The Scariest Book I’ve Ever Read
When you ask someone to name the scariest book they’ve ever read, you’re asking a pretty loaded question. Scary in what way? In the sense that it just gave you a good spooky thrill, or in the sense that it actually filled you with real-life dread? With me, it’s even more complicated than that. As a very young kid, I scared really easily, but by the time I was in middle school, I was an avid fan of all things scary, and I still am today. I’m well on my way to reading every novel Stephen King has written, to say nothing of my love of horror comics. But there’s a difference between horror fiction and real-life fear, the way I see it. Only one book has ever actually been able to induce genuine, real-life, existential fear in me. And that book was. . . a nonfiction text on geopolitics.
Published in 2009, The Next 100 Years, by George Friedman, claims to be a forecast of political, military, and technological developments over the course of the 21st century. Taken at face value, that seems like an absurd premise, but Friedman has a reputation as a brilliant geopolitical strategist. Broadly speaking, the book posits that the 2010s and early 2020s will be defined by a “second Cold War” with Russia and China, followed by an economic downturn causing Russia and possibly China to fragment. This would be followed by the ascension of Poland, Turkey, and Japan as world powers, culminating in a third world war between these major powers.
At this point, I should probably backtrack a little and mention that, for all my life, I’ve had a deep fear of uncertainty — and by extension, what I’ve come to call a “pathological need to know the future.” Discovering The Next 100 Years, therefore, both fascinated and deeply frightened me. Here was a book written by a man who claimed to have well-supported knowledge of events that would occur decades in the future, and who predicted that the world would once again be consumed by a war between superpowers.
At the time, I was a little skeptical of Friedman’s claims. But the events of the past several years have made me less so. The election of Donald Trump and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have only made the predictions in this book seem more plausible. While some of them haven’t happened yet, per se (we’re in 2023 now, and there’s no sign of China breaking up, for example) it’s not hard to see that history is going Friedman’s way. That is to say, the wrong way. Countries that were close allies, or at least had decent relationships, as little as a decade ago are now growing apart. Turkey and Japan — the two future superpowers Friedman name-checked in his book — are both increasing their military spending significantly.
Geopolitics is like the weather, in that it’s impossible to predict it with complete precision. At best we can, as Friedman does, make educated guesses based on past data. But there is an important difference too, and that is ultimately why I find The Next 100 Years to be the scariest book I’ve ever read. If you hear on the news that a hurricane is bearing down on your city, you and everyone else who hears that warning would logically make preparations for the coming storm. You might stockpile supplies, head for a sheltered area, and build a barricade. In his book, Friedman plays the role of a weather forecaster, but predicts something infinitely more destructive than any storm — a world war fought between four countries that are currently close allies.
If Friedman is a weather forecaster in this analogy, he is not a very responsible one. He alerts us to the coming storm, but offers no advice as to how we can avoid getting caught in it. The narrative of The Next 100 Years implies that a global war is inevitable, and no amount of diplomacy, peacekeeping, or anything of that nature can possibly prevent it. Regardless of whether such a war is, in fact, inevitable, the fact that someone — someone with a lot of very good credentials, no less — says it is, but hasn’t said anything about how it could potentially be avoided, is a disturbing one.
And you can probably ask how this is any different from the old fire-and-brimstone doomsday prophets of ages gone by. The differences is that we live in — supposedly — a more rational era, a time when predictions about the future are given a lot more scrutiny. If someone says something bad is going to happen X number of years in the future, we ask questions. And if we can confirm it, we take steps to prevent it.
What haunts me, even today, is the idea that none of it matters. When I was a kid, I grew up thinking that the days of war between superpower countries was a thing of the past. With the Soviet Union collapsed and China becoming capitalist in all but name, there wasn’t really any potential enemy for the United States, and it seemed like it would stay that way for the foreseeable future. But that didn’t happen — we’re already seeing proof of that today.
And that’s terrifying. During the last decade of the 20th century, it seemed like we as a society had more or less fixed everything. But now it looks more and more like that was the exception rather than the rule, and we’re always going to be headed inexorably towards one global conflict or another. Imagine it’s thirty or forty years from now, and Friedman’s predictions have come true, all the worse for us. Yet despite that, no one ever thought to do anything to stop them from happening.
I don’t consider The Next 100 Years to be the scariest book I’ve ever read because of the scenarios it portrays, but because of what it implies about human nature. This book proposes a future where humanity is hurtling towards a new world war like a runaway train, but the passengers on that train are all asleep.
