Book Club – The Next One Hundred Years

Greenwich Library
101 W Putnam Avenue
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
7:00pm-9:00pm
Foreign Affairs Book Club – The book to be discussed is George Friedman’s The Next One Hundred Years.
Free and open to all.
Presenter: Yang Wang, 203.622.7924

In The Next 100 Years, Friedman undertakes the impossible (or improbable) challenge of forecasting world events through the 21st century. Starting with the premises that “conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination” and “common sense will be wrong,” Friedman maps what he sees as the likeliest developments of the future, some intuitive, some surprising: more (but less catastrophic) wars; Russia’s re-emergence as an aggressive hegemonic power; China’s diminished influence in international affairs due to traditional social and economic imbalances; and the dawn of an American “Golden Age” in the second half of the century. Friedman is well aware that much of what he predicts will be wrong–unforeseeable events are, of course, unforeseen–but through his interpretation of geopolitics, one gets the sense that Friedman’s guess is better than most. –Jon Foro