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The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century |  | Author: George Friedman
Creator: William Hughes
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $18.33
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Rating:  130 reviews
Sales Rank: 1622147
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Media: MP3 CD
Edition: Unabridged
Pages: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
ISBN: 1433215462
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.49
EAN: 9781433215469
ASIN: 1433215462
Publication Date: January 1, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, January 2009: "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
Product Description
George Friedman, founder of Stratfor, has become a leading expert in geopolitical forecasting. Drawing on a profound understanding of history and geopolitical patterns dating back to the Roman Empire, he shows that we are now, for the first time in half a millennium, experiencing the dawn of a new historical cycle.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 130
 The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century November 24, 2009
David L. Sullivan (State College, PA USA)
George Friedman, the author of The Next 100 Years, is the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a private intelligence and forecasting company. He is the author of four books and numerous articles on national security, information warfare, computer security, and the intelligence business. He lives in Austin, Texas.
If the reader of this book is a severe critic of the United States, that reader must be prepared for an author who is very pro United States. While Friedman's bias is indeed extreme, he does a very credible and learned job of defending his position with substantial informed levels of information. Secondly, the reader will find in this book an interesting discussion on wars and their effects. Third, this author reveals a fascinating forecasting methodology. Friedman states, "...it is important that I address my method - that is, precisely how I can forecast what I do. I don't intend to be taken seriously on the details of the war in 2050 that I forecast. But I do want to be taken seriously in terms of how wars will be fought then, about the centrality of American power, about the likelihood of other countries challenging that power, and about some of the countries I think will - and won't - challenge that power." Finally, I found the author's views on the next 100 years to be, to say the least, dramatic!
 Useless and nationalistic book ! November 13, 2009
Condesaoli (Mexico)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Mr. Friedmann, what is the idea of this book? Up to chapter 5 you resume facts one should know, when reading the paper daily. Nothing new! Anyhow - serious books have a "glossary". Where did you get all your information from? Where are the links to all of your "facts"? (your wrote a book, not a blog)
What comes then, and I do not even want to talk about your Star Wars fantasy, shows me that you do not have a world vision. You have a regional vision - not a world vision. The US behaving like an stubborn adolescence and Europe being decadent? The US just going into wars to de-stablize? The US has reached a decadence far higher than Europe and the time of the US being a world power is coming to an end. Read again and study history - military overstretch! (you just can not pay it anymore - ups and did I forgot that the US owes China a couple of USD). This has already started and it is more than normal. Pls read a wonderful book called "The rise and fall of the big powers" !
Bottom line - reading this book was a waste of time!!!!
Big disappointment November 12, 2009
F. L. P. Souza (Amstelveen, The Netherlands)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
What a disappointment! Friedman's logic is so narrow-minded and short-sighted that it left me with a feeling of being swindled for having paid good money for such a poor work of forecasting. This book is so below what you could expect from Friedman that it hurts...
The main problem is that the whole book's forecasts are based on geo-politics, which in itself is rapidly becoming an outdated basis for analysis, as Alvin Toffler (among others) already pointed out 30 years ago in "Powershift"! I expected something bold, maybe "breakthrough" thinking, but instead this book reads as if someone in the middle ages was forecasting that 100 years in the future people would be using advanced forms of arrows and catapults in battle.
The issue is not that Friedman predicts that the US will dominate the 21st Century; the issue is that he argues that the basis for that is that the US has access to both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, and therefore will continue to dominate world trade. This is a 20th Century argument, based on 20th Century logic. If, indeed, the US will continue to dominate the world (although its market share of world trade has been shrinking for the past 40 years, and so has its share of world GDP!...) it will probably be due to other reasons, linked to the quality of its universities, its ability to innovate or its efficiency in the service industry, but not its geographical location.
Friedman predicts that there will be a massive demand for immigrants in the US and Europe, to satisfy the demand for production workers. Hello? What about off-shoring and outsourcing? Production for the US and Europe does not need to be physically located in the US and Europe. Has George Friedman not read the book by Thomas Friedman (The World is Flat)?
Another faulty basic assumption in the book is that nations will continue to have wars with each other, trying to assert themselves over all others through force. This is another concept that is going out of style (though it is certainly what the military would like to hear). Nations are going out of style and so are nationalistic wars.
Friedman forgets that the nation-state is a relatively new concept, barely 200 years old in History, which is most likely already being replaced by the concept of supra-national economic blocs (like the European Union). Yes, there will still be wars being fought 100 years from now, but in all probability they will happen in Africa and Western Asia, between relatively minor contenders (though larger powers will be the ones feeding them weapons and training). The better-educated people all over the world have a tendency towards favoring diplomatic power struggles and domination through economic power and culture, but not through force or military power.
The challenge of forecasting is to predict the use new types of logic which will govern thinking in the future. That is the "unexpected", which Friedman refers to, but then builds all his arguments based on concepts developed in the beginning of the 20th Century (or even earlier). His logic is a mere extrapolation of trends observed in the past. The real "tectonic shifts" that are already happening and that will determine our future are the ones connected to communication technology, information, education and social innovation.
The book delivers a very shallow analysis precisely because it centers on outdated concepts and fails to examine the deep changes which are occurring in the way we learn and interact with each other.
"The Meaning of the 21st Century", by comparison, is a much more lucid and thought-provoking piece of literature.
 Biased fanciful thinking backed by lackluster research and data November 12, 2009
Francis Z. Zhou
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book, upon first read, instills a sense of security and hope in American citizens that the American century is only beginning, and there's nothing that will challenge the American hegemony in the 21st century. This is exactly the kind of placebo pill the American public needed at the time of this book's publication. However, once a reader had the chance to "cool their heads" and view the book from an analytical perspective, it's not hard to see that the book is full of theories and "predictions" backed by shallow to non-existing research, and fueled more by a right-wing bias that the US will maintain its dominance in the 21st century simply due to its geopolitical position. Geopolitics is an important "lens" to view the world and analyze its events, but it's still only a single instrument to analyze the multitude of spaces in which nations compete. The analogy is viewing the physical world only through the human visible spectrum and claiming that is all there is, dismissing all other spectrum or senses.
The book is a disappointment from the author who produced "The Future of War" and "America's Secret War", not to mention the person behind Stratfor. If this book is any indication of the author's personal bias, then I'd have to take into account any future work (including information from Stratfor) that the author put out. George Friedman should have stayed to military science and analysis (The Future of War is a great work) instead of getting into the business of national cheerleading and predicting the future. I only gave it 2 stars (instead of 1) because it did have a temporary placebo effect (making me feel good about being an American) that quickly wore off after some sober thinking.
It's Gonna Be The Future Soon October 22, 2009
Andrew Liptak (Vermont)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
One of the main elements of the science fiction genre is the future. Looking to the future extends far beyond just the world of Science Fiction, but to speculative fiction, religion, the business and military worlds, and indeed, is a question that everyone inevitably asks, can we predict what will happen next? George Friedman's latest book, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century purports to just that. While Friedman makes a number of interesting, and at times, good points, the resulting work is deeply flawed in its reasoning. I've since reviewed this book for io9 - much of the summary for the book can be found here: [...].
There are three major points that I took issue with when it came to this book, which are instrumental to the book's findings: lack of sources, an overemphasis and reliance on history and the assumption that the world will return to similar political connections that characterized the Cold War. However, while this is the case, Friedman imparts a very important lesson through this book, reminding the reader that history and nations work with a sort of cause and effect mentality, where x event causes y reaction over z time. Major events take years to build and grow, and an essential thing for the reader to keep in mind is that the world and political structure can change over the course of twenty to thirty years.
This book has no index, notes or sources anywhere in the book, which is odd, considering the number of places that there should be some sort of citation, such as a UN report citing declines in birthrates, or historical information on the political stance of a country. The result of this is a lengthy opinion piece that gets stranger and stranger as the decades pile up. Unfortunately for the book, this does nothing to help with the book's credibility, despite the author's credentials, and essentially turns it into an extended op-ed. With no scholarly information to back up the author's assertions, the book rests on the idea that the author knows just what he is talking about, and given some of the things that he comes up with, I am more inclined to file this under fiction, rather than non-fiction.
Much of the book's reasoning seem fairly flawed to me. Friedman, right off the bat, suggests that what he terms the US-Jihadist war (This should probably be Western-Jihadist war, in all actuality) is merely a small problem that will go away within a couple of years. I'm not well versed in the intelligence community or up on the current information, but I would imagine that that's as far from the truth as you can get. The conflict that's ongoing in the Middle East is one that has been brewing for years, even decades. Israel, Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and others close by have long-seated issues with the United States and the Western world, fueled by extremists who believe that our way of life is detrimental to theirs, and have literally been killing themselves to try and stop us. This is not a problem that will vanish without many of those underlying problems being corrected, which I don't see happening. Furthermore, Friedman fails to take into account how things will change with time - the importance of petroleum, for example, which is not a sure thing. What will the effects of climate change legislation have on nations, and how will changes in these resources affect countries. Furthermore, South America, Oceania and Africa are barely mentioned throughout the book.
Friedman hangs his hat on this one assumption - that the global war on fundamentalist terrorists will go away, and that the world will resume tensions that were in existence during the Cold War. He predicts that Russia will consolidate its power and a Russian bloc in Europe. While there are indications that this is happening, I don't believe that it will be anything like what happened before, and that the US will essentially enter another Cold War. Furthermore, down the road, he predicts that the eventual demise of Russia will lead to the rise of Japan, Turkey and Poland, which I find somewhat more unlikely, at least with Poland and Japan.
Much of his reasoning in these instances depends upon historical record and what has gone on before with these countries. He notes that Japan, despite its recent pacifism, will return to warlike routes and eventually challenge the United States. Turkey will do the same. I find Turkey's case slightly more reasonable, because of its diplomatic ties, stability and economy. In addition to these two countries, he also cites German and Russian tendencies to war. This to me is a particularly dangerous assumption, because countries and cultures are redeemable, as seen with Japan. Countries will not go to war or suddenly become aggressive simply because they have done so in the past. Japan has become incredibly tame, with a culture and multiple generations of people to support that. Germany similarly. Warfare, as Clausewitz notes, is an extension of political policy, and with a culture that is largely against war and conflict supporting a political structure, a highly militant Japan rising again seems unlikely. Friedman's assertions that by the middle of the century, with lunar bases and 'Battle Stars' operated by the United States, are on the face ridiculous. (The cost alone of creating the International Space Station, which houses 6 scientists is in the trillions - the prices for stations that house people in the hundreds is magnitudes higher. Even then, with a mindset of defense against other nations, this still doesn't fly.) But, even then, the idea that the Japanese will bomb these US facilities in a Pearl Harbor-esque attack on Thanksgiving evening is just nothing sort of laughable. History certainly has its place, but it cannot be used reliably to predict the future with an instance such as this. Analyze trends and motivations, yes, but using a country's prior methods of warfare, in this manner, is pure fiction.
This is unfortunate, because the book is presented as fact and not necessarily as an exercise in history or how to think about how these events might work in the future. The result is a ridiculous and absurd argument for a return to older political thinking from people who were immersed in that world for so long.
Originally posted to my website.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 130
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