George Friedman and The Next 100 Years: A Forecast Under the Test of Reality

Political forecasting almost always remains open to doubt, at least until events place it under the unforgiving test of reality. In the series Were They Right?, we take a retrospective path: returning to the analytical record of the past to examine what experts anticipated, then confronting those forecasts with the hard facts of the present in order to identify what truly endured.   Today, we place George Friedman under close analytical assessment, measuring the forecasts of The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century against the geopolitical record of the 17 years since its publication. The objective is not to judge whether Friedman successfully predicted the future in its entirety, an impossible standard for a book that projects a century ahead, but to determine which of his underlying assumptions have survived contact with reality, which have already failed, and which remain too distant to be meaningfully tested.