Winston Churchill famously said America ultimately does the right thing after exhausting all other options. In a way, noted political scientist George Friedman is channeling his inner Churchill when he suggests that America’s true superpower is its ability to find solutions to significant societal and economic cycles or crises by constantly reinventing itself.
America, the world’s economic and military superpower, will likely need to rely on those qualities as it contends with current geopolitical turmoil such as wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe and the demographic crisis here in the U.S., suggested Friedman in a recent talk at John Mauldin’s virtual Strategic Investment Conference and in a follow-up interview with Financial Advisor magazine. Friedman is an author and the founder of the firm Geopolitical Futures.
America’s flexibility at coping with change and crisis is unique among nations, notably its European cousins. “Europeans are not flexible,” he said. “They move in a certain direction.” He’s optimistic the country will cope again, especially in tackling the aging of the population amid declining birth rates, although it won’t be without cost and political unrest.
“The United States has a remarkable ability to correct itself,” he said in a Q&A session with John Mauldin on Monday. “When we think of ourselves as constantly reinventing ourselves, then a lot of this [upheaval] is not scary and it’s not catastrophic,” he explained. “So I see the United States, at least as frequently, rectifying unexpected problems.”
Friedman told Financial Advisor he expects the U.S. to play a significant role in ending two of the biggest “problems” roiling the globe right now. He predicted the Ukraine-Russia war will have “an informal ending within a few months,” and that Egypt and Saudi Arabia will help devise some agreement to end the conflict in the Middle East. He doesn’t see the U.S. involving its troops in either conflict.
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