The Next 100 Years

The Jetsons 
did not define life in 1999, but I write these words 

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on a computer that I can hold in one hand and that can access information 
on a global basis in seconds—and without wires connecting it to anything. 
The United Nations did not solve the problems of mankind, yet the status 
of blacks and women underwent breathtaking changes. What I expected 
and what happened were two very different things. 
In looking back on the twentieth century, there were things we could be 
certain of, things that were likely, and things that were unknown. We could 
be certain that nation- states would continue to be the way in which humans 
organized the world. We could know that wars would become more deadly. 
Alfred Nobel knew that his invention would turn warfare into endless hor­
ror, and it did. We could see the revolutions in communications and 
travel—radio, automobiles, airplanes already existed. It took only imagina­
tion, and a will to believe, to see what they would mean to the world. It 
took the suspension of common sense. 
Knowing that wars were inevitable and that they would grow worse, it 
did not take a great leap to imagine who would fight whom. The newly 
united European powers—Germany and Italy—and newly industrialized 
Japan would try to redefine the international system, controlled by the At­
lantic European powers, Britain and France chief among them. And as these 
wars ripped apart Europe and Asia, it was not hard to forecast—indeed 
many did forecast—that Russia and America would emerge as the great 
global powers. What followed was murkier, but not beyond imagination. 
Early in the century H. G. Wells, the science fiction writer, described the 
weapons that would fight wars in the coming generations. All that was re­
quired was that he look at what was already being imagined and what could 
already be built, and tie it to the warfare of the future. But it was not only 
the technology that could be imagined. War gamers at the U.S. Naval War 
College and on the Japanese defense staff both could describe the outlines of 
a U.S.–Japanese war. The German general staff, before the two world wars, 
laid out the likely course of the wars and the risks. Winston Churchill could 
see the consequences of the war, both the loss of Britain’s empire and the fu­
ture cold war. No one could imagine the precise details, but the general out­
line of the twentieth century could be sensed. 
That is what I have tried to do in this book—to sense the twenty- first 

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century with geopolitics as my primary guide. I began with the permanent: 
the persistence of the human condition, suspended between heaven and 
hell. I then looked for the long- term trend, which I found in the decline and 
fall of Europe as the centerpiece of global civilization and its replacement by 
North America and the dominant North American power, the United 
States. With that profound shift of the international system, it was easy to 
discern both the character of the United States—headstrong, immature, 
and brilliant—and the world’s response to it: fear, envy, and resistance. 
I then focused on two issues. First, who would resist; second, how the 
United States would respond to their resistance. The resistance would come 
in waves, continuing the short, shifting eras of the twentieth century. First 
there is Islam, then Russia, and then a coalition of new powers (Turkey, 
Poland, and Japan), and finally Mexico. To understand American responses, 
I looked at what seemed to me a fifty- year cycle in American society over the 
past several hundred years and tried to imagine what 2030 and 2080 would 
look like. That allowed me to think of the dramatic social change that is al­
ready under way—the end of the population explosion—and consider what 
it would mean for the future. I could also think about how technologies that 
already exist will respond to social crises, charting a path between robots 
and space- based solar power. 
The closer one gets to details, the more likely one is to be wrong. Obvi­
ously I know that. But my mission, as I see it, is to provide you with a sense 
of what the twenty- first century will look and feel like. I will be wrong 
about many details. Indeed, I may be wrong about which countries will be 
great powers and how they will resist the United States. But what I am con­
fident about is that the position of the United States in the international sys­
tem will be the key issue of the twenty- first century and that other countries 
will be grappling with its rise. In the end, if there is a single point I have to 
make in this book, it is that the United States—far from being on the verge 
of decline—has actually just begun its ascent. 
This book is emphatically not meant to be a celebration of the United 
States. I am a partisan of the American regime, but it is not the Constitu­
tion or the Federalist Papers that gave the United States its power. It was 
Jackson’s stand at New Orleans, the defeat of Santa Anna at San Jacinto, the 

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annexation of Hawaii, and the surrender of British naval bases in the West­
ern Hemisphere to the United States in 1940—along with the unique geo­
graphical traits I have spent much time analyzing in these pages. 
There is one point I have not touched upon. Any reader will have no­
ticed that I do not deal with the question of global warming in this book. 
This should be a glaring omission. I do believe the environment is warming, 
and since we have been told by scientists that the debate is over, I easily con­
cede that global warming was caused by human beings. As Karl Marx, of all 
people, put it: “Mankind does not pose problems for itself for which it does 
not already have a solution.” I don’t know if this is universally true, but it 
does seem to be true in this case. 
Two forces are emerging that will moot global warming. First, the end of 
the population explosion will, over the decades, reduce the increases in de­
mand for just about everything. Second, the increase in the cost of both 
finding and using hydrocarbons will increase the hunger for alternatives. 
The obvious alternative is solar energy, but it is clear to me that earth- based 
solar collection has too many hurdles to overcome, most of which are not 
present in space- based solar energy generation. By the second half of the 
twenty- first century, we will be seeing demographic and technological trans­
formations that, together, will deal with the issue. In other words, popula­
tion decline and the domination of space for global power will combine to 
solve the problem. The solution is already imaginable, and it will be the un­
intended consequence of other processes. 
The unintended consequence is what this book is all about. If human 
beings can simply decide on what they want to do and then do it, then fore­
casting is impossible. Free will is beyond forecasting. But what is most in­
teresting about humans is how unfree they are. It is possible for people 
today to have ten children, but hardly anyone does. We are deeply con­
strained in what we do by the time and place in which we live. And those 
actions we do take are filled with consequences we didn’t intend. When 
NASA engineers used a microchip to build an onboard computer on a 
spacecraft, they did not intend to create the iPod. 
The core of the method I have used in this book has been to look at the 
constraints placed on individuals and nations, to see how they are generally 
forced to behave because of these constraints, and then to try to understand 

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253 
the unintended consequences those actions will have. There are endless un­
knowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly cor­
rect. But if I have provided here an understanding of some of the most 
important constraints, the likely responses to those constraints, and the out­
come of those actions on the broadest level, I will be content. 
As for me, it is extraordinarily odd to write a book whose general truth 
or falsehood I will never be in a position to know. I therefore write this book 
for my children, but even more for my grandchildren, who will be in a po­
sition to know. If this book can guide them in any way, I will have been of 
service. 

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S 
This book could not have been even imagined, let alone attempted, without 
my colleagues at Stratfor. My friend Don Kuykendall has been steadfast and 
supportive throughout. Scott Stringer has been patient and imaginative 
with the maps. All at Stratfor have tried to make me and this a better book. 
I particularly want to thank Rodger Baker, Reva Bhalla, Lauren Goodrich, 
Nate Hughes, Aaric Eisenstein, and Colin Chapman. In particular, I want 
to thank Peter Zeihan, whose meticulous and withering critiques helped 
me, and irritated me, immeasurably. Outside the Stratfor family, I want to 
thank John Mauldin and Gusztav Molnar, who taught me other ways to 
look at things. Susan Copeland made sure that this, and many other things, 
got done. 
Finally, I want to thank my literary agent, Jim Hornfischer, and Jason 
Kaufman, my editor at Doubleday, both of whom made great efforts to try 
to lift me beyond the impenetrable. Rob Bloom made sure it all came to­
gether. 
This book had many parents, but I am responsible for all its defects. 

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Document Outline

• Cover
• eISBN: 978-0-385-52294-6
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Author’s note
• OVERTURE
• THE DAWN OF THE AMERICAN AGE
• EARTHQUAKE
• POPULATION, COMPUTERS, AND CULTURE WARS
• THE NEW FAULT LINES
• CHINA 2020
• RUSSIA 2020
• AMERICAN POWER AND THE CRISIS OF 2030
• A NEW WORLD EMERGES
• THE 2040
• PREPARING FOR WAR
• WORLD WAR
• THE 2060
• 2080
• EPILOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS