We all want a little clarity about the future. Whether that is what the weather will be like tomorrow or how our stocks might perform. Is the new iPhone going to be better than the last one, or will artificial intelligence become a big deal? Others want to know whether WWIII will break out next week and should I cancel my beach plans. For every single one of these questions there are analysts who claim to be answer exactly (or close enough) whether certain things will happen in the future.
In my travels across the web I have come across more than a few such claims made by people with varying degrees of certainty, and I have found most of those claims wanting.
For today I’m mostly looking at the geopolitical side of things, focusing on the work of two notable “futurists” and their ideas of what the 21st Century might look like. The first is George Friedman, often lauded as one of the best in the business, and he has written many books on how the future might look starting with his 1991 book, The Coming War With Japan. That title might strike you as distinctly odd, but in the 1980s this was a very real – if ridiculous – fear that infected certain subsets of the American psyche. From policy reports to fiction, the idea that the United States would, after over half a century of peace and alliance, be once again facing down a militarized Japan for dominance seemed to be far fetched. The idea was notably lambasted at the time by some, and with this in mind you might be wondering why you ought to take Friedman seriously at all.
His book The Next 100 Years is a wide ranging attempt to predict how the 21st century might look and how it may end. It is a sweeping narrative embracing how the world will look by the dawn of the year 2100 and more importantly to the author, how the United States will weather these storms and come out on top. Notable highlights include, the rise of Poland, Turkey and Japan as powers, the collapse of the EU and the break up of Russia by the 2010s, and the breakup of China by the 2020s. Stop me if either sounds familiar. Friedman has been predicting the balkanization of China for years, but has revised those ideas recently somewhat. Recently rather than predicting the outright balkanization of Russia and China, he has tweaked his predictions that neither country will break up, but instead be reduced in efficiency and relevance as their governments focus on internal problems, and both will be facing a resurgent Japan who will militarily dominate eastern Asia.
That’s not something which has stopped his unofficial protégé Peter Zeihan from cheerfully predicting those outcomes however.
Zeihan is different from Friedman in that he also makes wide and sweeping geopolitical speculations, but he attempts to back it up with sweeping claims about demographics and geography. For instance, he hyper fixates on borders, demographics, and who has the oil. As such he is convinced Russia can pay for short term gains from oil, while China, who is not a producer in any meaningful sense, cannot. The poorly balanced demographics of Russia and China mean that their populations are cratering, which will lessen their geopolitical power as the century goes on. The current demographic trends of both countries are poor, with aging populations and in China’s case a crazy male/female imbalance, and Russia’s population is predicted to decline from 145 million to between 125 and 90 million people. So some decline is almost inevitable. However Zeihan makes this sound further catastrophic by claiming, without any evidence, that both Russia and China are fudging their population numbers to make it look like there are in fact more children.
This, he says, is what will lead to these countries to break up and balkanize. Though the how or why stems from some odd speculation about the ethnic groups in Russia (which make up only 19% of the population) will claim independence, somehow, and China will collapse into different states, but more because of regionalism since it would be hard to claim ethnic troubles outside Xinjiang and Tibet when the country is 94% Han Chinese.
As for who will replace them in the region, it’s Japan. Though that seems odd when Zeihan is so sure of the demographic collapse of China and Russia that Japan, a country with the worst demographic population prospects on Earth predicted to potentially half by the middle of the century, is somehow going to reverse that decline and be able to exert influence across much of eastern Eurasia. This is something neither Friedman or Zeihan ever really address, which coupled with both of their focuses on demographics is a somewhat startling omission.
Zeihan though, maintains this idea throughout his 2020 book Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World. It’s a short and at least interesting read with his main thesis. That thesis is mainly that the United States is solely responsible for the current world order and is increasingly withdrawing from playing global policeman, and so the world order will collapse into chaos. In that sense the United States will withdraw in on itself and mostly focus on controlling its direct neighborhood and its trading partners. Filling the void will be Turkey and Japan. If that sounds familiar it’s because Zeihan seems to crib a lot of his work from Friedman, with slight amendments here or there.
The penultimate gist of Zeihan’s analysis however is that the United States is an autarky, and because of the shale oil boom it will persist as a great power essentially indefinitely throughout the 21st century. I could write an entire essay on how weird this is considering the integrated relationships of the global trade network and the numerous gloomy looks at the shale industry and how it is at best a short term energy project, but instead I would like to highlight just why Zeihan’s fixation on geography and oil is bizarre.
His book might have included a section on Canada, but it was cut in the editing and you can read it here. The gist of the book is that Alberta and Saskatchewan drive the Canadian economy (they don’t, the diversified economies of Ontario and Quebec outstrip them both combined) and are fed up with the Trudeau government. This has increased separatism (it hasn’t, at least no more significantly than Texas separatism in the United States, both poll at similar levels) in the West, and with Canada being such a small country right next to the US, it may be in Washington’s best interests to balkanize its northern neighbor, and he’s written as much for a Canadian newspaper.
Some of you may stop here and go; wait, how would it benefit the United States to cause political calamity and economic dislocation north of its border with one of its biggest and closest trading partners? If you’ve thought of that you put more effort into this that Zeihan has.
To put into perspective how this is a bad analysis, Zeihan states that after the 2019 Canadian federal election the Liberal government, which had lost its majority to 157 seats, would now have to rely on support from the Greens (described as “whose primary concerns are climate change policies”) and the NDP (described as “like a more math-challenged version of the Greens” without any explanation). In summation he declares, “For Canada as a whole, this courts disaster” before going on a long rant about Western alienation and how Washington has the power and interest to breakup Canada.
It would take a long, long essay to point out the problems with this conclusion but let me just point out that his declaration of the balance of Canadian politics in 2019 was just laughably wrong. The Liberals had 157 seats, the NDP had 24, and the Greens had in record numbers, 3. You need at least 170 seats to control the House of Commons, which means that with those numbers the Greens don’t even merit consideration in voting. Hell, the government worked more with the regional party the Bloc Quebecois who held 32 seats in 2019, enough that the LPC never had to work with the NDP at all if they didn’t want to. Of course, considering Zeihan’s obsession with balkanizing Canada and many American’s misunderstanding of Quebec separatism, this is probably not surprising.
This may seem like a minor thing, harping on a terrible misreading of the balance of power in a Canadian election, but it speaks to how poor Zeihan’s analysis is. If he couldn’t read the political balance of power in a country that sits right next to him, speaks the same language, and has a system that is far more easily observable and understandable than China, Russia, Turkey or any of the other powers that Zeihan analyses, how can we trust his predictions or analysis about anything else?
Well, you can’t.
Both Friedman and Zeihan are to a more or lesser extent, American nationalists. They base their predictions and ideas largely around the idea that the US is and will continue to be top dog on the international stage and that they have the power and the ability to manipulate the global system to suit them as they see fit. This in turn leads them to lean on the last century of history to inform their analysis, whether it’s the break up of Russia (or China) the rise of Japan as a regional superpower, or the rebirth of a pseudo-Turkish empire that controls much of the Middle East, the Balkans and Caucuses.
Both men predict that, unlike the rest of the world, the United States can easily navigate its internal crisis and emerge out of an uncertain present to a certain future where the American dominance of global affairs remains strong. Friedman’s most recent book is all about that, and Zeihan’s upcoming book is more of the same. In none of their analysis is there really a sense that things could go wrong, nor a clear eyes assessment of the potential problems the US may face at home or abroad. This at a time when polarization in American politics is at an all time high and faith in the very institutions of government at an all time low.
Neither man pays much attention to the effects of climate change on the global sphere, and they each say sparingly little about Africa, India, or South America. They stick to what they’re familiar with.
Now I may seem like I’m picking a little on Americans here (maybe a little) and you can find people like this from many countries and across many industries. It is difficult to track trends in any field or make sure bets on any industry, and many have tried to a greater or lesser extent. Being informed by biases isn’t a bad thing, but it can cloud your judgement. The field of futurism is inherently fraught with judgement calls, sudden twists and turns, and lots of preconceptions. That doesn’t make it useless, but it does mean we shouldn’t take these judgements at face value, and while they can be fun, let’s not consider them necessarily accurate reflections of the world at large.
Matthew Stienberg 