The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
Conventional political analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.
The imperialism of Atlantic Europe created a single world.
Grand Strategy is not always about war. It is about all of the processes that constitute national power.
An emerging power overreacts. A ,ature power finds balance. A declining power loses the ability to recover its balance.
Things change, and the unexpected should be expected.
In geopolitics major conflicts repeat themselves.
When a single war does not resolve an underlying geopolitical issue, it is refought until the issue is finally settled. Significant conflicts are rooted in underlying realities - and they do not go away easily.
Sometimes the defining moment is not readily apparent until later and sometimes it can't be missed.
To understand war, you need to understand more than the reasons a war was fought. You need to think about technology, culture and other matters, all of them in detail.
As frequently happens in war, once the initial attack, planned over years, is executed, everyone starts to improvise, working from uncertainty.
(c) George Friedman - "The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century"