The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond

by George Friedman

The Atlantic and the Appalachians defined the colonies. The distance between the two shaped not just the commercial but the moral nature of the colonies. South of Pennsylvania, the Appalachians were over two hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.

There were different Americas reflecting the two founding colonies.

George Washington was the great-grandson of John Washington, who immigrated to Virginia in 1656.

John Adams was born to a Puritan family in Massachusetts.

The settlers were all English, but they came with different ambitions.

The division wasn’t just the work of the Appalachians. It was also the work of rivers.

There was another factor that isolated the southern colonies from each other and from the North.

The idea of a unified nation under a single government ran counter to the geographic reality of most of the South.

The idea of a powerful national government was easier to grasp in the North. The fundamental issue was not yet the relation of north and south, but rather the relation of the colonies to England.

In 1754, the Seven Years’ War broke out. It involved virtually all European powers and raged throughout the world. The war consisted of two alliances, one led by the British, the other by the French, and the triggering issue was the status of Silesia.

In North America the strategic issue was control of the Ohio Territory, a region west of the Appalachians whose heart was the Ohio River.

For the British, this was a small part of a global war. For the colonists, everything was at stake. The colonists raised militias to block the French and the Indians.

After a time, the British did send troops, commanded by General Edward Braddock.

Braddock

Gentlemanly fighting was impossible in the Appalachians, with their rugged hills and heavy woods. Here, men fought alone or in small groups, hiding behind rocks and trees and setting up ambushes. Stealth and initiative were the keys to success. Mass and order were impossible.

For Braddock and his officers, the manner in which the colonials fought was undignified. Wars were about not just winning but winning with grace and style. Therefore the British treated the American troops and officers with contempt.

The Americans fought like barbarians. For men like Washington, who saw himself as English, an officer and a gentleman, the contempt was unbearable. It reminded them that in the eyes of the British aristocrats, they were nothing of the sort.

The war ignited the colonists’ anger at the British, particularly among the more influential classes.

The struggle for the Appalachians changed the American character and began to shape the nation.

Braddock’s defeat opened a cultural gulf between the colonies and the British.

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were part of the generation that lived through the Seven Years’ War.

In 1720, there were about 466,000 Europeans living in the colonies. By 1740, that number had risen to about 900,000, and by 1776 there were about 2.5 million.

Thomas Jefferson,

America could not survive as a long and narrow strip of land along the East Coast.

It made the lack of strategic depth unbearable.

The engine driving American expansion begins at Lake Itasca, a very small lake in northern Minnesota, about one hundred miles from Canada.

The Chippewa Indians had called the stream Mississippi, in English “large river.” As the Mississippi flows south, thirteen major rivers flow into it, along with seventy-seven lesser rivers.

Jefferson had written that “France possessing herself of Louisiana…is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both shores of the Atlantic and involve in its effects their highest destinies.”

Most nations define nationality in terms of shared history, culture, and values. The American people had none of these. They did not even share a language.

It was not only immigration that invented the American people. The American people invented themselves.

The invented people invented things and invented themselves.

It is impossible to fully describe a people, but it is even harder to describe a people who didn’t exist until a few centuries ago.

There was one thing that all Americans had in common: they left the things they were born to, and they desired to come to America. In each generation more came, and in each generation the memory of who their family once was grew dim, yet rarely faded into nothingness.

This duality is the essential nature of the United States from the English settlers onward. Their past was with their family lineage. Their future with the United States.

The first core culture of the United States was the culture of the first English settler. Initially, this meant English and Protestant.

The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant remained the defining center of American culture until after World War II, when the vast numbers of other nationalities and religions were integrated into the military, side by side with the WASPs.

There are three symbols that give us a sense of the American. One is the cowboy and his complex relationship to duty, evil, and women. The second is the inventor, who both imagines and creates the extraordinary things that compel America forward. Finally, there is the warrior.

There is of course one thing beyond these stereotypes. When I think of an American, I think of subtlety.

Let’s begin with the quintessential American image: the cowboy, presented in the quintessential American art form, the movies.

The reality of the cowboys was different from the movie portrayal. They were significant for only about twenty years, until railroads expanded.

The movie High Noon, considered one of the finest of the genre, shows the surprising subtlety of the gunfighter’s life.

Amy had become a pacifist and Quaker after her father and brother were gunned down. She wants Kane to flee with her to avoid a fight and likely death.

One is the ideal of manly courage confronting the lurking evil. The other is the dissenter tradition of English Protestantism. The man embodies the tradition of courage. The woman embodies the tradition of Christian gentleness.

Kane is not serving the town but doing his duty to himself. In the song accompanying the movie, there is a warning about going to the grave as a “craven coward.”

But the story takes a twist. The four outlaws come at Kane in a swirling gunfight. Kane kills two, and when another waits in ambush for him, Kane’s wife takes a shotgun and shoots the gunman in the back.

High Noon portrays Kane as calm, determined, and unemotional. But it isn’t Kane who is the hero of the movie. It is his wife. She abandons her religious beliefs and her oath to herself in order to save her husband’s life.

Her duty is to what she loves, and everything else is secondary. Had Kane’s wife stood her moral ground the way her husband had, Kane would be dead. He couldn’t give. She could.

Kane was forced into action by his fear of being a coward. Amy decided the future. Kane is simplistic in his morality. Amy bears the complexity of Christianity in a New England town, where she had been born.

It is the woman, not the man, who bears the burden of moral ambiguity, and her willingness to do...

Like most small towns of the day, this town is isolated, connected to the world only by an intermittent train.