The Next 100 Years

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hus far I’ve been doing geopolitical forecasting. I’ve been working 
with the major themes that are unfolding in the twenty- first century 
and thinking about how they would affect international relations. In 
this chapter, I will change my approach a bit. I want to describe a war that I 
think will take place in the middle of the twenty- first century. Obviously I 
don’t know when it will happen with any precision, but I can provide a 
sense of what a twenty-first-century war might look like. You can’t imagine 
the twentieth century without some idea of what World Wars I and II were 
like, nor can you really get a sense of the twenty- first century until you’ve 
described war. 
War is different from what I’ve been talking about so far because war is a 
matter of detail. Without this, you miss its essence. To understand war, you 
need to understand more than the reasons a war was fought. You need to 
think about technology, culture, and other matters, all of them in detail. So, 
for example, in talking about World War II we have to discuss Pearl Harbor. 
Pearl Harbor was, geopolitically, an attempt to buy time while Japan seized 
Southeast Asia and the Netherlands East Indies. But to really understand 
the reality of Pearl Harbor, you have to understand the details—the use of 

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aircraft carriers, the invention of a torpedo that would work in the shallow 
waters of Pearl Harbor, and the decision to attack on Sunday morning. 
What I’ve tried to show in previous chapters is how the United States, 
Poland, Turkey, and Japan will get entangled in the next century, and why 
the Japanese and the Turks will feel so threatened that they will have no 
choice but to launch a preemptive war. This is a book about my perception 
of the events of the next hundred years, so I now want to talk about the war 
itself. To do that, however, I have to pretend to know more than I do. I have 
to pretend to know the times and dates of the battles and precisely how they 
would be executed. I do think I understand the military technology that 
will be used in this war. I think I have a rough idea of when in the century 
the war will take place, and I think I have a good grasp of how it will play 
out. But I don’t think you can grasp the nature of war in the mid-twenty­
first century unless I go further and tell a story that in some sense I have no 
right to. But if you will indulge me on this, I think I can give you a 
feel 
for 
the warfare of the twenty- first century—and this particular war—if I take 
some license and give it real specificity.