The Next 100 Years

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Deployment of the Battle Stars, the introduction of new generations of 
weapons managed from space, and aggressive political pressure coupled with 
economic policies will all be intended to contain Japan and Turkey. And 
from the Japanese and Turkish points of view, American demands will be so 
extreme as to seem unreasonable. The Americans will demand that both 
countries withdraw all forces to within their original borders, as well as 
guaranteeing rights of passage in the Black Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the 
Bosporus. 
If the Japanese were to agree to these conditions, their entire economic 
structure would be imperiled. For the Turks, economic upheaval will be a 
consideration, but so will the political chaos that would then surround 
them. Moreover, the United States will make no equivalent demands on the 
Polish bloc. In effect, the United States will demand that Turkey turn over 
the Balkans and Ukraine, as well as part of southern Russia, to the Poles, 
and that it allow the Caucasus to fall back into chaos. 
The United States will not actually expect Turkey or Japan to capitulate. 
That will not be the American intent. These demands will simply be the 
platform from which the Americans try to impose pressure on these coun­
tries, limiting their growth and increasing their insecurity. The Americans 
won’t truly expect either country to return to its position of 2020, but it will 
want to discourage further expansion. 
The Japanese and the Turks, however, will not see things this way. From 
their perspective, the best- case scenario will be that the United States is try­
ing to divert their attention from pressing issues by creating insoluble inter­

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national problems. Worst case will be that the United States is preparing the 
way for their geopolitical collapse. In either case, both Turkey and Japan will 
have no choice but to assume the worst, and prepare to resist. 
Turkey and Japan won’t have the extensive experience of the Americans 
in space. They may be able to construct manned space systems, and will 
have created their own reconnaissance systems by this point. But the mili­
tary capabilities possessed by the United States will be outside their reach, 
certainly within a time frame that might cause the United States to recon­
sider its policies. And neither the Japanese nor the Turks will be in a posi­
tion to reconsider theirs. 
The United States will not plan to go to war with either Japan or Turkey. 
Its intention will simply be to squeeze them until they decrease their dy­
namism and become more malleable to American demands. As a result, 
Turkey and Japan will have an interest in limiting American power and will 
therefore form a natural coalition. By the 2040s, technological shifts in war­
fare will have made a close alliance remarkably easy. Space will change the 
global geopolitical equation. 
In more traditional terms as well, the Turks and the Japanese will be able 
to support each other. The United States is a North American power. Japan 
and Turkey will both be Eurasian powers. 
This sets up a very natural alliance, as well as a goal for these countries. 
Japanese power hugs the Pacific coast, but by 2045 it will have spread 
throughout the Asian archipelago and on the mainland as well. The Turkish 
sphere of influence will extend into Central Asia and even into Muslim 
western China. The possibility will exist, therefore, that if Japan and Turkey 
were to collaborate, they could create a pan- Eurasian power that would rival 
the United States. 
The fly in the ointment, of course, will be Poland, and the fact that 
Turkish influence won’t penetrate beyond the Balkans. But this won’t pre­
vent Turkey and Japan from seeking out an alliance. If just one European 
power could be brought into the coalition, then Poland would have a seri­
ous problem. Its resources and attention would be diverted, giving Turkey a 
freer hand in Ukraine and Russia, and giving the Turkish- Japanese alliance a 
third leg. The European country they will have in mind is Germany. From 
the Japanese and Turkish perspectives, if Germany could be persuaded that 

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the threat from a U.S.- backed Polish bloc would be sufficiently dangerous, 
and the creation of a tripartite pact sufficiently threatening to force the 
United States to act cautiously, then the possibility of securing Eurasia and 
exploiting its resources jointly would be viable. 
Germany will not believe for a moment that the United States would be 
deterred. Indeed, it will fear that a tripartite coalition would trigger an im­
mediate American military response. Germany also will reason that if the 
Polish bloc is eliminated, it will shortly be facing the Turks in the Danube 
basin and it will have no appetite for that game. So although I see the Ger­
mans as the most likely choice to form a coalition with Turkey and Japan, I 
also believe it will decline involvement—but with a caveat. If the United 
States winds up in a war with Turkey and Japan and is allied with Poland, 
Poland might well be severely weakened in that war. In that case, a later 
German intervention would hold lower risk and higher reward. If the 
United States won outright, Germany would be no worse off. If the United 
States and Poland were both defeated—the least likely outcome—then Ger­
many would have an opportunity to move in quickly for the kill. Waiting to 
see what happens to Poland will make sense for Germany, and that is the 
game it will play in the middle of the twenty- first century. 
The only other possible member of the coalition might be Mexico, how­
ever unlikely. Recall that Mexico was invited into an alliance by Germany in 
World War I, so this idea is hardly unprecedented. Mexico will be develop­
ing rapidly throughout the first fifty years of this new century and will be a 
major economic power by the late 2040s, although still living in the shadow 
of the United States. It will be experiencing a major outflow of Mexicans to 
the southwestern borderlands after the new American immigration policy of 
2030. This will be troubling to the United States in a number of ways, but 
Mexico will hardly be in a position in the late 2040s to join an anti- American 
coalition. 
U.S. intelligence, of course, will pick up the diplomatic discussions be­
tween Tokyo and Istanbul (the capital will shift there from Ankara, return­
ing the capital of Turkey to its traditional city) and will be aware of the 
feelers to Germany and Mexico. The United States will realize that the situ­
ation has become quite serious. It also will have knowledge of the joint 
Japanese- Turkish strategic plans should war break out. No formal alliance 

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will be in place, but the United States will no longer be certain it is facing 
two separate and manageable regional powers. It will start to appear that it 
is facing a single coalition that could, in fact, dominate Eurasia—the pri­
mordial American fear. This goes back to the grand strategies I discussed in 
the early sections of this book. If it controlled Eurasia, the Japanese–Turkish 
coalition would be secure from attack and able to concentrate on challeng­
ing the United States in space and at sea. 
The American response will be a policy it has executed numerous times 
in history—it will squeeze each of the powers economically. Both countries 
will depend to some extent on exports, difficult in a world where popula­
tions will no longer be growing very fast. The United States will begin form­
ing an economic bloc that will bestow most-favored-nation status on exports 
into the United States for countries that are prepared to shift their purchases 
away from Turkey and Japan and toward third countries—not even neces­
sarily the United States—that could supply the same goods. In other words, 
the United States will organize a not particularly subtle boycott of Japanese 
and Turkish goods. 
In addition, the United States will start limiting the export of tech ­
nology to both of these countries. Given the American work being done in 
robotics and genetics, this will hurt Turkish and Japanese high- tech capabil­
ities. Most important, there will be a surge in U.S. military aid to China, In­
dia, and Poland, as well as to forces resisting Turkey and Japan in Russia. 
American policy will be simple: to create as many problems as possible for 
these two countries in order to deter them from forming a coalition. 
But the intense activity of the United States in space will be the most 
troubling to Japan and Turkey. The establishment of the Battle Star constel­
lation will convince them that the United States will be prepared to wage an 
aggressive war if necessary. By the late 2040s, given all the actions of the 
Americans, the Japanese and Turks will have reached a conclusion about 
American intentions. The conclusion they will draw, however, is that the 
United States means to break them both. They will also conclude that only 
the formation of an alliance will protect them, by serving as a deterrent— 
or make it clear that the United States intends to go to war no matter what. 
A formal alliance will therefore be created, and with its formation Muslims 

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throughout Asia will be energized at the thought of a coalition that will 
place them at the crossroads of power. 
The resurgence of Islamist fervor built around Turkey’s confrontation 
with the United States will spill over into Southeast Asia. This will give 
Japan, under the terms of the alliance treaty, access to Indonesia—which, 
together with its long- term presence in the Pacific Islands, will mean that 
U.S. control of the Pacific, and access to the Indian Ocean, can no longer be 
assured. But the United States will remain convinced of one thing—that al­
though it might face challenges from the Japanese and the Turks within 
their region and in Eurasia, they will never challenge America’s strategic 
power, which will be in space. 
Having put the Japanese and Turks in an impossible position, the Amer­
icans will now simultaneously panic at the result and yet remain complacent 
about their ultimate capacity to manage the problem. The United States 
will not view the outcome as a shooting war, but as another cold war, like 
the one it had with Russia. The superpower will believe that no one would 
challenge it in a real war. 

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