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

by George Friedman

The most important fact to bear in mind is that the United States was an invented nation; it didn’t evolve naturally from a finite group of people over thousands of years in one indigenous region, as did, for example, China or Russia.

More than that, the United States was an intentionally and rapidly invented nation.

The regime, the people, and the land combine to give the nation agility most other nations lack.

The United States of America is the place where the principles of the regime govern the country.

Inventing the government was the preface to inventing a nation. Governments can be machines, but nations have to accommodate the actual lives of people.

People don’t live abstract lives. They live real ones, within nations, and those nations give them a sense of who they are.

that the founders ever envisioned the diversity of immigration, although the Constitution clearly anticipated it because it set the rules for naturalization.

Beneath the pyramid is the third motto on the seal: Novus ordo seclorum, which means a “new order of the ages.”

In a sense, the American Revolution was not directed against England alone. It was directed against the European age that had begun in 1492.

The Americans viewed the European age as founded on oppression and inequality. European nations believed these values to be the natural order of things.

When I say that the regime was invented, I am therefore saying that it was invented by men who were lifelong inventors.

Liberty is the precondition to the pursuit of happiness. Liberty is the freedom to define one’s own happiness.

The Indian nations, like the Europeans, were constantly at war with each other.

Indications are that the Indian nation giving the settlers refuge was attacked by a hostile Indian nation that massacred both. It was a lonely death in a faraway place.

New Amsterdam harbor became the main link between North America and Europe. Then, in 1664, England seized it and renamed it New York.

The struggle for the Appalachians changed the American character and began to shape the nation. For all the colonists might have wished to look like the British aristocracy, they did not share the aristocratic belief that their right to rule had nothing to do with their competence or achievement.

According to Jefferson, there was a strategic reason for the purchase but also a vital political reason: the larger the country, the greater the stability, because local passions were more divisive in a small land than in a large one.

The Louisiana Purchase would wind up being the engine that propelled the United States to global power a century later.

The Europeans, and then the Americans, had three advantages. First, so long as they could gain a foothold on the continent, they had the ability to bring overwhelming numbers to bear over time. Second, the technology they had was superior in general to what the Indians had. Finally, and most important, the Indians were deeply divided against each other, and allying with a European force meant they could subdue their enemies. A further advantage more devastating than weapons were the diseases the Europeans brought with them and against which the Indians had no defense.

Mastering the technology of the conquistadors, they themselves became conquistadors.

Instead of perceiving Native policies toward colonial powers simply as strategies of survival, it assumes that Indians, too, could wage war, exchange goods, make treaties, and absorb peoples in order to expand, extort, manipulate, and dominate….[T]he fate of indigenous cultures was not necessarily an irreversible slide toward dispossession, depopulation, and cultural declension.

The Comanche were as genocidal as the Europeans, if not as efficient. They annihilated other nations, both killing and enslaving. Their ruthlessness was deeply feared by other tribes as well as by European settlers. But they also created a complex culture and within their nation were utterly civilized.

The perception that the European settlers simply overwhelmed helpless and spiritual people, or that weak savages were brushed aside, is untrue.

In fact, the Europeans defeated capable and sophisticated empire builders, as...

The Comanche and the Iroquois, along with the Aztecs and the Incas, had themselves built significant empires subject...

The Indians were as capable as the Europeans of all human...

Until the very end, in the 1880s, they never formed a general alliance with one another.

Some Indian nations found it beneficial to ally with the Americans in order to defeat their more dangerous enemies.

Enmity between the Apache and the Comanche ran deeper than hatred for the Americans, particularly at the be...

Like all successful conquerors, including the Romans and the British, the Americans used thes...

With the rise of the United States, the Americans defeated the British, expelled the French, forced the Mexicans far to the south, and crushed the Indian nations and empires, fighting united against an enemy that could not unite against them. The outcome was inevitable.

Jefferson knew that the loss of New Orleans to France, or any other power including the Spanish or British, would end the dream of American independence. Whoever controlled New Orleans controlled the valley.

Whoever controlled the valley controlled the fate of the United States.

The means Americans used were cleverness, creativity, brutality, and all the other characteristics that defined humanity from its beginning.

No North American power had achieved this before. The Indian nations had a different sense of geography. They feared each other, but they had not learned to fear global forces until it was too late. The Spanish conquerors did not search for fertile land to farm. Their map consisted of gold and silver mines and mythical cities made of gold.

If the United States occupied a sliver or merely a part of the continent, it would not survive. A continent filled with multiple independent nations, such as Europe, would tear itself apart as Europe did.

For Washington the economic bonds that held the country together also guaranteed the national unity needed for mutual defense.

There is a fierce unity to America, and simultaneously there are deep differences that turn into mutual contempt at times of stress.

The aloneness of a city filled with people is real and the sense of isolation powerful. The fear of danger from evil is as real in a city as it is in a small town out west.

The Soviet Union and Britain were able to resist and destroy the Germans only because of the equipment the United States gave them.

Thomas Edison became the template for Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and all of the rest who understood that the inventor had to have a user and that business was the bridge between the two.

The lonely deserts and towns of New Mexico were the places where the atomic bomb was designed, assembled, and tested.

The degree to which the Defense Department reshaped everyday life is rarely fully appreciated.

There is a saying attributed to Balzac that behind every great fortune there is a great crime,

This was an unforgivable sin of the United States. Men like Jefferson and Adams certainly knew African Americans were equal, but for economic and political convenience they consented to accept the doctrine that they were not.

Law shapes culture, and the abolition of a law does not by itself change the culture.

Recent studies of the decimation of the natives of the Western Hemisphere make it clear that it was disease, not acts of violence, that killed not only North American Indians but Indians throughout the hemisphere. Measles, smallpox, and other diseases wiped out as much as 90 percent of some Indian nations.

One in particular, the Comanche, had established a vast empire ranging from the Rockies to Texas and Kansas.

From the eighteenth century onward, they had terrorized other Indian nations, particularly the Plains Indians.

These nations and tribes where therefore savaged in three ways. One was by disease introduced by the Europeans. The second was by the Comanche empire, which also terrorized European settlers. And the third was by the Europeans, who took advantage of the destabilization of the Plains Indians in order to kill...