The weaponization of the US Dollar and sanctions directly impact energy prices and are a major contribution to the potential pending wars.
George McMillan, Founder and CEO of G3Strat Group, a geopolitical historian and current energy expert, stops by the podcast. This is the second of our podcast series, which talks about the academic scholars and grand strategies taught at the military academies and how the current administration uses these strategies.
Our first podcast was a two-hour interview that felt like 5 minutes. The feedback from around the world has been phenomenal, and we started the series to help avoid potential wars.
He points out the key steps this current administration is making and ties the published works of experts on YouTube and other public sources. Just as Michael and I have the “Energy Threads” between our stories every day, George can match stories, books, and theories into an excellent analysis of why the current administration has weaponized the US dollar and imposed sanctions around the world.
George was also on the ground with Michael Yon, an international war correspondent, researching several stories. In my interview with Michael, they looked at the Chinese military base in Panama that is moving military-aged men from around the world to the open US border. This is all tied to energy, as we are also working on the Chinese connection to our grid and their ability to take it down in the case of a military conflict.
Is it incompetence, or is it by design that the world is heading into a potential multi-front war that the US can not win?
Thank you, George, for your service to our country and geopolitical and energy leadership.
Georges’s landing page on the Energy News Beat site is HERE: https://energynewsbeat.co/george-mcmillian/
Follow George on his LinkedIn HERE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-mcmillan-5665b015/
Highlights of the Podcast
01:54 – U.S. Historical Strategy: Overview of the U.S. strategy of containing Russia and China, rebuilding Western Europe and Japan, and countering communism.
06:30 – Energy in Geopolitics: Emphasis on understanding energy in geopolitical realignment, discussing grand strategies, and the role of trade in national power.
11:40 – U.S. German Russo-Japanese Connection: Exploring the geopolitical implications of historical connections, highlighting ongoing conflicts and alliances.
17:54 – Central Asia Geopolitics: Discussion on the ongoing geopolitical struggle in Central Asia, focusing on natural gas integration and proposing a nine-power center doctrine.
21:53 – Silk Road and Belt and Road Initiative: Explaining the original Silk Road’s purpose and Belt and Road Initiative’s maritime strategy, providing insights into China’s energy and geopolitical goals.
27:36 – China-India Rivalry: Highlighting historical rivalry, connecting it to the Belt and Road Initiative, and emphasizing the complexity of geopolitical conflicts in neutral zones.
31:29 – Understanding Human Behavior: Emphasizing the continuum of human behavior and its impact on political-economic development and geostrategic mercantilist theory.
36:04 – Jeffrey Sachs’ Peace Plan: Discussing a peace plan based on mutual trade dependency, addressing negative sum sabotage, and highlighting the continuity of conflicts.
39:45 – Energy Sources and Geopolitics: Exploring the cost dynamics of energy sources, with a focus on Gazprom’s low cost, and underscoring the multifaceted nature of geopolitical and economic discussions.
44:37 – Global Currencies and Challenges: Discussing historical shifts in global currencies and potential challenges arising from growing national debt and interest payments.
50:18 – Sunni-Shia Geopolitical Dynamics: Delving into Sunni-Shia dynamics, pipeline routes, and connecting it to Wesley Clark’s mentioned targets for invasion.
54:30 – Pipeline Routes and Middle East: Exploring geopolitical dynamics around pipeline routes, U.S. and U.K. strategies, and recent events in the Middle East.
58:39 – Russia’s Export-Led Growth: Discussing Russia’s export-led growth model, challenges with oligarchs, and connecting factors to geopolitical strategies and conflicts in Eurasia.
01:04:35 – Changing Geopolitical Landscape: Examining the changing geopolitical landscape, Russia’s integration with China, and rational actor models in global competition.
01:09:06 – Geopolitical Importance of Energy Routes: Underscoring the importance of controlling energy routes, especially in the context of Russia’s integration with China.
01:13:15 – Counter-Strategies and Geopolitical Moves: Emphasizing the need to understand counter-strategies and geopolitical moves in response to U.S. and U.K. strategies.
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– Get in Contact With The Show –
Stuart Turley [00:00:03] Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Energy News Beat podcast. My name’s Stu Turley, president CEO of the Sandstone Group. I’ve got a series with George McMillan, and it’s probably the most single important series that I’ve done as a podcast host. Have you ever wondered why certain decisions are made or things go the way they go in the energy space around the geopolitical world? George McMillan is a academia geopolitical guru and he has released three articles on the news beat. The last one was U.S. cut off their European allies from affordable energy. Now what? The one before that was Russian natural gas and geopolitical realignment. A reverse domino theory. The geopolitical problem of the U.S. and a German Russo-Japanese connection. All three of those articles are phenomenal. They’re available. They’ll be in the show notes and George’s first podcast in I we recorded for over 2 hours of content. George is knowledgeable. He’s been boots on the ground around the world and I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate it getting to know you, George. George Thank you. You’re the CEO of Macmillan Associates. Thank you. Thank you for stopping by the podcast.
George McMillan [00:01:36] Oh, yeah. Thanks. Lots to. Yeah. And thanks for thanks for putting my work out there, especially in the in the energy sector, because there’s a few things that people really don’t understand. And that’s the role of of of energy and geopolitics.
Stuart Turley [00:01:53] Right.
George McMillan [00:01:54] And they don’t know the grand strategies of. How the United States has been always, you know, since since Kennan’s firepower center doctrine, always trying to surround Russia at first. And then in the 1949, Mao Zedong defeated Chiang Kai shek. Then it was containing Russia and China together to stop communism. Right. But the reverse domino theory. And then. Obviously. Well, what I’ve been looking at in Southeast Asia is looking at the Ho Chi Minh Trail campaign. You know, since 1958, Right. I’ve been riding my motorcycle around, taking a lot of pictures. I’ll be going back, you know, hopefully January, February ish. Right. But. The the whole idea of the United States is they wanted. To rebuild Western Europe and keep that as their allies after World War Two and re industrialize it because the argument was the Morgenthau plan was to keep Germany de industrialized so they can’t start a war again. Right. But then how do you contain Russia? So then the cat argument came from Ambassador George Kennan of you know, you need to re industrialized and rebuild both Germany and France so they can support an army to oppose the spread of communism from from from the Soviet Union. Well as and that also. Since Russia spans such a big, huge part of the Eurasian heartland. You have to rebuild Japan and South and maintain South Korea. You know, you’re getting into my hand seapower versus seapower theory and then hem them in on on the on the Japanese side. So the idea was for the United States to be in power center number one, rebuild Europe in power center. Number two, rebuild Japan and South Korea in power center number three, and then contain Russia in power Center four and China in power Center five. So that’s basically the five power center doctrine.
Stuart Turley [00:04:11] Well.
George McMillan [00:04:12] Okay. It’s just having a discussion offline as we were talking before. It’s an extension of the old British great game of always hemming in the Russian ports in Saint Petersburg, Sebastopol and Vladivostok. See all three that Russia only has three major ports in the subarctic.
Stuart Turley [00:04:35] Right.
George McMillan [00:04:35] They’re all naturally surrounded and hemmed in by islands or seas. Vladivostok is surrounded by Japan. So the United States moved into Japan, wanted to end the Japanese war early with the with the atomic bombs because they didn’t want Russia to take over more of the Koreas. They already took over the Northern Koreas and Sakhalin Island. They didn’t want them to take over the island chain because then the United States couldn’t put its navy in to surround Vladivostok.
Stuart Turley [00:05:09] Right. The sea of our people. And that feeds in right in to Ukraine. And why Russia took Crimea for those eight ports that are in the sub bases, the Black Sea. Even though the Black Sea is in there, as we kind of alluded to. Also on the last podcast, the map that I’m using, George, is the map that was on our article titled The Geopolitical Problem of the German Russo-Japanese Connection. So we’ll take a look at that one and we’ll also have some other ones so producers of it can go and fly that back out. We’ll be all right. So, George, sorry for cutting you off. Just wanted to help get into that because we also covered Gaza on the last one as well, too. But let’s go back on. So those first three were a beautiful summary of the the articles are really going in to your next phase of your next three articles. So as we go over the summary of this, you and I have been having wonderful interaction on the great traction these three stories are getting in our original podcast. It’s nuts how far this article has been going.
George McMillan [00:06:26] Yeah, you’re going to put up the fourth article today.
Stuart Turley [00:06:30] Yes.
George McMillan [00:06:31] And yeah, because okay, in this forum, no one’s going to read. No one is going to read a hundred page book. So we got to do this, you know, two or three pages at a time. A people don’t know the role of energy in geopolitical realignment. And to the second problem is people have never heard of the Postman Post Mackinder Sea power versus sea power and sea power versus land power, grand strategies. Those are taught, you know, some people are like, Why? Why is George? Talking about these obscure theories because it’s what they teach at the military academies in the in in Britain and U.K. And then the Russians picked them up and then they use it to. When you get into. Mackinder. My mahant. Let me let me back up a second. My hand started. The sea power versus sea power theories because it was after after the Civil War era. And and the beginning of the battles with with this with Spain over over Cuba and the Spanish colonies in Latin America and especially the Caribbean. So he was just stating, going back through history of the wars between the naval wars between Great Britain and Portugal and and Spain and especially France. And. He’s going over those mercantilist strategic plans, right. To to stop another country’s trade and make it well, it’s beggar thy neighbor policies is what they called it.
Stuart Turley [00:08:19] Okay.
George McMillan [00:08:20] I had a Professor Schafer at Rutgers. He lives up in northern Thailand now. That always drilled home what these strategic plans were.
Stuart Turley [00:08:31] Right.
George McMillan [00:08:32] So. What? What? What my hand talked about. Well, he read a lot of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations because that was 1776. So he’s right. So 100 years later, he’s he’s talking about that. And David Ricardo’s Fundamentals of political economy. He he’s really focusing on those things. A country has a production of goods, but it doesn’t become wealth until you can trade it for things that you don’t have but need. And then he goes into you trade out of your strengths for your weaknesses, but you’re also getting allies with it, right? So in in post Clausewitz, he in theory and Bismarck, you’re using your your economy and your infrastructure to drive your military, which then drives your diplomacy. So you get diplomatic, infrastructural, military, economic dime analysis or political military, economic, social, infrastructural, informational, your transportation, communications. When you get into economic theory, especially the solo swan models or the are the Rostow growth and development models. That part of the mantra is really advanced with modern economics.
Stuart Turley [00:09:51] Right?
George McMillan [00:09:51] So a way to stop. The economic growth theories and the national power measures of promise in dime is to stop somebodies trade. So once you understand that that’s the basis of of Kennan, who’s who was from Yale. That’s his focus on hemming in all the Russians ports on both sides, both on the European side and the Pacific Rim side. So then that explains why we resurrected the Japanese and industry after World War Two. It explains why we maintained the foothold in in South Korea and then explains the whole. Southeast Asia, French Indochina, Vietnam War history and why there’s so much focus. On, especially while it was start out in Lao in Northern Vietnam, and then it just kept on spreading.
Stuart Turley [00:10:58] Right.
George McMillan [00:10:58] It’s the whole idea is not just to contain communism is to control the rim land to all around Eurasia in order to block the heartland. And the original Mackinder.
Stuart Turley [00:11:16] Speak.
George McMillan [00:11:17] Because Russia changed from Soviet Union to Russia or back and forth.
Stuart Turley [00:11:22] Right.
George McMillan [00:11:23] Different political systems. You know, Putin spent a lot of money in rebuilding the Orthodox Church because he says atheistic Marxism is just a big it’s a big nothing. It’s a real failure. So once you know.
Stuart Turley [00:11:40] That when I was listening, I listened to that first podcast over five times. I’ve been in the car a lot, a lot of hours and everything. Your lights in the way that you explained all of this was phenomenal. I started having some serious lights as everything started going off and as we talked about the Crimea, as it feeds into today, that history and we’re going to have some of those as the transcript comes comes out on this. The Ukraine war was intentional from Putin to come down and get those bases. As we kind of talked about, the has the whole nado kind of thing in there. You sent me also some an article yesterday with why nado and I don’t want to go into this because this will be covered I’m sure, in some of your your other things that keeping everything that you’re discussing right now in current geopolitical is the point I’m trying to make. You just explained all of these things and when our last podcast, you led it right up to why Gaza was going on. So this is your article. And the reason I’m bringing this up is your article titled The Geopolitical Problems of a U.S. German Russo-Japanese Connection actually digs into the potential of not having an ally in Japan. Yes, Everything you described is a real problem for a government that does not think correctly or not excuse me, that thinks aggressively in and thinks that everybody’s going to be their ally, not everybody is going to be your ally, because the key point out of those first three in the fourth being released today is the fact that our government is assuming governments will be our allies, but we have not been supporting their low cost energy, George. We don’t support their low cost energy and we deprive them of them. The US set up Japan with a heck of an industrial machine. We upgraded their machines and their things and that’s why they were economically very successful after World War Two. The best thing that could ever happen to a country is have the U.S. come in and beat them and then get their manufacturing and everything up again. And you nailed it with everything that you just talked about in how the decisions were made with This is kind of a confirmation that I think I understand what you’re saying, and that is we were deciding on how to get Germany either to set them and tie them up for success in industrialize them. Was all of that a fairly consistent correct statement?
George McMillan [00:14:49] Yeah, Yeah. The Marshall Plan did that.
Stuart Turley [00:14:53] So everything we’re talking about applies to today. And I just that’s the key point for people listening to this in listening to your series.
George McMillan [00:15:04] Yeah. There’s a few things I want to bring up, you know, from the way that you stated that.
Stuart Turley [00:15:11] Yes.
George McMillan [00:15:12] Is. And the reason why I went back to the great game and and later on, you know, okay, we already have a bunch of papers that we need to go over.
Stuart Turley [00:15:21] Right.
George McMillan [00:15:22] Down the road when you actually we actually need to get into the history of the of the of the grand strategies.
Stuart Turley [00:15:30] Right.
George McMillan [00:15:30] What I want people to focus on right here because we get it. We did the two hour interview where I went basically counterclockwise around Eurasia because I like to do that pretty much. Or did we.
Stuart Turley [00:15:42] Go until I kept interrupting.
George McMillan [00:15:47] And we still need and we’re still dozens of papers away from getting in to Turkey because that’s really old. A very strategic plan.
Stuart Turley [00:15:54] Right?
George McMillan [00:15:55] Because we need to we need to focus. We need to control for one variable at a time and just talk about Russia and energy.
Stuart Turley [00:16:01] Right.
George McMillan [00:16:02] And and how is pipelines going out to the other industrial power centers? So from the heartland to the coastal rim land and in Mackinder language.
Stuart Turley [00:16:15] Right.
George McMillan [00:16:15] We’re focusing on that. The other thing I want to focus on, when you go back to the great game in the history of the grand strategies is this is a continual war over the last 400 years.
Stuart Turley [00:16:28] Wow.
George McMillan [00:16:29] Okay, So people need to stop thinking, oh, well, Putin invaded Ukraine and in February of of 2022. No, they need to see this as an ongoing war. And then what? Speakman called, you know, the Yale professor. The the neutral zones. So Cannon was talking about you rebuild you rebuild Germany and push on the Warsaw Pact, countries going west to east. We are the agency. Well, both the Brits and the Americans got rid of Mossadeq in Iran to try to break up. A Rush US-Soviet alliance with Iran. So they would get key access in the Persian Gulf and and the. And the Indian Ocean. So people need to see this as just an ongoing conflict. Also, again, we talked about Operation Cyclone of Zbigniew Brzezinski. And you know again, Harvard Grand Strategies. He took to the Yale seminars with Kissinger. And and Klaus Schwab in 67. They’re okay. They’re all in the same mix.
Stuart Turley [00:17:53] Wow.
George McMillan [00:17:54] So it’s to the the foray into into Central Asia is always to try to to try to break up Russian and Chinese pipeline integration and railway integration to keep them from integrating because the firepower center doctrine is how do you surround them and then divide and conquer them. But people need to see it as an ongoing war and what the what the first paper was about. On the on the domino theory was. It’s actually not the spread of communism. That was the big worry. It’s actually the natural gas integration and permits idiom analysis that actually changes everything. That’s actually, you know, because I was I went in and out of college. So, yeah, when I went back and finished my finished my undergrad degree and, and the and the Berlin Wall fell and, and communism fell and all of that, we thought it was great. And it, it and there’s a bunch of options we need to get into, too. But yeah, if we could just get into we’ll go over the map. And then get into because I already went over enough of what the five power center doctrine was.
Stuart Turley [00:19:18] Right.
George McMillan [00:19:19] I’ve done papers on and podcasts and slides that. On what a Rousseau centric sixth Power doctrine is on.
Stuart Turley [00:19:28] Right.
George McMillan [00:19:28] And then going forward again, this is going to take a lot of a lot of papers and and a lot of podcasts if we’re trying to keep it down to under an hour.
Stuart Turley [00:19:39] Right.
George McMillan [00:19:41] To explain to put it in the nine power center doctrine, because you have to explain under what conditions. The the alliances will break down. So if you use the F, if you use the nine power centers as the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia, India, China, South Korea and Japan.
Stuart Turley [00:20:07] Right.
George McMillan [00:20:08] And then the other ones are secondary or tertiary powers. You can kind of see if they get a new government, because democracies, you know, different political parties and factions and ruling coalitions come into power. Right. We might reverse the old one. That’s what democracies do. So you can start to look at these things and start to say, okay. If you have a change in government because of an election in this country. They’re going to get cheap natural gas and then. What? Then there are industrial industries are going to become more cost competitive globally and they’re going to move ahead. Then another country is going to jump on and say, well, we got to stay competitive, so we’re going to buy natural gas in pipelines. Then they’re going to jump into it. So it’s no set order. I have it set up where you can just monitor it and see see how the internal elections are going. Knowing already knowing that. This is going to be in. So the first batch of papers is just about the Russian connection. So the second batch is going to be about. The the Chinese Silk Road and Belt Road, not just supply line and realignment and how they work together.
Stuart Turley [00:21:32] So everybody throws around George and I cannot wait for this series because everybody goes, Oh, it’s the Belt and Road, or it’s the Silk Road or it’s the belting, so whatever. Nobody really understands the difference. Oh, I can’t wait to hear your explanations on this.
George McMillan [00:21:48] Yeah. Just to give people a quick overview on what that is.
Stuart Turley [00:21:52] Right.
George McMillan [00:21:53] The original Silk Road. Was was to build pipelines and railroad infrastructure, upgrade the existing Soviet infrastructure where it existed, and put new pipelines to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan where it didn’t exist before. And they wanted to get into Iran because Iran is one of the biggest natural gas reserves in the world. So if. Once the Soviet Union fell, they wanted to move into that area before the Soviet Union, before Russia could could, you know, could collect itself and and and redevelop and establish itself. So they wanted to move in there and establish that because with their growing economy there. Their energy demands went through the roof. They were self-sufficient, but the more they industrialized, their higher their living standards. Got more people get air conditioners, refrigerators, phones, cars, then the more energy that they need for that living standard. So that you almost have like an or not an excellent but a geometric increase of their energy consumptions. So they needed to get. They needed to go in there and get to natural gas before anybody else did, before the West did. And before Russia reestablished itself. So they made a mad dash with the Silk Road to take the natural gas out of the Caspian Sea region and move it into Kashgar, into a Rumsey so they could get it into into Beijing and Shanghai and Hong Kong and everything else. Right. So the first Silk Road program is just to get that established. Now there’s that. They run into another problem. Of them, of course, what they call the Malacca Strait dilemma of. With their further increase of energy needs, even after they did that, they’re still, you know, getting 80 or 90% of their energy from from the Arabian Peninsula sent through them, sent through the Strait of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca. Then it goes through the. Through the different islands. So the idea there is to is to put ports. On the end of the Silk Road program and the end of the Silk Road Project and Chabahar port. What our port Karachi and truck put out Myanmar oc I name those in geographical order, not chronological order. But each one of those things does something very specific as far as being able to get. Cargo ships or tanker ships to one of those ports and then try to ship their cargo and or gas through pipelines and railroads. Into Kashgar, Urumqi, or in the case of the jackpot port in Myanmar from the Bay of Bengal into Kunming, Yunnan, China.
Stuart Turley [00:25:11] Mm hmm. So.
George McMillan [00:25:14] Each one bypasses. Chose a maritime choke point so the U.S. Navy can’t cut it off.
Stuart Turley [00:25:22] Right.
George McMillan [00:25:23] Because they want to end the century of humiliation. Of the of the colonial era. Plus, Mao Tse tung did not like did not like being treated as a second citizen by Joseph Stalin.
Stuart Turley [00:25:40] Right.
George McMillan [00:25:41] So, again, they moved the Belt and Road Initiative is to secure energy and not be the second fiddle to Russia anymore.
Stuart Turley [00:25:50] Right.
George McMillan [00:25:51] And then the. The Belt and Road is a maritime strategy to get access to the Indian Ocean so the U.S. can hem them in with the U.S. naval bases on the first island chain in the Pacific.
Stuart Turley [00:26:10] Oh.
George McMillan [00:26:12] So each. Yeah, I know we’re going out of order here, but that’s okay.
Stuart Turley [00:26:17] I just made a little light, went back on. I got about 19 other things, but this is great. Keep going.
George McMillan [00:26:23] Yeah. It doesn’t matter which order you explain this stuff in, because it’s. Everything’s a separate aspect that adds up. Yep. And it only, again, I go back to the Firepower Center doctrine, because if you understand how the United States and the UK have always been trying to hem in Russia because they don’t want they don’t want the biggest. Raw materials producer connected to the biggest industrial power centers, because eventually they’re going to start, you know, with with dependency theory. They’re going to start wanting to move the value out of production into the heartland.
Stuart Turley [00:27:01] Exactly.
George McMillan [00:27:02] And then they’re going to industrialize. So then you get into the different economic development theories you have going on. And what was Putin’s thesis on It was using raw materials to boost to boost the economic sectoral development. So you get into a lot of different economic theories here. Do you want me to go into? Okay.
Stuart Turley [00:27:29] Yeah. So I’m following you, George. I’m getting tired flying around the world, but I’m having fun, so you just keep going.
George McMillan [00:27:36] Oh, yeah. When I. When I go on my vacations and ride around on my motorcycles or whatever, I love to see these. I’d also do the little fact finding missions all over the place. You just. You learn so much just by going and looking at these infrastructural projects. So. To get out of. So for China not to be cut off on the Malacca Strait, that’s the purpose of building the ports and railway pipeline systems on the Indian Ocean. But it also surrounds India. India and China have been rivals since the 1950s because Mao Zedong suspected India of colluding with Stalin. To thwart Chinese advancement. Real or imagined. The Indians say that’s nonsense. He’s just paranoid. But that’s why Mao Tong wanted to start moving into Tibet and East Turkistan, which is Xinjiang province.
Stuart Turley [00:28:46] Right.
George McMillan [00:28:47] And start pushing in the Himalayas to push back India because he was paranoid. That continues with the Belt and Road program. And, you know, 70 years later or 60 years later of then surrounding India. And by going through Pakistan, Iran and then Myanmar, neither sides. So when when we get to why these two things are critical later on. You have different overt and covert operations trying to either extend these these infrastructural projects or block them. So that’s why there’s always so much conflict in these new and using statements terms in these neutral zone areas. And people need to look at this as just a continual war because it has been a continual war. You know, for a very long time now. Right. You know, especially since the British left India in 1947. You know, something’s filling that vacuum.
Stuart Turley [00:29:52] Right? Let me just. That’s a great explanation. And I’m just I don’t want to derail us because you and I are out of the same mold. Squirrel. Yeah, just like Tom Kirkman, but. You bring up England and England used to be the good have there. The British sterling pound used to be the world’s global dollar, if you would. Mm hmm. They fell. They. Their policies. They lost the dollar. Once the British sterling pound went away and the U.S. dollar replaced it. I see a pattern happening and I see the U.S. dollar going away. And I think once the demise of the dollar happens, as you point out, once we have the debt at a certain level, this is going to be a whole new world. And we’re following England’s path. But I think we’re going to go down even further. But that’s that’s a whole nother topic. I just wanted to add in there, the importance of everything you just said is also tied to our financial issues coming around the corner. I hope you don’t mind me just saying that. Oh yeah. Podcast listeners need to understand, even though this has been a 70 year discussion that we’ve had right now, everything applies to today. Does that make sense? Yeah.
George McMillan [00:31:21] Okay. It’s in the papers that that you already posted. Like I said, you posted? Yes. You’re going to post a fourth one later on.
Stuart Turley [00:31:28] Yep. Today.
George McMillan [00:31:29] Yeah. Okay. One thing I always stress, it doesn’t matter where the Russian pipelines blow up, it doesn’t matter when they blew up. What? What decade?
Stuart Turley [00:31:38] Right.
George McMillan [00:31:38] Since. The United States and the U.S. and the U.K. are trying to stop two things a natural gas going from the end user to Western Europe. It’s been Germany. Well, and Germany and Italy.
Stuart Turley [00:31:55] Right.
George McMillan [00:31:56] And then the end user in Western Europe paying in a Euro rubles exchange and exiting the petro dollar. I have different some of my MBA friends want me to to not use the petrodollar and the US world reserve currency. They want me to be.
Stuart Turley [00:32:16] A little bit.
George McMillan [00:32:17] More specific in that. But for my case, I want to keep it as simple as possible.
Stuart Turley [00:32:24] Right.
George McMillan [00:32:24] Focus and focus on the geopolitical aspect of it, not the weaponization of the dollar as much.
Stuart Turley [00:32:33] Right.
George McMillan [00:32:34] Okay, so.
Stuart Turley [00:32:35] Now why are they?
George McMillan [00:32:37] And that’s got to be in a separate set of papers that we can’t even get to until March. But behind the scenes with my MBA friends, I focus on that.
Stuart Turley [00:32:46] Wow. That makes sense.
George McMillan [00:32:49] They do. They want to get into it because that’s their area of study. I’m trying to control for one variable at a time and keep everything simple because basically we’ve got to. Give people a 100 page paper, a 100 page book or 200 page book or whatever works out to be two pages at a time.
Stuart Turley [00:33:10] So this is this is not easy.
George McMillan [00:33:13] Yeah. This is going to take this is going to take six months to a year to do. It’s not going to be. Yeah, it’s going to take a while.
Stuart Turley [00:33:20] Right.
George McMillan [00:33:21] And yeah, one thing we noticed in the comment section just yesterday is people read the one two pages, but they didn’t read the other ones. And there’s a lot they’re already lost. You know, that’s.
Stuart Turley [00:33:32] Why that’s why I on our on our Web site, Energy Newsweek.com, we are going to put a page just for you so that we can have it organized in a nice fashion for you so that all these articles are going to be articulated and we can just have it right there. And as we refer these things to everybody, we can say everything on George from the desk of George. So yeah.
George McMillan [00:34:01] Because again, you know.
Stuart Turley [00:34:05] Yeah, we’re.
George McMillan [00:34:05] We’re going we’re going through everything out of order, but it doesn’t mean it’s. There is no particular order here.
Stuart Turley [00:34:12] Okay.
George McMillan [00:34:13] One thing I was talking about, because there’s so much to learn, is just. One thing is that people have to understand because, you know, Jeffrey Sachs talks about it in his in his interviews that he’s been been doing like a lot this past year. He’s been very vocal, see, in development, in development economics, you’re talking about passage of some gains.
Stuart Turley [00:34:36] Right.
George McMillan [00:34:37] Okay. So the way I put human behavior in my unified behavioral theory models, which is a separate channel.
Stuart Turley [00:34:45] Right?
George McMillan [00:34:45] There is two extremes of human behavior. One, because everything is nominal continuum is when you start to build measurement systems, you start with that, then go to interval ordinal and ratio models. Right? Right. So. Is you break everything down to a continuum of full continuum of human behavior. So you got positive mutual, some gains on one side and you have sabotage on the other. So you are on one half of the continuum. You’re going to have gradations of mutual, some positive, some gains on the other side. You’re going to have zero sum extraction. Where one person takes 100% from the other. And then on the end of it, you have negative self-sabotage behavior. So political economic development theory from. Adam Smith Base Theory and Ricardo trade theory is based on positive some mutual some game. Geostrategic mercantilist theory is negative. Some sabotage. So people have to realize. Different government agencies, overt and covert. Work on different behavioral dynamics.
Stuart Turley [00:36:03] Oh.
George McMillan [00:36:04] So Jeffrey Sachs is a development economist and he wanted. A content peace plan. Of mutual trade dependency. Of democracies. So he wanted. The West. To interact with with Central Europe as a as a neutral zone where you don’t put tanks or rockets in a neutral zone.
Stuart Turley [00:36:36] Right.
George McMillan [00:36:36] And then economically integrate Russia with Europe because democracies don’t go to war. And trade alliances don’t go to war because you’re going to ruin both your economies if you go to war. I mean, you lose money. You’re not making money.
Stuart Turley [00:36:53] Right.
George McMillan [00:36:54] But what he’s been talking about in his podcast for the past. For the past year. I mean, he’s really he’s really hot under the collar about this. Is he thinks the United States and I agree with him totally the United States should have gone into an interdependence model and not and not a negative sum sabotage strategy like that.
Stuart Turley [00:37:18] Right.
George McMillan [00:37:18] So the negative sum sabotage strategy is the covert agencies operating in what Speakman called the rim. Yeah, the the rim land and the neutral zone. The neutral zone being really Central Asia.
Stuart Turley [00:37:33] Right.
George McMillan [00:37:34] So we. With the Brzezinski, Stansfield Turner. Operation Cyclone. The idea was, one, the Mujahideen destabilize the southern republics of Russia. Right. And then try to get all the oil and natural gas. Out of there into the west by pipeline. So this none of this is new. This is a continual war. Most of my lifetime, basically. Actually. Wow. So if people just look at this as ongoing, then they’ll start to understand why there’s all these conflict. Because you have. Different ethnic groups. The British have always done this, played one ethnic group off of another. They play this sort of PWN jobs and and a whole bunch of other things that’s been going on for a long time. When you start to see these, okay, like in Myanmar, you have all these factions. And that and the 1027 alliance.
Stuart Turley [00:38:40] Right.
George McMillan [00:38:41] That all of a sudden are in their training videos, their troops are out there doing all these military training exercises, and now they have weapons, they have this and that and the other thing. Well, the only way that that kind of guns and ammo falls out of the sky is by cargo helicopter. And only nation states. Again, not focusing on any particular country because there’s so many covert agencies operating in these areas. Just look at a map and and Stevie Wonder could see it. Which ones? Because India is a rival with China. India doesn’t want to be surrounded by China. The U.S. and the U.K. want to maintain that Malacca Strait choke point, along with all the other maritime choke points. So people just look at a map of the choke points. I’m focusing on Malacca and Strait of Hormuz, but there’s other ones. You know, Suez Canal is obviously one strait. Ahmed Bab is another one in the Red Sea. You know, you can go down the list.
Stuart Turley [00:39:45] Yeah. The Red Sea is where Yemen just just to bring in I’m willing make this one comment is they just had Yemen who is dropping some missiles, interrupting traffic right there. Yeah.
George McMillan [00:40:03] Yeah, well, we’ll get into that.
Stuart Turley [00:40:05] I just was saying that for our podcast listeners, because we’ve been running stories all over about that.
George McMillan [00:40:11] Yeah, that’s a whole nother can of worms. We touched on that because again, it looks like. You know, reading the Institute for the Study of War, it looks like they want you know, they want that war with Iran because they again, they need to build that pipeline underneath the Caspian to go through Armenia. We spent a lot of money and influence in the election in Armenia with get passionate and elected. And we spent what, in 2000 for a lot of money to you know, to. Move their election, move the elections in Georgia to get Mikheil Saakashvili elected there, to get NATO’s UK friendly governments in power. Right. Same thing in Myanmar. So this whole area, this whole thing is they have a problem. Liquid LNG is way more expensive than natural gas shipped by pipeline. It’s a sea power coping strategy to feed its allies, but at a 30% higher cost. That’s what the opening papers are about. It’s going to since energy is an every product, every good and service. An increase in energy costs is a cost push inflation that drives the other inflations because then they’ve got to cover it with monetary inflation. Yeah, I think I have a degraded living standard and then people are going to buy less and something else.
Stuart Turley [00:41:42] Right.
George McMillan [00:41:43] And then the industries are going to go out of business. Germany’s been de-industrialization because you need to move. You need to move your heavy industry close to where the cheap energy is.
Stuart Turley [00:41:57] Exactly. It’s all about the energy. Yeah. Just as Georges is a side note, I visited with one of the head guys at Gazprom years ago. He was one of the. He was in charge of their entire investor relations thing. 13 under $0.13 to market to consumer is Gazprom’s cost.
George McMillan [00:42:21] Oh. Amortized over. Over. How many years does he do? They amortize because he does the inside numbers. Obviously I don’t have.
Stuart Turley [00:42:28] Yeah, he didn’t. He didn’t give it to me. But if you think you know a normal Ah Henry Hub price right now is what. Let me look I can tell you you hear him say it is. 2.50 $2.50. U.S. can’t produce it for that cheap. So I just want our listeners to understand less than $0.10 compared to 50. You know, that’s. Oh, yeah. I mean, so when you’re sitting there thinking of price to market, that’s a lot of profit. And then, um, and not trying to interrupt on this, but uh, yesterday Putin put out a note saying Russia is becoming the new global growth center as the West rests on its laurels. The GDP for Russia is up to 3.5% on their GDP this year. Their energy has been exporting without even concern with all the sanctions and everything else. So I just want to take that tiny second break right back in to where you were, because our folks need to understand everything you’re describing has ramifications today.
George McMillan [00:43:47] Yeah, it’s.
Stuart Turley [00:43:48] Yeah.
George McMillan [00:43:49] I just kind of shake my head because. Yeah, this isn’t going to be done in a one hour podcast. This isn’t going to be done in a month. This has got to be an ongoing discussion because this is there’s so many facets to this. It’s going to take a very long time. Right. Okay. Like the one guy, somebody in the comment section said, oh, no, we didn’t separate the the allies. The allies from from energy here. You know, here is a chart. Well, no, the problem.
Stuart Turley [00:44:20] With the.
George McMillan [00:44:21] Chart is accurate. I get it.
Stuart Turley [00:44:24] Right.
George McMillan [00:44:25] It’s it’s it’s 30% more or it’s. Yeah, the it depends on where the energy’s coming from, what it is. Right. And how you’re amortizing the cost over decades or not.
Stuart Turley [00:44:37] Right. Or per contract. I mean, it depends on I mean, there’s so many different ways to flip that number around. But still.
George McMillan [00:44:46] I mean. Well, again, you know. We have. I’m throwing out the geostrategic arguments.
Stuart Turley [00:44:53] Right.
George McMillan [00:44:53] There is already number crunchers out there. If they. If they see what my geopolitical arguments are and they put my information together with their information, we’re going to have better and we’re going to have better models.
Stuart Turley [00:45:07] Exactly.
George McMillan [00:45:08] So, yeah, it’s because the people yesterday, people are reading maybe one article, but not reading the other one. So they’re not seeing a systematic explanation. Because I want to go from I want to go from the north of Russia, right. And my way down Eurasia, because what I want is systematic. Okay? We’re not doing that in this conversation, but I mean, we’re doing it.
Stuart Turley [00:45:29] We’re doing it by the articles.
George McMillan [00:45:31] Yeah, it’s a conversation, right?
Stuart Turley [00:45:33] Right.
George McMillan [00:45:34] So it’s the morning. So we’re having the conversation over coffee instead of beers.
Stuart Turley [00:45:40] Yeah. Okay. Well.
George McMillan [00:45:43] We’ll have a wine symposium in the evenings, maybe. I don’t know. So if we work our way down systematically in control for, you know, one or two variables or factors at a time, then people can start to see a systematic build out.
Stuart Turley [00:45:58] Right.
George McMillan [00:45:59] Okay. Right now, we’re just talking about two issues that we’re talking about in the papers. So, yeah, there’s a bunch of things. That that you raised because. You’re talking about the pound sterling was the world reserve currency under Pax Britannica. Then you have PAX America. And then, you know, Bretton Woods and then the then the petrodollar of of of of Kissinger and what Abdulaziz.
Stuart Turley [00:46:32] Right.
George McMillan [00:46:34] In 73 that was adopted and finalized by all of OPEC in 1975. Then that made all the energy that OPEC sold had to be done in dollars. And we didn’t have a big debt, national debt. Until we switched to that format, because now there is a way. Then there was a way for Congress to push that. And have it paid for by people buying our treasury notes with, you know, as their as their money market. And then now the drought. Now that that’s driven up, there’s no way we’re going to pay this back, especially when you start looking at. We’re almost $34 trillion in debt. And I’ve been saying for ten years we’re going to have inflation at 30 trillion and then rampant or higher levels of inflation that at at 35 trillion. And then I was watching a video that the institute put out recently in their economics professors. I forget their names, but they what they track in their podcast is that. What point? The interest payments are going to start eclipsing the whole Department of Defense or the whole of social services or the whole intelligence agencies.
Stuart Turley [00:48:04] Right.
George McMillan [00:48:05] Because the neocons track progress in military power.
Stuart Turley [00:48:10] Right.
George McMillan [00:48:11] The neo liberals and the left, the AOC, Pelosi left. They tracked how they tracked progress in terms of socialism, of expanding the bureaucracies, going to a welfare state. So the neo liberals might have a softer form of socialism. And the far left Social Democrats of America have a much more expansive version of of socialism.
Stuart Turley [00:48:40] Right.
George McMillan [00:48:41] And the neocons want the military, but they all want big government.
Stuart Turley [00:48:46] Right.
George McMillan [00:48:47] But that’s going to drive us to a point where either the banks aren’t going to get paid, the people owning the Treasury bills. Okay. They already know that they have MBA’s on again. They got number crunchers on that. So we’re throwing in the geopolitical aspect of that so they can better fine tune their models. We can better fine tune our models.
Stuart Turley [00:49:11] Right.
George McMillan [00:49:12] That’s the point of this exercise of throwing it out there for general discussion. And then we’re also looking at the. At Wesley Clark’s videos because he’s been talking about why we’re invading these countries in the Middle East. And there is a policy coup a certain people have taken over. What are what are they doing? What are their motives? Right. So we’re adding their rigorous analysis to what he was talking about in his 2007 campaign.
Stuart Turley [00:49:41] Right.
George McMillan [00:49:41] Also. So again.
Stuart Turley [00:49:44] And on those videos, George, if you cut the time, we’re still recording our podcast for our podcast listeners. We will fly in some of the most important pieces as you tell us which ones he’s talking to, and we’ll get those flown in either at the end or interject them in the appropriate times.
George McMillan [00:50:05] Yeah, and that in the two minute I mean, in, in, in the seven country video, it was right at the right before the two minute mark. Right. And then he gets into the countries that they want to invade.
Stuart Turley [00:50:18] So that would be a good point to fly it in now. Yeah. Okay.
George McMillan [00:50:22] And then and then you start talking about then he starts. If you overlay a map on that, you see where the pipelines want to go. Again, I didn’t really want to get into the Iranian thing, but we’ll get into it. We’ll get it now that we’re there anyway because, well, it’s a conversation, so it’s kind of at random. The papers are systematic. The conversations are at random.
Stuart Turley [00:50:50] Right.
George McMillan [00:50:51] So you get the. The Qatar pipeline wanted to go from Sunni controlled, you know, Qatar. Right. To Sunni controlled Saudi Arabia. To Sunni controlled. Jordan. But then they stop at Shia controlled Syria and Lebanon.
Stuart Turley [00:51:16] Right.
George McMillan [00:51:17] Okay. Because. Okay, so the Shia, the Alawite Shia that are in Lebanon and Syria, which are now all Hezbollah.
Stuart Turley [00:51:26] Right.
George McMillan [00:51:27] Okay. Just again, keeping things very simple here. Or Iranian control. Ever since the 1970s, the Sunnis have been trying to go into Afghanistan to surround Shia Persia. Right. The Arabs, the Arabs and the Persians have always been fighting since biblical times. Everybody knows that. But since since the Sunnis have been trying to encircle. The Shias, then the Shias. What’s their counter strategy is to break out of the encirclement. So if someone looks at a Sunni Shia map, you can see where you got the Houthi areas and. In Yemen are Shia and in and just south of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia and on the east coast, the Persian Gulf, all the way from Baghdad, all the way down to to to Qatar, that whole eastern seaboard of that area is Shia. So they’re striking back, Right, trying to take control of those areas and what they call the Shia Crescent Crescent. They’re really trying to build a cross through Kurdistan in northern Iraq to hook up and feed Bashar al Assad. So, again, going to the pipeline by the pipeline, going from natural gas, getting from Qatar, which is has. There a lot of natural gas in the Persian Gulf. They need to get it to Europe. It can go through the Sunni controlled areas Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. It gets blocked in Lebanon. In Syria and then it reconnects into Turkey. So they needed to get rid of those governments. So that explains the seven countries that they wanted to invade that Wesley Clark was talking about. That explains the use of big tech in the Arab Spring driving revolutions in those areas. To me, it’s more my interpreters that I have in the Middle East. We’re adamant that this is going to create such as a Frankenstein’s monster is what that the Indians call it. But they were just saying it’s going to stir up such a hornet’s nest, it might go out of control. Hence I talk about the Brzezinski Stansfield Turner era. Was regime change destabilization.
Stuart Turley [00:54:08] Right.
George McMillan [00:54:09] Then it looked like with the G. What area? Know global war on terror. Terror after 911. That’s a regime change. Nation building project which failed. Then we left out of Afghanistan and we turned it back to Operation Cyclone. Regime change, destabilization.
Stuart Turley [00:54:29] Right.
George McMillan [00:54:30] So they need that pipeline to replace Russian gas going through going through Syria. What did Russia do? If that’s the strategy of the U.S. and U.K.? Then the Russian counter strategy is to support Bashar al Assad, support Iran and block it. You’re supporting Iran to keep the natural gas coming out of the Caspian Sea region underneath the Caspian Sea into Armenia and Georgia, where they moved where they are. Well, they do want to see rigged elections, but they they influence the elections. They influence the elections in those areas. We want to stay politically correct here. So they can get those pipelines to Armenia and Georgia and Fiona Hill in 2000 for Brookings Institution for Robert Kagan, married to. Victoria Nuland.
Stuart Turley [00:55:29] Right.
George McMillan [00:55:29] Did a paper on building the trans Black Sea pipeline from Batumi, Georgia, to Burgas, Bulgaria. So they’ve had this plan in effect since at least then, obviously because she’s written a paper. It’s on the Brookings Institution website. I downloaded it. Make sure it didn’t disappear. So.
Stuart Turley [00:55:52] Oops.
George McMillan [00:55:53] Now Russia is supporting Iran to keep the pipeline from going to keep them from destabilizing Iran.
Stuart Turley [00:56:04] Yep.
George McMillan [00:56:05] And they went in. They backed Bashar al Assad. To stop the pipeline from. From going through. From Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan into Turkey is a Sunni controlled Turkey. And they’re part of NATO’s. They’re part NATO kind of sitting on a fence. They’re sitting on separate fences, which is why I don’t want to get into it. But that was the that was the problem. So now you’ve got the Hamas attack in Israel. That a lot of people are like. It took them a little bit too long. I don’t know anybody in the industry that doesn’t say it took them a little bit too long to respond like they wanted a raise. They wanted it to be a little bit more horrific. So they have a reason to flatten Gaza.
Stuart Turley [00:56:55] It’s disgusting.
George McMillan [00:56:57] Yeah. And I don’t know anybody in the quick reaction force business that isn’t leaning that direction. Again, what Hamas data is is horrific. There’s no question at. But they are the reason to flatten Gaza. Yeah. It’s not the SEWA. It’s not the the Ben Gurion Canal, because that can actually go north of Gaza, because a lot of people are talking about that. They could have done that decades ago going around. It’s not that the Gaza Marine oil play and gas play out there make sense, but the pipelines there were supposed to go underneath the Mediterranean Sea. To Greece.
Stuart Turley [00:57:40] Yep.
George McMillan [00:57:42] That takes too long. They didn’t. Do that yet. Maybe it’s too exposed to sabotage if they did.
Stuart Turley [00:57:53] Right.
George McMillan [00:57:53] I just you know, I don’t. I can read pipeline maps. I can’t read their minds. Yeah, we can. I can read maps, and I can be strategic. Yeah, you can make a game theoretic strategic plan if side does, does something. You know, how is it how is side B going to respond to that? That’s all I’m doing is just building game theoretic models in a geostrategic format.
Stuart Turley [00:58:18] Right. So.
George McMillan [00:58:21] Yeah, that’s all this is. Yeah. People will probably call me a Russian shill for for building strategic game theoretic strategic models. But whatever.
Stuart Turley [00:58:30] You’re right.
George McMillan [00:58:32] They can have as much fun with this as they want, because a year from now, they’re going to see this play out. Right. So it doesn’t matter.
Stuart Turley [00:58:39] Well, you know, I have affectionately called you Jack Ryan. And, you know, I sit here and I watch Jack Ryan a little while ago. You know, I don’t want to know what you know. Is it sitting here going, I don’t want anybody showing up on our doorstep? Fortunately, everything we’re talking about is academia. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
George McMillan [00:59:01] Maybe more like Indiana Jones if you want to go with that character.
Stuart Turley [00:59:04] Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, either one’s better looking than me, So we’re off. Yeah.
George McMillan [00:59:09] Yeah, I just.
Stuart Turley [00:59:11] Yeah. Kevin Costner could play you in a movie.
George McMillan [00:59:15] You know? So, I mean, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t think it’s all. Ah, yeah.
Stuart Turley [00:59:20] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now I can see when we make your book into a movie that Kevin Costner would be there. And I’d be there like Marty Feldman with a hump on my back.
George McMillan [00:59:31] Yeah. All right.
Stuart Turley [00:59:33] When you write your book, you got to have a marty Feldman. Karen, your bags around. Okay?
George McMillan [00:59:38] All right. Yeah, well, yeah, we’ll do okay. We’re getting back to reality.
Stuart Turley [00:59:42] Oh, sorry. Okay.
George McMillan [00:59:47] Yeah. Yeah. I don’t have his looks. I don’t have his money, So we’re. We’re going to get back to reality. Yeah. So when you get to when you get to the. The Syrian pipelines. Oh, I’m sorry. We’re talking about the canal, Right? And we’re talking about. The the the Gaza Marine play. And so then. What they really need is the pipeline going through the Levant.
Stuart Turley [01:00:21] Right?
George McMillan [01:00:22] And right now. So you got. You got in Speakman terms is the cordon sanitaire in Eastern Europe because they moved NAITO into Eastern Europe to surround all the pipelines coming out of Belarus.
Stuart Turley [01:00:37] Right.
George McMillan [01:00:38] And then, you know, flaring off to all the other countries. So they blocked that off. Thinking that Russia was going to collapse with the light with the slightest bit of sanctions.
Stuart Turley [01:00:50] Right.
George McMillan [01:00:51] Again, Putin’s thesis is how to use an export led growth model on. On raw materials.
Stuart Turley [01:01:00] Right.
George McMillan [01:01:00] Or an economic development plan. You know, a sectoral development plan following either. You know, like a like a Rostow take off theory or bomb sectoral growth theory. So they were trading oil for technological knowhow and joint ventures following export led growth model. The problem with that is with the oligarchs that they put it that the United States put into play the, you know, the big finance. They’re sucking so much money out of the system with the petrodollar trading system that they can’t keep the investment money inside Russia.
Stuart Turley [01:01:38] Right.
George McMillan [01:01:39] So the Russian hard liners, you know, got rid of Yeltsin, put Putin power and told him basically we need to keep this investment money. Inside Russia for economic development and the Western oriented oligarchs that are putting the money every place. But Russia, you know, Swiss bank account, city of London, of course, Wall Street, Caymans, you know, wherever or Cyprus, you know, you’re all the big offshore banking centers and how to get that stopped and keep the investment inside Russia. So that’s one of the I well, I got I did. Three videos on that on the Russian strategic plans, on the Working Brother channel on YouTube. It’s high informational, extremely boring, low production value. But I again, I just did it just to get these things out there. Yeah, we need to do a higher production values value videos. I totally get it. But you know, just to get the information out there, we did it that way.
Stuart Turley [01:02:46] Right.
George McMillan [01:02:48] But again, for us to do it in this format more to an energy sector, because that’s just the start up channel, you know, it was just both for us to kind of practice.
Stuart Turley [01:02:58] Right.
George McMillan [01:02:59] Well, again, it’s going to take us a year to get these different strategic plans out there, because once people start to see what the different strategic plans are and what the difference between economic growth models are. Right. That’s positive. Some growth in the following the content, these triangle and your interdependency triangle and versus. The covert agencies doing the negative, some sabotage. People are going to understand. You all the what? The conflict of low to high intensity conflict that’s all around that Asia, all around Eurasia is going to start to make increasingly more sense. It is not random. It’s planned. It’s orchestrated. It’s the continuous fighting in the neutral zones. Again, I went back to Vietnam. It’s it was to stop the spread of communism. Then it’s to stop Russia from building its pipelines. Now, one reason and then the second reason is to stop Chinese integration, because if Russia and Chinese integrate infrastructure. LI Yeah, then that they economically military, militarily and diplomatically integrate also, because whenever you spent $1,000,000,000 on building something you use, you know, the military is armed guards to protect it. You know, individuals hire armed guards to protect their businesses. Nation states use their military armed guards to protect their billion dollar, trillion dollar infrastructural projects.
Stuart Turley [01:04:35] Right.
George McMillan [01:04:35] Yeah. People need to start understanding what the conflict is in each one of these areas and go, I don’t go to these areas for no reason. I mean, I take weird vacations because I’m into economic development theory and geopolitics.
Stuart Turley [01:04:50] Yeah. Have you seen the have you seen the movie Air America? Oh, yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. Mel Gibson. Yeah, absolutely. A great one. It’s one of my dad’s favorite movies. Being a military pilot. That he is. George, we have about ten more minutes. And of these 10 minutes just is a little bit of a teaser again for our folks. And that is we’ve got the four articles. The fourth is going out today. You’re going to have your page on energy news B dot com, and that page is going to be organized very nicely so people can go to that one page and then we’re going to start having these videos out here. So in I am I owe you an apology for sidetracking you. But the one point I want to make is that as we’re going through this learning curve with you, it applies to today. Oh, yeah. Is is you’re leading up and I hate to keep bringing it to today, but you have you have really opened the veil for me in this and I can’t begin to tell you thank you but we got about ten more minutes and I don’t want to interrupt. Yeah, not again.
George McMillan [01:06:10] Let’s let’s close this out with. Again that the idea of the first few papers is if you get Russia, Russia natural gas going to Germany. And it’s already connected with power. Siberia. One project, which was completed a few years ago. So Russia and China are already integrated. So the United States can’t separate Russia and China as as it did as it wanted to under the under the Kennan or Kissinger strategies.
Stuart Turley [01:06:46] Right out.
George McMillan [01:06:47] Of the 5060s and seventies. So that’s kind of gone. And they want to build power of Siberia to come in from the Yamal field up in the Arctic. Okay. That’s going to be a huge pipeline. They want to build that through Mongolia because they don’t want it to go through Kazakhstan because they’re selling the same product. So Putin wants to send it around. China just wants it to go through Kazakhstan, because then it fits into their existing pipeline network already and is the fastest, cheapest thing to do. But Russia wants to send it around and bring in Mongolia into it so they can economically develop and integrate. And again, they they’re all the players in that area. All the nation states are selling oil and gas and other raw materials. So they’re all competitors in the same space. So, you know, nobody wants the other country to shut off their gas so they can sell.
Stuart Turley [01:07:55] Russia.
George McMillan [01:07:55] Their natural gas to China and feed that industry. China doesn’t want any country to cut off any other countries. Supply either. So they want as many pipelines going north to south or east or west to east as possible. Right. So no one person can cut off their supply. China’s also been rebuilding its 300 coal power plants for the last several years.
Stuart Turley [01:08:26] Yeah, they have 400 new ones. 400 new ones per minute already.
George McMillan [01:08:31] Okay. Yeah. So they’re trying to hurdle. Do that because of all the perimeter wars. If the U.S. Navy cuts them off in Malacca, they want to switch to coal. That’s why.
Stuart Turley [01:08:46] Yeah.
George McMillan [01:08:47] Yeah. I mean, if you were them just rational actor models is all I’m doing. If you were, then what would you do? If you’re being surrounded, if you already know what the strategic plans are. Because, you know, I named the authors in these strategic plans they do to the major universities. Okay. They’re reading the same books.
Stuart Turley [01:09:06] I just want to tell you something here. Every topic in every paper that I read all the time. I read lots of articles every morning I’m up at four or five. I read till, you know, 8:00 and I work on the news, news channels and stuff. Everybody is saying China is putting in the coal plants, the new coal, the 400 that are permitted. They’re putting in one or two week, whatever the numbers coming up. Yeah. The gigawatt of 480 gigawatt or whatever the number is that is coming up is because they need the power plus their renewables. That comment that you just made is so critical. It that is an epiphany for me right now because all of a sudden that made about four or five other articles tied through a thread that is not being talked about that I read it is not there.
George McMillan [01:10:11] Right. I mean, getting back to Wesley Clark. He talks about somebody hijacked the American foreign policy. Well.
Stuart Turley [01:10:19] Right.
George McMillan [01:10:19] Again, it’s for the journalists to figure out what that is. The covert agencies, you know, whether it’s United States, Britain, you know, China, Russia, whatever. It’s not up for the covert agencies to tell us what their strategic plans are. Otherwise, they would not be covert agencies. Right. So, I mean, it’s up to you. Read the books, figure it out what it is, and just throw it open for discussion.
Stuart Turley [01:10:45] Right.
George McMillan [01:10:46] You know, so that was that was why I throw in the Wesley Clark interviews will be a role that, you know, when we write, we can because we got to do a whole bunch more podcasts.
Stuart Turley [01:10:58] But yeah, just.
George McMillan [01:10:58] To just to close out what the domino theory was. It’s China’s already I mean, Russia and China are already connected by natural gas. So China is going to be more economically viable because of lower energy costs and they can’t be cut off. Right. Had Nord Stream gone through. Then all then all the Eastern European countries that NAITO moved into.
Stuart Turley [01:11:27] Right.
George McMillan [01:11:28] Can be bypassed. You can’t you can’t influence elections in the sea. So Nord Stream had to be blown up because of. If. If the industrial power center of Germany gets gas, natural gas, there are goods, you know, cars, BASF, with their pharmaceuticals and petrochemical production, they become more competitive against, you know, Dow and people.
Stuart Turley [01:11:59] Like that.
George McMillan [01:11:59] DuPont. They’ve become more competitive worldwide. But it’s not just Germany, it’s it’s Switzerland. It’s the whole German world, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Austria.
Stuart Turley [01:12:10] And the Slovak area as well, too.
George McMillan [01:12:13] Then you get the whole Danube River Valley and the Slavic area. Yeah. So every place that Naito moved into, you’re like, oh, they’re blocking this for they’re blocking this pipeline, they’re blocking this river.
Stuart Turley [01:12:27] Because that’s what.
George McMillan [01:12:29] Why the great game of the great of Great Britain for 300 years now, they’ve got the rivers already mapped out. Instead of blocking just agricultural shipments, now you’re blocking oil shipments.
Stuart Turley [01:12:42] Right.
George McMillan [01:12:42] Or technology change. Energy changed, but the rivers didn’t move.
Stuart Turley [01:12:49] No, the game still was there.
George McMillan [01:12:51] The gas strategy still there. So then if China’s connected to Russia and again, these are bilateral agreements, I’m not saying they all get along in multilateral agreements. But for a game theoretic competition, it’s better that they are than a lot of them are rivals because one of them gets gets a price advantage for energy. The other one has to follow suit, too.
Stuart Turley [01:13:14] Exactly.
George McMillan [01:13:15] You only have to do a bilateral agreement with Russia. So then if China is integrated with Russia. The German world gets integrated with Russia with the secondary players and again, river. What’s Japan going to have to do? They got to complete the Hokkaido to Sakhalin pipeline so they can get it. If. Japan and the other people get in what South Korea is going to do. Well, Russia’s been to North Korea a lot. They talk about foreign military sales and pipelines wherever, wherever. Putin and the Gazprom executives go. So if they talk about foreign military sales, which is what the mainstream media is talking about, what the mainstream media isn’t talking to you about is probably a pipeline to. Going through North Korea to South Korea.
Stuart Turley [01:14:05] No, No, they’re not. Yeah, well, George, I cannot wait for our next group. And I mean, I can’t wait for our web design team to have you have your own page. So we’re going to have that organized and have it approved by you. So. Yeah. I just cannot wait to help continue get this discussion out. You know, even though I got my MBA, you can tell that I keep trying to pull back to finance. Yeah. And this is a whole different kind of an animal. And I love studying geopolitical. And this is a front row seat to the great professor George McMillan. Oh, I’m having so much fun. Thank you so much. Now, last word to you.
George McMillan [01:14:59] Oh, yeah, We’ll just. Yeah. The biggest threat. To that fire power center alliance. Turns out that is not communism. It’s actually cheap Russian gas. And again, we need to control one variable at a time. And and you have to see if that if the U.S. and U.K. strategy is to surround Russia, then you’ve got to see, well, okay, what’s their counter strategic plan? And then that’s how you start building strategic models. So, yeah, the plan here isn’t to come up with a definitive solution, because if I could do that, if my crystal ball worked really well, I would I would just play it in the end and in the lottery, and I wouldn’t be doing this at all. So we’re building a model where people as things start to move because you’re going to have different you’re going to have some people making some oddball moves and you’re going to have some black swan events.
Stuart Turley [01:15:55] Right?
George McMillan [01:15:56] So when something happens instead of people starting to figure out what their emergency procedure response procedures are, if you already have your emergency response procedures mapped out ahead of time. Oh, they play. They play option D. Okay, switch this menu. And then what’s the collateral effects? How are the other people going to play that which co is? And you do that by watching which political parties are going to win. And each. In charge actors.
Stuart Turley [01:16:30] Yeah, I can see that you and I are going to have a merch store on your page. We’re going to have t shirts made and then we’re e Do you remember risk that game? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I love risk. In fact, we had risk parties that would last all night. We get five or six risk risk boards, tie them together and just get in the middle of law. And we would play for 24 hours straight that I love this kind of stuff that much that we’re going to have the McMillan and Associates risk game update Oh yeah so do not got as a merge we’re going to have to create the McMillan risk.
George McMillan [01:17:13] Yeah risk strategic. Strategic. Always another one back in the day.
Stuart Turley [01:17:19] Yeah. But I’m sitting here thinking, you got to have this in a board and you’re going to have to have maps out there for people to really look at.
George McMillan [01:17:29] Yeah. And I guess, yeah.
Stuart Turley [01:17:32] Why did wait.
George McMillan [01:17:35] For a whole bunch of different reasons.
Stuart Turley [01:17:37] Yeah. Yes. Burt.
George McMillan [01:17:39] Yeah, well, we’ll leave it there because if we open up another can of we need to have, we need to continue. We need to have several more podcasts if we got it.
Stuart Turley [01:17:48] Absolutely. George, thank you for stopping by the podcast today. George McMillan, CEO of McMillan and Associates, will have your LinkedIn conversation and thank you for your industry thought leadership. George Outstanding. Thank you for stopping by today.
