Review - The Next Decade, by George Friedman
George Friedman
I didn't know what to think of George Friedman before I read this book. I hadn't actually heard his name before, so when the prospect struck me that this was a work of dense geopolitical predictions -- my immediate reaction was to speculate about the many possibilities for pure nonsense. Even the half-soused riff-raff from any pub on the strip can throw down predictions about the next election, Obama's administration or American foreign policy -- and sometimes they even make a kind of sense. So how's the rationale in Friedman's prospective decade? How crazy are the predictions?
Well, Friedman works with a layering of theories to produce his predictions. He first works backward from the outcomes which he imagines are unacceptable, given historical precedent and ongoing trends. After that, he works within the framework that the current global hegemon, the United States, will undoubtedly seek to maintain its preferred status at the top. They'll do so, he claims, via time-tested techniques of Empire, grafted to a modern-day state within a hyper-globalized planet. The result is a book that conjures some very likely hypotheses, some that certainly make sense -- and some that seem downright preposterous.
Global politics is immensely complicated, but Friedman gives an excellent summary of details for why he believes what he believes. This review will focus on shortlisting those details to just the most pertinent, but should still leave a lasting impression of how The Next Decade gets laid out.
Main Thesis / Main Idea:
U.S. foreign policy will remain relatively unchanged in that it will seek to maintain their hegemony at home and abroad by attempting to diffuse networks of potential future economic threats and destabilize pockets of power.
Ideas Addressed:
--What will the future hold for America?
--Which geopolitical forces will shape the next decade?
--Who will be the major players within the international scene over the next 10 years?
--Which countries will form alliances going forward? And for what reasons?
Cold and calculating. Not driven by sentiment for any one particular nation despite its emphasis on the American future.
Very much like reading a modern Machiavelli.
Assumes a sizeable undertaking in predicting the future and, by and large, outputs a fairly solid list of countries to discuss and predictions to make.
Poor analysis in areas which are not Friedman's fields of expertise.
Occasionally over-simplifies situations and influences for the sake of predictions, but this is to be expected...given the subject.
Will anyone actually challenge American political, military and financial supremacy over the next 10 years?
I'll note one thing up front: The Next Decade carries a heavy devotion to analyzing the American future particularly. This is because, given our time-period and America's current dominance, focusing on their future would be as natural as focusing on Britain's future at the turn of the last century. All moves affect the largest empire -- and any move from the world's biggest empire affects almost everyone.
Now, Friedman doesn't strike me as a conspiracy theorist, but he does speculate that American military planners must have undoubtedly realized that a war on "terror" would be faceless and unwinnable. Just like a war on crime, a war on drugs, or a war on anything that's something abstract and not easily defined. Regardless, recovering from an unwinnable and resource-draining war is surely on the agenda for the next American decade.
"Recovering from the depletions and distractions of this effort will consume the United States over the next ten years. The first step -- returning to a policy of maintaining regional balances of power -- must begin in the main area of current U.S. military engagement, a theatre stretching from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. For most of the past half century there have been three native balances of power here: the Arab-Israeli, the Indo-Pakistani, and the Iranian-Iraqi. Owing largely to recent U.S. policy, those balances are unstable and no longer exist. The Israelis are no longer constrained by their neighbors and are now trying to create a new reality on the ground. The Pakistanis have been badly weakened by the war in Afghanistan, and they are no longer an effective counterbalance to India. And, most important, the Iraqi state has collapsed, leaving the Iranians as the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf area."
The possibility of America simply "pulling out" from its military excursions abroad seems unthinkable to Friedman. Unthinkable not because he's pro-war, but because in a highly globalized world in which the economic and political actions of a neighbor three countries away may unwittingly affect you will lead the world's largest power to exert influence pre-emptively. It's not a pleasant argument, but a rational one: purists who argue for a completely non-interventionist foreign policy forget that their country produces roughly a quarter of the world's wealth. That explain a past foreign policy aimed squarely at producing global military dominance and de-stabilizing potential threats before they become actual threats.
This is not to say that I (nor does Friedman) condone American military blunders of the past, present or future. Just because there's a rationale for invading a tiny, mostly helpless country halfway across the globe, lying to your populace about why you need to, admitting defeat in a war you knew from the start would be unwinnable and ransoming your descendants’ future with a preposterous deficit and renewed hostilities in destinations all over the world...does not lend any moral legitimacy. Or even intellectual legitimacy. But there's a reason for it nevertheless.
Rather than moving through a chronological order of chapters within The Next Decade, which is usually our MO, I'll instead run down a Coles Notes version of Friedman's main hypotheses. So here they are.