From the Desk of George Friedman

The border between the United States and Canada has been closed. I don’t recall that ever happening before; I’m not sure what it is...

We live in a world filled with risks, some large and some small. When we step off the sidewalk to cross the street as the light turns green, there is a risk the car to our left will suddenly accelerate and kill us. We see it stopped there, we evaluate our desire to cross the […]

The United States is under enormous pressure. The nature of the particular pressure is unique, though pressure on the United States from various forces...

The planet has reached an extraordinary moment of unity. The overriding focus is on the coronavirus and the radical restructuring of our lives and societies. There is a weird sense of sharing. This is not a “Kumbaya” moment in any sense. The moment is not giving us a sense of how we are all human […]

The global medical community appears to have devised a strategy for mitigating the coronavirus that depends largely on quarantine, or limiting contact among the...

Battling the coronavirus is essential. But the battle has costs, which are invariably measured against the gain. “No matter what the cost” – the approach many countries appear to be taking – is a principle that can be disastrous, particularly when the cost is so high that it cannot be borne socially. With the coronavirus, […]

Since before World War I and throughout the 1970s, the people who controlled oil had a lever for controlling others. Since the 1980s, the...

Perhaps the most important thing that has emerged in the presidential election campaign over the past few weeks is that the next president of the United States will be in his 70s. Several of the remaining candidates would finish their first term in their 80s. The first five U.S. presidents ranged in age from 57 […]

I have presented geopolitics to be like economics, a science that predicts and summarizes the impersonal forces that drive a system so vast as...

My new book has finally been published. Of all the books I have written, this one took the longest. I conceived the principles around which it would be built – the idea of cycles guiding the United States – in a bar in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, sometime in the winter of 1975. I know it was […]

Canada is being wracked by what appears to be a moderately important internal crisis over First Nations’ objections to the construction of a natural...

June 21, 2017 In Britain, Theresa May failed to understand that leadership is more important than management.