It’s always funny to read books on current events a few years after they were published and try to find those cases where they were flat out wrong, or even encounter some very funny coincidences. In this book the first moment came when Friedman is arguing against Samuel P. Huntington’s assertion on The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order, where Huntington mentioned that the next great war would be a war of civilizations. Friedman even mocks it as
we won’t have the Soviets to kick around anymore, so we will naturally go back to kicking the Hindus and Muslims around and them kicking us
I guess Huntington got the last laugh there.