Let me preface by saying that strategy teaches you NOT to make long-term predictions because, by definition, situations can be changed by people making the right decisions. Sun Tzu's strategy is more about recognizing opportunities as they arise and taking advantage of them. That said, I was asked by the Coast to Coast Radio Show to do a series of predictions for 2005 to discuss during my interview on the 19th. Here is my list: 1. Other governments in Middle East visibly start embracing democracy and freeing their economies.

Today, virtually anything today that promotes American values is tagged as "propaganda." If you look at these posters from WWI and WWII, you will see the values that America once publically promoted. These values allowed it to grow into the strongest, freest, and most productive country on earth.

Putting my earlier post on the war against Christmas in perspective, it occurs to me in reading this Jeff Jarvis post about how the cultural wars in America aren't that bad, it occurs to me that we no longer see that chilling term "Xmas" at all, which was all the rage twenty years ago. This has to be progress.

Sun Tzu teaches that it is axiomatic that every organization has the desire to grow its power. Sun Tzu's strategy was developed as systematic process for realizing that desire. The purpose of that growth was to enhance the lives of those within the organization relative to those outside of the organization. As an organization grows, its compromizes the core philosophy that gives it unity and purpose. This in turn leads to organization decline and the rise of new organization.

In reading this article about French anti-Americanism, I was reminded on a recent conversation I had with a Australian who had lived in England since he was a child. The conversation started blaming Iraq on American "colonialism." When I pointed out that the war on terror was worldwide, with people dying by the tens of thousands everywhere from Sudan to the Philippines, he said that it was all caused by American cultural imperialism in those countries.