The Next 100 Years

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T
he years around 2040 will be a flush time in the United States, com­
parable to the 1990s, 1950s, or 1890s. About ten to twenty years 
after a fifty- year cyclical shift in the United States, the changes intro­
duced start powering the economy. Economic, technological, and immigra­
tion shifts introduced in the 2030s will take effect by the end of the decade. 
Productivity gains from robotics and the surge in health care opportunities 
presented by genetic science will fuel growth. As in the 1990s, the internal 
processes of American research and development (particularly those ramped 
up during the second cold war) will bear fruit. 
As we have seen countless times in history, however, flush times are not 
necessarily peaceful or stable times internationally. The question that will 
come to the fore in 2040 will be this: What will be the relationship between 
the United States and the rest of the world? On one level, the United States 
will be so powerful that virtually any action it takes will affect someone in 
the world. On the other hand, the United States will have such power, par­
ticularly after the Russian retreat and Chinese instability, that it can afford 
to be careless. The United States is dangerous in its most benign state, but 
when it focuses down on a problem it can be devastatingly relentless. The 

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global impulse will be to block the United States, but in practical terms that 
will be easier said than done. Those who can avoid confronting the United 
States will choose that path because the risks of confrontation will be too 
high. Simultaneously, the rewards of collaboration will be substantial. These 
crosscurrents will be settled in different ways by different powers. 
Around 2040, the most contentious issue on the table will be the ques­
tion of the future of the Pacific Basin. It will be addressed more narrowly as 
a question of the northwest Pacific, and more narrowly still as Japanese pol­
icy toward China and Siberia. The surface issue will be Japan’s increasingly 
aggressive role on the mainland of Asia as it pursues its own economic 
interests and interferes with other powers, including the United States. Ad­
ditionally, there will be the question of Japanese respect for Chinese sover­
eignty and the question of self- determination for maritime Russia. 
On a deeper level, the United States will be alarmed by Japan’s rapidly 
growing maritime power, including sea- based and space- based military sys­
tems. Japan, still importing oil from the Persian Gulf, will be increasing its 
power in the South China Sea and in the Strait of Malacca. In the early 
2040s, the Japanese will be concerned with the stability of the Gulf and will 
begin to probe and patrol in the Indian Ocean in order to protect their in­
terests. Japan will have well- established, close economic ties with many of 
the island chains of the Pacific, and will begin to enter into agreements with 
them for satellite tracking and control stations. U.S. intelligence will suspect 
that these will also serve as bases for Japanese hypersonic anti- ship missiles. 
Hypersonic missiles move faster than five times the speed of sound—by the 
mid-twenty-first century, they will travel in excess of ten times the speed of 
sound, eight thousand miles an hour and faster. Hypersonics can be mis­
siles, crashing directly into targets, or unmanned aircraft, releasing muni­
tions on targets and then returning home. 
The Japanese will share waters with the American Seventh Fleet and 
space with the U.S. Space Command—by now an increasingly independent 
service of the American military. Neither side will be provoking incidents at 
sea or in space, and both nations will be maintaining formally cordial rela­
tions. But the Japanese will be exquisitely aware of America’s concern—that 
its private lake, the Pacific, contains a power that it does not fully control. 
Japan will be deeply concerned with protecting its sea lanes against po­

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tential threats in the south, particularly in the waters of Indonesia, which 
are the paths between the Pacific and Indian oceans. Indonesia is an archi­
pelago consisting of many islands and many ethnic groups. It is inherently 
fragmented, and it has—and will continue to have—many separatist move­
ments. Japan will play a complex game in backing some of these movements 
versus others in order to secure the various straits in Indonesian waters. 
Japan will also want to be able to keep the U.S. Navy out of the western 
Pacific. Toward this end, it will do three things. First, it will build and de­
ploy hypersonic anti- ship missiles in its home islands, able to strike deep 
into the Pacific. Second, it will enter into agreements to allow sensors and 
missiles to be based on Pacific islands it already dominates economically, 
like the Bonin Islands (which include Iwo Jima), the Marshalls, and Nauru. 
The strategy here will be to create choke points that would potentially inter ­
dict U.S. transpacific trade and military transport. This, in turn, will create 
predictability in American routing, making it easier for Japanese satellites to 
monitor the movement of American ships. The most disturbing thing for 
the Americans, however, will be the degree of Japanese activity in space, 
where not only military but commercial and industrial facilities will be un­
der construction. 
American policy will be complex, as always, and influenced by different 
factors. The idea of a strong China threatening the Russian rear will become 
an obsession in the U.S. intelligence and military communities in the 2010s 
and 2020s. In the 2030s this fear will become an idée fixe in the State De­