The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman

Summary

I'm not entirely sure how to summarize this book. Writing it must have been a massive undertaking.

The author, George Friedman, is a professional forecaster. He is the founder of STRATFOR--a private firm that specializes in intelligence gathering and forecasting--so when it comes to geopolitics, this guy knows his stuff.

And geopolitics is what this book is all about. It begins by identifying the trends in modern human history (and by modern, I mean the past five hundred or so years). And most of this book is occupied with trends in history.

First, Friedman identifies a particular trend or set of trends and briefly explains how they shaped the recent past and the present. Then he explains how these trends will shape the future in several different scenarios. Lastly, he explains why one of these scenarios seems most likely to him.

He separates the future into decades, each with its own crisis and solution.

What I liked

This book is extremely imaginative. And imagination always scores big points with me. By imaginative, I don't mean that it is fanciful or fantastical, I just mean that it requires a good bit of imagination to do what Friedman does so well in this book: expect the unexpected. His predictions are not unlikely, but they are surprising.

Also imaginative are his predictions about the future of warfare. He describes how warfare in the 21st century will be fought from space on orbital platforms (called Battle Stars--just because it sounds cool) that can coordinate strikes by robotic hypersonic aircraft and infantry in powered suits. These predictions are based on current military research.

His writing style is phenomenal. It is almost conversational but his sentences are well structured into strong paragraphs that are easy to read and follow and understand. He doesn't make his thought process inaccessible: first he explains his methods, and then he writes in a way that makes the mechanics of global politics and grand strategy and economics understandable to the layman.

What I liked most was how this book set the events of the present and recent past into the bigger historical picture. It helped me see how events of the present that seem so catastrophic and important will be insignificant in as little as ten or twenty years. He uses examples from the past. For example, in the opening chapters he explains how the current economic recession is not a unique event in the history of this century but that there were other economic crises, all based on investors thinking that current economic trends would never change. All previous economic crises were solved by government bailouts and were followed by periods of economic growth. He demonstrates that this economic recession is only one of many in the recent past and not an unprecedented crisis.

What I didn't like

Almost nothing. The book got a little boring at times when it focused on the tiny details of future events.

Conclusion

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who's not dead yet. It broadened my understanding of current events in the greater historical picture and identified major trends in history of which I had been unaware. I give it a 4.9/5 Battle Stars.