"Be Practical, Expect the Impossible." So
declares 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 global network of operatives and analysts (drawing the
nickname "the Shadow CIA"), Stratfor produces thoughtful and
genuinely engrossing 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
undertakes the impossible (or improbable) challenge of
forecasting world events through the 21st 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.
--Jon Foro
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