I just finished reading “The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century,” by George Friedman, and I hope he is wrong about nearly everything.
His thesis is that we humans don’t have much choice in our international politics, that we are guided by geopolitical considerations, and that armed conflict is inevitable. The book is an odd mix of plausible scenarios and wacky Star Wars fantasies.
Perhaps that is not surprising, coming from a fellow who is the chief intelligence officer and founder of Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor), a private intelligence agency whose clients include foreign government agencies and Fortune 500 companies (and plain old citizens willing to pay $199 a year for newsletters).
There is a some fresh thinking in the book, but ultimately it suffers from a failure of imagination.
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