” view of globalism that developed over the last 20 years.

 

Some excerpts from George Friedman:

“In one sense, the world has been globalized since the 15th century. Every since the wealth of Latin America flowed to Europe and drove the economy there, and ever since the Silk Road was opened up, it’s always been globalized. So, the first thing is that globalization isn’t new. What is new is the fantasy, what I’ll call the Walt Disney fantasy: ‘It’s a small world after all.’ It’s not a small world after all. It’s very diverse, very different, and trying to merge cultures and nations into one legal entity simply didn’t work. It worked between, let’s say, the fall of the Soviet Union and 2008. It worked during periods of prosperity, when it was a win-win situation. But after 2008, economic well-being became a zero-sum-game. Also, you had questions of who can enter my country… It was a generalized question and that’s where it really came to a head, where people excepted the idea that, yes, the economy is global. That doesn’t mean that I have to submerge my family, my friends, my nation into a single entity. So what you had was a very short period of what you would call globalization, perhaps 20 years… then it returned to the way it always was. So to me the interesting thing was the idea that those 20 years of attempting to merge to EU into one, and all the other nations into one, and the WTO, that was the rarity. That was odd and the idea that anybody thought that that was going to continue is the interesting problem.”

“It feels like 1930. It feels like 1910. It feels like 1950. This is the world as it normally is: different nations pursuing different ends, having economic competition, having political conflict, sometimes war. This is the way the world has been for a very very long time… We have returned to a time where the nation state is dominant. Economic interest are important but not the deciding factor in what drives nations…”

There is much more to the interview, so enjoy it above.

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