His four issues are the euro mess, China's bubble looking shaky, the pan-Arab political convulsion, and our U.S. jobless recession "recovery." His analysis of the first three is reasonable; his view of the fourth may be accurate, of that I'm much less sure.
Friedman's concern is that a highly interconnected world may not be able to withstand working through all four at the same time. He doesn't say what happens if the world system cannot cope with this much change.
Worst case scenario: the outcome could be chaos, a new Dark or Middle Ages. If so, Australia and New Zealand might be the new equivalent of the "eastern Roman Empire," the place where development and culture persist.
