George Friedman, columnist for the New York Times, has written a series of bestselling-books about geopolitics. Friedman’s newest book is The Next 100 Years, Friedman’s latest book, tries to predict how and when the geopolitical landscape will change over the course of the next century. Obviously, the book is very ambitious—no one has had much success in making the kind of forecasts present in The Next 100 Years.
Therefore, Friedman needed to explain exactly why his book would be special and why it would be accurate when the dominant majority of similar books have failed miserably. In this vein, Friedman observes that accurate predictions of the coming geopolitical landscape would have seemed ridiculous at any point in history, and claims that his discussion is special in that he knows to “suspend common sense.” He also claims to have an “intellectual framework” that has served him well in the past, though he fails to describe either the framework or the accuracy of its past predictions.
One apparent characteristic of Friedman’s intellectual framework undwermines many of the predictions in The Next 100 Years. Friedman relies relentelssly on the so-called “Rational Actor Model,” which treats national governments as cohesive wholes that act unerringly according to a self-interest that is assumed to be simple and obvious. This model works well in describing the choices of the Communist Party of China, where inevitable disagreements in the population need not be reflected in the government, and where the culture is more conducive to consensus than debate. In other cases, Friedman abuses the model by illogically granting human attributes to nations, such as when he literally thinks of European nations as inactive or even senile simply because they are old.
Of course, because of the scale of the subject, The Next 100 Years has some very interesting ideas. For example, Friedman argues that the growth in China and India cannot possibly be maintained, and that when it does slow down, internal conflict will cause the already tenuous political structures to collapse. Turkey, Japan and western Europe will rise to occupy the space left by these two giants after and during the second collapse of Russia, according to Friedman.
This second collapse is supposed to come after a short and final repeat of the cold war, as Russia attempts to restore itself to superpower status. Friedman sees this renewed conflict between the United States and Russia as the most important geopolitical problem for the next decade or so. That the United States will triumph once again seems inevitable to Friedman, because he sees the American advantage as structural and very slow to change.
This continuing dominance of the United States is perhaps the thesis of The Next 100 Years. Friedman thinks that the United States’ advantage arises ineluctably from simple geography and infrastructure: the United States has easy access to both the Atlantic and the Pacific, and remains the greatest industrial power the world has ever seen, by far. In Friedman’s eyes, the only real threat to American power will not come until late in the century, from Mexico. Mexico is the only potentially hostile country that has access to both oceans and the ability to attack the United States homeland, since Canada will not have a serious rivalry with the U.S. and no other country could muster the naval might for an invasion.
As a well-written book about geopolitics, Friedman’s book could never have been anything but entertaining. However, it seems to be more like indulgent fan service than a serious attempt to predict the future. Friedman provides only the thinnest of support for his predictions, and as his forecast advances through the century, it becomes more and more questionable. By 2050, even, his predictions are very difficult to take seriously. The Next 100 Years is perhaps best thought of as “pulp nonfiction”—nonfiction whose primary value lies in its ability to entertain.
