George Friedman - The Next Decade

Africa’s wars cannot be prevented, and they would happen even if there had never been foreign imperialism. Indeed, they were being fought when imperialism interrupted them. Nation-building does not take place at World Bank meetings or during the building of schools by foreign military engineers, because actual nations are built in blood. The map of Africa must be redrawn, but not by a committee of thoughtful and helpful people sitting in a conference room.

What will happen, in due course, is that Africa will sort itself out into a small number of major powers and a large number of lesser ones. These will provide the framework for economic development and, over generations, create nations that might become global powers, but not at a pace that affects the next decade. The emergence of one nation-state that could introduce a native imperialism to Africa could speed up the process, but all the candidates for imperial power are so internally divided that it is hard to imagine a rapid evolution. Of all of them, South Africa is most interesting, as it combines European expertise with an African political structure. It is the most capable of Africa’s countries. But that very fact leaves it with divisions that make its emergence as a regional power harder to imagine with each passing year.

Ultimately, the United States has no overwhelming interest in Africa. It obviously cares about oil from Nigeria or Angola and about controlling Islamist influence in the north as well as Somalia and Ethiopia. Thus it cares about the stability of Nigeria and Kenya, powers that might help with these issues. But America’s intense involvement in Africa during the Cold War—the Congolese civil war in the early 1960s, Angola’s civil war in the 1980s, Somalia and Ethiopia—was merely an attempt to block Soviet penetration. That level of intensity no longer exists.

In recent years the Chinese have become involved in Africa, purchasing mines and other natural resources. But as we have discussed, China does not represent the same order of threat that the Soviets did, both because of the limits of power projection and because of China’s internal weakness. China can’t exploit Africa’s position strategically, as the Soviets once did, and it can’t carry home the mines. The primary effect of Chinese investment is more intense exposure to Africa’s instability, which leaves the United States free to remain aloof.

At the same time, U.S. corporations are as skilled as any in making the deals that allow them to get oil, other minerals, or agricultural products without a major American commitment to the region. Given all the other interests of the United States, having one region where it can remain indifferent is strategically beneficial, if only in that it allows the U.S. to conserve resources.

But there is an opportunity in Africa nonetheless. The strategic requirement for the United States to be involved in systematic manipulation in many parts of the world makes it disliked and distrusted. There is no way to avoid this through policy, but it is possible to confuse—or defuse—the issue, and Africa is the place for that.

The United States, like all nations, is brutally self-interested. But there is value in not appearing that way, and some value in being liked and admired, as long as being liked isn’t mistaken for the primary goal. Giving significant amounts of aid to Africa would serve the purpose of enhancing America’s image. In a decade in which the United States will need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year on defense, spending $10 billion or $20 billion on aid to Africa would be a proportional and reasonable attempt to buy admiration.

Again, the aid itself will not solve Africa’s problems, but it might ameliorate some of them, at least for a time. It is possible that it will do some harm, as many aid programs have had unintended and negative consequences, but the gesture would redound to America’s benefit, and at relatively low cost.

The fact that a president must never lift his eyes from war does not mean that he cannot be clever about it at the same time. One of Machiavelli’s points is that good comes out of the ruthless pursuit of power, not out of trying to do good. But if doing some good merely convinces Europe to send more troops to the next U.S. intervention, it will be a worthwhile investment.

This book is about the imbalances of American power in the next decade and the effect of these imbalances on the world. I’ve focused on economic and geopolitical issues and made the argument that imbalances here are transitory and can be corrected. But the book would be incomplete without a consideration of two other major issues impinging on the decade ahead, namely demography and technology.

Economic cycles—boom and bust—can be driven by speculation and financial manipulation, as was the decade just ending. But at a deeper level, economic expansion and contraction are driven by demographic forces and by technological innovation.

During the decade to come, we will see the ebbing of the demographic tide that helped to drive the prosperity of the immediate postwar period. The age cohort known as the baby boom—the children born during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations—will be in their sixties, beginning to retire, beginning to slow down, beginning to get old. As a result, the same demographic bulge that helped create abundance a half century ago will create an economic burden in the years ahead.

In the 1950s, the baby boomers helped create demand for millions of strollers, tract houses, station wagons, bicycles, and washer-dryers. During the 1970s, they began to seek work in an economy not yet ready for them. As they applied for jobs, married and had children, bought and borrowed, their collective behavior caused interest rates, inflation, and unemployment to rise.

As the economy absorbed these people in the 1980s and as they matured in the 1990s, the boomers pushed the economy to extraordinary levels of growth. But during the next ten years, the tremendous spurts of creativity and productivity that the boomers brought to American life will draw down, and the economy will start feeling the first rumblings of the demographic crisis. The passing of the baby boomers throws into sharp relief an accompanying crisis in technological innovation that ultimately may be more salient. As the boomers age, not only will their consumption soar and their production disappear, but they will require heath care and end-of-life care at a level never seen before.

The next decade will be a period in which technology lags behind needs. In some cases, existing technologies will reach the limits of how far they can be stretched, yet replacement technologies will not be in the pipeline. Which isn’t to say that there won’t be ample technological change; electric cars and new generations of cell phones will abound. What will be in short supply are breakthrough technologies to solve emerging and already pressing needs, the kinds of breakthroughs that drive real economic growth.

The first problem is financial, because the development of radically new technologies is inherently risky, both in terms of implementing new concepts and in terms of matching the product to the market. The financial crisis and recession of 2008–2010 reduced the amount of capital that is available for technological development, along with the appetite for risk. The first few years of the next decade will be marked not only by capital shortages but by a tendency to deploy available capital in low-risk projects, with the available dollars flowing to more established technologies. This will ease up globally in the second half of the decade, and sooner in places like the United States. Nevertheless, given the lead time in technology development, the next generation of notable technological breakthroughs won’t emerge until the 2020s.