George Friedman

George Friedman (born February 1, 1949) is a Hungarian-born American futurologist, political scientist, and writer. He is a geopolitical author on international relations. He is the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures. Prior to founding Geopolitical Futures, he was chairman of the publishing company Stratfor. He is best known for his 1991 book The Coming War With Japan, co-authored with his wife Meredith LeBard, which predicted a military conflict between the United States and Japan around 2020.

Friedman was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1949 to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. His family immigrated to the United States. Friedman describes his family's story as "a very classic story of refugees making a new life in America." He grew up in New York City. Friedman received a B.A. at the City College of New York, where he majored in political science, and a Ph.D. in government at Cornell University.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Friedman studied the potential for a Japan-U.S. conflict and co-authored with his wife The Coming War with Japan in 1991. The war he predicted did not occur.

Friedman spent nearly 20 years in academia, during which time he taught political science at Dickinson College.

In 1996, Friedman founded Stratfor, a private intelligence and forecasting company, and served as the company's CEO and Chief Intelligence Officer. Stratfor's head office is in Austin, Texas. He resigned from Stratfor in May 2015. That year, he founded Geopolitical Futures.

Friedman's reputation as a forecaster of geopolitical events led The New York Times magazine to comment, in a profile, "There is a temptation, when you are around George Friedman, to treat him like a Magic 8 Ball".

During his tenure at Stratfor, George Friedman oversaw the publication of the company’s recurring Decade Forecasts, which aimed to predict long-term global trends based on structural factors such as geography, demography, and national interest.

1995–2005: The first forecast emphasized the continued supremacy of the United States in a unipolar world and projected a fragmented international system marked by tension and economic growth. Stratfor saw no credible rivals to U.S. power, predicting Japan would reemerge militarily and that Germany would be unable to lead European monetary integration. Neither of these occurred: Japan remained pacifist, and the euro was successfully launched. The report also failed to anticipate the rise of Islamist terrorism or the impact of 9/11, a major blind spot for a forecast released just a few years earlier.