Page 155 - The Drucker Lectures

136 [ The Drucker Lectures

years ago, and every reviewer said, “This man is crazy.” And my
publisher asked Henry Kissinger to review it, and Henry wrote
back and said, “I have known Peter for many years. I don’t want
to say that he has become gaga.” That was early 1989. For the
first time in my 40 years with that publisher, he made me take
out the sentence in which I said that I consider it highly probable
that within the next five years, Germany will be reunified. He
said, “Look, Peter, at your age, you don’t have to make a total ass
of yourself.”
And I didn’t predict; I just looked out the window. I don’t
predict. I learned that in 1929. I got my first decent job with a
major English newspaper, and I predicted in October ’29 that
the New York Stock Exchange crash couldn’t last. I’m not going
to predict anymore. So, no, I just looked out the window. And
that’s only two-and-a-half years ago. It was very clear that Mr.
Gorbachev couldn’t succeed. You didn’t have to predict it. It was
very clear that the Russian empire would dissolve. You didn’t
have to predict it. But nobody could imagine it.
As you know, Mr. James Baker, the secretary of state, slipped
into one of his speeches a very innocent-sounding sentence in
which he basically said, “We, in the United States, are now ready
for the dissolution of China.” He didn’t put it this way. He put it
very diplomatically, but everybody got the message. And I think
it very likely that by the end of the century we will be back to the
traditional China, which has a nominal central government that
costs a lot of money—and that’s about all it does—and where
you have economic warlords overseeing different regions. China
will also be the center of an economic Far Eastern union.
And so, we are in a period of very rapid change, and some
of the elements of the new worldview are already pretty clear.
Maybe the most important thing is that, since about the French
Revolution, we in the developed countries have believed in sal-
vation by society, the secular religion of which Communism was