March 10, 2025
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A Personal Explanation of Why I Don’t Vote
By: George Friedman
I must confess that I have not voted in an election, other than local ones, since I left my life in academia and government 30 years ago. I chose to pursue my passion – geopolitical modeling and forecasting – as a business and so created a company that was my own Office of Net Assessment. (I’d encourage you to look this title up online.) Academic and government life constrained my ambitions. I sensed there were fewer constraints on ideas, and what it takes to develop them, in the private sector. I was too arrogant to imagine that I could fail, despite my ignorance of entrepreneurship.
And so off my wife and I went into business, producing and selling geopolitical forecasts and explanations of national behavior. It sounded like snake oil to some and boring to others. But the move left me free to pursue my passion and my wife (as crazy as I was) loved the challenge. She had no desire to be a professor’s wife. So we started this business by sending free articles to friends, and they forwarded them to others, until my wife told me to stop the free stuff and charge money. She was and is my business manager.
My idiosyncratic view of things boiled down to the idea that leaders do not make policy and that outside forces compel leaders to do what must be done, regardless of their intent. It is not ideology that shapes nations but national imperatives, constraints and capabilities. Watching politicians compete is a sideshow. History is impersonal.
Our marketing strategy was to be right more often than we were wrong so that, in time, the word would spread. To achieve this, we had an intellectual, business and moral imperative. I had to control the urge to express my own wishes regarding the outcomes in history and see instead what is and must be. My goal was to call the play-by-play of history, not to be a player in it. So I decided not to vote in national elections. I must force myself to be clinically distant from political personalities and their ideas. I must focus on the forces that create them, shape their actions and determine their fates.
This was not as difficult for me as it might be for others. At the heart of my model was an insistence to focus not on the behaviors of leaders but on the forces that call them to action. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt had radically different political beliefs, and both had their share of critics, but neither would have become president without an unsentimental and ruthless understanding of how to win elections, and neither could govern with an equally unsentimental and ruthless understanding of the world. Each crafted his personality to the task. This is true in democracies and dictatorships alike.
I can’t suppress my love of my country or the New York Yankees. I won’t put money on them if they don’t have two good relievers. So I must discipline myself on the things I can disregard. This came up in a recent video interview, in which I mentioned that I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I received many comments from Trump supporters who thought this meant I voted for Kamala Harris. But the truth is I didn’t vote for Harris either. I write this piece today because of that confusion. My job is to explain what Trump is doing in his capacity as president. But as with all presidents, who are the products of history rather than its masters, I care more about forces that shape his actions. This is because I think leaders, more often than not, do what they must or what they can. Leaders emerge because they have personalities that adapt to what is necessary. They craft their actions and personalities to suit the situation. If they can rise to leadership of a country, they have the wit and will to recognize what is necessary and possible. And if that’s the case, they must be ruthless and cunning to some degree. For some, their personality is what the times command. Others craft the personality they need. They make errors, of course, but they have gained an overwhelming ability to avoid errors in their climb to power.
I do not know if Trump’s persona is genetic or crafted, and I don’t care. In my thinking, we do not know the vices and deep thoughts of successful leaders. Leaders can see more clearly than I can what’s at stake, what’s necessary and what’s possible. If they cannot, they will be crushed by their enemies or by history. What I do know is that Trump understood what he must do to become president, and that taught him much about the principles of geopolitics.
It is my job to forecast events. So I must see as clearly as I can and suppress my own feelings. The passions of the time are not indicators of much. So far, I think I understand what Trump is doing, and in doing it, he reveals that the norms and guardrails of the last epoch have collapsed from old age. Remember that the Founding Fathers smashed through the rotted guardrails of their time and were loathed by the vast mass of American loyalists to the English Crown. This is the nature of America, and it is how my model told me that the norms and guardrails rot every 50 years (a regularity I have no explanation for), and it was time for a president like George Washington or Franklin Roosevelt to storm through them. I saw it coming but had no idea of the name that would be coming with it. And I knew that whoever was president would be both loved and hated by a divided nation. As for Trump himself, I am neither for him nor against him. I would say only that he is not violating the guardrails or norms as much as recognizing that they have outlived their usefulness and that new ones must be built. In my work on the United States, I have found that each cycle destroys the old cycle’s norms and replaces them with a new set. The defenders of the old cycle are outraged, and the defenders of the new cycle are pleased.
Mark Twain said, “history does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Trump is a product of American history and, as such, should have been expected, even if the new norms he ushers in are unknown. But emerge they will as they always do in U.S. cycles.
