In the Energy News Beat – Conversation in Energy with Stuart Turley, talks with George McMillan delves into the geopolitical implications of energy resources, focusing on the shifting power dynamics between Russia, China, the EU, and the U.S. It highlights how natural gas pipelines, such as Nord Stream, influence economic and political stability, with Germany at the center of potential realignments. The conversation explores Turkey's emerging role in controlling energy supplies to Europe, the impact of U.S. LNG exports, and the domino effect on NATO, the EU, and global industrial competitiveness. Strategic moves by leaders like Trump and Putin are analyzed within a broader framework of energy dependency, economic pressures, and geopolitical maneuvering.
Highlights of the Podcast
00:01 - Intro
01:07 - Energy Policies and Geopolitical Influence
02:09 - Geostrategic Frameworks and Election Impacts
03:48 - Syria, Oil Fields, and Regional Control
05:51 - Germany’s Energy Crisis and Nord Stream
07:26 - Russian-Chinese Integration and Global Shifts
12:17 - Nord Stream Pipeline and Economic Power
13:56 - Geopolitical Impacts on NATO and EU Stability
20:12 - Energy Economics and Populist Movements
25:40 - Erdogan’s Role and Pipeline Control
41:23 - Syrian Developments and Energy Strategies
50:28 - Energy as a Tool for Global Realignment
George McMillan [00:00:07] The United States has a bunch of problems. Russian oil and gas. The cheapest form of energy. So whichever industrial power centers that they connect to by pipeline, we'll have industries that prosper and basically put everybody else out of business. Russia being in the heartland of Central Asia. Chinese energy integration is so much more cost competitive globally that the other industrial power centers are probably going to have to also integrate. Japan's been having energy production in Sakhalin Island. Germany had the Nord Stream pipeline, but they also had the South Stream pipeline going through the Black Sea. And wherever there is a Russian or Chinese infrastructural project, there happens to be war, tension, color, revolutions all the way around Eurasia. That is causing a big problem for the United States and losing its allies. And also whoever integrates then pays in rubles. And then there's nobody to support or $34 trillion in debt and everything just collapse.
Stuart Turley [00:01:07] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name's Stu Turley, president CEO of the Sandstone Group. The world is going nuts right now. And I'll tell you what. It is absolutely wild when you consider the green energy policies of Germany, the UK, New York, New Jersey and California have led the way to fiscal deindustrialization. But now we have geopolitical influences. If Germany does not get back to cheap Russian natural gas, we will see a regime change. In fact, I'm talking about cheap Russian. Natural gas is so critical that we're talking about natural gas around the world. On the Energy Realities podcast with David Blackmon, Irina Slav and Tammy Nemeth. Today I have George McMillan and he and I are working on a geopolitical series right now and George is with me today. George, how are you? I'm doing fantastic.
George McMillan [00:02:09] Great to be here. I keep on saying we're having a year between the election cycle and between the elections in November and when Trump has his inauguration day on the 20th, we're having about a decade's worth of news happening happening in this time span. We stop. I have no life. But this is what we're having. We were, you know, last month. Boy, it was actually during the election cycle. You got held up with some tech problems there. But we were we were going over this original slide set about to see power versus land power dichotomies. Once you understand those different strategies, you go from, you know, reacting to news to predictive analysis. If one side does this, what's the counter strategy supposed to be? So you manage of having that kind of methodological explanation is a big advantage of, you know, what's the next place you're going to be? Which, okay, there's a whole bunch of different actors at different levels of, you know, regional powers, major powers and global superpowers occurring here. So I like to go over things in different levels because the superpowers at the top are influencing the proxy wars at the lower levels and the intermediate power players are jockeying for position. So that's what we have. You know, that's what we have here in Eurasia. So that's why I like to explain things systematically in levels, because it's a matter of multivariate analysis here. And you're having to learn with me because I'm like a hyperactive rat child and I go like squirrel. And I'll look on something else. And you do have to do a very good job keeping me in line. And when you take a look at that news cycle, we release this story the other day, Syria and beyond, How energy drives geopolitical strategy.
Stuart Turley [00:03:48] This is already gotten some great traction out there. And I want to share with this that Syria's oil field nightmare came up from Anonymous. I recommend everybody follow him on X. He is an absolute energy Jew out there. And this is really hard for me to sit back and think that you've got people out there just trying to either steal oil or why is the US still in the Syrian oil fields protecting it? You got to sit back and kind of go, is it about oil? Well, yeah. I mean, it's is energy news. Great. So we can talk about this, right? Yeah, right. There's a Well, okay. I didn't know where you're going here. Otherwise. We have brought up maps of the other oil fields in the region. This is only an intro to your other topic, so I just want to bring this out and say that we have an update for your podcast that we did here that I'm going to include into the update. So then we can go ahead and keep going into the other one. Most of the oil fields are in northwestern Iraq and the Kurdish areas with the YPG are that right? That's that's going to be the Euphrates River and north and north into the east. Right. And then there's also oil fields. So it would be on that on that road. That goes from that goes from Baghdad to Damascus. There's also oil fields in those areas that Assad controlled and now controls. So I'm not sure which oil fields he's talking about, but it's those two areas. And of course, Israel is taking over more and more of that area. And the Druze in that southern part of Syria want to actually get annexed by Israel.
George McMillan [00:05:24] So for their protection. So that's going to push the Israelis into those oil fields, or at least it gives them an excuse or a pretext to move up to the Euphrates where the where the U.S. forces are. Right. People can Google out an airbase right on the border of Iraq and Syria and see what area I'm talking about. That's right. Well, Al Temple, TANF. Okay. So if you want to get that on on Google Maps.
Stuart Turley [00:05:51] Well, for today, in the last three weeks, we've had the German chancellor or German Chancellor Shultz has been asking for Russian natural gas to be turned back on. And he needs it because regimes change without natural cheap Russian natural gas. And your intro, George says it all. Wherever there's pipelines, there's world problems. Now, today, German purchases of Russian uranium surge and Russian uranium is not sanctioned for nuclear. But Germany turned off their nuclear plants and they're quietly trying to turn them back on because they've got an energy crisis. And when you marry that news with the German program, the Ministry of Energy calls for Nord Stream to be reactivated. And then I also ran a story about the rumors from the Slavic country last on our last podcast. We that we got recorded in the can. It's not been released yet, but the Nord Stream has a rumor that it may be bought by a U.S. company. There's Nord Stream one and two four pipelines, three have been destroyed. One is in functional state and they could immediately turn that one on to solve the problem. It's pretty amazing when you sit back and think of what a mess is going on in the EU.
George McMillan [00:07:26] Yeah, it really is the mess. What I had written in the the blurb that I sent to you on the Telegram channel was you have Europe is in a huge energy crisis, right? And what we've been talking about is, yes, the the U.S. and NATO, Britain, they want to keep the global political center of gravity from shifting from Washington and London to Berlin. Moscow and Beijing. Right. Russian natural gas hooked up to German industrial power. That union shifts the industrial might of the world to Berlin and Moscow. And then Moscow with power. Siberia. One is already formed. A union of Russian heartland is using statement terminology to China and is creating a nucleus there. So you have the heartland with the immense resources and energy connected to China. You have that heartland coastal rim land and infrastructural integration that leads to the economic integration, that leads to the diplomatic integration, that leads to the military integration. So it's these integration, this series of dive analysis that actually creates to create geopolitical power. And when it's among allies, alliance trading blocs, that's what shifts the global political center of gravity. So you have a Moscow Beijing relationship. You have between Russia and China. You have Central Asia and the Caspian region, which has a whole bunch of oil and natural gas. Right. They have the resources. So if China is getting all that cheap energy, you know, energy is the multiplier coefficient in economic economic growth there. So then you have that as a nucleus. China becomes more globally competitive than all the other industrial powers, you know, in selling products on the world. So they're selling goods cheaper. What we are talking about is before well, Nord Stream was was was running. The German automakers were selling 7 million cars per year without right now they're down to four. Okay. You also get into BASF cannot stay in power. Then the whole myriad of automotive.
Stuart Turley [00:09:38] There's steel mills have closed.
George McMillan [00:09:40] Yeah, just the whole the whole chain. So you're going to get everything from the raw materials manufacturers through the different component manufacturers for automobiles that feed the car industry. The whole pyramid just goes away. So you're talking about thousands of jobs, not just one factory. I mean, belt that now in Japan. The U.S. through diplomatic pressure. I have to keep on saying this. They stopped the Sakhalin de Hokkaido pipeline project under diplomatic pressure. So Russia for the 40 miles that that pipeline would have to go. Russia built in an lengthy liquid look of liquefaction plant. And Japan just on the other side, built the Regasification plant. So there are pipelines are all ready, but they just need that 140 mile link underneath to say.
Stuart Turley [00:10:27] In the world of pipelines, that's nothing.
George McMillan [00:10:29] That's enough. All right. And that was back in 2016. So that's eight years ago. They could have they could have done that years ago and saved a lot of money. And because they basically wasted money with the whole LNG plants there. Right. I mean, yeah, the Russians sell the LNG to other places. Wouldn't be totally wasted. But just between the trade of Russia and Japan, it's a waste. Just build the 40s, the 40 mile stretch and you're done for the next several decades. So because of that, now, Japanese automakers are not as competitive globally and there's a wash out because there's a big buyer or big merger between Honda, Nissan and Mitsubishi. Right. So, you know, to my thesis that whoever is hooked up to Russian natural gas is going to be globally more competitive than those that are Chinese cars have gotten way, way better. They're no longer selling as many Japanese and German cars in China. They're being replaced by China, by by China, by Chinese cars in Russia. So then you're going to get to a point where in order for Germany. Now, here's the rub in this for you. In order for German industry to survive, are they going to have to rebuild Nord Stream, rebuild their relationship with Russia to do that? And that's what the AfD, the alternative for Deutschland party is arguing in Germany. They are not in opposition to the Green Party. And you know, an awful lot. Schultz Before the Nord Stream was blown up. It's that argument in between German politics that was really the impetus for the blowing up of Nord Stream because blowing up of Nord Stream takes it off the Democratic, takes it out of the democratic process, is still longer decision. The okay. They meant to blow up all four pipelines. They blew up three out of four.
Stuart Turley [00:12:17] Right. Well, you know, the Ukrainians that were on the the sailing ship, that was allegedly the ones that did that. There is no way that a sailing ship full of underwater Ukrainians blue, that that was one of the rumors.
George McMillan [00:12:32] It would be. It's not as plausible as some other things you can imagine.
Stuart Turley [00:12:36] Exactly. Especially when President Biden bragged about it.
George McMillan [00:12:40] Yeah. When he bragged about it beforehand. And you have Seymour Hersh has article that says the the hardhat divers out of Panama City, you know, are the ones that blew it out, You know, Florida. I mean. Yeah. I mean, we don't it sounds he makes a reasonable story. There's no way to know if that's true or not.
Stuart Turley [00:12:55] Right.
George McMillan [00:12:55] No. He lays out wouldn't be Special forces because then they got, you know, special forces, I mean, SEALs in that case.
Stuart Turley [00:13:02] So when do you trust Biden? If you if you trust President President Biden, when he says that he is going to make sure that it does not work, is he a liar or is he telling the truth?
George McMillan [00:13:12] That Well, I mean, it's yeah, there's there's correlations not cause, you know, there's a high correlation between him saying it and the time sequence of it happening later. So. Yeah. All right.
Stuart Turley [00:13:23] We're just saying conspiracy theories, but there is. No, there is correlation.
George McMillan [00:13:29] There's corners. We can say that and be factually true. So in this case, you know, the argument within Germany is, well, if they don't go back to Russian natural gas, they're going to their German industry is going to totally collapse. But they need to go back to buying Russian natural gas to keep their whole industrial economy afloat because they're going to do well. Rapid decline of living standards. Well, they won't even be a major regional power anymore.
Stuart Turley [00:13:55] They already have in in a Chancellor Shultz has already gotten a vote of no confidence and he is now facing being tossed out. So regime change, you are right, George. And I did not mean to a compliment you. I am so sorry for that. I did not mean to like say that My guest is very smart and I apologize for being nice to my guest. I want to just get that on record right now. I apologize for me at night, so I need to be a jerk. But you are right. Regimes change when pipelines break.
George McMillan [00:14:25] Yeah. So now and then Trump comes into office and he's catering to, you know, trying to get elected. And he's very sensitive to being called, you know, a Russian prop or Russian stooge or whatever Hillary was saying. So he's out there saying, I'm not going to let Germany rebuild Nord Stream. They're going to buy American LNG. Well. Okay. That's he's playing to an American audience and trying to.
Stuart Turley [00:14:51] Can I ask this question? If I was a chess player and I love playing chess, if I was President Trump and I in. Encouraged a U.S. company to buy Nord Stream. If I had that company behind Nord Stream, you have one of those pipes that all you need are the Canadian compressors on each end, and you can bring one of those pipelines back online. You have cash flow coming into Germany. You have reoccurring revenue. You get it on a deal. But you now control the amount of rebuild time that it takes. So it makes sense that if President Trump is trying to control how fast Germany is coming back online, he would encourage that. That's a chess move.
George McMillan [00:15:40] Yeah, those those Bombardier compressors as part of United Technologies, Pratt Whitney. It's an export group. Okay. Yeah. Just give people a background on that. Yeah, That's why those those Pratt Whitney engines are. Or sold to Bombardier. That's why they're in Canada.
Stuart Turley [00:15:55] Right. And they were sanctioned and shut down and all that kind of happy horse crap. But if it is a a U.S. chess move and I would not want to play chess against President Trump or Putin, those two men know how to do geopolitical strategic moves. And I'm not going to use the word strategery like President Bush. I'm above using a President Bush Saturday Night Live joke.
George McMillan [00:16:21] Right, right, right. Well, I'm in the Permian Basin, too. So.
Stuart Turley [00:16:25] My question makes sense because that is a perfect control mechanism by President Trump. If he was willing to do that.
George McMillan [00:16:33] But I mean, on the other hand, if he buys it, what's he doing? He's he's controlling the linkage between the St Petersburg area and where it lands and Northern Germany. Right. So then why was Nord Stream put there in the first place? When you put it in in the ocean, they wanted a direct link between Russia and Germany. So you can't rig the elections in the Baltic Sea.
Stuart Turley [00:16:53] Right.
George McMillan [00:16:54] Then you just figured out a way to rig the elections in the Baltic Sea. So if they have to take power, what do they do? Just nationalize the pipeline and. And give the money back to whoever buys it. I mean, that would be that would be. Okay. So because there's no reason for an American company to buy that. When a German company, BASF, was one of the original owners under Gerhard Schmidt.
Stuart Turley [00:17:18] WOw.
George McMillan [00:17:19] So that would just be the obvious move because it's like, all right, we see what you're doing. We're just going to give you your money back. We're going to take the shares back and we're going to run this. All right?
Stuart Turley [00:17:29] Okay.
[00:17:30] Yeah, that would be the obvious counter. I mean, it's. Yeah, they don't have to nationalize it, steal the money, Just give it back. Or they just because all offshore, this government would have to engineer the sale and. Okay. The sale before that. So the AfD or the CDU, whatever coalition is going to emerge, is going to be you know, it's it's going to be the CDU, CSU, merging with somebody else because they're going to try to freeze out the AfD. They can only do that for so long because if Merge gets back into power, then what's he going to do? Well, he's not going to rebuild Nord Stream because he's not going to want to have the threat of the United States of losing the American market. But if you lose the American, if you try to fleece the Americans, your whole economy goes down, collapses anyway. So that's not a solution. So under those things, the AfD takes power anyway. But then you have and here's the rub. You have there's a debate in the AfD while between beetle and and say Bjorn Hookah of you know, do you want to buy Russian at a Nordstrom by Russian natural gas rebuild Nord Stream. Revive the economy. They across the board in the AfD they want to revive the sphere because it used to be mandatory conscription. Just like Austria and Switzerland. And then they stopped the mandatory conscription after the Soviet Union collapsed. Well, they want to revive their army and and have more autonomy over their own security. Then you get the thing. Well, do you want to reduce the presence of the EU and Naito, you know, Germans presence in that or get rid of it altogether or something in between. Well, if Trump comes and doesn't say, you know, threatens them with tariffs, if they rebuild Nord Stream, then they're going to be like, well, all right, if you have the tariffs on German cars coming into the United States, we lose the American, we lose more of the American American market share.
Stuart Turley [00:19:22] Right.
[00:19:22] Right. We still have a business and we can sell to the rest of the countries of the world.
[00:19:26] Wow.
[00:19:27] So under that under that scenario, they're going to be like, okay, we'll rebuild Nord Stream. We'll do the deal with Russians and then we'll deal with the terrorists, or at least our industries can sell to all the other, you know, Well, there's 190 countries in the world or whatever, but, you know, they'll just sell their cars within the BRICs nations and Eurasia. And at least our business, at least they they don't lose that.
[00:19:49] So how is how is this impacting? Okay. This is going to impact Nieto because Germany is the largest U.S. and Germany are the largest funders of Naito. Right. And you. You had mentioned that in your Telegram article as well. And we also have the other video that you had put in there as well. How does this chess playing going on impact NATO?
[00:20:11] Well, for the if Trump does not let them rebuild Nord Stream, he's got to replace it with natural gas. And it's not just him. It was the neocon plan to cut or cut them off, cut Germany off from Russian natural gas. Well, all of Europe. But you're focusing on German industrial power, right? Cut it off from Russia and get natural gas and then use the global war on terror to take over the oil fields and the pipeline route and replace it. But that never that never happened because the regime changed nation building strategy across across the Middle East and Central Asia didn't work. It collapsed. And then you have the different Sunni versus Shia, you know, different terrorist organizations operating there that just made it that just made the whole nation building thing untenable. And you have a whole bunch of you have a whole bunch of countries funding the terrorist groups in in that in that region that we're not going to get into today because we're focusing on on Europe. Well, Iraq failed. Now, you still have to replace the gas, which all the contracts just ended, you know, midnight of the 31st.
[00:21:12] Right. The Ukrainian pass through from Ukraine to the Slavic countries and then on. And that has caused some serious heartburn.
[00:21:21] You had the Yamal pipeline up high up in the north, northern end of of Russia on the Arctic, closer to Finland, kind of. You had that big pipeline going through Poland that Poland ended years ago. They ended that on the day of the invasion. But they were trying to end that because you had too many pipelines going to Germany. And every time they moved the EU and NATO East and then slapped these big tariffs on transfer fees on Russian natural gas, the Russians just spot just Russians. And Putin just responded by building a different pipeline. Then they blocked the pipeline in Poland. Then they're like, okay, well then we'll do Gerhart, Schmidt And then Merkel started Nord Stream one and two because they can't move the EU into the Baltic Sea and then slap on these big transfer fee tariffs.
[00:22:10] So this could actually be the beginning of the end of the EU? Is that what I just heard?
[00:22:18] Yeah. It's exactly what we been saying last year when I started the Russian Natural Gas and Geopolitical Realignment series of papers.
[00:22:27] Right.
[00:22:28] Okay. Because.
[00:22:29] We're seeing it really come to fruition right now, right? So that Naito is going to lose the funding of the US, potentially potentially lose the funding of Germany. But the EU could start. Not only could Brexit take a thing, what would you call Germany exiting exit?
[00:22:52] YEah. Now people have to understand what the EU is. It's created by Wall Street and the City of London banking community to federalize Europe into a trading bloc so they could organize and control the different European countries. Right. In the United States, under the Articles of Confederation, we had a whole bunch of loose knit states. It was the United States with, you know, the small you. And it was really disorganized. The federal government made it free trade within the United States. That's what the US Constitution did. So Wall Street in London took the European Steel and Coal Union and they made that the economic community and then they their European community, and then they made that the EU to coordinate everything within a singular bloc. So that way the banking community could administer just to the EU and have them administer to the, you know, to the European countries as individuals. They needed something to organize them. Then you're using trading blocs to put tariffs. Back then it was the Warsaw Pact countries. So you don't want to have your your trading bloc, your geopolitical alliance system integrated with another one because then you're going to have conflicts of interests between military alliances, right? So you move NATO's east to then as a way to put block all trade coming from Russia into your trading zone. If if if the West believed in free trade, you know the general agreements on tariffs and trade, the old GATT system, you wouldn't have the EU, you would just have a free trade system and the EU could adopt that. But they don't want the global political center of gravity to shift. So that's why they they put on the tariff and non-tariff trade barriers because they want to block Russia. Okay, well, they've done that, but now they have replaced the cheap Russian natural gas with something that's affordable.
[00:24:45] Right.
[00:24:45] So here is the point you have. And then Mike Pence has always been talking about, well, since they started putting the high tariffs on Russian natural gas, their energy prices have going up. That's a cost push inflation back in. ISM across eastern Germany or across Eastern Europe, I mean in Central Europe. So the more the populous movement started to complain about it and gain power in the different Eastern European countries and in Central Europe and in Western Europe, the more dissent, the more the big, big tech censorship happened. So Mike Barnes, in his or in his videos discusses that, which is a very astute observation right then that that censorship moved the United States during the during the Trump election cycle of 2016. So yeah, that's the correlation that he makes. Well, guess what? The more they cut off Europe from Eastern Europe, I mean, from Russia, natural gas, the more the energy prices go up. But energy's in everything. So it's it's a cost push inflation driver to everything. So it goes up. Standards of living go down. Economies collapse. So the situation now is instead of censoring the populist movements, Nigel Farage's is gaining ground. And you're in in Great Britain, the UK. Marine Le Pen is gaining popularity in France and he is gaining popularity in Germany. Freedom Party just made big, big gains in Austria the other day as well. Right. You have Viktor Orban party in power in in in Hungary. Italy, Yeah. Fico in Slovakia is okay. Italy on the other side. You have good church ends in Serbia, right? You have heavily funded Western backed candidates in Bulgaria. You have Georgia skew that got that won the election in Romania. On the other side of the Danube River, the Moldovan president is heavily supported, like, okay, wanted just to make an example. What did. How much did Hillary outspend Donald Trump in the 2016 election? Is it 10 to 1? 20 to 1? Right. It was a big margin. A big margin. But nobody has ever spent what Kamala did in order to lose. Right. So it's the same thing. Yeah. Trump Trump's, you know, spending just a fraction of what he was up against, right? Well, the same thing in Europe. They the Western backed candidates are outspending everybody else, you know, 10 to 1, 21, whatever. I mean, people can look at their different countries and come up with the exact ratio. But, you know, I got to deal with too many countries. I don't I can't pay attention to it, to that level. But anyway. They're outspending by a lot. And it's really aggravating the people in those countries because they can see. Right. So you have.So that's a hope. That's all the Danube River Valley countries plus plus Italy that are ready to switch over and buy it and go back to buying Russian natural gas. You had that loss in Georgia where the Dream Party in Georgia wants to go back to buying Russian natural gas. Right. If Germany rebuilds Nord Stream. And this is what I've been arguing about since the invasion in 2022 on the different shows I bet on. Right. Is the German pipeline network is connected to Switzerland, this time in Austria. So it's not just Germany exiting the petrodollar where it would collapse and buying Russian natural gas is going to be the whole German speaking world with the biggest industrial powers. Italy. I leave out of this because they got natural gas coming over from Libya. You know with with that in a built in in the late 60s early 70s in southern Europe you still have the turkstream Russian natural gas and natural gas coming from the Caspian Sea through Azerbaijan into Bulgaria and Greece and then going over to Italy underneath the Adriatic. So you still have those pipeline networks. So that's why I kind of leave Italy out of this equation a little bit. I focus on the Dam River Valley because of how the networks run the pipeline.
[00:28:37] Got it.
[00:28:37] All right. So under this rubric, if Trump threatens Germany that they can't build Nord Stream, and if they do, they're going to get huge tariffs to get into the U.S. market. Well, then that's going to just instead of keeping the AfD from gaining power, that's going to accelerate because then they're going to be like, well, we can't stay in business anyway. Right. Well, we're going to totally collapse. It's going to be a Morgenthau plan of turning Germany back into an agrarian society.
[00:29:06] So then and that's argued that's argued in the different German German blocs, the German populous. While it's. Yeah, I got lots of friends who speak German right. So that that discussions been going on. So then you get to the point where all right if if the CDU, CSU takes power in Germany and doesn't include the AfD so they don't build Nord Stream, then the whole Germany collapses, well then more people are going to shift over to the AfD and say, hey, we got to revive it, rebuild Nord Stream, rebuild by Russian natural gas and learn long term contracts because that's stable and cheap where LNG is always spot price, right? Right. It's always more expensive than it's always spot price or tends towards spot pricing. So that if they do that, then they're going to be like, well, we don't care about the American market. We just need to stay in business. But if that happens, it creates that domino effect I've been talking about since last year on your show and others where it's Austria is also going to buy that gas from Germany and exit the petrodollar they already have. Austria gets pipelines through the southern route. Natural gas will take more of it because KTM is going out of business. The motorcycle manufacturer. Right. They exist without that energy. Their motorcycles are just too expensive. Road tax makes the engines. Engines design for Tata of India, who owns Jaguar cars. And so Jaguar just woke up. So you get these engine manufacturers and designers that will just have to move out of Austria to India or or to Eastern economic corridor in Thailand that well, you can't move the gas to the industries. The industries have to move to where the gases.
[00:30:48] It's very, very simple. So in order but then the the Germans lose jobs. Then we just have to take the high tech engineers and move them out of the country, you know, on whatever the equivalent of an H-1b visa is. But they can do that, right? But then who loses the jobs is the blue collar workers. Yep. So ultimately, the elites don't care. They'll just move to where they got to go in the world. You know, like Andrew Henderson says, in no mad capitalist build us go to where they are treated best. So in order to keep Germany industrializing industrialized, what what Trump's threat is he's just playing into the hands of. Well I mean it runs the gamut of we want to rebuild our own economic autonomy and the military, again, diamond dime integration, infrastructural information, diplomatic and military, it all goes together. So they want to integrate with Russia and they want to rebuild the military. People naturally do that, whether they know about that kind of theoretical modeling or not, they do it anyway, right? So they want to rebuild their own military. So then the thing was, is it going to be you're going to have a Buddhist in coordination with Naito like it used to be, or do they want the American bases completely out or something in between? Wow. You know, if if Germany, you know, if Dave D takes that power and Trump threatens them, he's actually moving them towards we're going to exit the EU, NATO, all at the same time. Well, if that happens, what happens to the other Danube River Valley countries? Do they also leave Natal because the Germans are angry that A they're being D industrialize and B, there's they're sending, you know, $80 billion a year into the EU to be redistributed to different countries.
[00:32:33] But then Orban and Fico are now excluded from that money because they don't want to open their borders for open immigration. Right. So Derek's exit, I guess, is what we should call it. And since I don't I haven't heard that term before. Exit or jarring or. Yeah, what are we going to call it? Jack the decks it with the D Deutsche Deutschland. Deutsche Deutschland. Och Deutsche Deutsche it and German exit. Yes. So wow. But then Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria have always been neutral countries. Right. So but their budgets that they pay into the EU or nothing. Well guess what? It's going to go down. It's going to actually be nothing. I mean, Switzerland isn't part of the EU. They're still will use their prime. The Swiss, right. Okay. So then I forget what Austria uses and then. Yeah, I mean, I'm sorry, Liechtenstein, but it's just a tiny country anyway. But Austria uses, uses the EU uses the euro, right. Yeah. So they just go back to using their own currencies. But I don't think that's what's happened because in the last show I was talking about when the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, one of the ideas was to go back to Intermarium plan of Unite in the Baltics, Poland and Ukraine. You know, Intermarium see, you know, from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. And then there was another they would have their own neutral zone and their own trading bloc in between the EU, Naito and Russia. See, that was an option that was thrown out there. The other option was the Three Seas plan of a bigger plan of the three seas, meaning the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Adriatic, and that would be the Baltic Seas, Poland and Ukraine, plus the old Yugoslavian countries in the Balkans, plus the integrated countries of of well, Czechoslovakia back.
[00:34:18] That was one country. Yeah. And then Serbia. And well, whether it includes Slovenia or not, they're kind of different different politics in Slovenia and Croatia. But you would have that series of countries that didn't occur because they moved the EU and NATO's east as fast as they could to put everybody in one single trading bloc and isolate Russia, which is which is the current problem. You know, the more you put NATO's offensive weaponry in Eastern Europe, the more they're under threat. And yes, the purpose of moving the trade bloc, the trading bloc and putting tariff and non trading barriers on Russia is to totally stop their trade. Right. Is an existential threat. So that's why the moving of military hardware to close to the ports of St Petersburg in the north and Rostov on Don in Crimea in the south, that's a military escalation that was met with a military response. The whole idea that Putin attacked for no reason is only believed by people that don't know anything about sea power versus land power, geostrategic theories. And again, I'm talking about my hand or spike men. Brzezinski George Kennan, that whole thought went. So it's not a he was provoked. Putin was provoked for decades and and was very patient about it. Again, I want to say this. I would not want to play chess against President Putin, nor do I want to play chess against President Trump. Both of those guys don't think like the rest of the sheep. I mean lemmings around the world. Right. So I'm just I'm just curious how he's going to play out of this. Right. Because it's the knock on effects is if he does not, is how is he going to replace knock on as in neo cons? No, no, no.
[00:36:12] I mean, the domino effect of they lose Germany, they lose Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Austria. Right. We said about that, about Switzerland, because they've always been a neutral country and they're not going to begin with and they're not NATO to begin with. They're in the Schengen. Right. Not the other. Okay. And then but Austria is is is neutral as it's not in NATO's, but it's in the EU. They use the euro. So those countries would be you would be leaving the EU and Germany would be leaving the EU, NATO, if all the bases had to move different people. And the GW videos they're talking about what Poland would would would, would welcome them. Right. Right. That would create a situation where more U.S. military hardware moves onto the border of Russia. But then in between, you're going to have a non EU non naito or the possibility of a non EU non-NATO bloc forming in Central Europe. So you're going to have then in that area, you're going to have well, you're going to have the Intermarium plan in reverse. You're going to have the Baltics, Poland and and Ukraine. That should be neutral. You're going to have them heavily fortified on the Russian border, cut off from the German world and the Danube River Valley, Slavic world, where all of those countries are becoming populists anyway. So the question is, how does Trump keep them from rebuilding Nord Stream and not trigger this big populist movement all down the Denver Danube River Valley countries? So it's not just Germany leaving the petrodollar, the EU and Naito, but it's about ten countries all exiting the petrodollar, the EU and NATO's. What advice would you give President Trump today? Did I just put you on the spot? No.
[00:38:02] You get into another can of worms there. That makes it tricky. This is a horrifically huge topic, George. Yeah, And if you and you your intro that we've used on maybe six podcasts now says it dramatically. Who's going to pay for the debt when the U.S. Petro dollar goes away? Yeah, I want to say two things that are very important. Okay. So you should probably add the strategy stuff about production and wealth so people understand that two minute clip explains the essence of geopolitical theory, and it comes from Mahone, who is a big reader of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Okay. So that we put two clips together because that says it all and got it just applying those existing theories into current strategies. Okay. So now you have the problem that I know the neocons are really clear are really gloating over Assad abdicating from Syria. They're really gloating over that. And I'm talking about it's prearranged because the Syrian army, well, they weren't paid. Morale was low. They walked off the job and basically let it happen on purpose. You know, it's like scenario, right. So what happened there was, okay, Assad just gave up. That's part of it. And Putin didn't want to want to pay $50 billion a year to support that because the United States already controlled the oil. So they lost the oil revenue. So it's no longer funding. Do they want to pay, you know, 50 billion per year in perpetuity? Obviously, they decide it's sunk cost fallacy and they cut it loose because his family was already in Moscow. And charity, it literally looks like they just said, to hell with it. Right. So the bases that the Russians left were not overrun by the U.S. They were allowed to pack up and leave while the Turks while the Turks moved their military into those bases.
[00:39:55] So, obviously, it's prearranged. All right. So now what happened? So. The big thing is I for the first day or two, I thought, this thing too is So I start again. I just stare at pipeline maps and then you start to figure out what actually happened. So you have a degree of coordination here. So, yeah, early on did not stab Putin in the back at all. Now that I. Yeah, I'm taking back my initial response because the only reason why you want to have bases just in Latakia or Tartus or anywhere for that matter is to promote commerce. You know, back to the original by hand theory. Well, if you don't have commerce over there, if it's just a net liability and not an asset. Yeah, right. That's just economic. That's just a no brainer. That's right. It looks like that's what Putin did. And Assad said, I'll just go into retirement in Russia and Russia. Okay. He's not going to spend his whole life in this perpetual war. I totally get it. I mean, some people were like, he was a coward. He backed down. He gave up. I don't know. Do you want do you really want to do that forever? I mean, at some point I want to retire, too. You know? Like, anyway, he just chose to retire. So then what's the next play? Well, what people? I don't see anybody talking about it, but it should just be obvious by looking at pipeline maps. It went from a duopoly between Putin and Erdogan having pipelines into Europe to now it's a monopoly, right? Everyone, and this is what I was getting to in the last. I mean, too bad we can't go on this every day because there's so much news happening.
[00:41:24] Erdogan now has a monopoly of gas going to Europe. So he's still going to take the Russian natural gas to Caspian Sea oil and gas and send it to Germany or send it to Europe via pipeline. Right. Well, now he gets to charge whatever prices he wants. He just has to put it just under the price of LNG. Well, Germany, Germany can't can't stay in business under those conditions either now. And when you take a look at I talked well, I want to Gazprom years ago and the amount of money, it is ridiculously cheap. He was the head of their finance group for Gazprom. And yeah, he was. How cheap can they produce the oil? I mean, the natural gas is just unbelievably cents. We're talking cents. We're not talking. We're talking cents. When you don't amortize the pipeline in. But financially, you amortize a pipeline in over decades anyway. So it's just unbelievable. Yeah. It pays itself. I mean, advertising costs out for 20 years and it comes down to dirt cheap and it's good way longer. Of course there's maintenance costs and stuff like that. But yeah, that point is now it's a really tricky play because what just happened with the Syria thing? Well, we you know, for one thing, Putin is can now focus on backing Iran because you have to control that. Landbridge Remember, I keep on saying geostrategic theory is about controlling maritime chokepoints, riverine chokepoints and choke points. Well, now the choke points of linking the petroleum fields of the Caspian and Persian Gulf area is is that land bridge between the Caspian Sea and and the Persian Gulf, which is where Iran is. So they want to control Enbridge and Iran is in the way, but as it is.
[00:43:20] Right. So then, you know, that's when you get into where I ended it on one of the previous interviews is Israel not just is going to are they going to use bombing the nuclear sites in Iran as a pretext to do battlefield shaping operations, to ignite a controversy, to ignite the to get the Baluch separatists in the south and the Azeri separatists and the Kurdish separatists in the north to do a civil war in Iran, or that's what you're trying to induce. And if it's rare, if Israel attacks Iran, is it going to be a limited strike? This is what we're looking forward to see, whether it's a limited strike or a wider strike. If it's a wider strike to wipe out the IRGC, well, then it's not just a limited strike. It's a battlefield shaping operation that if that happens, it's not going to be reported in U.S. media. But the Indian media will be reporting that nonstop. Wow. Shift over. I just depending on where the news is in the world. If I hear something on Western media, I shift to certain regional news that I know will cover it much more accurately. Right. That's what I do. Because, I mean, I've been living abroad for most of the last 15 years, so I know what Yeah, I work with a lot of interpreters and I know I just, you know, they they've walked me through this before. All right. Well, you don't know. You don't know 37 languages, George. No, I'm too busy doing geostrategic theory, among other things. But I think I speak Klingon. But we'll leave that alone. So now it's actually Erdogan and Putin that by withholding the gas prices, control the fake. Of the EU, NATO. And nobody's talking about it.
[00:45:01] But if you if you stare at pipeline maps long enough. Okay. I've been doing this. I've been staring at pipeline maps for logistical supply route planning since 2011 when I was back. So this is this is not something that's new. It's been evolving. Right. All right. And then all the different, you know, railroad routes and pipeline routes. And you're going to use the alfalfa, you know, the old Baghdad German railway system to bypass the Suez Canal. There's a whole bunch of issues in that. Are they going to build a Ben-Gurion Canal through Israel? I mean, these plans have been around for a long time. Well, no. So, yeah, I was in I was in these economic development strategies because you have economic development strategies that are all about. Riccardo Comparative advantages and economic efficiencies. Yeah. Geo strategic theories of, well, you want to reroute the pipelines, reroute the railroads because you're rerouting the profits. Right. So you have these different strategies. And then, okay, if you're a Jeffrey Sachs kind of economist, you're just going to be looking at political and economic development theory in Ricardo comparative advantage terms, and you're going to be like, okay, you've got raw materials here, factories here, you got to put it together. What kind of logistical supply route structure do you need? Well, when you do that, you're rerouting the profits and then you get into national interests and then geopolitical strategies. So that's why I always say and you got my kind of integrated analysis is economic, political, political, economic development theory of what it should be. And then you can see what the geo strategies are of, you know, what what trading bloc interests are. And then you got the third function, which is then economic warfare or military warfare targeting strategies.
[00:46:47] It's those three elements combined into my models. So now since all of the natural gas pipelines or most of them coming from Eurasia, I need to need to say go through Arctic article. So now Erdogan is now in a position to decide whether the Eurasia gets enough enough gas at a cheap enough price to keep the German industrial powers going. Wow. So now he can directly start controlling EU and Naito politics now. So that's why the neocons gloating over the big victory. Putin lost. Putin lost. I think they jumped from the frying pan into the fire. Wow. Well, I want to know how Trump is going to negotiate that. He's he's a 4D chess player. Way better than me, right? Absolutely. So you. Yeah, my yeah, he's there. And I'm sitting here. I mean, come on. Yeah. There's a reason why he's a billionaire. I'm not. All right. Give me both. I'm on the back of a backhoe, you know. Go figure that. Which is. Which is more fun than what I'm So the podcast host. A backhoe operator. Okay. And then president. Okay, Actually, I'll take the backup because it's more relaxing. Trust me. Yes, it is. I enjoy the relaxing. Yeah, I'd rather play with toys. So now. Yeah, I just want to see how he's going to play this. Because if he. If he threatens to affect the German economy, the AfD takes power, and then they're like, Well, we're going to lose the American market anyway. But at least if we if we get Russian natural gas cheap, at least our industry's competitive everywhere else in the world. And then if the EU puts tariffs on Germany, because if Germany leaves the EU and Naito and they slap big tariffs on them, well when their voting base goes to get their cars repaired and they have to pay twice as much for Mercedes and BMW parts and Porsche parts, which are already kind of catastrophically high.
[00:48:42] And because they're dealer only parts, basically, then that's going to anger all the German car owners in the EU and in the United States. And that's going to be a canary pressure. So it's a way it is going to export inflation and these costs of energy to everybody else. Now, the the United States has been using the petrodollar system to export our inflation. Right. It's going to reverse the exporting of inflation is going to come back the other direction based on energy cost production. That's exactly right. Well, I'm just wondering and I'm not I'm using Germany as an example, but I keep on throwing in there. Nissan and Mitsubishi are going out of business. Right. So it's the same thing is that I've been talking about the axial ends of Eurasia since I came on and actually for a couple of years now, because it's the the the Rim Land versus Heartland strategy is for the sea powers to control all the rim land all the way around Eurasia. Right. Clearly the industrial the Marshall Plan is based on rebuilding Western Europe. You know, the canter the Cannon Fire Power Center doctrine on controlling Western Europe to to him in the Warsaw Pact to stop communism. And the same thing with the first island chain. Which is started in Japan and South Korea, to keep to limit communist expansion on that side. And then I thought when when the Soviet Union collapsed, all that would end. It would go back to Ricardo free trade. Well, I'm admitted, Jeffrey Sachs, is it kept on going? Right now, I'm like, it's not about communism. It's about the global political center of gravity shifting. That's what it's trying to stop. Wow. So I don't know. We were playing what we're going to play that Alex Cristoforo.
[00:50:28] And we get we get we've got about five more minutes and I can play this if you want to. So it's teed. We'll do it next time. Let's just end it here. Okay. Go ahead and end it and we'll pick it up. Okay. Play that and then we'll we'll end it and we'll do a summary and then go on. So I want to preface this this clip with Alex Cristoforo, because they do a really good new show every day. But it's not a geopolitical strategy show. I do the land Power versus Sea Power Strategies and the Canon five power center strategies argument because it's predictive analysis. You have a sea power encirclement strategy and you have a land power counter strategy. So once you know a strategy versus counter strategy, once one side does something that start to predict the move of the other. So it's predictive analysis. That's the value of what I do different than a news show. All right. Let me let me play the clip to your head. But anyway, that's a whole different story. I talked about it on a different video. So basically, you have you have turkstream and you have the U.S. LNG. This is from Zero Hedge. Europe has gone from relying entirely on cheap Russian gas to relying entirely on expensive U.S. LNG. The price of freedom. It is the price of freedom, everybody. That's what it is. Yeah. Turkey controls the gas going to the European Union. The pipeline gas. The pipeline gas now is controlled by Erdogan. He also controls the refugee flow into the European Union. 3.2 million refugees in Turkey that he could release at any moment into into Europe. Now, you know why Ursula went to Turkey a couple of weeks ago and gave Erdogan a really nice Christmas gift of €1 billion.
[00:52:15] Now, you know why that Erdogan? Erdogan has the EU by the honest man. Congratulations, Europe. You went from cheap, reliable Russian gas, dependable, very dependable Russian gas from the times of the Soviet Union. That's how dependable it was. And now you're 100% dependent on Turkey and Erdogan not only for gas, but also for for refugees, for for preventing refugees from flooding into Europe. Yeah. Boy, it doesn't sound like a good deal to me. But anyway, what do I know? Ursula knows better. So thank you. Yusei Sikorski, the man who posted Annex. Thank You, USA. When Gilligan and the skipper blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, he posted on X. Putin spent billions building Nord Stream to circumvent Ukraine and blackmail Eastern Europe with the threat of cutting off gas supplies. Today, Ukraine cut off his ability to export gas to direct to the EU another victory after the enlargement of Naito by Finland and Sweden. Yeah, that's right. Sikorski. Another victory. Another. Another freak. Wow. I hate to end the clip there because the next couple of minutes is good too. Why don't we pick the next couple of minutes up on the next episode? Okay, Start there. This is nuts because the elites who are millionaires are a tip. Like, it's a cycle. It's like a 17 year old girl, you know, mean girls show. They're playing this tit for tat and they're crashing. They're crushing the economies and all the blue collar jobs because they don't care. They're making they don't care. Hours a year in the international markets. They're not in. They're not trying to. They don't have a factory job that they're dependent on. Wow. I'll tell you what. All right. You want to pick it up next time because we.
Stuart Turley [00:54:03] Wow, we cannot record enough of these shows because Americans are in this little bubble with CNN and Fox.
[00:54:10] Right. I think you bring up a great point. And I think President Trump has attributed podcasts in alternative media and X for one of the key reasons why he's won. But I'm hoping that he listens to our podcast from the standpoint that his and his administration coming in and his advisors, the General Flynn's of the world, and Pete Hegg says and the Chris writes of the world, he has an all star coming in. They don't have the information they need.
[00:54:44] Yeah, I think they're very good at domestic policy. But again, I keep on saying there's not a lot of people there, people that do the integrated geostrategic theories. They work for BlackRock, right?
[00:54:55] They don't. They they take. The Economist. They send them to your grand strategy courses and then they build their own models behind the scenes. And they're proprietary.
[00:55:04] Right? Wow. This was a bunch of knowledge, knowledge, input today. George, I didn't want to use that bomb word.
[00:55:13] Yeah, right, right, right. I developed mine working overseas.
[00:55:17] Right.
[00:55:18] So in a limited, you know, for a limited for limited reasons.
Stuart Turley [00:55:22] Well, with that, George, let's go ahead and end it here. We'll pick it up with the beginning of this video again on the next one. And until then, we'll have your LinkedIn as a way to contact you in case you are a oil and gas or energy expert around the world. A CEO wanting to do geopolitical analyzation before you put a pipeline in or before you build a refinery. Call George. And if you are a person wanting to understand we want George to be successful. So I'll have your contact information in the show notes. Thank you, George, for stopping by today
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