The Next 100 Years

George Friedman

Navies

Having achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world’s oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motivated to build navies—or had the resources to do so. One strategy, “the carrot,” is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, “the stick,” is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.

The United States emerged from the Cold War with both an ongoing interest and a fixed strategy. The ongoing interest was preventing any Eurasian power from becoming sufficiently secure to divert resources to navy building. Since there was no longer a single threat of Eurasian hegemony, the United States focused on the emergence of secondary, regional hegemons who might develop enough regional security to allow them to begin probing out to sea. The United States therefore worked to create a continually shifting series of alliances designed to tie down any potential regional hegemon. …

China

China is inherently unstable. Whenever it opens its borders to the outside world, the coastal region becomes prosperous, but the vast majority of Chinese in the interior remain impoverished. This leads to tension, conflict, and instability… This is not the first time that China has opened itself to foreign trade, and it will not be the last time that it becomes unstable as a result. Nor will it be the last time that a figure like Mao emerges to close the country off from the outside, equalize the wealth—or poverty— and begin the cycle anew….

The vast majority of China’s population lives within one thousand miles of the coast, populating the eastern third of the country, with the other two-thirds being quite underpopulated …

The Europeans encountered a China in the mid-nineteenth century that was going through one of its isolationist periods. It was united but relatively poor. The Europeans forced their way in, engaging coastal China in intense trade. This had two effects. The first was the dramatic increase in wealth in the coastal areas that were engaged in trade. The second was the massive increase in inequality between China’s coast and the poor interior regions. This disparity also led to the weakening of the central government’s control over the coastal regions, and to increased instability and chaos. The coastal regions preferred close ties to (and even domination by) the Europeans.

The period of chaos lasted from the mid-nineteenth century until the Communists took power in 1949. Mao had tried to foment a revolution in coastal cities like Shanghai. Having failed, he took the famous long march into the interior, where he raised an army of poor peasants, fought a civil war, and retook the coast. He then returned China to its pre-European enclosure. From 1949 until Mao’s death, China was united and dominated by a strong government, but was isolated and poor.