The Road To 2040

George Friedman has long been a successful predictor of international trends. I greatly enjoyed his books The Next 100 Years and The Future Of War. If anyone had paid attention to the latter book, we would have spent the 2000s building space stations and moon bases rather than fighting useless wars in the Middle-East and wouldn't now have to race to prevent the Chinese from gaining control of the ultimate "high ground". 

In any event, Friedman used to run a valuable service called Strat-For which I often visited. But he left years ago and, as I recently discovered, joined or started another enterprise called Geopolitical Futures. This is a subscription service, but there are a few tidbits for the rest of us. One of these to check out is a short piece written in 2021 entitled "The Road to 2040: A Summary of Our Forecast." Subscribers get access to the full forecast, but even the summary is interesting.

I'll skip over his forecasts concerning Europe as they mostly mirror those in his book, The Next 100 Years: Germany will falter and decline and Poland will become the dominant European power. 

Just as the collapse of the British Empire continues apace, he predicts the continued decline and rupture of the Soviet Empire, perhaps with even the Russian Federation breaking apart into smaller units. Which is what Joseph Tainter's work, The Collapse of Complex Societies, would have predicted. 

The United States, he predicts, will abide as the sole world dominant power through at least 2040. Not the least of his reasons is that with China's export economy faltering, China will (and has seen as events played out over the past several years) a great increase in unemployment which will eventually result in growing discontent. 

The regime will attempt to survive the economy’s downward spiral by tightening its grip on power and sliding back into dictatorship. However, the regional divergences in China are too widespread and not easily suppressed by dictatorship. Therefore, by 2040, China will see a return to regionalism, accompanied by turmoil. As China weakens, a power vacuum will emerge in East Asia, which will be filled by Japan. By 2040, Japan, with its enormous economy and substantial military capabilities, will become the leading East Asian power. 

If Oswald Spengler were describing it, he might suggest that China will enter another warring states period. In any event, speaking to my LDS readers, it is inevitable that China will suffer severe shock and loss of influence of the CCP--we know that at some point China will have to be opened up to missionary work and that Japan will provide the bulk of those missionaries. 

His predictions of the Middle-East will also interest those of end-time prophecy:

 In the Middle East, we do not foresee a definitive end or containment of Islamic extremism. On the contrary, it is likely to re-emerge and expand its territory. Turkey and Iran are the only regional actors with the capability to challenge Islamic extremist groups, and Iran is unlikely to do so in any substantial way. Given these groups’ s territorial aspirations to re-establish a caliphate, Turkey will have to engage militarily to defend its borders. As Turkey asserts its military and economic strength, these developments will effectively bring a return of the Ottoman Empire, thrusting Turkey back into the position as the dominant regional power by 2040.

He concludes:

To summarize, the dominant theme we see playing out over the course of the next 19 years is increasing disarray in Europe and Asia. We expect prolonged stability in North American with U.S. rivals working to increase their footholds in Latin America. Despite the growing unsteadiness in Eurasia, we also expect to see three regional powers emerge: Japan, Turkey and Poland. These countries will be outliers in an otherwise fragmented Eastern Hemisphere. 

Strangely, there is no mention of Israel which sees itself as a becoming a regional power, if not already one. I believe that Israel will seek (1) to consolidate control over the territories within its borders (thus, no homelands for the Palestinians), (2) continue to nibble off bits of its neighbors, and (3) consolidate its position as having the most powerful military in the region.