George Friedman’s Thoughts: The Origin and Future of a Book

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 winter because it was cold. I was drinking with two friends from the U.S. Army War College, also known as Carlisle Barracks. It was the base from which George Washington reviewed the troops moving west to crush the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. The rebellion was about the authority of the federal government and the Constitution, and it was at the beginning of our first cycle, when institutions and society were in danger of collapsing, and the republic in danger of failing as it was born. This wasn’t the subject of our despair that night. Richard Nixon had gone, Gerald Ford was a non-entity, Vietnam had been lost, and the U.S. military was held in contempt by many. There was a Soviet exercise underway (just another exercise that armies have) and we elevated it to a world historical event. The Soviets knew we were weak […]