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

by George Friedman

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.

Franklin was an iconoclast, and perhaps best represented the American spirit. He was a serious man. He was not a sober one. Franklin was a party of one and represented the people who loved the country, but he understood that decency required humor.

technology and happiness are intimately linked in American life, to the point that technology is at times a substitute for other types of happiness, such as love and the divine. Americans value those things, but they love cutting-edge technology with a different but real passion.

It would be interesting to imagine the outcome if all Indians had cooperated and rallied against the Europeans. But that was impossible. The continent was vast and the Indians knew the place where they lived and the immediate neighboring nations, but they did not know places far away. They did not all speak the same language or worship the same gods. And like people everywhere, they feared each other more than they feared the new stranger.

There is a fierce unity to America, and simultaneously there are deep differences that turn into mutual contempt at times of stress. This tension actually has a virtue hidden within it. The tension within the country, the radical differences in culture and outlook, actually become a goad driving the country forward but leaving some behind.

Morality starts as a simple concept and becomes complicated.

There is a saying attributed to him that helps explain his thinking: “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

A soldier is not alone in war. There are parents, spouses, children, and other relatives who all experience war through the soldiers, sometimes while they serve and sometimes afterward, through their memories. They are affected by war almost as deeply as the warriors. Assuming that there are on average four people whose lives are shaped or reshaped by someone’s service, that means that about a hundred million Americans have had their lives shaped by war or the possibility of war. That is almost one-third of the country.

The United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.

There is obviously a level in which humans make their own choices, but as Adam Smith pointed out, all those individual choices lead to a predictable nation.

The United States has little reason to build an empire for economic and trade purposes. It exports only 13 percent of its GDP to the world, compared with Germany, which exports almost 50 percent, or China’s exports in excess of 20 percent of GDP.

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 if it is always at war somewhere, it will always be vulnerable to someone taking advantage of the empire’s preoccupation. Even more important, if the empire doesn’t benefit its citizens, but instead exhausts them and disrupts their lives by war, the political support for the empire will quickly evaporate. Both Rome and Britain survived by using minimal direct force, in favor of other means of managing their empires.

We have to remember that presidents are simply the street signs. The cycle is working itself out in the murky depths.

the idea that the past is obsolete is always resisted at an era’s end.

The technocrats saw expertise as the only measure of a person.

The argument for expertise as the basis for political authority depends on the experts’ success at managing both their small niche and society as a whole.

Expansion in the mission of the federal government has created a belief in its effective power. Its ineffectiveness is therefore seen not as a systemic failure but as the result of a deliberate failure designed to benefit the powerful and harm the many.

since 2001 the United States has been in a constant state of war, even if not on the scale of World War II or the Civil War. But it is a war that has lasted far longer than any other in American history. And in the inability of the government to frame the war in such a way that it might be won, the institutions of the United States revealed their fundamental weaknesses. War requires a simplification, an understanding of a desired end, clarity on strategy, and allocation of resources appropriate to both. The government proved incapable of the clarity needed for a war because it could not simplify. The complexity of the government was translated into a complicated plan for the war, and the complexity trapped the warriors in a confusion that undermined their mission.

The issue now and during the next decade is access to the center of gravity of the technocracy, the leading universities that not only teach subjects but train you in the social rituals that allow you to belong to the technocracy.

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.

the expectation is that the sixth cycle will have a new communication technology at its center. It won’t. It won’t, because communication technology has reached its reductio ad absurdum. It has become so thin in its efficiency that it cannot sustain the emotional needs of a human life. What will actually happen is the transcendence of the microchip culture and an aggressive reassertion of community, not perhaps with the old rituals, but with a culture that has at its center the avoidance of loneliness. The self-imposed loneliness of the microchip cannot sustain itself in human relations.

The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings. But more important than money or guns is the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary. All lasting empires are empires of the mind and soul, empires that cause others to crave to emulate them.

All nations contain some elements of wildness. None have institutionalized the chaos as has the United States.

America is a country in which the storm is essential to clear the way for the calm. Because Americans, obsessed with the present and future, have difficulty remembering the past, they will all believe that there has never been a time as uncivil and tense as this one.