In his latest book, "Flashpoints - The Emerging Crisis in Europe", George Friedman gives a summary of various events through European history, focusing on the 20th century wars, inter-war years, and cold war eras. Although the book tries to sell itself as being about future predictions, he spends more than half of it looking at the past. In the second half, he tries to foresee various possibilities and outcomes for the regions of Russia / Eastern Europe; Germany; France; the Mediterranean region; Turkey and Britain. However, most of the attempt at analysis remains limited, shallow, and biased.

The problem with Friedman's book, is that it seems he didn't quite decide what it was supposed to be about: his own and his family's escape from war in Europe; his travels across Europe in later years; a history of Europe; or as the title suggests, about future emerging crisis. It turns in to a bit of everything, and becomes colloquial and incoherent. Between the endless anecdotes, it seems what Friedman is missing is an editor who can cut away the cruft. Totally irrelevant stories covering taking a leak behind a border office in Ukraine or that some hotelier in Sarajevo reminds him of his aunt, are just some of what could have been left out.

Skip it

Frankly, this book is a waste of time. Although the history of Europe is important in order to understand the present and the future, this book is not a good summary. If any section of it had been part of Wikipedia, it would have been littered with "citation needed". In fact, Friedman hasn't included any references at all, and sometimes it seems he has not done his homework very well, with plenty of inaccurate facts.

This makes the future predictions in the book rather worthless. They are not based on any hard facts or research, but rather what Friedman could imagine. Furthermore, the book shows some age, despite being republished this year: In the chapter on Britain, he completely missed the risk of Britain voting to exit the EU, while it's mentioned briefly in the after-word.

Overall, this is not a book worth spending time on.