Rob's Blog: June 2009 Archives

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June 01, 2009

The Next 100 Years

Friedman is the founder and CEO of STRATFOR, a private intelligence and forecasting company based in Austin, Texas. His perspective is "real politic" on steroids. Bismarck would have found him cold and analytical. Compared to the PC nonsense from most politicians and commentators, his unique point of view is very refreshing.

The book attempts to tell us what's likely to happen in the remainder of the 21st Century. In the near term, 10 to 30 years out, it is plausible and thought provoking. Beyond that it's very speculative.

Friedman starts his 21st Century chronology by telling us the war with radical Islam, whom he calls Jihadists, is essentially over. There is talk of a "long war" and in fact desultory conflict may continue, but America has won what it had to win, preventing Al Qaeda from uniting Islam and posing a serious threat to the US. He then pauses to describe America's "Grand Strategy" to protect our country and project power and influence abroad.

Before reading the book I would have described America's grand strategy as essentially defensive, preventing any major hostile state or organization from gaining a strong position in our hemisphere, or dominating Europe or the western Pacific (the two areas we fought to defend in WW 2). Friedman is more detailed, more complete, and I think pretty persuasive. He says we have five goals in order of priority:

1. The complete domination of North America by the US Army
2. The elimination of any threat to the US by any power in the western hemisphere
3. Complete control of the maritime approaches to the US by the Navy in order to preclude any possibility of invasion
4. Complete domination of the world's oceans to further secure the US physical safety and guarantee control over the international trading system
5. The prevention of any other nation from challenging US global naval power

Goal #1 was probably accomplished when we won the Mexican American War in 1848. #2 was probably accomplished more gradually as we excluded European powers from the western hemisphere late in the 19th century. #3 perhaps was achieved with Lend-Lease when the British gave us control of their naval bases in exchange for war material in WW2. #4 came as a result of our victory in WW2. #5 is an ongoing challenge although victory in the Cold War went a long way toward that end.

A curious consequence of this list is that the ultimate goal of US involvement in the eastern hemisphere is to prevent any other power from building a navy that could challenge the US. I thought we fought WW2 to keep the Nazis and the Cold War to keep the Russians from dominating Europe and the world. Is Friedman saying that was only an intermediate objective; ultimately we didn't want them building a navy?

Friedman finesses the question by saying the US should act to prevent any regional power from getting too strong, so that they could eventually challenge the US. No need to talk about shipyards or aircraft carriers, just keep any potential enemy off balance and weak. This means the US doesn't have to win wars in the eastern hemisphere, just keep others from gathering too much power. We can "win" a conflict even if we don't have a clear-cut battlefield victory.

Another consequence of the pursuit of global naval power is the importance of the military use of space. If you control space you can see any place in the oceans - every place in the oceans - and you can attack that place. Our present naval superiority could be obsoleted overnight. A great navy can only survive with superiority in space. Get ready to write some big checks to the space program.

After the Jihadists Friedman addresses China's potential as a major force in global politics. Before reading his book I would have said China is the next superpower, the next nation to compete with the US on an equal footing. Not so says Friedman; China is a paper tiger. His reasoning is that China has two very serious problems, (1) a tendency toward decentralization, toward regionalism and disunity, especially with conflict between the coastal cities and the interior, and (2) their economy.

I thought China's economy was the wonder of the world. Friedman says for the 30 years of tremendous growth China has experienced, capital has been allocated on the basis of political rather than economic reasoning. There are an astronomical number of bad loans, unprofitable enterprises and inefficient businesses. An economy can't keep growing forever, reasons Friedman, and when it does reverse the downturn will be severe and long term. He describes inherent flaws in the Japanese economy and says China is Japan on steroids, headed for an even bigger economic reversal. He expects the problem to hit sometime in the next decade.

Economic hard times will exacerbate problem #1, the tendency toward regionalism and disunity. Since nobody believes in communism anymore, at least in China, in the face of economic depression the central government will use nationalism to try to hold the country together. They will manufacture a crisis with the US or its ally Japan. This will be China's downfall because they cannot develop the naval and other military power within a decade to take on the US. Friedman projects that when China loses that confrontation it will dissolve into competing regions.

Who knows? I have not read any other experts who see China's decentralizing tendencies as so serious a problem as Friedman does. Whatever internal problems China's economy may have, they sure are developing a lot of productive capacity, a lot of infrastructure, and a lot of skilled managers and technical people. Friedman's prediction is provocative, plausible, but well under 100% certain.

Russia is a different story, a greater threat. There will be a future conflict, perhaps "cold" perhaps "hot," between Russia and the US. The reason is geography. Russia sits on the northern European plain, a vast swath of land stretching from the Pyrenees to the Urals, without any natural, defensible boundaries. The plain also stretches south into Ukraine and to Central Asia. Any country on the northern European plain has to worry about the security of their borders. There are only two ways to defend against potential attack; a strong military or territorial expansion. The further you push out your own border, the greater the distance an invader must travel to attack your heartland.

Russia will, of necessity, follow the same policy Moscow has followed for 8 centuries, since its emergence as a power in the region: expand westward as far as possible, and south until it controls the plains and reaches natural geographic boundaries (e.g. the Black Sea, the Caucuses, the Caspian, the central Asian desert).

From the standpoint of Russian defense strategists, this strategy has become very urgent since the end of the Cold War. The Cold War resulted in various Soviet Republics which were not ethnically Russian becoming independent nations. They are no longer controlled by the Russian army. That means Russia's borders on the vast plain moved 1000 miles closer to Moscow. And that doesn't even factor in the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, which put much more territory between Moscow and the western powers. In Russian minds, a crisis.

The difficulty with the compulsory strategy Russia must follow is that to its immediate west and southwest are independent, sovereign nations, some of whom are even members of NATO. Although Russian strategists are thinking defense, their strategy requires aggression. There is no real distinction between offense and defense in the mind of a Russian military strategist. Russian aggression to the west will result in what Friedman calls a "rematch" between the US and Russia.

Russia will have a lot of assets in the rematch; a vast population and territory, extensive natural resources, western European dependency on Russian energy supplies, a more modern and effective army, the pacifism and even cowardice of many longtime NATO members... But they will also have many liabilities; ethnic diversity and potential division within the country, severe demographic problems (their population is shrinking), and a strong desire for freedom among eastern European countries. Russia will win some things, retaking Belarus and Ukraine, but Friedman expects this conflict to turn out like the Cold War, with the US economy and technology eventually wearing Russia down.

Friedman goes on to speculate which powers will emerge after the demise of China and Russia. His picks are Japan, Turkey and Poland. The cases he makes are plausible but who knows? Predicting the shape of the world 30 or 40 years out is uncertain. The one thing he is confident about is American preeminence. He is very upbeat about the 21st Century being one of American dominance.

The first sentence of Chapter 1 is, "There is a deep-seated belief in America that the United States is approaching the eve of its destruction." Friedman then goes on to deride the pessimism and point out America's strengths. It is true that environmentalists, Christian fundamentalists and others tend to be pretty irrational about their apocalyptic visions, but Friedman is definitely a glass-half-full kind of guy.

Some of America's strengths he cites are constant or at least very long-lasting, such as our geographic position astride both the Atlantic and Pacific, the two great arteries of world trade; our openness to immigrants and our relative demographic strength; and the dominance of our navy which has endured for 6 decades since WW2 (it takes a long time to build a world class navy).

But Friedman seems blind to things that can change, such as a strong economy, dynamic industries, technological innovation, willingness to sacrifice for the greater good, and willingness to fight when national interests are threatened.

Friedman cannot imagine the US could become "decadent" like the western Europeans. Yet European decadence results not from inherent differences from other human populations, nor solely from the tragedy of two world wars, but as a result of deliberate government policies of high taxes, cradle to grave welfare, fiscal irresponsibility, stagnant economies, government involvement in nearly all facets of life, redistribution of income, subsidies for failure and the unwillingness to work, freedom from individual responsibility or morality, confiscation of rewards for innovation, requiring businessmen to devote the greater part of their energies to dealing with politicians rather than customers, competitors, or the market, etc. etc. European decadence is the foreseeable consequence of political and economic policies.

If the US government puts such policies in place, Americans will respond as western Europeans have. The Left in America stands for exactly these things. Perhaps not Friedman personally, but as a Democrat he seems to be blind to the risks of his party's policies. His President and all the Congressional leadership want us to be more like western Europe. There is an uncanny resemblance between Obama's agenda and that of British Prime Minister Clement Atlee after WW2, the man who brought socialism to Great Britain, made the economy moribund, and removed Britain from the list of great powers. Whether or not the 21st Century is America's Century depends on the failure of the Left's agenda.

Posted by rob at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)