The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman

I was recently given the book The Next 100 Years (2009) by George Friedman by a friend. After the first few dozen pages, I’d made so many quizzical notes that I had to look up the author, because I’d never heard of him. It turns out that he’s “the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation STRATFOR, a global intelligence company founded in 1996”, according to Wikipedia. That helped set the context for the book a bit better.

There seems to be something about the having last name “Friedman” that leads someone to think that he is an authority on absolutely everything under the sun.[1] Not only that, but he sees no need to delve into the works of other authorities in the field before holding forth and tying everything in to a holistic “this is the way the world works” predictive scheme that kowtows to the way he wants the world to work. This involves, of course, ignoring a lot of history and a lot of science, research and philosophy to the say nothing of basic logic and rational reasoning.

The book is not very long for such a portentous title, weighing in at 273 lightweight pages. Large parts of the early chapters are filled with somewhat superficial regurgitations of U.S. textbook history that reads as if it was written by high-school junior trying desperately to copy something from Wikipedia without getting caught for plagiarism. I wondered while reading it whether Friedman had managed to write any other books because it seemed as if he’d thrown in a reference to everything he’d ever heard of or learned into this book. And it still didn’t crack 300 pages.

When he does extemporize, Friedman isn’t shy about holding forth on the topic of a woman’s “traditional” role in society as well as what all of the world’s major religions would like that role to be. These bold assertions serve as the base for a prediction that world population will actually drop. This treatment leads then seamlessly into interpretations on what Osama bin Laden really meant in his writings and then lurches into a lesson on how computers work, starting with “[t]he computer is based on binary logic” and quickly working his way into describing ASCII encodings.

This, all without a single footnote or reference to any scholarly works or sources for any of his statistics. Is it possible that the human population will stabilize and perhaps even go down in the next 100 years? Sure it is, but not before it goes up to about 8 billion people and, more importantly, not before many of these people will want the same lifestyle that George Friedman himself, as the founder and CEO of Stratfor, has, complete with the extra energy and resource demands. All of this was not discussed at all, leaving his discussion purely in the realm of superficial and largely non-interesting speculation. He lets his readers assume that this population reduction will be good for humanity when, in all likelihood, it will either not happen or will happen as a result of catastrophic die-back.

As with many predictive books, you can read it one way or you can read it another. Turkey will rise to the level of a world power…or it won’t. Russia will fall…unless it gains power first or loses it more slowly. Or whatever. The point is: the author will have been right. The only very consistently correct—in this author’s humble opinion—prediction is that the U.S. will continue to be savage—barbaric, in his words—brutally unfair, pressing for every advantage with no thought for any principle other than “he who dies with the most toys wins”. Friedman constantly treats the U.S. as an “it” looking out for itself without a thought for what its citizens may be able to bring about. He does this for all countries, and he has a sole emphasis on history as created by state actors: terrorism isn’t mentioned as an influence at all (at least not in the first 170 pages).

Not only that, but climate change also has no influence on world policy for the first 30 or 40 years, either. Energy seems to be in great supply as well, with no explanation given (other than space-based microwave cannons, which themselves would have required only a minor up-front energy and materials investment, as hand-waved away by Friedman).

Instead of that, he places an inordinate amount of emphasis on not just military power, but specifically maritime military power. Oh, and “develop[ing] significant capabilities in space” is something that many nations will do (Poland, Turkey, Japan, etc.) even though it’s something that the up-and-coming power United States (according to Friedman) is incapable of doing right now (U.S. astronauts currently fly out of Kazakhstan).

And, I feel that this must repeated: though he claims that his “book is not meant to be a celebration of the United States”, it is. It just is. Actions by the U.S. turns out to be advantages where the same actions by opponents are deadly missteps. America seems to win, no matter what. The world-spanning war he envisions is also just ludicrous. His hypothetical military actions are ubiquitous, strangely antiquated but also surgically clean, with large swaths of territory changing hands with almost no casualties.

Several times, he pauses to remind us that he’s “laying out logically” a very plausible future, but he’s really just talking out of his ass. He copy/pasted a bunch of 20th-century history together, took his preconceived notions of how the world works and should continue to work and had at it, no footnotes, no references, no data. Nothing.

It is people, in general, that are missing from Friedman’s book. There is no discussion of living conditions, advancements in social or human-centered technology, nothing about poverty, health care … nothing. His thoughts about the future are centered on military states. In the late 2060s, when “America presides over a golden age of stability”, one can only presume that, not only are the people of the world kept on a short leash by the newly rebuilt Battlestars (the aforementioned microwave cannons—I am not kidding), but even the people of the U.S. are probably not doing so great (as e.g. now with stock market soaring but many people not working, underwater on homes, in prison or otherwise dying of poverty).

Not recommended.

Notes

I jotted down a few notes while I was skimming/reading the book.

• Page 24: He seems utterly oblivious to irony when he says that China will fall because of a class divide engendered by people on the coast doing better than those in the middle of the country (hint: he might as well be describing the U.S. – why does it work for them?)
• Page 26: common sense is for pussies. Cool, no wonder there are no footnotes.
• Page 29: what about perestroika? What about Tuchman’s many examples in her excellent March to Folly?
• Page 31: How was the twentieth century a wholly European century, with only the last decade belonging to the U.S.? The U.S. owned a majority of the world in 1945 already. The U.S. is ascending only now? Really?
• Page 33: And there is it: global warming is an irrational fear. And, prediction of America’s downfall was wrong once (in the 70s), ergo future similar predictions are also wrong. Q.E.D.
• Page 35: the biggest industry requires a lot of imported oil, but if that’s gone, what happens to that industry? And how long will that soil remain arable? Aren’t there a lot of problems already? How the hell is Alaska considered uninhabitable, but he says nothing about somewhere like Montana?
• Page 64: “overdramatize?” I imagine he refers to the wailing about lost American lives. Considering the amount of damage done to the rest of world per lost American soldier, it is absolutely correct to characterize our histrionics as overly dramatic. However, millions have been killed in these actions that he just dismisses, to say nothing of the lost opportunity costs of trillions of dollars wasted on “confusing” the rest of the world and preventing it from getting organized. What a bizarre theory: it explains why it always looks like the U.S. is fucking up royally … it’s all part of the plan.
• Page 67: Christ, that’s deft (or daft?), turning the U.S. inability to win a war in any real sense into a string of “actual” victories by claiming that the intent was only ever to destabilize. And the myth that the entire Muslim world wants to establish a Caliphate is just taken as established, credible fact.
• Page 96: At the same time—on the same page—he exhorts us to “expect the unexpected” but also that “this is not the most likely” outcome. What the hell?
• Page 97: Iran is at fault for the U.S. obsession with it, of course. Iran will be perceived as being “prematurely aggressive” and will have rightfully earned the baleful wrath of the U.S.
• Page 101: He constantly discusses population and labor force as seemingly purely fungible resources; he never mentions education, training or skill sets
• Page 130: Here he’s unduly harsh on the paranoia of the Russians: they quite reasonably think in terms of having been constantly under threat or attack over the last 100 years. Look at the current European attitude toward them, which crosses the line into racism, even at the State level.
• Page 132: His analysis is based heavily on what feels like decades-old military strategy and tactics (e.g. focus on naval forces), ignoring—or not mentioning nearly as much—the much more prevalent economic strangulation and colonization. Already today, we have drones, cyber warfare, nuclear weapons (which he dismisses as not usable; why?) as well as all sorts of asymmetrical terrorist and guerrilla tactics. All of this is not discussed, favoring missile porn about hyper-rockets that travel at 10 times the speed of sound
• Page 138: His ideas about the mobility of labor have no basis in reality. He makes it sound like blue-collar labor forces just jump around, optimizing their incomes by location. There is no reason to believe that this will become easier (even were immigration restrictions reduced as per the mysterious “population bust” he posits).
• Page 145: Once again, he waves his hands and makes history happen with utterly unexplained forces
• Page 146: He casually mentions 401ks as a saving vehicle when, for many people, those had been literally decimated just a year before his book’s publication. He also ignores the massive financialization of the U.S. economy, treating it instead as a GDP comprised primarily of industry and exports.
• Page 147: lots of bla, bla, but essentially boils down to very generously explaining how a large part of the U.S. economy (the financial part, at least) is based almost purely on fraud. He used far more words to get there, but I’m sure he also has many, many friends that he is trying to avoid offending.
• Page 149: Here he talks about Social Security as if he’s the first one to think about the baby boomers and as if the SSA has no actuarial division that perhaps anticipated it (i.e. he thinks we have to raise the retirement age, of course). Despite all of these problems, though, the U.S. will still easily come out on top in the world standings in the next century.
• Page 152: Here he posits a population slump in OECD countries, engendering a situation in which “immigrants will certainly comparison-shop”. This would be a sea change indeed, but there is no factual argument made for this coming about, other than reverse population pressure. And, even given that, the vacuum of U.S. desire for labor doesn’t making moving to another country any easier, really.
• page 162–166: Purely old-school militarism with no mention made of the potential for nuclear war or other less conventional attacks. Just armies moving back and forth as they always have done.
• Page 167: “[…] intensification of the crisis of confidence that has undermined France and Germany since World War I.” Really? Wasn’t Germany just brimming with confidence somewhere in the middle there? Does anyone else recall something like that?
• Page 172: Is this some neocon fantasy? Instead of being on the rise and riding a resource boom, Russia disappears on its own? Again? Why does the U.S. get to ride a resource boom, but not Russia? Why does China implode due to class divides but not the U.S.? No reasons given, other than it makes the prediction more palatable to Stratfor’s customers.
• Page 173: So, wait a minute, just a few pages ago, the U.S. had unparalleled economic and military power over the world, but still allows Japan to develop into a James-Bond–villain–like power? Methinks he’s just getting a hard-on describing the awesome military hardware they will all have.
• Page 174: It’s weird, because as the world develops, he keeps reaching back to the 20th century for patterns, envisioning ever-expanding, classic empires which would seem to require much more military personnel and energy. He makes no attempt to describe how this will all transpire and how energy budgets will work; instead, he just asserts that it will (work). And one large empire is threatening to break up (the EU)—what is the justification for believing that any other country would want to expand to more territory and leave itself even more exposed? There’s more confusion here because, once the Turks have expanded far northward, they can then magically “tell the U.S. [what] to do”? And Iraq will be “torn apart by traditional internal conflicts” but this is more historical work than prediction, no? And he predicts that Iraq will somehow build up into something useful in 30 years but will then fall apart again because “Russia withdraws support”? Wouldn’t decades of U.S. sanctions and war be more to blame here? Or are we just going to look ahead and forget that all happened?
• Page 175: “Force Israel into an accommodation.” Did he write that with a straight face? This has barely happened in the last 60 years and, with its major ally in nigh-unimaginable ascendancy (Friedman’s prediction), it isn’t likely to happen in the future either.
• Page 185: I call them “Battlestars, for no other reason than that it’s a cool name.” Yep, definitely getting a hard-on over military hardware.
• Page 186: Why would the “Japanese be alarmed by Battlestars”? Following current trends in U.S. education and technical expertise, wouldn’t the Japanese most likely have designed and built them? And would these plans not have been available online since pretty much the project inception? Or does the Internet no longer exist? Or perhaps Wikileaks gave up and went home?At any rate, The Japanese would have presumably kept a Battlestar for themselves. Or are we still assuming that, as in the 1960s, only Americans can build technology?
• Page 189: “U.S. intelligence, of course, will pick up the diplomatic discussions […]” because, in forty years, we still won’t be using encryption for anything so that the eavesdropping infrastructure continues to work just as well as it does today.
• Page 190: Apparently, he’s going to ride the “only Americans can design and build technology” horse until it dies out from under him.
• Page 192: It’s really getting a bit infuriating how he’s so understanding that the U.S. considers any minuscule or barely potential threat to its hegemony as life-threatening and an “offensive maneuver”.
• Page 200: bla, bla, bla, more war porn … moon bases! Moving on…
• Page 203: “As we have seen, nuclear weapons are more frightening before they are used than after […]” I’m not even sure how to respond to that. Is he sure about that? Japan has been pretty quiet, no? They used to be quite dedicated militarists and are now quite dedicated pacifists. They invented an entire film genre with plots dedicated almost solely to working through the angst engendered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That seems like a spectacularly insensitive and wildly inaccurate thing to write.
• Page 229: The massive, world-spanning war will cost only 50,000 lives in all. Naturally, collateral, second-order and third-order effects of such a war are not counted toward the body count. If people starve to death because a death ray wipes out their crops or power centers or clean water, that’s their own fault, and is naturally not attributed to the war. The scenario he depicts would require so much energy; where does it all come from? It feels like Michael Bay helped him write that chapter.
• Page 233: Here he once again takes up those 50-year cycles of American history. He explained how American history can be roughly aligned—very roughly, because you can only use the official history and must ignore other significant events that don’t line up so well—in 50-year blocks. He does not explain why this pattern is inescapable.
• Page 235–238: More tech porn, listing historical technologies and throwing in every technology he can think of. I’m not sure what the purpose here was, though. Perhaps just padding to fill out the book a bit more.
• Page 245: Here he has a good 3-item list that describes how technology is developed (hint: the first step is publicly funded research at universities and grant programs, the second is publicly funded military development and the last step is private industry making money off it, for free). Nothing new to see here.