George Friedman Read online

  ALSO BY GEORGE FRIEDMAN

  THE NEXT 100 YEARS

  AMERICA’S SECRET WAR

  THE FUTURE OF WAR

  THE INTELLIGENCE EDGE

  THE COMING WAR WITH JAPAN

  POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

  Copyright © 2011 by George Friedman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Limited, Tonronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  All maps created by STRATFOR

  Jacket design by Emily Mahon

  Jacket photograph © Chad Baker/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Friedman, George.

  The next decade / George Friedman.

  p. cm.

  1. World politics—21st century—Forecasting. I. Title.

  D863.F75 2011

  909.83’1—dc22 2010043116

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53295-2

  v3.1

  For Don Kuykendall,

  Friend

  I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.

  —ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.

  —FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT

  We cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent.

  —RONALD REAGAN

  It is necessary for a prince who wishes to maintain his position to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge or not to use it according to necessity.

  —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PREFACE TO THE ANCHOR EDITION

  INTRODUCTION: REBALANCING AMERICA

  CHAPTER 1

  THE UNINTENDED EMPIRE

  CHAPTER 2

  REPUBLIC, EMPIRE, AND THE MACHIAVELLIAN PRESIDENT

  CHAPTER 3

  THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE RESURGENT STATE

  CHAPTER 4

  FINDING THE BALANCE OF POWER

  CHAPTER 5

  THE TERROR TRAP

  CHAPTER 6

  REDEFINING POLICY:

  THE CASE OF ISRAEL

  CHAPTER 7

  STRATEGIC REVERSAL: THE UNITED STATES, IRAN,

  AND THE MIDDLE EAST

  CHAPTER 8

  THE RETURN OF RUSSIA

  CHAPTER 9

  EUROPE’S RETURN TO HISTORY

  CHAPTER 10

  FACING THE WESTERN PACIFIC

  CHAPTER 11

  A SECURE HEMISPHERE

  CHAPTER 12

  AFRICA: A PLACE TO LEAVE ALONE

  CHAPTER 13

  THE TECHNOLOGICAL

  AND DEMOGRAPHIC IMBALANCE

  CHAPTER 14

  THE EMPIRE, THE REPUBLIC, AND THE DECADE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Major American Trade Relations

  Countries with a U.S. Military Presence

  U.S. Home Prices

  Three Regional Balances

  Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf

  Ukraine-Kazakhstan Gap

  Russian Population Density

  North European Plain

  Europe—1815

  Empires—1900

  Western Pacific

  Chinese Rainfall and Population Density

  China’s Terrain

  Northeast Asia

  Southeast Asia

  Indonesian Sea-Lanes

  India’s Terrain

  Terrain Barriers in South America

  Cuba and the Caribbean

  Brazil’s Trade Relations

  Islam in Africa

  Ethnolinguistic Groups in Africa

  Population Density in Africa

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book is about the relation among empire, republic, and the exercise of power in the next ten years. It is a more personal book than The Next 100 Years because I am addressing my greatest concern, which is that the power of the United States in the world will undermine the republic. I am not someone who shuns power. I understand that without power there can be no republic. But the question I raise is how the United States should behave in the world while exercising its power, and preserve the republic at the same time.

  I invite readers to consider two themes. The first is the concept of the unintended empire. I argue that the United States has become an empire not because it intended to, but because history has worked out that way. The issue of whether the United States should be an empire is meaningless. It is an empire.

  The second theme, therefore, is about managing the empire, and for me the most important question behind that is whether the republic can survive. The United States was founded against British imperialism. It is ironic, and in many ways appalling, that what the founders gave us now faces this dilemma. There might have been exits from this fate, but these exits were not likely. Nations become what they are through the constraints of history, and history has very little sentimentality when it comes to ideology or preferences. We are what we are.

  It is not clear to me whether the republic can withstand the pressure of the empire, or whether America can survive a mismanaged empire. Put differently, can the management of an empire be made compatible with the requirements of a republic? This is genuinely unclear to me. I know the United States will be a powerful force in the world during this next decade—and for this next century, for that matter—but I don’t know what sort of regime it will have.

  I passionately favor a republic. Justice may not be what history cares about, but it is what I care about. I have spent a great deal of time thinking about the relationship between empire and republic, and the only conclusion I have reached is that if the republic is to survive, the single institution that can save it is the presidency. That is an odd thing to say, given that the presidency is in many ways the most imperial of our institutions (it is the single institution embodied by a single person). Yet at the same time it is the most democratic, as the presidency is the only office for which the people, as a whole, select a single, powerful leader.

  In order to understand this office I look at three presidents who defined American greatness. The first is Abraham Lincoln, who saved the republic. The second is Franklin Roosevelt, who gave the United States the world’s oceans. The third is Ronald Reagan, who undermined the Soviet Union and set the stage for empire. Each of them was a profoundly moral man … who was prepared to lie, violate the law, and betray principle in order to achieve those ends. They embodied the paradox of what I call the Machiavellian presidency, an institution that, at its best, reconciles duplicity and righteousness in order to redeem the promise of America.

  I do not think being just is a simple thing, nor that power is simply the embodiment of good intentions. The theme of this book, applied to the regions of the world, is that justice comes from power, and power is only possible from a degree of ruthlessness most of us can’t abide. The tragedy of political life is the conflict between the limit of good intentions and the necessity of power. At times this produces goodness. It did in the case of Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan, but there is no assurance of this in the future. It requires greatness.

  Geopolitics describes what happens to nations, but it says little about the kinds of regimes nations will have. I am convinced that unless we understand the nature of power
, and master the art of ruling, we may not be able to choose the direction of our regime. Therefore, there is nothing contradictory in saying that the United States will dominate the next century yet may still lose the soul of its republic. I hope not, as I have children and now grandchildren—and I am not convinced that empire is worth the price of the republic. I am also certain that history does not care what I, or others, think.

  This book, therefore, will look at the issues, opportunities, and inherent challenges of the next ten years. Surprise alliances will be formed, unexpected tensions will develop, and economic tides will rise and fall. Not surprisingly, how the United States (particularly the American president) approaches these events will guide the health, or deterioration, of the republic. An interesting decade lies ahead.

  PREFACE TO THE ANCHOR EDITION

  The Next Decade combines three themes. The first is the tension between the American empire and the American republic. The second is the character of the president needed to manage the unintended and unwanted empire while preserving the republic. The third is a forecast of the world in which we will be living during this decade.

  As I write this preface to the paperback, about eight months after the hardcover was published, I am surprised only by the speed with which events have taken place, and the manner in which some events, which have loomed so large in the media and public mind, have already begun to fade.

  Certainly the most important thing that has happened is the acceleration of the crisis of the European Union. Both in The Next 100 Years and in The Next Decade, I made the case that the European Union as an institution and Europe as a united ideal were untenable. It is not simply a matter of different cultures, although that is not a minor matter. The problem is a free trade zone with the world’s second largest exporter—Germany—at its center, using the free trade zone to stabilize its own economy while undermining its partners’ ability to develop economically. This problem, coupled with the bureaucracy in Brussels and a currency designed to bolster northern Europe’s interests, made it difficult to imagine Europe surviving. In fact, it is not surviving. Certainly it will take a long time to die as an institution. But the reality of Europe that was imagined even a few years ago is gone. All that is left is the machinery of Europe and bitterness.

  I spoke of China as a nation facing crisis. It is in that crisis. In order to keep businesses from going bankrupt and swelling the ranks of the unemployed, Chinese banks are lending failing enterprises money to repay their debts. The result is surging inflation that has made Chinese labor more expensive than Mexican. That means that the exports on which China depends to run its economy either become noncompetitive or profits are cut to the disappearing point. The economy grows but profit declines. This is what happened to Japan in 1990 and it is happening to China—and, as with Japan, the Western media is still celebrating China’s success.

  Russia has continued to grow in power as the only major nation not experiencing a financial crisis, while Turkey continues to increase its presence and influence in its region. The eastern Europeans have formed a Visegrad Battle Group consisting of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. It is a paper alliance at this point, far from an effective fighting force, but these countries are looking beyond NATO for their security.

  What was not predicted in this book was the Arab Spring. I would argue that the Arab Spring never happened except in the fantasies of Westerners. No regime fell except for the Libyan and only because of NATO’s intervention. The fall of Mubarak was not the fall of a regime but of a person. He was replaced by a military junta that continues the military regime created in the 1950s by Gamel Abdul Nasser. At this point, Syria’s Assad has not fallen nor has any other regime. Bahrain’s government remains in place, kept there by Saudi troops. The Arab Spring didn’t happen. It just seemed about to and never quite jelled.

  We must always remember that all unrest does not constitute revolutions; all revolutions are not successful; all successful revolutions do not create constitutional democracies. Certainly there were constitutional democrats in the crowds, but no matter how often they were interviewed by CNN and BBC, they did not constitute the whole of the crowd, many of whom were democratic but wanted to create Islamist regimes, not liberal ones. In the end, the region was swept by unrest, but what is most interesting is how little changed. The Arab world is the Arab world, and it does not yearn to be remade in the image of Europe and America. Nor was it.

  The United States, as I argued, is in the best condition of any of the great powers. Unlike Europe, its economic problems are not causing it to shatter. Unlike China, its economic problems can be handled. This isn’t to say that the economic problems of the United States have not been painful.

  Nor should it be said that it has not created an institutional crisis or, more precisely, that the institutional crisis that has swept the world hasn’t touched the United States. The single most important consequence of the global financial crisis was the delegitimation of the authority of the financial elite, who were seen as simultaneously corrupt and incompetent. The political elites intervened to stabilize the situation and, then failing to solve the problem, were themselves delegitimized.

  The global crisis is that the publics of the major countries do not trust the political or financial elites. We can see this in Europe and China. We can also see this in the United States when movements on the left and right both challenge not so much the principles of the regime but the leadership. The Tea Party on the right and the Democratic left, in different ways and with different rhetoric, have both raised the question of whether the elites know what they are doing or are acting in the public interest.

  This has deepened the crisis of the republic at a critical time. I have made the argument in this book that the empire threatens the republic. A crisis of confidence in the political elite at this point is particularly troublesome. Reconciling republic and empire in this decade is crucial. It won’t wait. The empire is becoming an unmanageable burden to the republic. With the political elite increasingly distrusted, their ability to manage this extraordinarily difficult task approaches the impossible. Without public trust, it is impossible.

  This is the crisis the United States faces. It is dealing with a fundamental contradiction in the regime and reality at a time when the leaders are held in low regard. This is a broad international phenomenon, but the crisis in the United States has implications for the world, because of the centrality of the United States to the international system. What happens in the United States does not stay in the United States.

  I have become more pessimistic in the past months about solving the crisis. The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends. It is difficult to be president under current circumstances. But presidents change or they can be replaced. In either case, the key burden of managing the republic in a time of empire will fall to the president. That much has not changed in my mind. Certainly there is time, but there is precious little. A decade is but a blink in the eye of history.

  INTRODUCTION

  REBALANCING AMERICA

  A century is about events. A decade is about people.

  I wrote The Next 100 Years to explore the impersonal forces that shape history in the long run, but human beings don’t live in the long run. We live in the much shorter span in which our lives are shaped not so much by vast historical trends but by the specific decisions of specific individuals.

  This book is about the short run of the next ten years: the specific realities to be faced, the specific decisions to be made, and the likely consequences of those decisions. Most people think that the longer the time frame, the more unpredictable the future. I take the opposite view. Individual actions are the hardest thing to predict. In the course of a century, so many individual decisions are made that no single one of them is ever critical. Each decision is lost in the torrent of judgments that make up a century. But in the shorter time frame of a decade
, individual decisions made by individual people, particularly those with political power, can matter enormously. What I wrote in The Next 100 Years is the frame for understanding this decade. But it is only the frame.

  Forecasting a century is the art of recognizing the impossible, then eliminating from consideration all the events that, at least logically, aren’t going to happen. The reason is, as Sherlock Holmes put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  It is always possible that a leader will do something unexpectedly foolish or brilliant, which is why forecasting is best left to the long run, the span over which individual decisions don’t carry so much weight. But having forecast for the long run, you can reel back your scenario and try to see how it plays out in, say, a decade. What makes this time frame interesting is that it is sufficiently long for the larger, impersonal forces to be at play but short enough for the individual decisions of individual leaders to skew outcomes that otherwise might seem inevitable. A decade is the point at which history and statesmanship meet, and a span in which policies still matter.

  I am not normally someone who gets involved in policy debates—I’m more interested in what will happen than in what I want to see happen. But within the span of a decade, events that may not matter in the long run may still affect us personally and deeply. They also can have real meaning in defining which path we take into the future. This book is therefore both a forecast and a discussion of the policies that ought to be followed.

  We begin with the United States for the same reason that a study of 1910 would have to begin with Britain. Whatever the future might hold, the global system today pivots around the United States, just as Britain was the pivotal point in the years leading up to World War I. In The Next 100 Years, I wrote about the long-term power of the United States. In this book, I have to write about American weaknesses, which, I think, are not problems in the long run; time will take care of most of these. But because you and I don’t live in the long run, for us these problems are very real. Most are rooted in structural imbalances that require solutions. Some are problems of leadership, because, as I said at the outset, a decade is about people.