America’s Primordial Fear: From the Berlin-Baghdad Railway to Nord Stream

Two short videos are circulating online that, taken together, make one of the more unsettling arguments in contemporary geopolitics — not because of what they speculate, but because of what they simply describe.

The first is a clip from George Friedman’s February 2015 speech at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. Friedman, founder of Stratfor and one of the most widely read strategic analysts of the past three decades, is asked whether Islamic extremism is the primary threat facing the United States. He pivots without hesitation:

The second is a commentary (via @itallstartswithin) that picks up Friedman’s thread and extends it backward into history, invoking F. William Engdahl’s book A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order as documentary backbone:

These are two very different voices — one a polished establishment strategist at a prestigious foreign policy forum, the other an informal online commentary. But they are describing the same thing. And across more than a century of historical evidence, the pattern they identify deserves serious investigation.

The Gravitational Logic: Why Germany + Russia = The Ultimate Threat

To understand why this combination has haunted Anglo-American strategists for over a century, start with geography and industrial arithmetic. Germany possesses the most advanced manufacturing and engineering base in Europe. Russia, meanwhile, possesses the largest territory on earth, immense reserves of hydrocarbons, metals, and agricultural land. The combination is what geographers call a “self-sufficient bloc” — a Eurasian economic zone that produces its own energy, its own capital goods, and its own food. One that cannot be strangled by naval blockade, outcompeted in resource terms, or easily penetrated by external financial pressure.

As Halford Mackinder argued in his famous 1904 “Heartland” thesis: whoever controls the Eurasian interior controls the pivot of world power. Britain was the first power to identify this threat. The United States inherited both the anxiety and the strategy.

Act I: The Berlin-Baghdad Railway and WWI

The first concrete episode in this history is one mainstream accounts of WWI almost entirely omit: the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. In the 1890s, Germany’s industrial rise was transforming Europe’s balance of power at remarkable speed. By 1913, Germany was producing nearly twice Britain’s output of pig iron. What Germany lacked was a secure, independent energy supply.

In 1888, Deutsche Bank led a consortium that secured a concession from the Ottoman government to build a railway southward from Constantinople. Over the following two decades this became the Berlin-Baghdad Railway — a planned overland rail link from the Rhine to the Persian Gulf, running through territory that geologists were already identifying as petroleum-rich. The strategic implication was clear: if completed, the railway would give Germany overland access to Middle Eastern oil that bypassed British-controlled sea lanes entirely.

The commentator goes further: Britain supported the Serbian nationalist movement specifically to destabilise the Balkans and trigger a war that would sever Germany’s eastern corridor. This claim is contested by mainstream historians, who attribute WWI primarily to the alliance system and miscalculation. But it is historically documented that Serbia’s geographical position — standing between Germany and the great ports of Constantinople and Salonika — made it a critical node in the Berlin-Baghdad corridor. Whatever the exact causal chain, the outcome was unambiguous: the war destroyed the railway, ended German access to Middle Eastern energy, and preserved Anglo-American control of global oil supply chains for the next century.

Act II: The Twentieth Century Pattern

Friedman’s argument is that the Berlin-Baghdad episode was not a one-off — it was the first iteration of a strategic pattern that played out in every major conflict of the twentieth century.

World War II: Hitler’s non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 — briefly created the exact German-Russian alignment that Anglo-American strategists feared most. Had it held, it would have combined German industrial power with Soviet resources into a genuinely self-sufficient Eurasian bloc. Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union destroyed this alignment — and US support for Stalin via Lend-Lease was not ideological but structural: Soviet survival was necessary to prevent a German-Russian empire under Nazi leadership.

The Cold War: NATO’s primary strategic purpose — understood in Washington if never openly stated — was to anchor West Germany permanently to the Atlantic alliance before it could be tempted toward accommodation with Moscow. The entire post-1945 European order was built around the premise that German economic dynamism must be channeled through the transatlantic relationship and never allowed to flow eastward.

Nord Stream and Ostpolitik: The post-Cold War re-emergence of German-Russian economic integration — through Gerhard Schröder’s Ostpolitik and the Nord Stream pipeline projects — represented precisely the drift Friedman warned about. In his 2015 speech, he noted with unconcealed unease that Schröder had joined the board of Gazprom. He described Germany as caught in a structural contradiction: economically compelled toward Russia, politically committed to NATO, intellectually unsure which way to choose.

Act III: Ukraine, Nord Stream, and the 2022 Resolution

The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine resolved Germany’s contradiction — violently and completely. Within days, Chancellor Scholz announced the Zeitenwende: Germany halted Nord Stream 2 certification, began energy decoupling from Russia, committed €100 billion to emergency defense spending, and started delivering weapons to Ukraine. The German-Russian economic relationship that had been building for thirty years was severed in a week.

The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022 then permanently removed the physical infrastructure that had made German-Russian energy integration possible. Investigations by Germany, Sweden, and Denmark were opened and subsequently closed without public attribution. Whatever the answer, the strategic consequence is identical to what Britain did to the Berlin-Baghdad Railway a century earlier: the physical removal of the infrastructure connecting German industrial capacity to Eurasian energy resources.

This is a strong claim that goes further than available evidence formally supports. But it maps precisely onto the structural logic Friedman described — not as conspiracy theory, but as interest.

What the Evidence Supports — and What Requires Caution

Historically documented: The Berlin-Baghdad Railway was a genuine cause of Anglo-German tension before WWI, and its destruction was a direct consequence of the war. Winston Churchill personally oversaw the British government’s acquisition of a majority stake in Anglo-Persian Oil (now BP) in 1914, explicitly to deny Germany access to Persian oil. The prevention of German-Russian economic alignment was a consistent thread of US Cold War strategy. Friedman stated it plainly in 2015.

Contested or requiring inference: Whether Britain deliberately orchestrated WWI to destroy the railway — versus exploiting a crisis that arose from other causes — remains a genuinely open historical debate. Engdahl’s argument is suggestive but not definitively proven. Similarly, attributing Nord Stream’s destruction to any specific actor is, as of writing, unproven. The claim that Germany’s current industrial difficulties are designed rather than collateral damage from the Ukraine war is interpretive.

The distinction matters. The structural argument — that Anglo-American strategy has consistently sought to prevent German-Russian integration — is well-supported. The intentional conspiracy argument — that every episode from Sarajevo to Nord Stream was centrally planned — is far harder to prove.

The 2026 Picture: Has the Thesis Held?

From today’s vantage point, the immediate outcome of 2022 looks like a decisive vindication of Friedman’s primordial interest: Germany decoupled from Russia, Berlin is more firmly embedded in NATO than at any point since 1990, and Russia is isolated from European capital markets. Germany’s defense budget has reached 2% of GDP for the first time since the Cold War.

But the structural forces that created the German-Russian relationship in the first place have not disappeared. Germany still needs energy. Russia still has it. The geographic proximity still exists. And — critically — the Trump administration’s 2025 recalibration of US-European policy is precisely the kind of American retrenchment Friedman himself predicted in The Next 100 Years (2009). If the US security guarantee for Europe recedes, the question suppressed since 2022 will re-emerge: what does Germany do without American security guarantees, without Russian energy, and with an industrial base that has spent three years paying four times what it previously paid for energy?