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The Friedmans have a view of world power returning to the multipolar world status it was before 1914. In their view, the old reasons for the USA and Japan to be allies had ended as of 1991, and economic frictions would lead to conflict between the two countries. But in retrospect, they were very, very wrong. In fact, the USA and Japan probably have more reasons to be economic, political and even military allies in an increasingly dangerous world than ever before. 1. While the Friedmans thought Red China would come apart ("The same forces that destroyed European communism are present in China, suppressed at Tiananmen Square"), and that the resulting "refragmentation of China" would lead to Japanese vs. American intrigue in China, that hasn't happened! Red China, while it calls itself communist, has in many ways reinvented or rediscovered fascism, with private corporations subject to tight state political control. And it is far from politically breaking up. Indeed, quite the contrary, an increasingly militarized and aggressive Red China, now with a blue water navy, will draw Japan and the USA closer together even more than the Soviet threat did. 2. The need to contain and perhaps reform the Muslim menace, and the need to secure oil and other resources, will again give Japan and the USA far more reasons to cooperate than to compete against each other. Already Japan has been quite cooperative with US military intervention in Iraq, in rather stark contrast to US "allies" like France. 3. Lastly, the Friedmans completely missed the demographic factor. For a nation to be willing to become more belligerent, especially against a nation as powerful as the USA, it had better have a large enough pool of angry young people, particularly men, willing to fight. Japan has one of the world's lowest birthrates, with 1.2 per woman as opposed to 2.1 per woman in the USA, and Japan has one of the lowest proportions of people under 30 of any nation on earth. Even with a society as into robotic technologies as Japan is, that's a serious and fatal flaw in the Friedmans' analysis.