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

I'm impressed by this George Friedman. He's the CEO & founder of the global intelligence firm Stratfor (short for Strategic Forecasting), which publishes a daily intelligence briefing for its customers, including Fortune 500 companies and international government agencies. His most recent book is a series of predictions for the next 100 years, based on current trends and geopolitical realities. The weakness of this book is that it's an impossible undertaking. No matter how informed the author is, he'll never hit the mark. Mr. Friedman explains in the introduction that his predictions aren't based on guesswork, but on a careful analysis of geopolitical realities and long-term trends. He compares what he does to playing a game of chess. It may seem to the observer that there are an infinite number of possible moves, but to a chessmaster, there are actually only a few moves if he knows how his opponent will respond. This is game theory. If you apply the same thinking to international relations, as Mr. Friedman does, you can come to some very logical and likely conclusions (in the short term).

According to the author, the three most important trends in the 20th century were the collapse of 400-year old European empires, the quadrupling of the global population, and the dramatic improvement in telecommunications technologies. The three most important trends for the next 100 years are the historical rise of the US, the collapse of the population explosion, and the evolution of robotics and space-based systems.

So what can we expect in the next 100 years? What are the actual predictions? I'll list some of the outcomes that I find most interesting, but the further George Friedman goes into the future, the more ridiculous this whole exercise seems. We only have to wait until 2030 before Japan has a moon base. Shortly thereafter, the United States will deploy three armed space stations into geosynchronous orbit, ensuring American dominance of space and the world's oceans. The Japanese will start the next World War on Thanksgiving Day, 2050 at 5pm (the date isn't important, but the reasoning behind that date is). They will have built a secret second base on the dark side of the Moon and figured out how to successfully attack our "Battle Stars" by then. Japan, with its ally, Turkey, will then unsuccessfully wage a war on the United States and draw the planet's other great empire, Poland, into the conflict. But that only gets us to mid-century! So, I actually stopped reading the book shortly after this war scenario. I found the book to be less intellectually stimulating and more like reading a bad Sci-Fi novel. So, let's only follow Mr. Friedman out about 20 years and stop. Past that point, this just seems silly. I find it hard to believe that Mr. Friedman doesn't also realize how frivolous this is. And I don't mean to disparge him, because he seems like a really, really smart guy. I love most of this book (especially how he breaks up US history in a way that I've never thought of before). But, he acknowledges that one of the three most important trends in the 20th century was the collapse of European empires, but would he have realized that in 1910? It's as silly as George W. Bush's claim that terrorism will be the great issue of the 21st century, made less than 10 years into this century!

So, here's what we can expect in the next 20 to 30 years (summed up nicely in the YouTube video I've included below): China will fragment. There is a wealthy coastal region that benefits more from its trade with the outside world than its relationship with Beijing, and an impoverished interior that has a radically different agenda. Beijing will be unable to walk the tightrope that it needs to in order to keep China united. Russia will also collapse. We'll fight another Cold War and Russia will lose again. It'll lose for largely the same reasons it lost last time, but this time it will have a smaller population, less territory, more powerful neighbors, and it won't be able to count on support from China. Plus, the United States is relatively more powerful than it was last time. Labor will cease to be cheap. The global population explosion of the past 100 years will peak and begin to decline sometime in the next 100 years. Global wages will rise and more countries will find themselves competing with each other for immigrants, essential to economic growth. The United States has an edge and will keep it. The economic burden to the United States for the retiring baby boomers will lead to an economic collapse more massive than the 2008-9 recession. The current collapse isn't being exacerbated by demographics, but the next one will be. The next economic crisis, occurring anytime between 2014 and 2025, will look like 1970s style stagflation. The last president of this era (George Friedman divides American history into 5 eras, and the modern one began with the election of Ronald Reagan) will try to fix the recession with more of what has worked in the past. He will fail. The next president (elected in 2028 or 2032) will usher in a new period of growth and prosperity in America and our nation will boom. The world's next great powers will be the US, Japan, Turkey and Poland. Turkey is the most significant and powerful actor in the Muslim world. It was the center of that world during the Ottoman Empire, and we'll see it play a similar role again. Japan will benefit from the collapse of Russia and China, and it will move its production to the Pacific rim regions that have broken away from those nations. Poland will benefit from the collapse of Russia and its close relationship with the US during the Second Cold War. NATO will collapse when Western European countries like France and Germany try to avoid confrontation with Russia during that war. Western Europe will continue to decline in relative power and Eastern Europe will begin to be the most dynamic and powerful part of that continent. Turkey and Japan will have a complimentary relationship and the US will try to break them apart. This will lead to the war of 2050, which Japan will start much like it started the War of the Pacific by bombing Pearl Harbor.

I'd give this book an 8 or 9 out of 10. It was a lot of fun to read and think about.

Technorati tags: George Friedman, American Century, Japan, Turkey, Poland, Stratfor, The Next 100 Years, Geopolitics