Anyone familiar with George Friedman? Below is a YouTube link to a speech by Friedman on the planned destruction of a Russian-German alliance and the rise of Europe.

George Friedman is the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures LLC , an online publication that explains and forecasts the course of global events.


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ_cFZ6bHZ0

Friedman is generally considered a brilliant analyst, except that he has a bit of a hard-on for Germany due to his family's holocaust experience. German anti-American conspiracy theorists have been hawking the relevant single sentence from this video since it came out in 2015 as "proof" that the US has been out to destroy Germany ever since the latter emerged as a united nation in the 19th century. These are the types who go on about "the old culture nations" of Germany and Russia being natural allies, as opposed to the age-old European stereotype of the nekulturny Americans; they will tell you the US engineered both world wars, that Germany is still American-occupied today, that the US has tried to destroy Europe by making the EU admit Turkey, by triggering the Greek financial crisis, making Merkel open the gates for refugees, aiming to replace Europeans with a servile "light brown mongrel race", etc.

You'll find this video all over left- and right-wing fringe, conspiracy, "alternate news" and pro-Russian websites which will also tell you how the evil Americans are supporting the likewise evil Ukrainians etc.; the population of those sites takes it as a bloody Zionist speaking the brazen truth about American imperialism. Of course history really shows no evidence for Friedman's claim that the US fought in WW I and II to keep Germany and Russia from aligning, and likewise not between the end of the Cold War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He may have a point about the Cold War itself, though in the sense of the US trying to prevent all of Germany falling under communist rule - which I find a totally agreeable aim, BTW.