A History of the Next 100 Years
On first glance, George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century looks like one of those instantly obsolete titles commonly found at thrift stores and garage sales: The Inevitable Economic Crisis of 1996, The Inescapable Y2K Apocalypse!, How to Profit from Global Cooling.
As far as wildly speculative and often hilariously detailed non-fiction ”histories of the future” go, it’s actually quite a compelling read.
Friedman is founder and CEO of STRATFOR, described as a “leading private intelligence and forecasting company” and immodestly repped in some circles as “the shadow CIA.” In the book’s slightly ponderous introduction, the author describes his methods of prediction based on “identify(ing) major tendencies” and “transmit(ting) a sense of the future.” Once the book proceeds with its galloping 200 pages of prognostication, though, its matter-of-fact tone and slightly guarded outlines of upcoming geopolitical events actually become rather convincing.
In his especially interesting opening chapter, Friedman chalks up the essential elements of the United States’s international primacy to its unique, straddling dominance of the Atlantic and Pacific sea lanes. Despite temporary doom-and-gloom reports of the 24-hour news cycle, according to Friedman this fundamental geographic fact is likely to make the the 21st century at least as much of an “American Century” as the previous 100 years.
The book also rapidly dismisses fears of Chinese, Indian, or Russian threats to American dominance with reference to their own geographic and demographic limitations, while counter-intuitively forecasting a global population downturn in the next several decades. The implications of this for Friedman’s narrative include massive robotics programs, serious cultural strife between traditionalists and social libertarians, and an ironically desperate future need for increased immigration.
As the book quickly moves through the 2030s and 2040s, seeing the rise of surprising new international powers like Poland and Turkey, it takes on more of a sci-fi/alternative history tone. For readers who can dig this material without a simultaneous need for flowery, fiction-y prose, Friedman’s work becomes compulsively readable.
To my surprise, I could hardly put the book down until I found out how the Global War of the 2050s would turn out, with a sneak attack from Japan’s secret bases on the far side of the moon devastating America’s orbiting “Battle Stars” in an upper-atmospheric sequel to Pearl Harbor. Readers may half-expect Kirk and Spock to come to our rescue by the third act, and Friedman’s stone-cold seriousness can stretch plausibility to the breaking point, but not a chapter goes by without several fascinating speculations that can’t be dismissed out of hand.
By the end of his tale of the 21st century, Friedman openly admits his predictions cross into the realm of pure imagination. Nevertheless, his anticipation of the rising economic power of Mexico and its inevitable clash with U.S. interests in the 2080s makes for a compelling series of “What Ifs” that turn current conventional wisdom on its head. His speculations on future energy sources, weapons systems, and demographic trends combine the imagination of sci-fi/fantasy with some fairly serious analysis of our present and recent past.
In this YouTube video, the author gives a quick and interesting gloss of his book’s forecasts. This San Antonio Express-News review details more of the book’s predictions through the next 100 years.
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