WORLD periodically interviews George Friedman, founder of Geopolitical Futures and a leading forecaster of international developments based on demography, geography, military capabilities, and ideologies. We have run previous magazine articles featuring Friedman in issues dated Jan. 30, 2009; Jan. 15, 2011; March 21, 2015; Nov. 12, 2016; and March 31 and April 28, 2018.

We’re sitting down on March 2, 2019, and hearing about India and Pakistan fighting. It seems serious: Two nuclear-armed countries shooting down each other’s planes? They do this regularly. Islamic groups occasionally carry out attacks on the Indians. India responds by blowing something up. In the end India feels better, the Pakistanis feel better, and life goes on.

The headlines are dire. Yes, something more for CNN to get hysterical about. This happens all the time. It was a slow news day.

OK: Let’s take a tour of Asia, starting with North Korea. Kim is not going to give up his regional nuclear weapons. He has no reason to. We’re not going to go to war because it’s very difficult to invade North Korea. It’s very difficult to know where his nuclear missiles are. So we have a standoff. The United States cannot eliminate the nuclear threat, and we’re pleased so long as Kim doesn’t build an ICBM that could reach the United States, which he has not done.

Is Japan pleased? Japan is a historic enemy of Korea going way back. Japan is moving more and more aggressively toward being armed.

Why would North Korea fire nuclear missiles at Japan? I don’t believe it will, but the Japanese after Pearl Harbor want to be prepared for the worst. Japan could rapidly have nuclear weapons. It’s the most advanced nuclear power country in the world, it’s very good at technology, and this technology is 70 years old.

Five years from now you expect Japan to have nuclear weapons? It’s one turn of the screw away from having them. President Trump has said the Japanese should develop their own weapons because we don’t want to take responsibility for their national security. Japan also faces two other major nuclear powers, Russia and China, and it has a very serious dispute with China over the status of the East China Sea.

Was it odd that Trump and Kim met in Hanoi? The United States and Vietnam have been building a friendship. U.S. naval vessels are based in Cam Ranh Bay once again. Germany and Japan, once our enemies, became allies: We specialize in this kind of alliance switching. The Vietnamese are not hostile to the United States: They are hostile to China. The U.S. and the Vietnamese are cooperating in many different ways because both have a common interest in blocking the Chinese. And the closer we get to Vietnam, the more we can irritate the Chinese, which is our foreign policy.

Our war effort in Afghanistan has now gone on longer than our Vietnam War. The invasion of Afghanistan made sense. The original intention was to disrupt the Taliban and their allies in al-Qaeda. We achieved that in the first six months. We then set as the goal creating a free and democratic Afghanistan. This was demented: Afghanistan is many things, but it is not democratic. It doesn’t want to be democratic. It has its own, very ancient method of governing itself.

And Afghans know that the Taliban is not going away, but we are. So we talk to the Taliban and arrange a graceful exit. I have to say that this could have been arranged 10 years ago or longer, and the tragedy is that it was not. We did not understand the limits of power. We could disrupt the Taliban and al-Qaeda. You can blow something up and leave, without the pretext of rebuilding, but you always have the idea to stay a little more, put in a little more power. This happened in Vietnam and in Iraq, and it happened in Afghanistan. Afghanistan broke British hearts.

It broke Russian hearts. It just about broke Alexander the Great’s heart. Afghanistan has withstood invasion for millennia. If there’s one thing that history tells us, it’s don’t mess with Afghanistan. If you need to do something, go there, do it, and get out.

Does that apply to Iraq? We disrupted Iraq. We took out Saddam Hussein, who certainly deserved to be taken out, but we also took out the plug. Iraq was blocking the Iranians from the Mediterranean. The Iranians have now expanded to occupy part of Syria, most of Lebanon and Iraq, part of Yemen. Still, their economy is in shambles, partly because of our sanctions.

Was going into Iraq a mistake? Iraq was a critical country for projecting force in the Middle East. The Iranians had a serious problem with the Iraqis, against whom they fought a war, and they were delighted to see Saddam Hussein, their mortal enemy, go. We assumed we would be welcomed because Iranian intelligence told us we would be welcomed. Iranian intelligence manipulated us and persuaded us that the Shiites would support the Americans. Then the Sunnis attacked us, and for various reasons the Shiites also decided to attack us. We got caught in the civil war, and now the Iranians dominate the country.

And Russia is allied with Iran? Russia was happy to use the Iranians in Syria, but Russia is worried about Iran becoming very powerful and using its substantial influence in Azerbaijan to put Iranian forces in the Caucasus, which the Russians could not tolerate. The Caucasus is the second area, after the West, from which invasions come.

Here’s one of the confusing things: When Syrian government land-to-air missiles mistakenly shot down a Russian plane last fall, Russia blamed Israel. What was going on? The Russian response gave away the game: Russia told Israel, You didn’t give us enough warning. That means Israel is notifying the Russians about upcoming airstrikes and the Russians are not telling the Iranians, their supposed allies, that Israeli planes are coming. This is the Middle East and it’s complicated.

Fear of Iran has given Israel some Muslim allies. The Israelis and the Saudis have worked together for years, covertly. They have common interests and common enemies. The Trump administration has chosen a prudent approach. We’re going to pull back a bit in the Middle East. It was a good thing to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement.

Is the Trump administration doing better in the Middle East than its predecessors did? It’s not as bad as people say, but nothing could be as bad as people say. It’s not as good as Trump supporters say, but nothing could be that good. Trump’s instincts are not bad. His execution is bizarre. His decision to withdraw from Syria was not a bad one, but saying 2,000 troops would move out of a combat zone in a week?

That was a dangerous situation with Russia and the United States potentially coming to blows in Syria. Russia is in deep trouble. It needs $70- to $80-a-barrel oil to stabilize. When a country has deep economic problems, it tries to solve them by creating national security issues, so Putin threatened another Cuban Missile Crisis. He’s trying to convince the Russian people that even though he hasn’t given them a prosperous life, he’s made Russia great again. Russia does have 3,000 nuclear missiles, but Putin’s not a fool. He’s trying to point out that he’s a player, but since he’s extremely weak it’s a pretty weak move.

How’s Xi Jinping doing? China’s elite was afraid China was fragmenting. Xi became the dictator. Countries don’t get dictators when everything is fine and they say, Hey, why don’t we have a dictator? He became dictator trying to hold together a country in the midst of a terrific economic crisis quite independent of American sanctions. China has an economy too large for domestic consumption.

It needs exports? It’s entirely dependent on exports to stabilize its economy, and since 2008 the appetite of the world for Chinese exports has declined—first the recession, and then China no longer has the cheapest exports.

But it’s getting into high tech. In technology it’s up against the United States, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Germany … that’s tough competition. You can’t just decide you’re going to become a technological power. So China is caught between its past and its future.

They’re worried about regional warlords? The Chinese are afraid they’ll go back to the condition they were in prior to 1948: They had a century of regional conflict as each region tried to secure its own interests. Xi’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. He periodically arrests corrupt people.

Isn’t “corrupt person” another way of saying “government official”? They’re almost all guilty of it. He’s getting rid of his enemies. Xi wants to make certain that no force arises within the Communist Party to challenge him. The question is how loyal the People’s Liberation Army is. It appears that the PLA is united and faithful to the government, but Xi is nervous.