The Next 100 Years

The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options, and the fewer moves there actually are available. The better the player, the more predictable the moves. The grandmaster plays with absolute predictable precision—until that one brilliant, unexpected stroke.
Nations behave the same way.

Countries will go so far as to pay people to move there. This will include the United States, which will be competing for increasingly scarce immigrants and will be doing everything it can to induce Mexicans to come to the United States—an ironic but inevitable shift.

There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.

The United States is socially imitated and politically condemned. It sits on the ideological fault line of the international system. As populations decline due to shifts in reproductive patterns, the United States becomes the center for radically redefined modes of social life. You can’t have a modern economy without computers and corporations, and if you are going to program computers, you need to know English, the language of computing. On one hand, those who want to resist this trend must actively avoid the American model of life and thought.

A peace conference will be organized in Geneva; where else would one hold a peace conference?

Earlier in this book I talked about history as a chess game in which there are many fewer moves available than appears to be the case. The better a player you are, the more you see the weaknesses of moves, and the number of moves shrinks to a very few. We can apply this principle to the future.

There is an underlying geopolitical principle shaping my thinking. In World War II two emerging powers—Germany and Japan—wanted to redefine the global order. In the mid-twenty-first century, this continual cycle

American warfighting will consist of three stages. The first will be an assault on enemy aircraft that could strike at the United States, along with enemy air defenses, including spacebased systems. The second will be a systematic attack on the rest of an enemy’s military capability and key economic facilities. The final stage will be the insertion of limited ground forces, consisting of infantrymen in armored, powered suits with tremendous lethality, survivability, and mobility, accompanied by an array of robotic systems.

As we can see, space warfare is a tricky subject. The deeper we explore it, the greater the risk of sounding like science fiction, but there is no doubt that humans really will experience all this in the coming century. The technology is there—as are the strategic and tactical advantages.

Therefore, the destruction of enemy satellites will become an essential goal of twentyfirst-century warfare.