And America is the Empire. But there is no Foundation.

It's all metaphorical, of course, there is no one-to-one correspondence, just vague yet startling parallels. Herbert's Dune, at least the first few books, 9s also eerily prophetic, although I don't really think there is any real prescience involved. But there are currents, ebbs and flows, and sometimes sensitive minds can pick up on them. It's like listening to Bob Dylan, you're getting the feeling of a great insight just beyond your grasp, one which the artist himself does not claim to possess, but his audience can, subliminally. What the poet provides is not the insight, that comes from the listener, what the artist gives us is a framework of images we interpret with those subconscious thoughts we don't even know we carry within us. Much mental preocessing goes on subliminally.

A friend of mine once called this "functional ambiguity", especially in reference to Dylan. Asimov and Herbert did not predict the future, no one can do that, but the writer of that article sees parallels, (probably accidental and coincidental ones) with what he sees going on today, and maybe a few lucky hits and wild-ass guesses later he can give us another way of looking at it, a framework of metaphors we can apply to help us make sense of reality.

Have you ever walked into a bar and suddenly you knew--you didn't know why you knew but you just knew--that there was going to be trouble that night? It's the same kind of thing. It's not magic or parapsychology, but it is nonetheless very real. Your mind is working all the time, even when you're not aware of it; and sometimes you smell a bit of perfume and recall a woman from decades ago. Subliminal processing, and functional ambiguity.