HK$208

It is difficult to trust a book's predictions for the next 100 years when it has the present wrong. Although published this year, The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, by George Friedman, fails to 'predict' the economic and financial turmoil that began last October. He writes that the US economy will continue to expand for another 15 to 30 years. Consequently, the whole work seems out of touch.

President Barack Obama claims the US is facing its biggest crisis since the Great Depression. Meanwhile, China and Russia are resurgent global powers. But Friedman proclaims the next 100 years will see an untrammelled expansion of US economic and military power. The mainland and Russia will soon devolve into chaos, he thinks, and the 'American Century' will result.

The US is strong and will doubtless weather the current storm and be a major player for the rest of the century. But probably not in the ways Friedman predicts. His geopolitical arguments are obvious, simplistic, inaccurate and sometimes bizarre. Friedman's argument for US dominance is primarily based on the idea that there will be no country with a military strong enough to defeat it. The US has the most effective navy in the world and can consequently control international shipping lanes. Furthermore, because it is difficult to invade the US, it doesn't need to win wars - just destabilise other regions to create a power vacuum it can fill. But none of this is new. In fact, it encapsulates US foreign policy since the second world war.

For a futurist, Friedman lacks imagination. His frame of reference is very much the past 100 years. He takes little note of the vulnerabilities that result from today's integrated global trading network. He trumpets the unassailable economic might of the US without heeding the complex financial relationship that now exists, for instance, between the country and the mainland.

Friedman also fails to take adequate note of how global communications networks leave countries open to new kinds of assaults - like the cyber-hacking of a country's energy grid. On a broader level, he makes no reference to how the effects of climate change will affect the world's geopolitical makeup. Temperatures have to rise by only three degrees Celsius to bring about climate change that will, in turn, bring about geopolitical shifts. He ignores climate change and its political ramifications.

His dismissal of the mainland is simplistic. He thinks the rich coastal regions will soon want to split from Beijing. He predicts that in about 2020 the mainland will revert to chaotic, warlord times. That seems unlikely. Europe is essentially written off as a future power because historically it hasn't been united and Friedman describes the European Union as existing in a state of benign disorder. Yet an analysis of the 20th century would conclude that today's Europe has actually moved from chaos to unity.

Some predictions, like that concerning an outlandish spaceship Friedman calls a Battle Star, have no basis in science. But despite this flight of fancy, The Next 100 Years is not a forward-thinking book. Technological and scientific advances drive political changes in the modern world as much as realpolitik - nuclear fission in the 20th century, for instance - but they figure little in this analysis. In Friedman's vision this century looks like a rehash of the last one. His future simply isn't futuristic enough.