Until the middle of the 19th century, George Friedman explains, there were two contenders for domination of North America — Washington and Mexico City:
After the American conquest of northern Mexico in the 1840s, Washington dominated North America and Mexico City ruled a weak and divided country. It remained this way for 150 years. It will not remain this way for another hundred. Today, Mexico is the world’s 13th-largest economy. It is unstable due to its drug wars, but it is difficult to imagine those wars continuing for the rest of the century. The heirs of today’s gangsters will be on the board of art museums soon enough.Mexico has become a nation of more than 100 million people with a trillion-dollar economy. When you look at a map of the borderland between the United States and Mexico, you see a huge flow of drug money to the south and the flow of population northward. Many areas of northern Mexico that the US seized are now being repopulated by Mexicans moving northward — US citizens, or legal aliens, or illegal aliens. The political border and the cultural border are diverging.
Until after the middle of the century, the US will not respond. It will have concerns elsewhere and demographic shifts in the US will place a premium on encouraging Mexican migration northward. It will be after the mid-century systemic war that the new reality will emerge. Mexico will be a prosperous, powerful nation with a substantial part of its population living in the American south-west, in territory that Mexicans regard as their own.