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

by George Friedman

The legacy companies based on the World War II model either changed or died. However, the federal government did not evolve. In distributing authority based on specialty, it fragmented itself into countless agencies or informal structures, each obsessed with its narrow function, few able to cooperate effectively with others, and most spending more time struggling with these other entities than performing their function. By their very incoherence, government actions increase the likelihood that projects will fail, or that they will succeed at an unacceptable cost, or that in succeeding, they will undermine the success of another project. There is no standpoint from which to visualize the whole, and the experts embedded in the nodes of the system are not foxes, nor have they access to the complexity. The result is, from foreign policy to health care, that the convolution of the issue is addressed through solutions that are even more complicated and therefore less understandable.