Summary of George Friedman 's The Next 100 Years

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 The American people have a deep-seated belief that the United States is approaching its end. This is reflected in the letters pages of newspapers, the web, and public discourse. The American economy is so large that it is larger than the economies of the next four countries combined.

#2 The United States is still underpopulated by global standards. It has plenty of room to increase all three of its components: land, labor, and capital. The American economy is so powerful because of its military power.

#3 The United States is only at the beginning of its power. The twenty-first century will be the American century, and it has been forced to take on the role that European power occupied for five hundred years, between Columbus's voyage in 1492 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

#4 Until the fifteenth century, humans lived in self-enclosed, sequestered worlds. But as the European empires expanded, they brought the world together as a single entity. Europe became the center of gravity of the global system.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669383598

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights on George Friedman's The Next 100 Years

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 9

Insights from Chapter 10

Insights from Chapter 11

Insights from Chapter 12

Insights from Chapter 13

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The American people have a deep-seated belief that the United States is approaching its end. This is reflected in the letters pages of newspapers, the web, and public discourse. The American economy is so large that it is larger than the economies of the next four countries combined.

#2

The United States is still underpopulated by global standards. It has plenty of room to increase all three of its components: land, labor, and capital. The American economy is so powerful because of its military power.

#3

The United States is only at the beginning of its power. The twenty-first century will be the American century, and it has been forced to take on the role that European power occupied for five hundred years, between Columbus's voyage in 1492 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

#4

Until the fifteenth century, humans lived in self-enclosed, sequestered worlds. But as the European empires expanded, they brought the world together as a single entity. Europe became the center of gravity of the global system.

#5

The European Age was the first global system, and it was built on two things: money and geography. Europe depended on imports from Asia, and as Asia was closed off by the Turks, the Iberians chose to go around them by sailing west.

#6

The inability of the Europeans to unite was due to a simple feature of geography: the English Channel. No one could cross it, and so none could conquer Britain and hold Europe as a whole.

#7

The United States emerged from World War I as a global power. It left a ticking time bomb in Europe that would guarantee its power after the next war. That time bomb was the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I but left unresolved the core conflicts over which the war had been fought.

#8

The American strategy was to contain and strangle the Soviets, and this was confirmed by history. The Soviet Union was created by the Americans to contain and strangle European Russia, but the collapse of the Soviet Union elevated the