Published: March 12th 2024, 2:07:29 am
Predicting the future is really hard. If it was easy, then maybe America wouldn’t have invaded Iraq or Afghanistan—and the war-planners back then had warnings. But some people have tried to predict the future, including this book you might’ve heard of: The Next 100 Years, written the political scientist George Friedman in 2009. Now, if you haven’t noticed, the world is in a bit of turmoil, so I figured looking at what Friedman has to say—and seeing where he was very, very wrong [The Coming War with Japan]—is a good way to try to figure out what future history holds.
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Okay, so who is this George Friedman guy? Well, he’s actually pretty influential. For twenty years he was the head of Strategic Forecasting Incorporated, aka Stratfor, an intelligence firm that has provided geopolitical analysis—and predictions—to the major powerbrokers of the private sector—Bank of America, Dow Chemical—alongside the Department of Defense and the United Nations. Now, Stratfor doesn’t control the world, but we can extrapolate that when Friedman makes a prediction, people listen, and those predictions might just be pretty good if he keeps getting customers. So I’m going to hold him to a high standard.
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna46555168#.XbZ6Fi1L0cg
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wikileaks-publishes-leaked-stratfor-emails-135816242.html
Anyways, I’m first going to summarize his predictions for the future, then go into detail section by section. I think pointing out how this guy got things wrong will let us get a better sense of what will actually happen. And also the picture he paints of the future is a pretty interesting timeline on its own, too.
The Future
Okay, so let’s do a summary: Friedman sees the next century as a struggle between the United States, at the top of the world, and a bunch of different countries that will rise and fall, biting at America’s heels. Now, you might expect Russia and China to be at the top of that list of rivals. But Friedman doesn’t have much hope in them, expecting them to crumble by 2020—yeah, four years ago. In their place will rise other countries that will challenge America in a Third World War. If you’re not familiar, try to guess what countries he’s going to say, because these are dark horse candidates. They’re Turkey, Poland, and Japan. Those countries are gonna be the next great powers.
Alright, so this a pretty zany prediction, but this guy is very influential, so let’s hear him out and go through his book.
Let’s go to the beginning. He writes that, in the next fifty years, America will struggle to prevent the formation of a coalition of rival powers that could challenge its position on top of the world (pg 4). Friedman argues that’s what the War on Terror was. America doesn’t need to win, it just needs to keep hostile regions split apart.
Now he doesn’t predict the Arab Spring or the rise of ISIS, which happened soon after he wrote his book, but I’ll give him credit for predicting that “US defeat or stalemate in Iraq and Afghanistan is the likely outcome” (pg 49) way back in 2009, which is right; Afghanistan is back to the Taliban and Iraq is a frontier-zone between America and Iran. With those wars dying down, the next major challenger to American hegemony is Russia.
Russia
Friedman predicts that Russia will put increasing pressure on its neighboring regions in the 2010s. On page 71 Friedman writes, “For the next generation, until roughly 2020, Russia’s primary concern will be reconstructing the Russian state and reasserting Russian power in the region.” Later on in the book he emphasizes Russia’s northwestern frontier as especially strategically important.
He also lists specific European countries that Russia will pressure: Belarus, Romania, Poland, and especially the three Baltic states. Those will be the site of confrontation between America and Russia in the 2010s, he predicts.
Friedman also writes later that he expects Russia to sponsor all sorts of feuds in the Balkans in the 2010s, meaning another war may break out there, presumably between Serbia and one of its neighbors (145).
How about Russia’s southern frontier? Well, Friedman sees Russia expanding its power in the Caucasus in the 2010s, perhaps starting another war with Georgia, writing that “a duel in the Caucasus will result” (109) between the US and Russia.
But anyways, let’s zip back up to the Baltics, where Friedman sees a bigger confrontation brewing. As he writes, “There has been a great deal of talk in recent years about the weakness of the Russian army…. But here is the new reality—that weakness started to reverse itself in 2000 and by 2015 it will be a thing of the past…. Russia will be facing a group of countries that cannot defend themselves and a NATO alliance that is effective only if the United States is prepared to use force” (114-115).
With America unwilling to go to war to defend Estonia, Friedman sees NATO buckling under pressure, especially with Russia threatening to blackmail Germany over gas imports. Russia’s play, he predicts, will be to “guarantee Baltic autonomy in the context of a broad confederation, as well as Polish security, in return for a reduction of arms and neutrality. The alternative—war—would not be in the interests of the Germans or the French…. Germany will block NATO support for Poland, the Baltics, and the rest of Eastern Europe” (2016). NATO splits apart, with Poland becoming the chief American ally in Europe against Russia.
So, by 2020 the United States, we can imagine under somebody wimpy like Jeb Bush, is retreating from the expansionistic new Russian Empire, dominant over Eastern Europe.
Except that’s not what happened; Friedman completely missed the mark.
For one, the idea that NATO would split apart at the slightest aggression from Russia has been proven obviously false. Friedman is probably inspired by the fact that France wasn’t the most enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq—freedom fries and all that. But obviously America invading Iraq on flimsy grounds is different than Russia making power moves in Europe. We can see this in how nearly all European countries have gone great lengths to help Ukraine.
Speaking of, notice what country Friedman didn’t mention? Ukraine.
Why? Friedman kind of imagines Ukraine as just naturally being part of Russia’s sphere of influence, without questioning why that has to be the case. On page 112 he writes, “When a pro-Western uprising in 2004—the Orange Revolution—seemed about to sweep Ukraine into NATO . . . The Russians did not mobilize their army. Rather, they mobilized their intelligence service… The Russians undermined the Revolution, playing on a split between pro-Russian eastern Ukraine and pro-European western Ukraine. It proved not too difficult at all, and fairly quickly Ukrainian politics became gridlocked. It is only a matter of time before Russian influence will overwhelm Kiev.”
But Friedman is missing key parts of the story. The new president of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, was so friendly toward the West that Russia poisoned him, but I suppose he also made his pro-Russian rival Viktor Yanukovych his Prime Minister for a little bit. And for some time it seems that Friedman was right; Yanukovych was voted president in 2010, and, under pressure from Russia, Ukraine backed away from the European Union. But anybody familiar with what happens next would know that’s not the end of the story; Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych as president in another revolution and Russia did resort to military force to try to dismember Ukraine, first in 2014 then again in 2022.
Was this predictable back in 2009? Well, with hindsight it seems pretty clear that the giant country on Russia’s border, which Friedman acknowledges is very geopolitically important, whose alignment to the West or to Russia was not yet resolved, and who was not yet in the defense alliance of NATO, was a more likely site of conflict between the US and Russia than Poland or Romania or the Baltics, all of which were in NATO.
Taking a lesson from this, we shouldn’t assume that country’s allegiances are set in stone, especially without inertia or binding international agreements. Just spit-balling here, but if I was in charge of Kazakhstan, I would be stressed out of my mind; back in January 2022, Russia put down an uprising there. If the Kazakh people rise up again against their pro-Russian government, Russia might be pulled into another conflict. There are certainly juicy areas in Kazakhstan’s north that are inhabited mostly by Russians, by the way.
It’s also probably a very smart decision for Finland to join NATO.
Friedman also completely overestimates the Russian army, predicting that it’ll be able to strongarm the West into retreating in the 2010s. This is of course incorrect. The Russian army proved itself to be incapable of defeating the forces of its neighbors, as we’ve seen in years of Ukrainian trench warfare.
Friedman also sees war brewing in the Caucasus; Friedman wrote this book in the late 2000s, soon after Russia invaded parts of Georgia. Later he writes, “The Russians will press south into the region, reabsorbing Georgia and linking up with their Armenian allies” by 2020 (144).
But looking back now, the Caucasus has been relatively quiet, except for Turkish-aligned Azerbaijan beating up Russian-aligned Armenia. So, a lesson there: don’t assume current wars will continue forever. Plenty of other people want a chance to blow up their neighbors.
It really seems that George Friedman was stuck in the Cold War conception of Russia and expected a return to his familiar status quo in Eurasia, even if it didn’t make much sense. But if there’s anything the last decade has shown it’s that Russia is inexorably declining.
The Fall of Russia
Now Friedman sees that too. As much as he overestimates Russia’s power in the 2010s, he sees Russia dropping dead by 2020. He writes: “the country’s military will collapse once more shortly after 2020” (119). As he writes early on, he doesn’t expect Russia to provide a legitimate challenge to the US; he cites its:
1. Deep internal problems
2. Massively declining population
3. Poor infrastructure
Later on, he writes, “The Russian Federation itself will crack open as Moscow’s grip shatters. Regions, perhaps even the thinly populated Pacific region, will break away, its interests in the Pacific Basin far outweighing its interest in or connection to Russia proper. Chechnya and the other Muslim regions will break off. Karelia, with close ties to Scandinavia, will secede” (136) and join Finland (151) [even though 95% of Karelia is Russian today]. This chaos also spreads to other countries in Eurasia, creating a vast expanse of civil wars. Presumably we could imagine multinational countries like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and maybe even Iran splitting apart. But this is supposed to take place in the early 2020s. While Russia has experienced some internal instability, and its neighbors have too, there is very little evidence that all these countries will Balkanize any time soon. Is it possible, yeah. Is it likelier in the 2030s than the 2020s? Possibly. But so far this prediction has also been proven incorrect; rumors of Russia’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Okay, so Friedman is right in spirit about the Russian-American confrontation in the 2010s and Russia’s decline in the 2020s, but the details are completely wrong.
China
How about the other classic bogeyman, China? Well, Friedman doesn’t really have much faith in the PRC either. He says that China won’t provide a good threat to the US because its:
1. Geographical isolation
2. Weak navy
3. Inherent tension between the prosperous coastal areas of China and the impoverished rural areas
Later on he writes about China’s economic development, pointing out that China has taken on bad debt and that its growth is unsustainable and unprofitable. Once it can no longer sell cheap exports, the whole system will collapse.
Friedman writes—and this is 2009, remember, that China has a few different paths. In one, “the Chinese cycle will move to the next inevitable phase in the coming decade,” i.e. some charismatic dictator will take charge, cut China off from the outside world, and try to equalize China’s internal inequality (pg 7). This Neo-Maoist leader will oversee a highly centralized dictatorship. Or, more likely, China will fragment into its different regions. Japan, desperate for labor, will import large numbers of Chinese laborers, or at least exploit them from afar. This will result in “an alliance between one or more coastal regions and Japan… confronting the power of Beijing” (99). Meanwhile, Taiwan will turn the tide and India will liberate Tibet (151).
So, Friedman overestimated Russia and underestimated China. Over the course of the 2010s, China did not turn to isolationism or division. Instead, Xi Jinping oversaw an unprecedented expansion of Chinese power across the planet, with China investing billions in the infrastructure of key countries in the Belt and Road Initiative.
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-massive-belt-and-road-initiative#chapter-title-0-3
China is also modernizing its shipyards and is building up its navy, including a new aircraft carrier.
https://chinapower.csis.org/analysis/china-naval-modernization-jiangnan-hudong-zhonghua-shipyard/
With China’s aggressive moves to expand its power in the South China Sea,
https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/territorial-disputes-south-china-sea
it seems pretty clear that China is marching its way into becoming not just a regional power, but a world rival for the United States.
Now, China does have serious problems, including a major demographic crisis. Just like Russia, in its state of decline, lashed out in a desperate attempt to claw back power before it was too late, China may do the same with Taiwan.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/chinas-shrinking-population-and-constraints-on-its-future-power/
Or, it might just slowly fade to a second-tier power. But in any case, it is very bold to say this collapse will happen in the 2020s, just like it was bold to say it would happen in the 2010s, like Friedman did.
Anyways, let’s move on beyond the Second World to the domestic troubles of America.
The American Crisis
Because while America is still on top of the world, something is Rotten in the State of Denmark. Friedman predicts that the US “will be short of workers no later than 2020 and accelerating throughout the decade, and will need immigrants to fill the gap.” With the native population aging quickly and exiting the workforce, he writes that there will be significant political tension, coming to a head in 2028 or 2032. Why then? Well, because America tends to have a crisis every fifty or so years (121). He predicts that, “Whoever is elected president in 2024 or 2028… will use Reagan’s solution, fielding a tax cut for the wealthy to generate investment. Tax cuts will increase investment at a time when labor shortages are most intense, further increasing the price of labor and exacerbating the cycle” (132).
But the true way out, he writes, will be “rapid and dramatic increases in the workforce through immigration” (133). He predicts “by 2030, advanced countries will be competing for immigrants.” Since the US has to compete with other countries, we’ll have to offer significant incentives to draw in immigrants and manage their employment, resulting in a “substantial increase in the power of the federal government” (134).
While he says America will mostly have no trouble digesting this new wave of immigrants, there is an exception: “the Mexicans.” He’s especially worried that Mexican immigrants will cause “serious strategic problems,” since they may remain loyal to their homecountry. But he talks more about that later, so let’s skip that and address his other claims:
I think mostly his predictions about the 2020s are pretty accurate. For one, he was right that even with regular immigration, the American labor force is not growing especially fast, and it’s slowing down.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/article/labor-force-and-macroeconomic-projections
But while workers—who obviously produce the things that the economy needs—are growing at slower rates, America’s elderly population is increasing significantly, from 13% in 2010, to 17% in 2020, and upwards.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/457822/share-of-old-age-population-in-the-total-us-population/
But I don’t think this tells the whole story of the political crisis that we are experiencing today that Friedman predicted 15 years ago. It’s not just about aging people and immigrants, it’s about growing political radicalism, about the social and cultural divides between cities and rural areas, it’s about declining faith in America itself. While Friedman predicts the crisis election will occur 2028 or 2032, it seems to me that the crisis is happening a little bit earlier.
But, he’s remarkably correct.
Now, his prediction that the US will have to compete with other countries for immigrants and will create some sort of powerful federal bureaucracy to manage them doesn’t seem especially likely to me; Latin American immigrants don’t really have the ability to migrate to Europe, so I think the United States will always have easy access to workers. Meanwhile, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats are promoting some sort of Super-ICE to make sure immigrants find jobs, but maybe that’ll change in the future.
Japan Rises (Again)
Anyways, Friedman sees America pushing thru its crisis. Russia and China, if you remember, won’t, succumbing to regionalism by, let’s say, 2024. This will be a “poacher’s paradise” (137) where the countries on the edge of the Russian and Chinese Empires can expand to fill the vacuum. These countries are:
Turkey, Poland, and Japan.
Let’s go into more detail with each.
Japan, as we know, is in a demographic crisis. This crisis motivates Japan, as we talked about, to take advantage of the Chinese laborforce and expand its influence in coastal China and Russia. But Friedman predicts economic policy alone cannot save Japan; it will shed its pacifism and resort to militarism.
While Japan was an American ally in 2009, soon Japan’s aggressiveness will butt against America’s power in Asia. He writes: “The situation is likely to play out as follows: As the United States begins to react to increased Japanese power, the Japanese will become increasingly insecure, resulting in a downward spiral” (143). By 2030, a unified Korea—he expects the North and South to be unified “well before 2030” will be on Japan’s chopping block. Meanwhile, Chinese forces rally against Japan’s growing influence in the 2030s and find an alliance of convenience with the US. So, by 2040, America will be allied with a post-communist China and a reunified Korea against a remilitarized Japan, which builds a constellation of bases across the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the 2040s.
Alright, let’s try to bring this back to reality. Yes, Japan is rebuilding its military capabilities.
But China and Japan are both experiencing demographic crisis, with similar low and declining birthrates.
Even though Japan is a wealthier country per person than China
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?end=2022&locations=JP-CN&start=1960&view=chart
it’s really hard to imagine that Japan, which spends a fraction of the amount China spends on its military, will somehow be able to leapfrog China as the big boss of Asia.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?locations=JP-CN
Maybe I’m wrong.
But I have much more confidence in rejecting the prediction that North and South Korea will reunify before 2030. North Korea isn’t like East Germany; you can’t stick the two countries back together. The North at this point is radically different than the South in too many ways, and if we’re talking from a practical level, if I was South Korea, I wouldn’t really want to reunify with the burdensome north anyways, even if China couldn’t block a merger. It’s much more likely that North Korea becomes a complete puppet of China after Kim Jong Un dies.
But let’s take a flight across Asia to the other Revisionist Power: Turkey.
Neo-Ottoman Empire
With Russia collapsing by 2020, Turkey will become the new powerhouse in the Near East. Over the course of the 2010s, Friedman predicts that Turkey will be a loyal US ally. It then uses American influence to springboard into regional hegemony. It won’t just be a military power, but an economic one too: “one of the top ten economies in the world” by 2020 (144). While Turkey might face challengers in Arabia and Iran, Friedman doesn’t have hope in them, writing that, “The Islamic world in general, and the Arab world in particular, will be divided along every line imaginable in the 2020s.” So imagine Iraq splitting between Shia and Sunni, Syria’s civil war beginning again, and Saudi Arabia struggling between modernists and traditionalists, which I show back in my first video.
After Russia collapses, America will encourage Turkey to take a leading role in the Middle East, but as Turkey fills Russia’s vacuum in the region, the alliance between the US and Turkey will shatter, probably in the 2030s. He also predicts that Turkey will abandon its secularism and “harness Islamist energies by portraying itself as being not only Muslim but also an Islamic power” (148). From there, Turkey will gain power over the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Middle East, Central Asia, and southern Ukraine through military interventions, alliances, and economic domination. Friedman concludes, “The breaking point will come when Egypt, inherently unstable, faces an internal crisis and Turkey uses its position as the leading Muslim power to insert troops to stabilize it. Suddenly Turkish peacekeepers will be in Egypt, controlling the Suez Canal, and in a position to do what Turkey has traditionally done: push westward in North Africa” (157). Turkey will also have the power to wipe up Iran once and for all.
Unlike his predictions with Russia, Japan, and China, this one seems pretty accurate to me. Now, of course, Turkey was not an especially strong ally to America in the 2010s. Turkey signed major deals with Russia to build a nuclear powerplant,
and purchase a missile system.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/us-sanctions-turkey-over-russian-s400.html
But Turkey isn’t a Russian ally; it just is prioritizing its own power over America. Friedman probably should’ve seen this, since Turkey blocked America from invading Iraq from Turkey back in 2003.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-02-fg-iraq2-story.html
But Turkey is a pretty powerful country. It has immense and growing cultural influence in the Muslim world, including Bosnia up in Europe. Back a few years ago I visited Bosnia and saw Erdogan in person as he attended a commemoration of the victims of Srebenica.
Turkish TV shows like Ertugrul are also massively popular, and Erdogan has taken a step away from secularism toward Islam.
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN24B1TH
But Turkey is also using hard power to expand by occupying northern Syria,
https://www.mei.edu/publications/whats-stake-if-turkey-invades-syria-again
and sending troops to Libya
https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-africa-libya-turkey-e4bbea58437ed3d57ece429cc1c6c282
So Friedman got that right. But I do think Friedman overestimates Turkey’s power. For one, Turkey’s GDP growth reversed in 2013
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=TR
and the country’s in the midst of a gargantuan inflation crisis.
https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/03/turkey-inflation-soars-to-over-one-year-high-at-648
In 2020, Turkey wasn’t in the top 10 for GDP, it was 20th, below Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile, other regional powers like Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to expand their power in countries like Yemen and Iraq. So it’s much more likely in my eyes that Turkey either stays a regional power balanced out by Iran and the Gulf Monarchies or even reverses course and becomes divided by its internal splits between modernism vs traditionalism and Turkish vs Kurdish vs Arab. Even if Russia collapses, it’s hard to imagine Turkey dominating the whole of the Caucasus.
But let’s hike up to the other Revisionist Power Friedman foresees: Poland.
Poland
After the collapse of Russia and the souring of ties between America, Germany, and France, NATO will “cease[s] to exist in any meaningful form” (138).
But Germany and France are old Europe—Poland will leapfrog over the declining powers to become the new big boss of Europe. Taking an aggressive posture, Poland tries “to create a buffer zone in Belarus and Ukraine” (149) and is soon joined by Romania, Slovakia, and Hungary. While Friedman doesn’t see any sort of confederation—sorry, Intermarium fans—he predicts that an alliance between them is likely. He says it’s possiblethat Estonia will occupy St. Petersburg, Poland Minsk, Hungary Kyiv, and Romania Moldova.
Of all Friedman’s predictions, he really spends the least amount of time on Poland. Let’s look to the facts to see how likely this prediction is.
While Poland’s GDP is on the rise, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=PL
It is so far, very distant from Germany or France: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?locations=PL-DE-FR
While Germany has an aging crisis, France isn’t doing so bad and Poland is way worse than both of them.
So I find it very hard to believe that Poland will become economically competitive in the next twenty years, unless some miracle happens.
Even when it comes to military power, Poland just cannot compete with Germany or France.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.CD?locations=PL-DE-FR
Now, Poland has taken a bit of a leadership role in the Russo-Ukrainian War, yes, but its military and financial aid to Ukraine as a matter of fact is dwarfed by that given by Germany, France, Britain, and even the Netherlands: https://www.statista.com/chart/28489/ukrainian-military-humanitarian-and-financial-aid-donors/
It wasn’t like Poland was on some skyrocketing rise in 2009; Germany and France were the most powerful European Union countries then, as they are today, as they likely will be in 2030. It seems like Friedman thought Poland had a bright future because it sent a couple thousand soldiers to Iraq.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25779521
Here’s another factor that he misses: if Russia collapses, why wouldn’t Ukraine or Belarus become their own respectable powers? Why should Russian power disappear completely—wouldn’t a rump Russian state still be a formidable power? Friedman also has significant doubt that NATO, which lasted through the Cold War, or the European Union, which was getting more unified as he wrote the book, would last through the 2020s. While the European Union certainly has issues today, I think it’s much more likely that a common European policy arise in the event of a Russian collapse than the European states split apart and start butting heads again.
But, anyways, let’s talk about the Third World War.
World War Three
Entering the 2040s, Japan and Turkey are expanding into the Indian Ocean, worrying India and of course the United States. Poland, meanwhile, becomes an enemy to Turkey over who will control the Balkans. Seeing Turkey as a greater threat, the US aides Poland, letting it expand into Croatia and gain access to the Mediterranean; meanwhile, the US also aides Serbia, Greece, and Arab nationalists against the Neo-Ottoman Empire.
The great powers also develop hypersonic missiles capable of zipping across the Earth and battle stars—orbital bombardment stations in geosynchronous orbit. America will have three of these, over the equator near Peru, over Papua New Guinea, and a third over Uganda, operational by 2047.
Alright, before we plunge forward, let’s take a second to talk about his battle star idea. I do think it’s fairly likely that the major powers will deploy major military resources into orbit in the coming decades. But,and this is definitely a nitpick, geosynchronous orbit is very overrated. Not only are satellites in geosynchronous orbit stuck over the same bit of land, limiting their coverage, but in order to orbit there, they have to be 36 thousand kilometers above the surface. For comparison, the International Space Station is 400 kilometers overhead and zips around Earth every 90 minutes. Lower satellites cover more ground and are closer to their targets.
Anyways, Friedman writes that as Turkey and Japan team up to meet the United States, they’ll seek allies. Germany will probably turn them down, Mexico too, and the US will respond to the Turko-Japanese Axis by boycotting their goods.
Tensions rise in the Balkans, with Turkey and Poland nearly coming to war over Bosnia. Poland trikes a Turkish base first, but the United States successfully pressures both sides to step down. On Thanksgiving Day 2050, things seem to be calming down…
Which is when Japan strikes. Using boulders from the Moon, it wipes out America’s satellites, then launches hypersonic missiles against dozens of military targets across the world. The whole crisis was a setup to distract and cover up Turkey and Japan preparing for war with America.
But while America and its allies are caught surprised, Japan and Turkey fail to wipe out their military capabilities, and they quickly take revenge, knocking out Turkey and Japan’s satellites and all of their missile bases. As the US builds up for a full counterstrike, Japan and Turkey mobilize their ground forces; Japan attacks “other areas in China and Asia” (202) while Turkey dives headfirst into war against Poland. Now, Friedman argues the days of massive armies are done; the 21st century will be about specialized soldiers with advanced, automated technologies. These Cyber-Turks rush from Bosnia to Budapest, then the Carpathian Mountains, cutting Romania off from Poland and neutralizing it. From there Turkey marches north toward Krakow, “with air strikes ripping apart the Polish military” (204).
With Poland about to fall, the United States Airforce flies to Europe and begins an air war against Turkey, stopping the army in its tracks. Turkey, desperate, turns to Germany for aide and offers it control of Europe. Germany, in a shocking twist, accepts the deal and invades Poland once more, France at its back. Britain joins to defend Poland, predictably. Poland buys time, slowly retreating, as America marshals its power and rushes aide to its ally. While Turkey and Germany try to cut off Polish electricity, America uses an experimental new technology, a microwave beam ray, to literally zap Polish mech-soldiers with the needed electricity from a new satellite in space. In summer 2052, America’s freshly constructed air force turns the tide of war.
Without much of a choice, Turkey and Japan come to the peace table. America doesn’t press for unconditional surrender; the Neo-Axis instead agrees to retreat from their occupied areas; Croatia and Serbia are freed again, while Japan exits China. World War 3 comes to an end without the mass murder of WW2—“perhaps 50,000 deaths” instead of millions (211).
Alright, so I’m not going to pick on this so much because he admits this is just one possibility among many paths. But the idea of Japan again surprise attacking America, even though everybody in Japan knows the consequences of what happened last time around, is pretty silly. Germany joining yet another war against America to help Turkey beat up Poland is also pretty silly. But anyways, let’s move on.
The 2060s
After the war, America continues to stand atop the world. With that being the case, it strongarms the world into giving it “exclusive rights to militarize space” (212). Fearful of another attack, America will devote billions to dominate orbit. This agreement, plus new advancements in space-based solar power generation, bring a booming economy to America. As Friedman writes, “Space will become more important than Saudi Arabia ever was, and the United States will control it” (220). America is at the head of other new sciences, and American cultural progressivism becomes the worldwide cultural force.
Poland, meanwhile, will be the winning team; it’ll devour Belarus and “create a confederated system of governments for its former allies” (213). But America will sour on Poland, seeing it as a new threat, and will again sponsor Western Europeans against a powerful Eastern European Empire. In a twist, America will give tender love and affection to its beaten enemy, Turkey, making Poland envious.
And Poland will find a natural ally in none other than…. Mexico, a new rival to America in the 2060s. Brazil too can provide a challenge to American hegemony.
2080
And this is where we get to the part about Mexican immigrants, because Friedman argues that “immigrants from Mexico will behave differently starting in the 2030s” due to the closeness of their homeland, which Friedman predicts will be an economic powerhouse by 2080. What about the cartels, you ask? That’ll help the Mexican economy by pulling cash from America and reinvesting it in Mexico. With huge numbers of Mexicans living in the southwest and unemployment skyrocketing from automation, Mexico will start to provide a serious threat to America, especially when America enters its cyclical period of crisis in the 2070s and starts deporting people. The crisis escalates, with both sides spiraling toward radicalism. The federal government and Mexican-majority states start to bicker, Mexico mobilizes it army and… negotiations calm things down. But the underlying issue remains, and as time goes on, things get closer and closer to war. Mexico looks for allies abroad, and finds Brazil and Poland. The Fourth World War looms.
But how plausible is this? Well, in his scenario where the United States imports, presumably, dozens upon dozens of millions of Mexican people, then this might be plausible. But I don’t that’s likely or even feasible, even with declining local population. And besides, the United States is a very unique country. Despite what some people on the fringes might say, America is not based on a single culture or race, but an ideology: democracy. That’s how America has been able to digest people from across the entire planet [wolololo] when other countries haven’t. I truly believe that America’s civic nationalism is a much greater power than ethnic nationalism. As time goes on, America will have more Hispanic people. But with America’s power, prosperity, and purpose, it’s much more likely that the US makes Latin America more like the United States of America than the other way around.
Why is this book so weird?
But anyways, let’s do some closing remarks. Why is this book so weird? How can the guy just extrapolate that second-tier powers like Poland, Turkey, and Japan are going to somehow leapfrog over Germany, Russia, and China to become rivals for American power? Well, he writes way back in his intro that every few decades of the 1900s, the world turned on its head, with unexpected twists and turns. He writes, “when it comes to the future, the only thing one can be sure of is that common sense will be wrong” (2).
But he gets his time scales a bit wrong, now that I think about it.
Since Friedman predicts what’ll happen in 2080 in 2009, that’s more like predicting what will happen today back in 1953 than what’ll happen today back in 1900.
And the world of 1953 really wasn’t that different than today on a geopolitical scale. The United States was the strongest power, Russia sought to challenge that power where it could, but many people questioned the ability of a state communist empire to last. The British Empire was obviously collapsing, having withdrawn from Israel and India. Many people were predicting and hoping for some sort of future United States of Europe, and work was already beginning on that. And China was on the rise too, stalemating the US directly in the Korean War. Obviously there were lots of changes between 1953 and 2023, but geopolitical competition had a very similar shape.
Actually, since most of Friedman’s predictions are about what’ll happen in 2050, it’s more like predicting what would happen today back in 1983, when the Soviet Union was still challenging American power, when China was moving beyond Mao under Deng Xiaoping, when Islamism was a growing force in the Middle East poised against America.
While obviously there were a lot of paths those trends could’ve taken, if George Friedman wrote his book back in 1953 or 1983, he’d completely reject those trends and find different ones to extrapolate: America would fight WW3 against Neo-Nationalist Japan and some sort of evil Federation of Europe or something. He did kinda write a book about that.
Alright, one last note. George Friedman is a realist. If you haven’t taken international relations 101, that means he believes that countries act in a cold, rational way to maximize their own power in competition with other countries. It doesn’t matter if they’re democracies or Islamist dictatorships, they compete. I think there’s some truth to realism, but clearly it has fallen short, at least in Friedman’s case, when it comes to actually predicting how countries will act in the future. That’s why he predicts that democratic Germany and Japan will go to war with America in a generation. If you want to look ahead and make your own predictions, it seems clearer after having gone over The Next 100 Years that you have to take into consideration what the people of countries believe in, what their governments believe in, and who their ideological partners are. Countries aren’t NPC’s in Civ5 and you can’t understand why history goes the way it does orbiting 36,000 kilometers above the Earth in geosynchronous orbit.
But alright, I’ve rambled long enough. If you want to see me make my own predictions, comment below and join my Discord, where you can vote on the next video. If you want to support the channel, all it costs is a buck a month. Thanks to those who already do:
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