Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

George Friedman

Jan 2015 · Sold by Anchor

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

The history and potential predictions of where the problems are and who will benifit and who does not.

Greate book!

Good unsight

About the author

Dr. George Friedman is Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a company dedicated to forecasting the course of the international system (www.geopoliticalfutures.com). He is an internationally recognized strategist on global affairs and appears frequently in the media, and is a New York Times bestselling author of The Next 100 Years, Flashpoints,The Next Decade, The Storm Before the Calm, America's Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. Prior to founding Geopolitical Futures in 2015, Friedman was Chairman of Stratfor, the geopolitical intelligence publishing and consulting firm he founded in 1996. He lives in Austin, Texas.