Recommended: The Next Decade

George Friedman’s previous book, The Next 100 Years (2009), argued that while details couldn’t be predicted, the overall effects of the impersonal forces of geography and geopolitics, demographics, cultural tendencies and technological and military evolution are reasonably predictable. And from those forces Friedman projected the likely shape of the next 100 years.

Friedman’s latest book, The Next Decade, argues that while in the long term individual leaders make little difference to the shape of history, in the short term – the next decade – they make a great deal of difference. He is particularly concerned that America, having become an empire without intending to, needs to learn how to manage this empire without losing the republic. A political realist unhampered by the ideological myths of the left or right, Friedman argues that to survive America needs presidents who have learned more than a little from Machiavelli, and who, like Lincoln, Roosevelt and Reagan, can keep their focus on the important ultimate national objectives and do what it takes, even if unpleasant and/or deceitful, to achieve them.

In general, he feels America’s overall policy should be to establish and support regional balances of power that assure that no other nation or coalition of nations becomes powerful enough to threaten or destroy the U.S.A. This may sound cynical, but in fact throughout recorded history this has been the single most successful strategy of national survival, from the early Greek city states right down to the British Empire. And in fact it was the essence of the strategy that won the Cold War.

Friedman argues that we badly need leaders with a balance of ideals and pragmatism. Too much idealism leads to unrealistic foreign policy (like thinking we can turn Afghanistan into a western-style democracy). But pragmatism without a moral foundation leads to shallow thinking and incomplete strategies. And he thinks that the American public, now adolescent in its outlook, needs to grow up and expect reality-based adult behavior from its leaders (something notably lacking in the current debates about the Federal deficit).

This is a worthwhile book to read and ponder. His nation-by-nation assessment of the world and of the existing regional balances-of-power, and his discussion of strategy alternatives available to the US in various regions, are very enlightening.