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Flash Points: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, by George Friedman. New York: Doubleday, 2015. 288 pages. $28.95.
Flash Points is both an elegant and a disturbing book. Not simply elegant in its writing style, which is direct and clear, but also in its initial discussion of the age of discovery and enlightenment that propelled the European nations into becoming world powers-you rarely find a more cogent and concise explanation of the roots of European social, cultural, political, and economic development. Yet the book is also very disturbing because it details how the factors that allowed Europe to transform the world-faith, individualism, scientific inquiry, ideas of self-determination and legal rights, and nationalism-also contributed to the almost unfathomable destruction of the two world wars that tore it apart. George Friedman details the region's history, current events, and potential future in a way that makes an admonishment from his father, a Hungarian Jewish survivor of both the Nazis and the Soviets, seem very true: "Europe will never change. It will just act as if nothing happened" (p. 23).
Freidman, the well-known founder of Stratfor.com, one of the first private intelligence firms to be a major presence on the web, and an author of prescient books on the future security environment, begins with the personal history of how and why his family escaped Hungary in 1949. Having survived the horrors of World War II and the Communist takeover in a weak, dependent, and occupied nation, Friedman's father wanted his family to go to America and "live in a strong country with weak neighbors and, if possible, no Nazis, communists, or...