‘100 Years’ book has good news for U.S.

Just when almost everybody is predicting a gradual decline of U.S. power in the world, a well-known futurologist says in a new book that the American era is just beginning — and will continue through the end of the 21st century.

And that’s not all.

George Friedman, the political scientist and CEO of the Stratfor private intelligence and forecasting company — once described by Barron’s as a “shadow CIA” — also says in his new book, “The Next 100 Years,” that Japan, Turkey and Poland will become major world powers, and that — get this — Washington is likely to go to war with Mexico.

Is this science fiction? I asked Friedman in a telephone interview. How can he predict the dawn of the American age, when we are in the midst of a mega-recession? How can he forecast that when even the U.S. government’s National Intelligence Council, the CIA’s long-term think tank, recently predicted that the United States will only be a “first among equals” by 2025, and that China will be closely behind it.

Let’s put things in perspective, Friedman answered. While the 1930’s economic depression saw the U.S. economy shrink by 50 percent, the current recession may lead to a 2 percent or 3 percent decline in 2009, he said.

Recession

Second, 1970s recession, with its double digit inflation rates, was by many measures worst than this one, he said.

“Americans really lack of a sense of perspective,” Friedman told me. “If we go back to Jimmy Carter’s speeches in the 1970s, he was saying that the next generation of Americans will not have a standard of living as good as the previous one. Nothing that we are hearing today is very different to what we heard in the 1970s, or in the 1930s.”

Hmmm. But on what grounds to you contend that the U.S. era is just starting? I asked.

Because the U.S. economy is larger than that of the next four richest countries — Japan, Germany, China and the United Kingdom — combined, he said. In addition, the United States enjoys a huge military superiority, occupies a massive continent that is difficult to attack, and controls the world’s oceans, he said.

“When you look at the objective measures of American power, there is no comparison between the size and the vibrancy of the American economy, and the rest of the world,” he said.

China will implode, he said. “We have seen this happening before in Chinese history: Tremendous inequality, one region of the country doing well while the other was starving. One of the results of that was civil war, followed by the imposition of a Communist government that closed off China from the rest of the world,” he said.

Friedman brushed off my suggestion that China, by its sheer size and focus on education, will keep rising. “Remember, 30 years ago, we were talking about Japan becoming the world’s biggest power. Before, it was Russia. Every generation has its country that will bypass the Americans, and it never happens,” he responded.

OK, but a U.S. war with Mexico? Isn’t that off the wall?

Not at all, he responded. Mexico will become one of the world’s 10 largest economies in coming decades. By around the middle of the century, there will inevitably be a rise in Mexican nationalism, at a time when a tremendous U.S. labor shortage will result in a massive flow of Mexicans — invited by Washington, with financial incentives — into territories occupied by the United States in the 19th century.

My opinion: I wouldn’t be surprised if the United States continues being the most powerful country in the world for the next few decades, although probably on a smaller scale than now.

Chinese prosperity

But based on what I saw in China, I would bet that China will continue prospering, and that its period of Communist rule will go down in history as a short parenthesis in the millenary history of a world power. And on Mexico, I would bet that rather than a war, we will see an inevitable integration into a North American Union, driven by U.S. demographic needs.

X Andres Oppenheimer is a Latin America correspondent for the Miami Herald. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.