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The Next 100 Years
A Forecast for the 21st Century
By George Friedman
If this book is to be believed, all you need to know about modern history is that it is an endless contest between the spirit of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who said that the control of the sea was the key to world power, and the spirit of Halford MacKinder, who said the same thing about the “heartland” of Eurasia. Mahan, the guardian angel of the United States, pretty much had the better of the argument in the 20th century and will have it again in the 21st, with outer space in part taking the place of the oceans, but to the continuing benefit of the United States. This assumes, of course, that the United States can meet the Mexican Menace toward century’s end. As you might expect, there is more to the matter than that, and this summary is too high concept even for this uncharacteristically high-concept book. George Friedman’s Stratfor consultancy is heavy on facts, mostly for the benefit of paying businesses and public officials, but also for the journalists who read its public material at Stratfor.com to learn in a hurry about some new global trouble spot. Still, Stratfor is not simply a fact-book publisher. The author intends the service’s products to be informed by a sense of geopolitics. Geopolitics might be defined as the hypothesis that the decisions of sovereign actors are constrained by various durable factors, the most important of which is the geography of the states they govern, in such a way as to make their behavior at least in part predictable. To put it another way, the same geopolitical issues keep cropping up in generation after generation, and in fact never really go away. In this book, the author lets the durable historical mechanisms and geographical chokepoints he has identified write the history rather than use them to interpret history that has happened. The exercise is not meant entirely seriously, but even readers who gag at the conclusions and who choke on the chokepoints may read it with interest and profit. To deal quickly with the scenario for the last 90 years of the 21st century, we might characterize it as falling into three periods of roughly equal length: Unfinished Business, The Battle for Eurasia, and The Reconquista. The most immediate piece of unfinished business is the Islamist war, which the author assures us is gradually ending. The war was begun by a narrowly focused attempt by Al Qaeda to undermine the Islamic regimes of the Middle East by demonstrating the fragility of their patron, the United States. Whatever else the attacks of 2001 may have accomplished, they signally failed to install an Islamic government in the Middle East or anywhere else. We should therefore expect to see the episode simply wind down. Perhaps in some places the winding down will leave chaos in its wake. In the author’s model of geopolitics, however, that outcome would do nicely, as we will see below. The next bit of unfinished business is the bursting of the Chinese bubble. In the author’s estimation, China has previously gone through periods like the last 30 years. At such times, China leaves its traditional isolation and the coast becomes relatively rich through contact with the world or regional economies, thereby creating political tension with the languishing interior. The tension causes political instability and even territorial fragmentation, which is remedied by a strongman who reunites the country and returns it to isolation. The author has an illuminating discussion of how Asian export economies are exercises in growth without real profit: they predictably produce huge reserves of foreign currency and a final implosion. The last business to be settled in the next 20 years is the matter of Russia. As the author repeatedly points out, Russia is fundamentally indefensible, but it must try to exert a degree of control in southeastern Europe if it is to have any hope at all of securing a tolerable border on the northern European plain and access to the resource-rich Caucasus. The author tells us that post-Soviet Russia gave up on the project of becoming a first-tier industrial nation, preferring to become chiefly a raw-materials exporting country. The revenues from the exports were to maintain a regionally predominant military. Whatever the geopolitical wisdom of that ambition, the author says that the markets for these materials just are not reliable enough to support a first-rank military. More important, Russia does not have enough Russians to maintain great-power military status. (We will have a great deal to say about demographics below.) The author expects the Russian Federation to fragment, with the fragments becoming objects of ambition among the world’s powers. This brings us to the Battle for Eurasia. For reasons of convenience more than anything else, the author sets a world war in 2050. Its causes will be pretty much the causes that the author ascribes to the Second World War: the powers on the periphery of Eurasia are driven by their geography to seek resources and strategic depth in the interior. The timing of the war will be dictated by the fortuitous eclipse of the central governments of the major interior states. This time around the contenders will be Japan, keen on gaining workers, consumers, and raw materials from costal China, and a resurgent Turkey; the book includes a map of the Turkish sphere of influence around 2050 that looks for all the world like the Ottoman Empire after the loss of the Balkans. Once again, what would have been two regional wars is transformed into a global war by the opposition of the United States, which views the establishment of secure hegemons on the periphery of Eurasia as a threat to American thalossocracy (not a term the author uses, and more’s the pity). The section on the Third World War allows the author to wax techno-thrillerish on the matter of mid-21st- century weaponry. We learn a great deal about hypersonic weapons and their ability to blow up unsatisfactory objects anywhere on Earth in a matter of minutes. He has plainly thought a great deal about the military applications of space which, again, he views as an extension of Mahan’s strategy of controlling the world’s trade routes. We get a description of geosynchronous Battle Star observation-and-command stations. (He adopts the term “Battle Star,” without noting the implications of that term for his optimistic view of the military and civilian applications of robots of all kinds.) We also get an excursion to bases on the Moon that sounds not altogether unlike Robert Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.” The gist of the author’s technological speculations is that warfare will become universal, precise, and no longer very destructive. Winning a war will no longer require destroying or even badly incommoding cities. It also will not require mass armies. Occupation, when that cannot be avoided, will still be labor intensive, but maybe that is where the robots will be helpful. We may note that, in this war, and in the earlier standoff with Russia, the nations of Europe are predicted to act according to their individual strategic interests rather than as a European unit. After all, the geography of Europe has not changed since 1939, and what is the European Union or NATO compared to the North German Plain? In the author’s scenario, US wins the war in part by technical prowess, but chiefly by negotiating agreements with Japan and Turkey that weaken their positions but do not threaten their regimes. The result is indecisive and messy, but it is the author’s repeated contention that the United States need not, and perhaps should not, win wars decisively; a mess is actually better. As for the last third of the century, when the author sees the possibility of a Reconquista of the American Southwest by a stable and prosperous Mexico, we will deal with it only briefly before turning to the author’s observations on demographics. The author anticipates that US opinion will become more favorable to immigration as time goes on, to such effect that the borderland of the old Mexican Cession will become Mexicanized enough to be liable to irredentist impulses. A crisis could in fact be caused by those pesky robots. By the last quarter of the century, robots could have become flexible enough to make unskilled labor unnecessary, thereby disrupting an economy based on a large, permanent immigrant class. Actually, though the US will face various challenges from demographic changes in this century, it will be less critically affected than any other advanced country. After noting some of the major trends to be expected in the century, the author makes this observation:
“But underlying all of this will be the single most important fact of the twenty-first century: the end of the population explosion. By 2050, advanced countries will be losing population at a dramatic rate. By 2100, even the most underdeveloped countries will have reached birthrates that will stabilize their populations. The entire global system has been built since 1750 on the expectation of continually expanding populations. More workers, more consumers, more soldiers––this was always the expectation. In the twenty-first century, however, that will cease to be true. The entire system of production will change...” This is yet another book in which the reader is told that the most important number for the 21st century is 2.1, the female fertility rate necessary for a society with good post-natal care to maintain itself. No doubt this is true, and the author is correct to emphasize that the phenomenon of societies falling below the fertility survival level is no longer confined to a few highly advanced countries, but is becoming universal. However, it is not at all clear that the author draws plausible conclusions from this development. For instance, he does not appreciate that the most important economic implication of low fertility is not a labor shortage but a demand shortage. The author imagines the US around 2030 inaugurating a policy of promoting immigration from all over the world in order to make up for a shortage of workers. But what will these workers be working on? Certainly they won’t be building vast amounts of residential housing for a population that will not be growing and may even be shrinking. The same is the case for manufacturing, which one might reasonably expect to be increasingly repatriated, at the cost of becoming increasingly cyberneticized. No doubt there will be some demand for service workers, but surely not enough for the immigration-driven economic boom the author anticipates. All of this is quite aside from the fact the author probably underestimates how close to zero growth the Mexican demographic profile already is. More important, the author has a feminist view of fertility issues. He observes that a professional-class woman in an advanced country might spend 10% or less of her adult life in mothering. This situation is so greatly superior to that of women in earlier eras, who spent most of their brief adult lives as mothers, that it is impossible to imagine the demographic shift this change represents ever reversing. Indeed, the author assures us that cultural traditionalism all over the world is doomed, because it is on the wrong side of the demographic shift. To these points one may reply that it is difficult to see how a cultural configuration that sterilizes every society that adopts it can be the wave of the future, robots or no. No doubt it is true, as the author suggests, that in the 21st century advanced societies will work out a relatively low-fertility family model consistent with medical technology that ensures that almost all children will live. However, this model is unlikely to divorce marriage from reproduction. We may debate what God thinks about the alternatives, but Darwin says no. Be this all as it may, this book is less about demographics than about the United States, its nature and prospects. If we are to believe the author, the key political fact of modern geopolitics is that the United States was more or less predestined by its geography to occupy a predominant place in the international system. The US has easy access to both of the world’s major oceans, an easily traversable interior, and its territory is too remote to invade. Indeed, the author suggests that any state placed in central North America would have come to occupy the geopolitical position the United States did. Mexico would have done as well, and it was only the accidental outcome of a handful of battles that ensured it did not. This jaw-dropping disregard of culture as a historical factor runs through the book. Where the author does essay a cultural analysis, his observations are not invariably novel. In talking about the United States, he repeatedly alludes to the country’s youth, saying the US is still essentially an adolescent society given to extremes of barbarian enthusiasm and panicked despair. Such notions are commonplaces. Nonetheless, he does note that the behavior of the United States is remarkably predictable, a characteristic he attributes to the guidance of the invisible hand of geopolitics. The discussion might have been more valuable had the author at least broached the alternative explanation of the United States as the old age of Europe. The US has the oldest continuing constitution and the oldest continuing majority political party in the world. Its political system is an 18th-century clockwork that generation after generation has proven impervious to injury and incapable of fundamental evolution, despite its tendency to chime “cuckoo!” once or twice every century. Geography isn’t the half of it. We might note in passing that the author has 50-year cycles of political and economic transformation running through American history, starting with American independence. The author seems to be thinking not of William Strauss and Neil Howe’s “Generations” model of history, but of Nikolai Kondratiev’s “long waves.” Like the author’s model, the long waves explain economic history in terms of the discovery and exhaustion of new classes of technology. However, the reader must surmise these points: the book is barren of references or bibliography. It also suffers from a number of historical howlers (no, Alaska was not purchased from the Russians during the Civil War), but let us press on to the Grand Strategy of the United States. Every country has a grand strategy forced on it by its geography, the author tells us. The grand strategy of the United States, and presumably of any state located where the United States happens to be, consists of these components:
(1) The complete domination of North America by the United States Army; In the author’s view, the United States is the greatest and chiefest of all possible off-shore balancers. Its goal is to maintain a balance of power on the Eurasian mainland. It must intervene all the time; the author notes that the percentage of time the United States spends at war has risen steadily since independence. However, as we have noted above, the author believes the United States has no particular interest in winning wars; it is enough if the Eurasian contestants are too busy sniping at each other to challenge the American thalossocracy. Indeed, the United States is the enemy of stability, since stability would afford a context in which a rival might form. This assessment sounds like a sour sketch of 19th-century British maritime strategy. There is something to it, but it is a misleading description even of what the Victorians were doing. It really does not describe the foreign-policy history of the United States. Only rarely, notably in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War, did the United States pursue a policy of keeping the pot boiling simply because it did not want either side to win. In fact, the mark of a successful intervention by the United States is that history ends. States continue to pursue their own interests, but in a civil rather than a military or diplomatic mode. This civilianization, or maybe just civilization, of the world’s affairs waxes and wanes, but geopolitical analysis should take it into account as a favored trend. The model of geopolitics that the author proposes is essentially a perpetual game of Risk, that board game in which the wooden counters are armies, and players throw dice to win countries. Gaming can be a clarifying activity; certainly its use in this book to extrapolate a history of the 21st century is entertaining. Nonetheless, we should recall that real-world systems have histories as well as moves, and even games of Risk eventually come to an end.
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