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

by George Friedman

Its purpose was to provide precision navigation for the American military. The method used by NAVSTAR was developed by physicists studying Einstein’s theory of relativity.

That character is built of contradictions far greater than exist in nations that didn’t invent themselves as recently and aren’t still in the process of reinventing themselves.

There is a saying attributed to Balzac that behind every great fortune there is a great crime, and in the case of the great

Brazil by far held the most Africans in bondage.

The United States not only carried on the practice of slavery but defined Africans formally and legally as subhuman.

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.

In many cases, the Indian nations saw the advancing Americans as allies against historic enemies.

During the American advance in the West, the Americans found not only nations decimated by disease or crushed by the Comanche but also allies pleased to see the Americans arrive and join them in war against their enemies.

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 those treaties.

Even the Civil War ultimately set the stage for peaceful and dramatic national development. The basic questions that have to be answered are why the United States evolved as dramatically as it did, why it didn’t tear itself apart, and where it goes from here.

As we grow older, the tighter the constraints get. It is those constraints that permit us to predict the approximate course of a life.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the clumsy management of the eighteen-year war against the jihadists.

There are those who want to emulate what they think the founders wished, which was to avoid foreign entanglements. There are others who argue that only a deep and continual involvement in the world can satisfy American needs.

The problem with this view is that most nations don’t adhere to American moral standards and U.S. power is greatly limited. This is a formula for endless war.

The founders knew they couldn’t win without taking advantage of that war. They sent Benjamin Franklin to Paris to represent the colonies and to seek an intervention by the French in North

From the beginning of its existence, the United States was engaged in diplomacy, power politics, wars, and every foreign entanglement imaginable.

Out of Pearl Harbor was generated the conspiracy theory that Roosevelt not only knew of the Japanese attack but made certain that no one stopped it so that he could justify entering World War II.

But given the nature of nuclear war, such authorization was impractical. Therefore, just as war was becoming more apocalyptic, Congress was marginalized.

The president assumed a role much greater than one branch of government among three.

During the Cold War, the United States developed a massive military until about 1970, using conscription.

The industrial side of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower

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,

At the same time, the United States is the largest importer in the world, although its imports are only 15 percent of its GDP.

A shift in the American diet can have immense and far-reaching consequences. It can cause massive displacement of sugar or corn growers; it can encourage the planting of quinoa.

Its empire is not only global but casual. It has and uses power casually, controlling the world without a clear plan or even a systematic intent.

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

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and was in a position to threaten the Saudi oil fields.

The United States willed the coalition into existence almost overnight. It behaved as the leader of the world and it was the leader.

In others words, the United States, in spite of the lesson in Vietnam, deployed a conventional force to fight a guerrilla war.

They managed the empire with local forces willing to fight for British interests for their own reasons.

American inclination to use its own military force to deal with an entity like al-Qaeda is irrational.

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

Both Rome and Britain survived by using minim...

problem is that the United States is emotionally and institution...

Pearl Harbor, to respond to attack with...

So, if there was a problem in Africa and the Soviets were not involved, the United States didn’t respond. If the Soviets were there, the United States became obsessed.

The decision-making structure in Washington is complex, diffuse, and at odds with itself. It has streamlined itself not for routine decisions but primarily for crises.

Efficient decision making beneath the crisis level is rare.

It’s not surprising that nearly two decades of war, and the outmoded shape of a federal government that has had to cope with it, have inevitably contributed to the cyclical crises we will be facing in the 2020s–2030s.

Every eighty years or so, the United States shifts the way its political institutions work.

The broad framework of the Constitution stays in place, but the federal and state institutions change their relationship to each other and change the way in which they work.

The first started with the drafting of the Constitution in 1787 and emerged from the Revolutionary War and its consequences.

The second institutional cycle emerged in 1865 from the Civil War and established the authority of the federal government over the states,

emerging from World War II, and dramatically expanded the authority of the federal government not only over states but over the economy and society as a

Invention is embedded in all parts of American culture, from technology to society.

The only global power must be present throughout the world, not because it wishes, but because the mere size of its economy and military makes this the reality.

First in 1929, the Great Depression began the process of challenging the institutional framework of the second cycle.

Factories that were able to manufacture products faced consumers who could not buy them, because they were unemployed. That led to closing more factories, in a downward spiral.