The Next 100 Years by George Friedman

George Friedman, chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Gathering information from its total network of operatives and analysts (drawing the nickname “the Shadow CIA”), Stratfor produces introspective and genuinely fascinating analysis of international events daily, from possible outcomes of the latest Pakistan/India tensions to the hierarchy of Mexican drug cartels to challenges to Obama’s nascent administration. In The Next 100 Years, Friedman attempts the impossible challenge of prognostication world events through the 21st century.
Drawing on a interesting explanation of history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years, Friedman shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, at the dawn of a new historical era–with changes in a store, including:
-Growing interest of having access to shipping via the oceans due to ever-expanding global trade.
-Prolongued U.S. domination of the oceans.
-Political and social faults in China and Russia that will cause those nations to weaken and fragment.
-Declination in population size in developed countries requiring pro-immigration strategies to stay aggressive.
-Emergence of space-based warfare and energy generation to shift the basis of national competition.
-Aggressive geographical expansions of influence by nations which are bounded by weak countries.
-A continued control by the United States except in controlling the regions in the country that are filled with Mexican-Americans.
Based in Friedman’s unmatched grasp of both historical and contemporary trends, THE NEXT 100 YEARS are a compelling, realistic portrait of the future.

With a unique combination of cold-eyed realism and boldly confident fortune-telling, Friedman  offers a global tour of war and peace in the upcoming century. Starting with the premises that “conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination” and “common sense will be wrong,” Friedman maps what he sees as the likeliest developments of the future, some intuitive, some surprising: more (but less catastrophic) wars; Russia’s re-emergence as an aggressive hegemonic power; China’s diminished influence in international affairs due to traditional social and economic imbalances; and the dawn of an American “Golden Age” in the second half of the century. Friedman is well aware that much of what he predicts will be wrong–unforeseeable events are, of course, unforeseen–but through his interpretation of geopolitics, one gets the sense that Friedman’s guess is better than most.
“Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.” —George Friedman

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