Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe

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

â€œThere is a temptation, when you are around George Friedman, to treat him like a Magic 8 Ball.â€ Â â€”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 Europeâ€”the worldâ€™s cultural and power nexus for the past five hundred years . . . until now. Analyzing the most unstable, unexpected, and fascinating borderlands of Europe and Russiaâ€”and the fault lines that have existed for centuries and have been ground zero for multiple catastrophic warsâ€”Friedman highlights, in an unprecedentedly personal way, the flashpoints that are smoldering once again.
Â Â Â 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.
Â Â Â Through Friedmanâ€™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 Friedmanâ€™s most timely and, ultimately, riveting book.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Anchor
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-01-27
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Anchor
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2015-01-27
Format	Kindle eBook