The Next 100 Years

C H A P T E R 1 2
T H E 2 0 6 0
s 
A G o l d e n D e c a d e
T
he outcome of the war will unequivocally affirm the position of the 
United States as the world’s leading international power and of North 
America as the center of gravity in the international system. It will al­
low the United States to consolidate its command of space, and with that, 
its control of international sea lanes. It also will begin to create a pattern of 
relationships the country will depend on in the coming decades. 
The most important outcome of the war will be a treaty that formally 
will cede to the United States exclusive rights to militarize space. Other pow­
ers will be able to use space for nonmilitary purposes subject to U.S. inspec­
tion. This will be, simply, the treaty recognition of a military reality. The 
United States will have defeated Japan and Turkey in space, and it will not 
let that power slip away. The treaty will also limit the number and type of 
hypersonic aircraft that Turkey and Japan can have, though it will be well 
understood that this will be unenforceable—merely a gratuitous humil iation 
victors enjoy imposing on the vanquished. The treaty will serve American 
interests and remain in force only so long as American power can enforce it. 
Poland will have been the great victor, expanding its reach enormously, 

---

213 
t h e 2 0 6 0
s 
although its losses will have been the most substantial of any major partici­
pant. The Chinese and Koreans will feel well rid of the Japanese, who will 
have lost an empire but will retain their country, having suffered only a few 
thousand casualties. Japan will still be facing its population problems, but 
that will be the price of defeat. Turkey will remain the leader of the Islamic 
world, governing an empire made restive by defeat. 
But Poland will feel embittered in spite of its victory. Its territory will 
have been directly invaded by Germany and Turkey, its allies occupied. Its 
casualties will be in the tens of thousands, the result of civilian battle casual­
ties from ground combat—house-to-house fighting in which armored in­
fantrymen are safer than civilians. Poland’s infrastructure will have been 
shattered and, along with it, the nation’s economy. Though Poland will be 
able to tilt the region’s economic table in its favor, exploiting its conquests to 
quickly rebuild its economy, the victory will still be a painful one. 
To the west, Poland’s traditional enemy, Germany, will be weakened, 
subordinate, and sullen, while the Turks, beaten for the moment, will retain 
their influence a few hundred miles south in the Balkans and in southern 
Russia. The Poles will have taken the port of Rijeka and maintain bases in 
western Greece to prevent Turkish aggression at the entrance to the Adriatic. 
But the Turks will be still there, and Europeans have long memories. Per­
haps most stinging, Poland will be included among nations banned from 
the military use of space. The United States will make no exception to that. 
In fact, the United States will be most uneasy about Poland after the war. 
Poland will have regained the empire it had in the seventeenth century, and 
added to it. 
Poland will create a confederated system of governance for its former al­
lies and will directly rule Belarus. It will be economically weak and badly 
hurt by the war, but it will have the territory and time to recover. 
The defeat of France and Germany by Poland will decisively shift power 
in Europe to the east. In a sense, the eclipse of Atlantic Europe that began in 
1945 will complete itself in the 2050s. The United States won’t relish the 
long- term implications of a vigorous, self- confident Poland dominating 
Europe. It therefore will encourage its closest ally, Britain, which will have 
thrown its weight decisively into the war, to increase its own economic and 

---

214
t h e n e x t 1 0 0 y e a r s
political influence on the continent. With Western Europe in demographic 
and economic shambles, and fearing Polish power, England will will ingly or­
ganize a bloc oddly resembling the twentieth- century NATO, whose task it 
will be to rehabilitate Western Europe and block Polish movement west­
ward from Germany, Austria, or Italy. The United States won’t join, but it 
will encourage the formation of this alliance. 
Most interestingly, the Americans will move to improve their relations 
with the Turks. Given the old British adage that nations have no permanent 
friends and no permanent enemies but only permanent interests, the Amer­
ican interest will be to support the weaker power against the stronger, in or­
der to maintain the balance of power. Turkey, understanding the long- term 
potential power of Poland, will happily accept closer ties with Washington 
as a guarantee of its long- term survival. 
Needless to say, the Poles will feel utterly betrayed by the Americans. But 
the Americans will be learning. Rushing into battle may satisfy some urge, 
but managing the situation so that battles either won’t occur or will be 
fought by others is a much better solution. In supporting Britain and Turkey, 
the United States will move to create a European balance of power matching 
the one in Asia. No other country will represent a coherent threat to the 
United States and, so long as it controls space, the United States will easily 
be able to deal with any other issues that rise to a level requiring its atten­
tion. 
One interesting facet of geopolitics is this: there are no permanent solu­
tions to geopolitical problems. But for the moment in the 2060s, as was the 
case in the 1920s and 1990s, there will appear to be no serious challenges 
facing the United States, or at least none that pose a direct threat. The 
United States will have learned that security is illusory but for the moment 
will luxuriate in that security nonetheless. 
The American economic expansion of the 2040s won’t be interrupted by 
the war. In fact, it will continue unchecked. As we have seen over the cen­
turies, the United States has historically profited from major wars. It will be 
fairly untouched by the war, and increases in government spending will 
stimulate the economy. Since the United States fights its wars using tech­
nology, any war—or anticipation of war—against other nation- states will 
increase government expenditures on research and development. As a result, 

---

215 
t h e 2 0 6 0
s 
a range of new technologies will be available for commercial exploitation at 
the end of the war. So we will see in the postwar world, until about 2070, a 
period of dramatic economic growth, accompanied by social transforma­
tion. 
The war will occur right in the middle of one of America’s fifty- year cy­
cles, about twenty years into it. That will mean that the war occurs at the 
point at which the country is its strongest internally. Its population prob­
lems, never as severe as the rest of the world’s, will be well managed through 
immigration and the death of the boomers, relieving the pressure of a gray­
ing workforce. The balance between capital availability and demand for 
products will be intact, and both will grow. America will be moving into a 
period of dramatic economic, and therefore social, transformation. How­
ever, as with World War II, when a major war occurs in the early to middle 
stages of the cycle, the cycle is kicked into overdrive as the economy adjusts 
to the immediate aftereffects of war. That means that the mid- to late 2050s 
will be a jackpot period, similar to the 1950s. In every sense of the term, the 
fifteen years after the war will be an economic and technological golden age 
for the United States. 
The United States will reduce its defense expenditures after the collapse 
of the Russians in the 2030s but will raise them again dramatically as the 
global cold war in the 2040s intensifies. Then, during the mid- century war, 
America will engage in extraordinary feats of research and development and 
will apply its discoveries immediately. What would have taken years to do in 
a peacetime economy will be done in months, and even weeks, due to the 
urgency of war (especially following the annihilation of U.S. space forces). 
The United States will have developed an obsession with space. In 1941 
Pearl Harbor created a national belief, especially among the military, that a 
devastating attack might come at any moment, and certainly when least ex­
pected. That mind- set governed U.S. nuclear strategy for the next fifty 
years. An unrelenting fear of surprise attack permeated military thinking 
and planning. That sensibility subsided after the fall of the Soviet Union, 
but the attack in the 2050s will revive the terror of Pearl Harbor, and fear of 
surprise attack will become a national obsession again, this time focused on 
space. 
The threat will be very real. Control of space means the same thing 

---

216
t h e n e x t 1 0 0 y e a r s
strategically as control of the sea. Pearl Harbor nearly cost the United States 
control of the sea in 1941. Conversely, the war in the 2050s will almost cost 
the United States control of space. The resulting obsessive fear of the unex­
pected, combined with an obsessive focus on space, means that enormous 
amounts of both military and commercial money will be spent on space. 
The United States is therefore going to construct a massive amount of 
infrastructure in space, ranging from satellites in low earth orbit to manned 
space stations in geostationary orbit, to installations on the moon and satel­
lites orbiting the moon. Many of these systems will be robotically main­
tained, or will be robots themselves. The disparate advances in robotics in 
the previous half century will now come together—in space. 
One key development is that there will now be a steady deployment of 
troops in space. Their job will be to oversee the systems, since robotics, no 
matter how good, are far from perfect, and in the 2050s and 2060s this ef­
fort will be a matter of national survival. U.S. Space Forces, a new branch of 
the military separate from the air force, will become the biggest service in 
terms of budget, if not troop size. A range of low- cost launch vehicles, many 
derived from commercial versions developed by entrepreneurs, will be con­
stantly shuttling from earth to space and between the space- based plat­
forms. 
The goal of all this activity will be threefold. First, the United States will 
want to guarantee enough robustness, redundancy, and depth in defense so 
that no power will ever again be able to disrupt U.S. space capabilities. Sec­
ond, it will want to be in a position where it can shut down any attempt by 
another country to gain a toehold in space against American wishes. Finally, 
it will want to have massive resources—including space- based weapons, from 
missiles to new high- energy beams—to control events on the surface of the 
earth. The United States will understand that it won’t be able to control 
every threat (such as terrorism or the formation of coalitions) from space. 
But it will make sure that no other nation can mount an effective operation 
against it. 
The cost of building this kind of capability will be enormous. It will 
have almost no political opposition, will generate huge deficits, and will 
stimulate the American economy dramatically. As with the end of World 
War II, fear will override caution. Critics, marginal and without influence, 

---

217 
t h e 2 0 6 0
s 
will say that this military spending is unnecessary and that it will bankrupt 
America, leading to a depression. In fact, it will cause the economy to surge 
dramatically, as deficits normally have in American history, particularly dur­
ing the centers of the fifty- year cycles, when the economy is robust.