1. The inherent power of the United States coupled with its geographic position makes the United States the pivotal actor of the twenty-first century.  That certainly doesn’t make it loved.  On the contrary, its power makes it feared.  The history of the twenty-first century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two opposing struggles.  One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try to contain and control the United State.  The second will be the United States acting preemptively to prevent effective coalitions from forming.  (5)
2. The United States doesn’t need to win wars.  It needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can’t build up sufficient strength to challenge it.  On one level, the twenty-first century will see a series of confrontations involving lesser powers trying to build coalitions to control American behavior and the United States’ mounting military operation to disrupt them.  The twenty-first century will see even more war than the twentieth century, but the wars will be much less catastrophic, because of both technological changes and the nature of the geopolitical challenge. (5-6)
3. Reasonable people are incapable of anticipating the future.  The old New Left slogan “Be Practical, Demand the Impossible” needs to be changed:  “Be Practical, Expect the Impossible.”  This idea is at the heart of [Friedman’s] method.  From another, more substantial perspective, this is called geopolitics. (10)
4. Geopolitics is not simply a pretentious way of saying “international relations.”  It is a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road.  Economist talk about an invisible hand, in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith, called “the wealth of nations.”  Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors.  The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior and therefore, the ability to forecast the shape of the future international system. (10)

   H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells on the set of Things to Come

Friedman borrows heavily from futurist writers like H. G. Wells and his image of the technology located in the future.  From the rebellious behavior in Things to Come, it is obvious that, “It is the delight of all societies to belittle their political leaders, and leaders surely do make mistakes.  But the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid.  More likely, mistakes are forced on them by circumstance. . . . Geopolitics therefore does not take the individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously.  Both are players who know how to manage a process but are not free to break the very rigid rules of their professions.” (11)

 

1936 View of Things to Com

Friedman believes that “we are now in an America-centric age.  To understand this age, we must understand the United States not only because it is so powerful but because its culture will permeate the world and define it.  Just as French culture and British culture were definitive during their times of power, so American culture, as young and barbaric as it is, will define the way the world thinks and lives.  So studying the twenty-first century means studying the United States.” (13)  He offers as example of the link between the computer and American culture.  “As the American Age opens, the United States has a vested interest in the destruction of traditional social patterns, which creates a certain amount of instability and gives the United States maximum room to maneuver.” (61)

Friedman states that “American culture is an uneasy melding of the Bible and the computer, of traditional values and radical innovation.”  (61)  Of all his statements, this is the most factual.  Americans have never understood themselves as a culture of so-called Christians.  Americans, for the most part are “freedom loving democrats,” with a small d.  However the Bible on which Christianity is based is a fascistic document—in that God and his biblical laws form a closed system of extreme right-wing dictatorial government and governance.  Its insistence upon racial purity; its misogynist ethos, where women’s sexuality is denied; its favoring of all out war; its emphasis on lebensraum, or land set aside or conquered for the chosen racially pure, all reflect Nazism, which was the German adaptation of Fascism.  On a lower level, American Christian fundamentalists understand this, and it makes them feel Exceptional.  The most radical sect of the Christian fundamentalist, the followers of the late R. J. Rushdoony and his books, second only to the Bible as God’s word to Christian fundamentalists, The Institute of Biblical Law (1973) and Thy Kingdom Come (1978), believe that democracy is not part of God’s plan for man.  “Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life.” (Thy Kingdom Come)  “The ‘civil rights’ revolutionary group are a case in point.  Their goal is not equality but power.  The background of Negro culture is African and magic and the purposes of magic are control and power. . . Voodoo or magic was the religion and the life of American Negroes.  Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive.” (The Institutes of Biblical Law, 61) (http://atheism.about.com/library/quotes)   However, Friedman points out that “along with demography, it is the computer that is reshaping American culture and is the real foundation of American cultural hegemony.  This will become extraordinarily important in the next hundred years.” (61)

George Friedman

Friedman claims that he is extrapolating from history to predict the future.  Then he moves history into the realm of speculative possibility, which some may see as science fiction.  However, one must remember that the human mind cannot imagine anything impossible, provided the technology is there or ready to be put to use.  History is always ready.

NINTEEN EIGHT-FOUR

Chapter 9, “The 2040s: Prelude to War,” and Chapter 10, “Preparing for War,” are highly reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984: A Novel.  However, the last paragraph of Chapter 8, “A New World Emerges,” is seminal to introduce the subject of war that is featured in #9 and #10.  “Suddenly there will be three regional hegemons [Poland, Japan, and Turkey] emerging simultaneously, and two of them (Japan and Turkey) will be significant maritime powers—one in the northwest Pacific and one in the eastern Mediterranean.  Both will also have developed significant capabilities in space, and we will see in the next chapter how that becomes relevant by mid-century.  The bottom line is a follows: In the 2040s, the United States will do what it does when it becomes uneasy.  It will begin to act.” (152)  According to Friedman, war will rage in Eurasia throughout the 2040s.

 

  George Orwell

Friedman seems to have borrowed his geopolitical war paradigm (for emphasis) from George Orwell’s 1984.  In other words, The Next 100 Years seems to be back-story for the war between The Three Superstates: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.   He writes, “The most threatening move the United States will make during this period is at sea—and those moves won’t actually take place in the water, but in space.  During the 2030s, the United States will have begun a fairly low-key program for the commercialization of space, focusing particularly on energy production. . . . (166-167)

Three Superstates: Oceana, Eurasia, and Eastasia

The United States as Big Brother

The “forever” wars featured in 1984 in which the enemy is nebulous and changes sides frequently,  is Winston Smith’s assignment at the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) to reorient history as to who is the enemy and who has morphed into the ally.  Friedman posits that in mid century, a new kind of war” will be fought. “World War II was the last major war of the European Age.  In that age there were two kinds of wars, which sometimes occurred simultaneously.  One was global war, in which the world as a whole was the battlefield.  Europeans waged wars on that scale as far back as the sixteenth century.  The other was total war, in which entire societies were mobilized.  In World War II, a nation’s entire society was mobilized to field armies and to supply them.  The distinction between soldiers and civilians, always tenuous, completely collapsed in the global and total wars of the twentieth century.  War became an extraordinary display of carnage, unlike anything yet seen—both global and total.” (175-176)

DEJAVU 2009: THE CRISIS OF 2030

Friedman, like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, promulgates that “debt is measured against net worth are economies of scale.  If you owe a thousand dollars and have a net worth that’s negative, you have problems if you lose your job.  If you owe a million dollars but have a net worth of a billion dollars, you don’t have a problem.  The U.S. economy has a net worth measured in hundreds of trillions of dollars.  Therefore, a debt crisis measuring a few trillion cannot destroy it.  The problem is how can this country’s net worth be used to cover the bad loans, since that net worth is in hundreds of millions of private hands?  Only the government can do that, and it does it by guaranteeing the debts, using the state’s sovereign taxing power, and utilizing the Federal Reserve’s ability to print money to bail out the system.” Moreover, “when we talk of economic crisis, all fears turn immediately to the Great Depression.  In fact, historically, the terminal crisis of a cycle has usually resembled deep discomfort more than the profound agony of the Depression.  The stagflation of the 1970s or the short sharp crises of the 1870s are far more likely than the prolonged systematic failure of the 1930s.  As will be true of the crisis of the 2020s, we don’t have to be facing a Great Depression in order to be confronting a historical turning point. (129-130)

METROPOLIS

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou

 

Metropolis, City of the Future

 

Exhausted Workers of the Future

The workers in Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis are the Proles in Orwell’s 1984.  They work from sun-up to sun-down to keep the City running in good repair.  Their children like the Proles’ children expect the careers of their fathers and mothers. 

 

 

  In “The Crisis of 2030,” Friedman attests that “American political culture, ever since 1932, has been terrified of a labor surplus--of unemployment.  The issue of immigration will have been regarded for a century in terms of lowering wages.  Immigration has been viewed through the prism of population explosion.  The idea that it could resolve a problem—a shortage of labor—would have been as alien a concept as the idea in 1930 that unemployment was not the result of laziness.  However, “in the 2020s this concept will shift again, and by the election of either 2028 or 2032 a sea change in American political thinking will have taken place.  Some will argue that there are plenty of workers available, but that they don’t have the incentive to work because taxes are too high.  The failing president will try to solve the problem with tax cuts to motivate nonexistent workers to join the workforce by stimulating investment.  Rapid and dramatic increases in the workforce through immigration will be the real solution. . . .” (132-133)BRAVE NEW WORLD

Friedman hedges his futuristic bet by stating that “I want to describe a war that I think will take place in the middle of the twenty-first century.  Obviously I don’t know when it will happen with any precision, but I can provide a sense of what a twenty-first –century war might look like.  You can’t imagine the twentieth century without some idea of what World Wars I and II were like, nor can you really get a sense of the twenty-first century until you’ve described war.  War is different from what I’ve been talking about so far because war is a matter of detail.  Without this, you miss its essence. To understand war, you need to understand more than the reasons a war was fought.  You need to think about technology, culture, and other matters, all of them in detail. . . . (Chapter 11, 192)

 

Aldous Huxley

Friedman borrows the dystopia and space science of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World for what he calls, “The 2060s: A Golden Decade.”  He writes, “America will be moving into a period of dramatic economic, and therefore social transformation [similar to the 1960s].  However, as with World War II, when a major war occurs in the early to middle stages of the cycle, the cycle is kicked into overdrive as the economy adjust to the immediate aftereffects of war.  That means that the mid-to late 2050s will be a jackpot period, similar to the 1950s.  In every sense of the term, the fifteen years after the war will be an economic and technological golden age for the United States.  The United States will reduce its defense expenditures after the collapse of the Russians in the 2030s but will raise them again dramatically as the global cold war in the 2040s intensifies.  Then, during the mid-century war, America will engage in extraordinary feats of research and development and will apply its discoveries immediately.  What would have taken years to do in a peacetime economy will be done in months, and even weeks, due to the urgency of war (especially following the annihilation of U.S. space forces) . . . . (215)

Battle Star USA

TRUTH OR FICTION

If you doubt the futurism of Friedman, perhaps you should doubt futurism of Buck Rogers or the internet itself.  We owe both these inventions to war and rumors of war and a captured Nazi genius named Werner Von Braun.