One example of how Friedman falls for the inevitability of history is how he claims that the ending of the first world war lead inevitably to the second, and that it's hard to see how the United States could have failed in World War II.

Well, in fact, it's not clear that the first world war would have inevitably lead to the second. Hitler came to power more out of behind the scenes finagling than anything else, he didn't really have overwhelming popular support. And he didn't campaign on a platform of going to war, if he had he would hardly have gotten any support at all. The vast majority of Germans at the time certainly didn't want another war. When the boys marched off, they were sent off not with jolly cheering crowds, but with quiet crowds standing in somber sadness.

Certainly it's the case that factors from the first world war influenced the start of the second, but people have made way too much of this. The second world war wasn't an inevitably, it's just the way things turned out.

As for America winning the war against Japan, well, that wasn't inevitable either. The Japanese plan was to beat America so bad before it was able to get it's act together that it would just give up. And it came pretty darn close! It was a risky plan, to be sure, but it was one that the Japanese just might have pulled off if things had gone differently.

The Battle of Midway for example, which is seen as the turning point in the war for America, was almost a disaster. It was like shooting fish in a barrel for the Japanese, the American planes were easily dealt with. The only thing that saved the day is what's now known as the "Miracle at Midway".

Some planes that were supposed to be in the original attack got lost, and were just about to give it up and return to base when they found the Japanese ships. They managed to catch the Japanese with their pants down at exactly the right moment. The Japanese thought that the battle was over and were refueling. The planes were mostly out of commission for the task, and fuel lines were everywhere. The Americans had free reign to drop their bombs and deal a crippling blow to the Japanese fleet.

When Friedman takes these historical events for inevitabilities, he makes a very serious mistake in the study of history. It's a very serious mistake for a futurist to make.

Friedman also seems to believe that politicians are more constrained by the limits of rationality than I think that they are.  For example, he says that:

The millions or hundreds of millions of people who make up a nation are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational. Climbing to the top of millions of people is not something fools often do. Leaders understand their menu of next moves and execute them, if not flawlessly, then at least pretty well.

I have no faith that rationality is even remotely a qualifier for leadership. In a perfect world, it would be... and it might be comforting to think that we live in such a world, but frankly I don't see any evidence for that.

A leader CAN be rational, and most human beings ARE able to act rationally to at least a certain extent. But leaders don't become leaders by virtue of their rationality. For the most part, I'd say it's charisma that carries a person to a leadership position.

You just have to look at the inner workings of any government to realize that these people are all just dumbasses who have their own agendas trying their best to work with the messiness of reality and of dealing with all the other dumbasses with competing agendas all around.

Irrationality is not a hindrance to attaining a leadership position. Unless that irrationality causes you to do something really stupid, there's no obstacle to how far you can go.

But even if we assume that leaders will be rational, there's still a whole lot of wiggle room for the actions that rational people can take.  Friedman seems to believe that rational thought will inevitably only allow one possible solution, and that solution will be inevitably implemented.

I would say that reality is much messier than that.

Friedman also sees patterns in the ways that nations develop and mature:

Psychologically, the United States is a bizarre mixture of overconfidence and insecurity. Interestingly, this is the precise description of the adolescent mind, and that is exactly the American condition in the twenty-first century. The world's leading power is having an extended adolescent identity crisis, complete with incredible new strength and irrational mood swings. Historically, the United States is an extraordinarily young and therefore immature society. So at this time we should expect nothing less from America than bravado and despair. How else should an adolescent feel about itself and its place in the world? But if we think of the United States as an adolescent, early in its overall history, then we also know that, regardless of its self-image, adulthood lies ahead. Adults tend to be more stable and more powerful than adolescents. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that America is in the earliest phase of its power.

Well of course! Based on the completely unsupported theory that countries somehow progress through stages equivalent to the human aging process, It's absolutely logical to conclude that the United States is a teenager with raging hormones whose best years are ahead of it!

It just makes sense!

Well, that is, unless this theory of countries as stages in human development, which isn't supported by any real evidence other than some guy's interesting little theory, turns out to be wrong... but what are the chances of that??

It is not fully civilized. America, like Europe in the sixteenth century, is still barbaric (a description, not a moral judgment). Its culture is unformed. Its will is powerful. ... Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle. Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century. The United States is just beginning its cultural and historical journey. Until now it has not been sufficiently coherent to have a definitive culture. As it becomes the center of gravity of the world, it is developing that culture, which is inevitably barbaric.

Whoa! Hold on a second... make up your mind here! Is America an adolescent with raging hormones, or is it a barbarian??

Do countries go through stages analogous to the human aging process, or is it this equally unsupported three stage Barbarian-Civilized-Decadent theory which bears little resemblance to the aforementioned human aging process??

In either theory, how is it possible to tell which category an individual nation belongs to? Is there some set criteria, or are you just basing this on informal observation and anecdotal evidence? (My guess is the latter.)

There's no real proven criteria here for evaluating the possible actions of a nation, just some flawed analogies that have been taken too far.

Friedman also has an enthusiasm for discovering cycles where something tends to happen at regular intervals.  It's basically just random pattern recognition, but it's worth looking at the details:

There is an odd--and not entirely explicable--pattern built into American history. Every fifty years, roughly, the United States has been confronted with a defining economic and social crisis. The problem emerges in the decade before the crisis be comes apparent. A pivotal presidential election is held that changes the country's political landscape over the following decade or so. The crisis is resolved, and the United States flourishes. Over the next generation, the solution to the old problem generates a new one, which intensifies until there is another crisis and the process repeats itself. Sometimes the defining moment is not readily apparent until later, and sometimes it can't be missed. But it is always there.

When we talk of economic crisis, all fears turn immediately to the Great Depression. In fact, historically, the terminal crisis of a cycle has usually resembled deep discomfort more than the profound agony of the Depression. The stagflation of the 1970s or the short, sharp crises of the 1870s are far more likely than the prolonged, systemic failure of the 1930s. As will be true for the crisis of the 2020s, we don't have to be facing a Great Depression in order to be confronting a historical turning point.

It seems to me that under these loose criteria, Mr. Friedman could call up any arbitrary number and make a case that there's a cycle in US geopolitics which corresponds. If all you need is to find some "deep discomfort" which one president fails to solve but the next president has some success at, well, that could fit a ridiculous portion of American history.

Hell, a lot of people would argue that the Bush presidency followed by Obama is just such a geopolitical landmark under George Friedman's criteria.

And if the "defining moment is not readily apparent until later", then you can go back and read all sorts of nuances into the historical record in order to make your case about pretty much any period in history.

It's like the dowser who claims that he can locate an underground pipeline within two feet at a construction site 80% of the time, when the fact is that 80% of the construction site is within two feet of an underground pipeline.

Friedman also often makes claims to the objectives of countries that seem to be pulled completely out of thin air.  It often seems to me that he's claiming that the objectives of a certain country are ones which probably none of the politicians in that country are even thinking about. For example:

Ukraine and Belarus are everything to the Russians. If they were to fall into an enemy's hands--for example, join NATO--Russia would be in mortal danger. Moscow is only a bit over two hundred miles from the Russian border with Belarus, Ukraine less than two hundred miles from Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. Russia defended against Napoleon and Hitler with depth. Without Belarus and Ukraine, there is no depth, no land to trade for an enemy's blood. It is, of course, absurd to imagine NATO posing a threat to Russia. But the Russians think in terms of twenty-year cycles, and they know how quickly the absurd becomes possible.

Exactly which Russian politicians are thinking in terms of twenty year cycles? I doubt that even a single one of them is!  Such cycles haven't really been shown to even exist, and even if they did, most politicians are only interested in dealing with the current political hot issues that will resonate with the voters.

But back to the topic at hand - I just felt that Friedman was constantly assigning fairly nonsensical objectives to countries - The US will act quickly to prevent such and such from happening, Turkey will protect it's best interests by doing this or the other. A lot of it was stuff that I couldn't imagine ever being the rationale behind any action that a politician might take. Friedman would probably argue that these rationales are just what's visible on the surface, and that you need to look at the underlying factors, but I don't think so.

While I have no trouble believing that politicians may have ulterior motives for the things that they do, I have a lot of trouble believing that there's some sort of underlying geopolitical principle of national interest that will reliably guide political actions towards certain definable ends. Even if politicians wanted to follow some sort of well defined national interest, I doubt that the politicians of any nation could work out a concise agreement to what those interests actually are.

Another example involves Friedman's contentions about Mexico's position:

Mexico's grand strategy was simple after 1848. First, it needed to maintain its own internal cohesion against regionalism and insurrection. Second, it needed to secure itself against any foreign intervention, particularly by the United States. Third, it needed to reclaim the lands lost to the United States in the 1840s. Finally, it needed to supplant the United States as the dominant power in North America. Mexico never really got past the first rung in its geopolitical goals. It has, since the Mexican-American War, simply been trying to maintain internal cohesion.

If Mexico has been making no attempt to accomplish most of these goals, then what evidence could Friedman possibly have that these goals even exist within the Mexican geopolitical landscape??

He certainly hasn't put forth any compelling arguments as to why we should believe that he's somehow able to ferret out these national goals and interests with any degree of accuracy.


In any case, poking holes in Friedman's arguments is certainly interesting, and I've had fun doing it.  But what I want to highlight here is how similar his line of reasoning is to people who believe in things like conspiracy theories.  Friedman isn't, of course, a conspiracy theorist, but we can recognize in his work the kind of mindset that underlies much of the arguments made by conspiracy theorists.

There's a distorted view of history and the facts where people feel a false sense of certainty about what happened.  There's the assignment of motives to individuals or organizations that are taken as a given even though there's no real evidence for them.  There's the search for patterns in random noise, anomaly hunting that comes up with illusory results that people then take as scientifically proven.

It's a mindset uninformed by the necessary standards of scientific evidence.  The chains of reasoning it comes up with sound scientific and convincing if you don't examine them closely, but fall apart when you understand the basics of critical thinking.

We need to recognize this kind of flawed thinking not only in others, but in ourselves as well.  We're all just dumbasses who can fall into these kinds of mental traps unconsciously.  I think the best way to avoid that is to examine people's arguments and learn to recognize when natural human reasoning can lead us astray.