Bonus Review: The Next Hundred Years
The predictions in this book are mostly insane. I'd still recommend it anyway.
One of my favorite places to hang out when I was a teenager was the local Borders bookstore. My friends and I would celebrate the weekend by eating out at a nearby restaurant, then hanging out at Borders for the next hour or so.
It was a sad day when Borders went bankrupt in 2011. I went to Borders one last time for their liquidation sale. I bought something like ten books in that trip — one of them being George Friedman’s The Next Hundred Years. This book would go on to be a huge influence on my thinking.
For the first half of the book, Friedman describes his approach to predicting the future. First, he disregards any sort of horse race political analysis. Despite the USA being the point-of-view character, the Republican and Democratic parties are not mentioned once throughout the course of the whole book. He also goes as far to suggest that the big news stories of the day won’t be worth thinking about in the future. He says he expects the Iraq and Afghanistan wars won’t be notable to future audiences — and that he says this as someone with a son in the US Armed Forces.
Second, Friedman suggests that changes in society don’t happen as a result of the political process, but are instead the culmination of long-term demographic and technological trends. In AP US History, we were taught that women’s suffrage, Title IX, and Roe v Wade came about because women decided to get together and do some political activism one day. Friedman instead suggests that all of this came about in the second half of the 20th century because women were having fewer children and were living longer as childbirth became less dangerous.
Third, Friedman goes over the importance of geography in global affairs. Countries with greater access to the sea have greater access to the global trade network, and therefore tend to be richer and more powerful. And Friedman asserts there is no country more maritime than the USA.
In the second half of the book, Friedman gives predictions for how he expects the twenty-first century to go.
The century is obviously not even close to over yet, but I think it is entirely fair to evaluate him on this metric: has this prediction become more, less, or as likely than when the book was published? For every major prediction of Friedman’s I award him a W, L, or question mark in [brackets] in the heading.
1 - [W] A resurgent Russia reasserts itself
Huge W for Friedman here. When I read this book, I thought “Russia lost the Cold War — there’s no way they’re gonna do this.” Friedman has every right to take a victory lap after Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
2 - [L] China fizzles out in the 2020s
Friedman begins the chapter with some maps and statistics about China — the country has roughly the same land area as the USA, but has five times the population. He asserts that as China gets richer, the coastal regions will become prosperous, while the rural and interior regions will be left behind. Eventually, the inequality will lead to political instability.
Friedman does not predict a civil war or the Communist Party losing power, but instead speculates that Beijing will have to devolve power and distribute resources to the regions.
It is 2021. The decade is only just beginning, but there is no sign of danger to the Communist Party. Xi Jinping is poised to rule China for life, and his government has enough political capital to prohibit children from playing video games. Chinese GDP is no longer posting the double-digit returns it did in the 2000s, but seems poised to grow at 5-7% per year this decade.
Friedman’s China predictions read more like cope than a serious prognostication.
Therefore, Friedman takes an L here.
3 - [W] The rise of Turkey
I think Friedman is justified in taking a W here. In the 2000s, Turkey was making overtures to the European Union for membership. Since The Next Hundred Years was published, Turkey has began to walk a different path from its Western allies. There have been lots of articles published about cooling Turkey-NATO relations recently.
4 - [?] Poland as a great power
Friedman believes that by midcentury, Poland can be a “great power” in the same league as Britain, Germany, or Japan.
I don’t see Poland being richer or more technologically advanced than Germany or Britain by midcentury, but could Poland be worthy of joining the G7 in 2050? I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility. It has smaller population than Italy or France, but a bigger one than Canada. If its GDP per capita closes the gap with Western Europe, I see no reason that Poland won’t be mentioned in the same breath with Germany and France.
I think Friedman takes a “?” here — could be right on Poland becoming more important, but wrong on Poland becoming more powerful.
5 - [L*] Space will be militarized by 2050
Friedman describes the US constructing three “Battle Stars” in geosynchronous orbit above Indonesia, Uganda, and Peru by 2050. These military stations will give America the ability to coordinate airstrikes and troops around the world with great precision.
It took ten years for the US and Russia to assemble the core of the International Space Station. If the ISS is retired, I think it is likely that the US will build its own comparable space station throughout the midcentury. I do not think that we will be able to construct three space stations that are (I assume) much larger and sophisticated than the ISS by then.
One reason why I am bearish on this prospect is that the energies required to ship payloads to geosynchronous orbit (GSO) are much larger than low Earth orbit (LEO). A Delta IV Heavy rocket can ship 29 metric tons to LEO, but just 8 to GSO. The pressurized modules of the ISS have masses between 15-25 metric tons each1. We’re going to need a bigger and better launch system for this. The SpaceX Starship should be able to get the job done, but it be a few years before it is able to fly.
Make no mistake: outer space is becoming more tactically important — the writing is on the wall with the establishment of the US Space Force. If Friedman had put “2100” instead of “2050” I would award him a question mark here instead. I am very bullish on outer space becoming more important in the future, but because he put the date so soon in the future, I have no choice but to give him an “L” there. I will not, however, hold this L against him in the final tally since I do believe he is going to be vindicated, but not for a while — think of this like your college professor dropping your lowest test score.
6 - [L] Japan and the US fight a war in the 2050s
Earlier in his career, Friedman predicted the US and Japan would go to war. He doubles down on this prediction in The Next Hundred Years.
Stop it, George.
A rich country with an aging population will not build up a navy to go to war with the country that protects it >for free.
7 - [?] Mexico challenges the US for continental supremacy in 2080-2100
This is the craziest prediction in the book, and the most interesting.
Friedman’s central thesis in the book is “he who commands the sea has command of everything, he who commands North America has command of the sea.” Well, who says the USA will always have command of the continent?
Friedman predicts that the increasing average age in the USA will prompt Washington to create some sort of guest worker program in the 2030s, and that the largest source of labor will be from Mexico. The Southwestern United States will begin to resemble Mexico more than Anglo-Saxon America. It’s a similar sort of prediction that Pat Buchanan made in his books, when he observed that there will be as many Hispanics living in the Southwest as in Mexico by 2060, effectively turning this part of the US into a second Mexico, and the United States into a “cleft nation” as described by Samuel Huntington.
Friedman suggests that Mexico will begin meddling in the internal affairs of the USA by allowing Mexican citizens and their children living in the US to vote in Mexican elections. He predicts that the airwaves of Los Angeles will be littered with political ads for candidates for both US Senator for California and Senador Mexicano por Alta California. He also goes as far to predict that there will be informal Mexican paramilitaries established throughout the Southwest, akin to the IRA in Northern Ireland.
This is so far into the future that I can award neither an L nor W. If I were writing this article in 2016, I would say “too early to tell but he might claim a W” and attach a photograph of AMLO giving a speech to a crowd of Mexicans in Los Angeles. Now, I’m not so sure, and am leaning towards giving him an L.
First, American culture is not in retreat anywhere in the world, especially within its own borders. The Internet, with much of its content in “en-US” is exporting American culture and folkways. The rest of the world follows US politics like never before, with murals dedicated to Ruth Bader Ginsburg in Scotland and Kyle Rittenhouse in Bulgaria.
Second, we cannot make predictions about the future from a single data point, but if the trends in the 2020 presidential election hold for the foreseeable future, then the Southwest may will secede… and join West Virginia.
The counties in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas are between 90-95% Hispanic — Iowa levels of homogeneity2. In the 2020 presidential election, these counties trended Republican harder than any in the USA. The Rio Grande Valley is already the trans-Mexico that Friedman speaks of, and there is no evidence of any Sinn Fein-style movement brewing there.
Granted, “I voted Republican because I want my taxes lower, but I would still like Texas to join Mexico” is not self-contradictory, but I doubt there are many people who think this.
It’s also worth pointing out that even if the Southwest becomes a sort of American Northern Ireland — administered by one country but economically and culturally coupled to another — this does not mean there will be an independence movement. Of any of the (200 choose 2) pairs of countries in the world, the two most similar are probably the United States and Canada. They both are primarily English-speaking, have a comparable GDP per capita, have a frontier character, and even celebrate a Thanksgiving holiday to commemorate the first harvest in the New World. But there is no serious movement for parts of Canada to join the USA, or for parts of the USA to join Canada.
2080 is so far into the future that it is impossible to grade Friedman here. He could be right, but my expectation is this:
8 - Conclusions
The tally is…
2 Ws — for Russia and Germany
2 Ls — for China and Japan (we’re not holding his space L against him)
2 ?s — for Poland and Mexico
It’s easy to dunk on people for poor predictions, but the future is a hard thing to predict. Friedman deserves some minimal level of respect for betting his name and career on this sort of writing. I recommend reading it for the simple reason that it’s smart, accessible, and a fun book to read, Ws and Ls aside.
If you do not read the book itself, you should at least read the Polandball adaptation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV_Heavy
Yes, I know that “Hispanic” is a cultural group and not an ethnicity, but you understand what I mean in this case.
Space will definitely be militarized in the next 30 years, but in a different way than what Friedman could imagine 15 years ago.
1. Geosynchronous orbit stations for coordinating air strikes/intelligence with humans on board are super wasteful + it's really easy to shoot them down. Much easier to have starlink-like redundant polar orbit satellite constellations everywhere, several thousand of them, doing everything from communications to targeting to positioning to radar.
2. By 2030-35 Russia will have nuclear powered megawatt-class radars and even maybe space-based laser canons. China will join 5 years later. The US will join in 2040-45. Space-based nuclear-powered radars will be an indispensable part of any large nation's anti-stealth and anti-ICBM/anti-hypersonic capabilities. The only way to globally track and target small and fast objects in space is using powerful high-frequency radars in orbit.
3. If by militarized you mean "weapons will be placed in orbit" then I agree -they won't be, it's mostly pointless, easy to track, easy to shoot down. Using space stations to bomb backwards nations is overkill, not cost effective for the rest, unless maybe you put thousands of nukes permanently in orbit.