The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century

No one can forecast what the weather will be next week in most parts of the world, why would anyone think that forecasting what nations will do in detail over 70 years is possible? George Friedman doesn't think it's possible either, but the exercise presents the opportunity to identify sources of potential future conflicts and alliances on the geopolitical stage. Thinking about those issues is well worth considering. An ounce of prevention may just help avoid tons of regret in some cases. George Friedman believes that considerations of potential military defense and offense, access to needed raw materials and markets, demographics, political strengths and weaknesses, technology, and national economic interests can be combined to imagine how future leaders will see their situations and how well they will be able to handle old and new challenges vis-à-vis their neighbors and competitors. From those sources, he identifies factors that will probably be important which include: 1. Increasing importance of having access to shipping via the oceans due to ever-expanding global trade. 2. Continued U.S. dominance of the oceans. 3. Political and social weaknesses in China and Russia that will cause those nations to weaken and fragment. 4. Decline in population size in developed countries requiring pro-immigration strategies to stay competitive. 5. Emergence of space-based warfare and energy generation to shift the basis of national competition. 6. Robotics replacing less-skilled workers throughout the world creating a wave of unemployment. 7. Aggressive geographical expansions of influence by nations which are bounded by weak countries. 8. A continued dominance by the United States except in controlling the regions in the country that are filled with Mexican-Americans. As a result, he projects an end to armed conflicts between Muslims and Americans on religious grounds; a new cold war with Russia; fragmentation of China's economic power and military strength; the rise of regional power in nations like Turkey, Japan, and Poland; a space-based war aimed at the United States by Japan and Turkey; the rise of space-based energy as the economic underpinning of prosperity; and a civil crisis in the Southwestern U.S. Who knows if these things will happen? They could. I felt that the main weakness in his argument was failing to consider the possible development of a strong regional block involving both North and South America over the next 20 years. Such a block would have tremendous access to technology, resources, positive demographics, and be easier to keep secure than trying to project power around the world. With such a strong base, many of the issues that concern Mr. Friedman about U.S. interests would be considerably less pressing. If the U.S. were not as aggressive in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, some of the conflicts described in this book would be less likely to occur. I was also surprised to see that the book doesn't make much of Af

Friedman's book is fantastic, not least in that he grapples honestly with the central fact that liberal guilt, conservative fear and general adolescent pessimism forever obscures in America: that the United States is the greatest power in the world, and not only is it not in decline, in many respects it is only beginning its rise. A world of people will disagree: the same world of people that's been predicting America's imminent demise since Erlich's "The Population Bomb" in the Sixties, "Limits to Growth" in the Seventies, and a thousand other certain-doom scenarios (both left and right) ever since. Beyond this? Friedman deals forthrightly with immigration: both the need for it and the corresponding danger it poses to the territorial integrity of the United States. He takes a realistic view of the nation-state as the primary means by which peoples organize themselves, something not likely to change in the century to come. He addresses global warming with characteristic practicality, alternate energies (he focuses on one, which may either be spot-on or may be a placeholder for others) from the perspective of geopolitical and economic results, and of course the most geopolitically transformative technology of all -- scramjets and the development of space -- in a manner which most readers will see as science fiction and which this one has long believed is far too tame. He addresses Russia's impending rise, paints an historically familiar but highly non-conventional portrait of China's future (whether accurate, as with all of this, remains to be seen), makes a strong (if not compelling) case for the rapid demise of al Qaeda and the slow but dramatic ascent of Turkey, and generally redraws the world's map as few but George Friedman could. Will he be right? In whole or in part? Well, therein lies the fun. But is it worth a read? Absolutely. Not only is it one of the best books of the year, it's clearly one that Americans broadly would benefit from considering at length.

Staying true to famed Stratfor's reputation for free from moralizing righteousness view of world events, its CEO George Friedman's book considers a plausible future scenario through a prism of almost certain US superiority in this century and efforts to impose a simple reality that would serve its national interests - no united Eurasian power. Those interests are nothing new to anybody who is familiar with British continental foreign policy of last several centuries, which US has adopted upon taking over the mantle of the dominant world power. A number of other commentators (S. Huntington, Z. Brzezinski) espoused that principle as the prerogative for maintaining long term preeminence. But, unlike the aforementioned ideologically driven works, Friedman's general position toward confrontation between US and contending countries is one of the expected defense of each power's national interests. The scenario of Russia's collapse, however unlikely it might seem now, is certainly within the realm of something plausible (think of a very powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire at the start of previous century). The uncertainty of actual realization of that scenario does not diminish the value of the book or its insights. The world with one superpower is by default not a stable arrangement in the long run (short of outright world unification - something left for other centuries), thus dynamic powers of the next 30-40 years will have to deal with a direct threat to their resource lifelines posed by US Navy and space dominance. Ensuring frictions are guaranteed. With mostly land power (USSR/Russia) another Cold War is a likely scenario, but with naturally maritime powers (chosen to be Turkey and Japan) a scenario for direct confrontation is already provided by recent history. In my view the book should not be treated as prophetic. It is an illuminating exercise in application of basic Machiavellian principal of statecraft - keeping your potential competitors from becoming too powerful. US did it superbly during Cold War of yesterday. It will follow the same trodden path in the world of tomorrow, while the assortment of rising powers might be different, just as Germany was even more heterogeneous in 1860ies compared to China and India of today, but became the main challenger of the world order 50 years later. The choice of Poland, Turkey and Japan as rising regional powers is not arbitrary, since those are the countries that would stand to benefit directly from the considered scenario of Russian collapse and chaos in China. To those living in the not too distant future the struggle on all sides will be sugar coated as a struggle for something with the pretense for high moral grounds as it happened abundantly during Cold War (from spread of democracy to spread of social equality). One of the book's themes is that the underlying motivations for all the events are and will be driven by nothing else, but conflicting self preservation interests of all the parties invo

When one takes into account the staggering advances that took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is a brave forecaster who would even attempt to predict the course of our (still relatively) new century. George Friedman undertakes this task in "The Next 100 Years". Friedman opens by taking the reader through the twentieth century at twenty-year intervals, showing how the concerns in any given time period are quickly forgotten and replaced by new concerns. This prepares the reader to see that the twenty-first century will also be anything but static, either, as America will not be facing the same set of challenges by 2020 as we did on September 11, 2001, and will be dealing with many different issues as the century progresses. The author is a very incisive thinker, relaying stunning insight after stunning insight in demonstrating how we arrived at where we are now, with Europe having been supplanted by America as the world's focal point. Friedman contends that, far from declining (as many fear), America is just beginning its rise. The century will be characterized, he predicts, by regional powers attempting to form coalitions to limit American power, and America attempting to prevent the formation of such coalitions. This will ultimately result at mid-century in a war that will have many similarities with World War II--the war will begin with a surprise attack on a key American military target, will be fought against a familiar foe, will result in the development of stunning new technologies, and will be followed by a new golden age redolent of the one following World War II. This book also takes a look at the worldwide population bust--policy debates in American politics will be driven in part by debates about the number of immigrants needed as a result of the bust. The author asserts that our politics operates in fifty-year cycles, and that both transition points of American politics in the twenty-first century will be driven by immigration. One of the predictions in the book is almost made as an aside--the author is really hanging his neck out on the line, since we will be able to see in not 20 or 50 years, but within the next two years whether the author is correct in his prediction about how much President Obama will be able to roll back the basic policies that President Reagan put in place in the early 1980s. The book closes by examining some of the technological breakthroughs such as robots and space-based energy that will transform life later in the century, and asserts that the end of the century will be characterized by increasing disharmony with Mexico over the American Southwest. Anyone interested in what the future might hold (that is, just about everyone) would enjoy reading "The Next 100 Years". The only regret you will have when you have finished reading it is the realization that you will not be around in 2100 to see if all of the predictions in this supremely fascinating book come to pass.

George Friedman's THE NEXT 100 YEARS has a serious "wow" factor. It's going to get people talking. Friedman, as the chairman of Stratfor, the global intelligence firm, believes that geography, population, and the surprising way history has of confounding our expectations are all important. He also believes that conventional political analysis and forecasting "suffers from a profound failure of imagination." The convergence of these axioms leads Friedman to write a book that should flabbergast more than a few of the talking heads who populate the airwaves and cable frequencies. I would venture to guess that none of them have the intellectual wherewithal to engage his predictions knowledgeably. I guess we'll see, because no doubt Friedman will be making a splash in the press with this surprising book. His predictions--they will raise your eyebrows. But two things will keep you from dismissing them for their outlandishness. One, Friedman, though ambitious and writing with a strong sense of self-confidence, keeps his ego in check. (He says he'll be pleased not if he's proven right on all points, but merely if his grandkids tell him some day, "Not bad.") And two, he makes a convincing case that throughout history, almost nothing in world affairs has turned out the way common sense or the prevailing notions of smart people (or journalists) thought that it would. There's no arguing with any of that, though it's very easy to lose sight of. At the start of the book, Friedman sets the table for his forecast by reviewing the changes in the world's geopolitics during the 20th century. He shows that every 20 years or so the world turned completely on its head. Though these events in hindsight seem to us today to be ordinary and unexceptional, if not completely predictable, if forecast in their day they would have seemed astonishingly unlikely. Please bear with me here... In 1920, with Europe in tatters after World War I, the one thing that was sure was that peace had been forced on Germany and it would not soon lift itself up off the mat. By 1940, of course, Germany not only roared back, but conquered most of Europe, with Russia as an unlikely ally. Britain stood alone. There was no way Hitler could lose. Now to 1960. Germany is a ruin and the U.S., no world power at all in 1940, was contending only with the Soviets for world domination. The U.S. dominated the world's oceans and could dictate terms to its rivals, or, if it wished, just nuke them. Stalemate was the best the Soviets could hope for. Come 1980, the U.S. had been beaten in a war--not by the Soviet Union, but by little North Vietnam--and was widely seen as in a slow, permanent retreat, expelled from Iran and watching helplessly as the oil fields fell into Soviet hands. Now one more leap, to 2000. The Soviet Union had collapsed. China was communist in name only. NATO had advanced into Eastern Europe and even into the former USSR. (It was always supposed to happen the other way aroun