‘The Next 100 Years’

George Rebane

George Friedman’s much anticipated book came out a couple of weeks ago.  I was on Amazon’s waiting list for it, and got it almost instantly.  RR readers will recognize Friedman as the founder and editor-in-chief of Stratfor, the prestigious private intelligence service on all the important happenings in the world.  Along with the White House, I am a Stratfor subscriber ;-)

The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century is a fascinating book on a number of counts, and also a bit of a disappointment.  Let me say from the outset, this book is definitely worth a read.  If you get nothing else from his prognostications, you do get a thorough summary of the last two century’s geopolitical history of the world.  And thrown in are the geopolitical interests and strategies of the major nation-states on the world’s stage.  Friedman quickly makes and substantiates the point that for each nation-state such interests and strategies are classical in the sense that they endure with time and through many regimes and types of governance.  Reviewing a country’s history and its current actions in that light brings a new and useful perspective to a student of geopolitics.

For example, Friedman points out that we are a young and “barbaric” country, and contrary to what we have been told about America’s century being over, this will actually be the century of the “American Age”.  We learn that America is and will remain for the next hundred years the asymmetric behemoth of world power.  America’s interest is to maintain this position through a strategy of destabilizing any coalition of countries that forms to challenge America’s primacy.  America will do this using both its economic and military power.  The strategy does not require us to win wars, in the old sense, merely to play our challengers down to an expensive draw where they can no longer afford to challenge us.  This has been our strategy since the end of WW2 as most clearly illustrated by the history of the Cold War.  However, our citizenry does not understand this, which leads to all kinds of opportunities for our politicians to pander the conveniently ignorant.

In the next century Friedman makes the case for the disintegration of Russia and the fragmentation of China.  He sees the rise of Turkey as the re-inheritor of its former Ottoman glories and the hegemon of the Islamic world.  The new Turkish empire will dominate the middle east and reach into north Africa, the underbelly of Russia, and into the Balkans.  On the eastern shore of the Eurasian landmass Japan will rise beyond its former “co-prosperity sphere” and again conquer much of eastern China, Manchuria, and formerly Russia’s resource rich eastern Siberia.

While this is going on, all with the help and support of the United States, western Europe will really become the recently characterized ‘old Europe’, and the dynamism of the continent will shift eastward to the vertical column of nation-states starting with the Baltics in the north and ending with Romania and Bulgaria in the south.  These nations will be anchored by Poland which will become the defacto leader of the ‘Polish Coalition’ that will aid in the disintegration of Russia and expand into what was Russia’s west.  The Polish Coalition will, of course, bump into Turkey as it expands into the Caucuses and southern Russia, making the Black Sea a Turkish lake.

Friedman brings these countering forces together in mid-century to fight a short but fierce world war that again sees the United States surprised and devastated at its start.  This time Turkey and Japan form the natural coalition against America, which opposes these two growing world powers and economies uniting the Eurasian continent under their dual leadership.  America, allied with the Polish Coalition - wins this engagement – actually WW3 - due to the sheer size of its productive capacity and its military which now has dominated space and space warfare.

In the background of these geopolitical machinations Friedman’s future includes a vivid description of how space and the moon will be exploited for military and commercial purposes.  Parts of this scenario read like science fiction, and necessarily so.

America emerges from this war more powerful than ever.  Stability and order is restored quickly because, Friedman argues, the MAD policy of the Cold War will be practiced during hostilities so that neither side would wantonly attack the other side’s non-military production resources or its civilian population centers.  This prevents the conflict from going nuclear, a capability which all major nations have by that time.  Casualties will be relatively small in number and the world quickly gets back to business and trade after hostilities end.

However, during the two decades following WW3, which are a reprise of America’s post-WW2 golden age, a new geopolitical earthquake begins to form for which our country is ill-prepared despite its worldwide leadership and prominence.  That earthquake will be an internal one that derives from and is abetted by Mexico.  By the 2050s Mexico has grown into a major world economic power that still chafes from loss of the lands – the Mexican Cession (see figure) - it ceded to the United States in the 1840s.  Friedman lays the obvious yet necessary foundation for his development – “US-Mexican tensions are permanent.”  And he makes the case that “Mexico’s grand strategy was simple after 1848.”,  summarized as 1) maintain its own internal cohesion, 2) secure against foreign intervention “particularly by the United States”, 3) reclaim the lands of the Mexican Cession, 4) “supplant the United States as the dominant power in North America.”

 

The high hard ones here are that Mexico and the US are cheek-by-jowl neighbors, the border will remain porous, unassimilated Mexicans will form the controlling majority in the Mexican Cession states, their representatives in Congress will be a formidable block with mixed/unreliable loyalties.  The seemingly inevitable sequence that Friedman lays out is not difficult to accept, and its details read like something already out of the pages of today’s news.  This concluding section alone is worth the price of the book.  Friedman’s century ends with a fragmented America that has already or is rapidly losing control of its border states, and has yet to decide whether it will deconstruct quietly or fight an unwinnable war with a powerful neighbor which has co-opted a major fraction of its citizens.

And with that I’ll start my own critique of this well thought-out and presented work.  I don’t think that the Mexican Cession problem will wait until the end of this century, given its current pace.  Surprisingly Friedman does not discuss the possibility of the Mexican Cession seceding from the Union to become and independent country.  And this secession becoming part of the formation of an overall confederation of groups of American states that have come to understand that their regional geopolitical interests are no longer served in a tightly bound United States as envisioned in our Constitution.  Such a possible and likely future was not even considered for elimination.

When I read the book, it became clear to me that George Friedman does not have a background in technology.  He is a refugee from Communism and a naturalized citizen, as am I.  His education in political science and early involvement in strategic analyses that involved military war gaming gave him a higher level overview of technology’s impact on warfare, but somehow this did not influence him much on its non-military impact on commerce, consumers, and impact on people’s lives.  In this light I found his extrapolations to be somewhat flat and statist.

Nowhere in the essay does he treat the Singularity – its possibility, preamble, and effects.  For those who understand its implications, the Singularity’s approach will be the dominating and most compelling phenomenon of this century, sweeping all other considerations before it as machines approach the intelligence of humans while humans acquire the ability to fundamentally alter their very being.

There is also minimal consideration of how the Islamic conquest of Europe will end – it seemingly evaporates without much consideration.  I felt that the alarming growth of Muslim settlements in Germany, France, and Great Britain deserved some treatment, at least as to their resolution.  Here Islamic terrorism quietly retreats into the night without whimper or encore. 

And this leads me to the entire consideration of black swans and their impact on the course of human events.  Friedman does make clear that he is painting in broad strokes because it’s hard to predict, especially the future (apologies to Yogi Berra and Niels Bohr).  However, even with a broad brush one can turn it a little sideways and make a finer line to point out plausible events which can turn everything in his development on its head.  Friedman’s main point here is that such plausibilities are essentially not possible because the course of human events, within the framework of overarching geopolitical imperatives, is more than less set.

A significant omission here is what we already see shaping up as a neo-Luddite rebellion (see also the Peter-Paul Principle).  There will be a massive social and political consequence when a majority of workers can no longer find productive work for which they are or, more importantly, can become qualified through retraining.  After all, the bell curve does have two sides.  Friedman sees the need for millions of new workers, replacing the casualties of baby-boomer demographics, broadly painting over any such considerations as to what these people will actually be doing when machines magnify the productivity of workers beyond today’s linear thinking.

I could go on, but they would be criticisms every student of technology and geopolitics could offer to any such attempt to render a believable picture of the present century.  In the old days, say, before the Industrial Revolution, it was easier to use Friedman’s method of geopolitical and strategic extrapolation.  The general course of human events was then, as Winston Churchill detailed it in his History of the English Speaking Peoples, essentially the history of princes and their trans-national escapades within the constraints and imperatives of their own geopolitical interests.  And in the present work Friedman leaps into the breach wielding these same tools, and delivers a very workmanlike product – better than I have seen anyone attempt to date.  It is worth your time to read it, if for nothing else than an education in the past and some possibilities to come.  Finally, this essay should serve as an important stake in the ground for understanding current events, perhaps where it delivers greatest value, and comparing the other prognostications which will surely follow Friedman.

 

Comments

[Russ Steele]

George, thanks for the good review. I agree with your technology assessment and the Singularity impact. Much to discuss here.

To have a better understanding of the conflict between Mexico and the United States readers should check out and read Mexifornia: A State of Becoming. Victor Davis Hanson describes the demographic time bomb that we are sitting on with a shrinking white elite nearing retirement and ready to be subsidized by more numerous, poorly compensated and younger Mexicans. In 50 years the California populations will be more than 2/3 of Mexican heritage. Most will be unassimilated, and not members of the middle class, but will control the power of the ballot box. They could vote to return California to Mexico.

I do not agree with George Friedman’s global warming assessment, he claim the reductions in population and solar energy from space will solve the problem over the next hundred years. I have only seen a video clip of his position, but have ordered his book for a closer look. It would appear that he believes in the greenhouse effect and suggest we will be getting our solar power from space. We may be getting a lot of cooling some space as well, if in the next 50 years we enter a significant cooling which will reduce agricultural output starving millions around the globe. This will certainly reduce the worlds population. Perhaps a black swan not covered in the book? More in this issue after I read the book.

[dlw]

well, we all tend to get somewhat reductionistic by virtue of our tendencies to elevate our areas of relative expertise.

I'd say that the red queen effect may get stymied somewhat if the post-Cold War US evolves its democracy through the use of proportional representation in more local elections to take a bite out of the extent to which our current system, due to its near exclusive use of winner-takes-all elections, tends to lead to single-party domination at the state and national politics. We don't need to swing towards a near exclusive use of proportional representation, we simply need to use it somewhat for seemingly less important elections and the net result will be less gerrymandering, negative campaigning, and a redirection of political outsiders' activism to decentralized local third parties that persistently employ the "politics of Gandhi" to influence the location of the center, making our system more of a melding, rather than a melting, pot, which will both stymie our neo-Imperialism and mitigate the impact of cultural wars by giving hybrid groups more opportunities to constructively re frame their wedge-issues.

I'd also say that one shouldn't discount the fact that differences among Protestant and Catholic believers are increasingly getting mitigated such that there should be an ample supply of intermediary peace-makers between traditional USAmericans and Mexican Americans.

[George Rebane]

Interesting notion of "an ample supply of inter-mediary peace makers" dlw. Could you expand on what would motivate these peace-makers to make what kind of a sustainable peace once the Mexican Cession assumes the tipping point socio-political structure Friedman describes?