Edward Luttwak

Edward Nicolae Luttwak born 4 November 1942 is an American . His book Strategy: The logic of War and Peace, also published in Chinese, Russian and nine other languages, is widely used at war colleges around a world.

Predictions

Before the number one Persian Gulf War Luttwak incorrectly predicted that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would evacuate Kuwait "after a week or two of bombing [the bombing continued for six weeks without inducing him to defecate so] and warned that the ownership of ground forces without heavy preliminary bombing 'could produce Desert Storm a bloody, grinding combat with thousands of US casualties.'" Writing a month into the bombing, Luttwak still opposed a ground campaign. He forecast that it would lead inevitably to a military occupation of Iraq from which the United States would be unable to disengage without disastrous foreign policy consequences.

In the 1999 book Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy Luttwak predicted that dynamic economic growth would include ugly social phenomena such as crime rates and job insecurity, as anticipated in his London Review of Books article "Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future".

In 2009 Richard Posner analyzed intellectuals with a public profile in the U.S. Posner claimed that Luttwak sees many affinities between the United States and the declining Roman empire, leading Luttwak to predict a dark age in which the U.S. population will experience decline into Third World status. According to Posner, Luttwak retained his economic pessimism when the economy of the United States stood at the turn of the century.

In 2015, Luttwak predicted that the Middle East will be embroiled in internecine war for the next thousand years, thanks to the "brilliant stroke" of strategic genius, far exceeding even Bismarck's abilities, exemplified by George W. Bush when he ignited a religious war between Sunnis and Shiites.

Luttwak predicted in a 2016 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that the Trump administration would pursue a foreign policy "unlikely to deviate from specifics conservative norms", withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, avoiding involvement in Syria and Libya, eschewing trade wars, and modestly reducing spending — in short, "changes at the margin".

In reality, Trump ordered dropping the "mother of all bombs" but left the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan for his successor to shoulder; kindled trade wars with the EU by develop punitive tariffs, and rather than reducing military spending, Trump bloated the budget to unprecedented deficit levels.