Flashpoints - George Friedman

Flashpoints

By George Friedman

  • Release Date: 2015-01-27
  • Genre: Political Science
Score: 4
4
From 70 Ratings

Description

A major new book by New York Times bestselling author and geopolitical forecaster George Friedman (The Next 100 Years), with a bold thesis about coming events in Europe. This provocative work examines “flashpoints,” unique geopolitical hot spots where tensions have erupted throughout history, and where conflict is due to emerge again.

“There is a temptation, when you are around George Friedman, to treat him like a Magic 8 Ball.”  —The New York Times Magazine

With remarkable accuracy, George Friedman has forecasted coming trends in global politics, technology, population, and culture. In Flashpoints, Friedman focuses on Europe—the world’s cultural and power nexus for the past five hundred years . . . until now. Analyzing the most unstable, unexpected, and fascinating borderlands of Europe and Russia—and the fault lines that have existed for centuries and have been ground zero for multiple catastrophic wars—Friedman highlights, in an unprecedentedly personal way, the flashpoints that are smoldering once again.
     The modern-day European Union was crafted in large part to minimize built-in geopolitical tensions that historically have torn it apart. As Friedman demonstrates, with a mix of rich history and cultural analysis, that design is failing. Flashpoints narrates a living history of Europe and explains, with great clarity, its most volatile regions: the turbulent and ever-shifting land dividing the West from Russia (a vast area that currently includes Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania); the ancient borderland between France and Germany; and the Mediterranean, which gave rise to Judaism and Christianity and became a center of Islamic life.
     Through Friedman’s seamless narrative of townspeople and rivers and villages, a clear picture of regions and countries and history begins to emerge. Flashpoints is an engrossing analysis of modern-day Europe, its remarkable past, and the simmering fault lines that have awakened and will be pivotal in the near future. This is George Friedman’s most timely and, ultimately, riveting book.

Reviews

  • U.S. Investor and Europhile

    5
    By Three Continent Mike
    This is the first book I've ever recommended to my most thinking international friends, businessmen and normal citizens alike. It works on three levels: provides the underlying rationale for what has occurred in the last century in Europe; makes an incredible case for the repetition of the same history from some of the same causes as we watch the EC begin to unravel even as I write this. And last, the case provides a new lens from which to look at other groups of countries...is the past the predictor of the future?