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

by George Friedman

Above all it should be remembered that each Indian nation and tribe saw the others as foreign. They saw themselves not as one continental people but as separate nations with separate languages and beliefs.

In a certain sense, they saw the Americans as simply another alien tribe.

But diseases had dramatically reduced the Indian populations, and those who were confronted by the United States were frequently so frightened of other tribes that they made alliances first with Europeans and then with Americans.

Americans took advantage of all of this, killing more Indians, conquering their lands, and then signing treaties with sovereign Indian nations just as they would have with other nations.

But the United States violated almost all of ...

The American president’s agenda is set not by his intentions but by the limits of his powers and the pressure placed on him by the social and economic conditions at home and the competing interests of foreign powers.

Political power is not about whim. It is about understanding realities.

The inability of Europe to contain its violent tendencies caused it to lose its own formal empires while leaving a vacuum that the United States and the Soviet Union were drawn into.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there remained regional powers, but no global ones except for the United States.

What it created was a dread of not being constantly entangled so that dangers could be identified and crushed early.

During the Korean War, Harry Truman went to war without any authorization of Congress. The Cuban missile crisis was a purely presidential decision, as was the 1998 intervention in Kosovo. The congressional role in authorizing war was at least diminished and sometimes omitted.

Empires are resented and hated. They are also admired and envied.

The core problem was inevitable. The United States did not expect the end of the Cold War and had not planned for it. It was left in an enormously powerful position and was uncertain of what to do about it.

The great danger to an empire is permanent war. Given global interests, something is always on fire. If the primary response is war, the empire will always be at war.

And for an empire, every challenge cannot mean war, and every sub-crisis issue cannot make efficient decision making impossible.

The New Deal didn’t end the Depression, but it established the principle that the federal government was in some way responsible for the economy and could legitimately intervene in the economy and society.

Industrial production in such massive quantity and at such a fast pace solved the problem of unemployment.

The cell phone was first deployed for the U.S. Army in 1985. The National Reconnaissance Office first designed the camera in the smartphone for use in spy satellites. The GPS function on a cell phone was first devised and implemented by the U.S. Air Force, lithium-ion batteries were developed by the Department of Energy, and the Internet was pioneered by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The idea that emerged from both the New Deal and World War II was that a state managed by experts dedicated to solutions without an ideology would do for the country what it did for the war: it would breed success. But of course, this became a principle, the principle became a belief, and the belief became an ideology. The ideology created a class who felt entitled to govern and who were believed to be suitable to govern.

The federal government, in wanting to provide homes to returning veterans, changed American society to the core.

The ideology of expertise failed to take into account that the expert’s narrow focus prevented him—and other people—from anticipating what they had opened the door to.

The purpose here is not to track the details of the subprime crisis. It is to make the point that this started as a very reasonable program to help veterans. It turned into a program to help the lower-middle class while also aiding business. What followed was giving banks the ability to sell mortgages, which over the decades both introduced private buyers of mortgages and made lenders pretty much indifferent to the creditworthiness of borrowers.

The entanglement between agencies becomes the defining characteristic of the federal system.

As society became more complex in its own right, and the federal imperative to try to manage this growing complexity tries to keep pace, management becomes more complex, regulations are created that are less comprehensible, and authority is less clearly defined.

Staffers to the president and experts scattered through the intelligence, defense, and foreign policy communities could affect the decisions being made far more than could Congress.

Politics isn’t the engine pushing the system. The system is pushing politics.

After a revolution, stability is essential. The French and Russian Revolutions showed what might happen when a revolution leads to social unrest and economic uncertainty.

They resented the English elite’s absentee power just as they resented the English absentee landlords in Scotland.

One of the major issues of the Civil War was the South exporting cotton to Britain, and it could not afford a tariff war. The North was just beginning to industrialize and wanted protection from foreign competition.

Poorer farmers were being forced out, and wealthier farmers and small-town businessmen were able to acquire foreclosed farms at a discount.

In spite of the crowds, they reasoned, people were alone in big cities, and being alone, they were likely to fall more easily into sin.

It was assumed that unemployment was the result of the lack of work ethic of the jobless and if that was fixed they would go back to work.

General Motors became so diffuse and entangled in so many industries that it could not compete in the core markets with Japanese and German companies, all of whom had much newer industrial plants and intense focus on their main product. General Motors was an example of a corporation that had diffused, grown large and complex, and was therefore overstaffed.

Type was set by hand at that time, and my father was a master craftsman. When computers were introduced into printing, his craftsmanship became obsolete, as was his job. He was one of millions who lost their jobs to a new technology at an age when they couldn’t possibly learn the mysteries of the things that had replaced them.

Free trade, and capitalism in general, are constantly creating new wealth and on the whole drive the economy forward. But “on the whole” excludes those who lose their jobs as the economic revolution takes place and never find a new job. In the abstract theory of the free market, this is a price that has to be paid. In the real world of society and politics, where the displaced have more power than they have in the economy, the reality is that this process can destabilize important and powerful sectors of the economy.

Those who found new jobs started at the bottom of the escalator and found themselves tossed off time and time again.

Total wealth had increased, but it flowed away from the industrial workers and toward those who worked in finance, technology, and other areas that now constitute the upper-middle class.

New social forms are always held in contempt by those in previous eras.

And the election ended in a virtual tie, with Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote, and Trump the Electoral College vote. That, more than anything, indicated how tense a time it would be.

Thus, political instability is the preface to a social and economic crisis that perhaps a decade later will become unsustainable.

the outer winds of the coming storm.

reject basic principles such as free trade and respect for immigrants.

Trump was incomprehensible to the technocrats because the white industrial class was incomprehensible to them.

We are governed by people who know a great deal about narrow subjects, but few who can see the whole.

It takes time to master one big thing.

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.

The problem is over-complexity and convolution, with subgroups of experts who do not cooperate, trust each other, or work well together.

The selection process at the best schools is presently designed not to find the best minds but rather to find minds already shaped to the culture and ideology the universities regard as being able to benefit from their education.

Freedom of action based on commander’s intent means that the expectation is success, not a particular way of achieving success.

In the fourth institutional cycle as I see it the technocratic approach will be dramatically modified to permit the intent of government to be rationally administered by each level.