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

by George Friedman

countless federal judges, and fifty sovereign states. He can rarely achieve anything, but he focuses the mind of the nation. So, when the nation goes through one of its periodic and predictable crises, rather than understanding the impersonal forces driving events, Americans blame or praise the president.

there are two major cycles in American history, and by understanding these cycles, we can understand the situation in the United States today. One is the “institutional cycle,” which has transpired approximately every eighty years.

The second major cycle is the “socioeconomic,” which has occurred approximately every fifty years.

That obviously means that the 2020s will be one of the more difficult periods in American history, particularly when we consider the new and complex role the United States plays in the world—something that was not a factor during nearly all earlier cycles.

the Cold War was followed by the tech boom that changed the world.

It’s important to note that unlike what sometimes happens in other nations, these cycles don’t break the United States. Rather they drive it forward.

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.

E pluribus unum, meaning “From many, one.”

Novus ordo seclorum, which means a “new order of the ages.”

The Americans viewed the European age as founded on oppression and inequality. European nations believed these values to be the natural order of things. Against this order, the founders posed not merely liberty and equality but also the domination of nature.

They tried to create things that would manage nature and ease human existence.

Technology and invention are always, in some sense, tied to happiness.

The reason the Europeans came at all, and when they did, was a desire to reach India and the East Indies. The famous Silk Road went west from India and China, bringing products to Europe via the Mediterranean. In the mid-fifteenth century, the road was interdicted by the rise of an Islamic empire, the Ottomans, centered on Turkey. They first blocked the road and then dramatically increased the tax on goods passing through. The Europeans depended on the Silk Road for goods, but the Ottomans had priced those goods to painful levels.

Whoever found a route to India that took them around the Ottomans would solve Europe’s problem and become wealthy. The Portuguese succeeded first, going around Africa. The Spaniards, delayed by their war with the Muslims, sought a route toward the west. It was a good move in theory. In practice, it failed because the Spaniards didn’t know that the Western Hemisphere blocked their way. What at first appeared a failure turned

In the end, it was the English who outstripped the Iberians, replaced the Spanish navy in the North Atlantic, and reshaped the geography of North America. Migration was a difficult process with a high cost that never ended. But it was the English migration, the English settlement, that transformed North America into the center of the global system.

The idea of a unified nation under a single government ran counter to the geographic reality of most of the South.

For Braddock and his officers, the manner in which the colonials fought was undignified. Wars were about not just winning but winning with grace and style. Therefore the British treated the American troops and officers with contempt. The Americans fought like barbarians. For men like Washington, who saw himself as English, an officer and a gentleman, the contempt was unbearable. It reminded them that in the eyes of the British aristocrats, they were nothing of the sort. This was the moment when the breach between Britain and the colonies opened up. Braddock turned out to be a catastrophe as a general in North America, leading his men into disaster. Yet, in spite of the British defeat, the colonials were still seen as lesser men. The war ignited the colonists’ anger at the British, particularly among the more influential classes. Out of that anger came a profound realization. It was the moment when the colonials realized that they were not English but Americans. A new sense of “nation” began to emerge from this war and from the Appalachians.

Braddock’s defeat opened a cultural gulf between the colonies and the British. The Americans realized that the British didn’t understand America. They realized that America was a very different place. In a way this was more of a shock to the southern states that patterned themselves after the British social order than to New England, but to all it drove home that the British pattern of history would not be the American pattern, and that opened the door to a deep rethinking of what America was.

Jefferson had written that “France possessing herself of Louisiana…is the embryo of a tornado which will burst on the countries on both shores of the Atlantic and involve in its effects their highest destinies.” Jefferson foresaw that whoever controlled Louisiana would likely be the most powerful nation in the world. He proved to be right. Napoleon’s desperate need for cash, and Jefferson’s yearning for Louisiana, gave the United States the key to global power for $15 million, a staggeringly small amount even then. Napoleon was a great soldier. Jefferson understood grand strategy.

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

Enmity between the Apache and the Comanche ran deeper than hatred for the Americans, particularly at the beginning of the European influx. Like all successful conquerors, including the Romans and the British, the Americans used these divisions in their favor.

And like people everywhere, they feared each other more than they feared the new stranger. 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.

The lack of wood, and the added effort of drilling wells, meant that this area had (and still has) many fewer people. This has created two sorts of American lives. In the East, well-populated farming communities grew up, and the small towns of American memory were created. In the West, the population had to be more widely spread, so as not to tap the aquifer too intensely in any one area, forcing wells to be drilled deeper and with far more difficulty. The farther west you went, the less likely there was to be farming and the more likely there would be ranching—grazing the grassland. In the West, communities were smaller and more scattered, and the settlers were less reliant on neighbors than on themselves. Two very different ethics emerged. In the East, there were communities. To the west, there was a more solitary life. It created a different political sensibility. In the East, there had to be collaboration. In the West, collaboration brought unnecessary complexity.

The Texans defeated the Mexicans, and Texas became an independent country. Seven years later, it became the only state to have entered the United States through a treaty between two equal nations—a cultural legacy that, to this day, gives Texas a unique sense of sovereignty.

The means Americans used were cleverness, creativity, brutality, and all the other characteristics that defined humanity from its beginning. What is remarkable was the thoroughness of their effort. What began in 1776 was virtually in place a little over seventy years later: a productive continental power stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Most Americans never dreamed of what would come. Thomas Jefferson did, and so did Andrew Jackson. Both understood that in creating a continental nation, the United States would discover extraordinary prosperity and a stable democratic order. They also believed that without that continental power, the United States would be destroyed, as were so many nations and settlements that had existed previously in North America. 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. Therefore, Jefferson and Jackson did what had to be done to create a single continental power. They understood America’s geography, and they created a geography in seventy years that would dominate the world.

With that, the idea that the WASPs were the American culture declined, save for one thing: the English language, which was always at the center of the American experience. One could choose not to learn English but would then be excluded from the economic and social life of America.

There are three symbols that give us a sense of the American. One is the cowboy and his complex relationship to duty, evil, and women. The second is the inventor, who both imagines and creates the extraordinary things that compel America forward. Finally, there is the warrior. The United States is a paradox. Dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, America was born in battle and has fought many wars since. The warrior lives by duty, not happiness, yet is integral to American culture. The cowboy, the inventor, and the warrior all speak to the dynamic that forces the United States into storms from which progress emerges.

the ability to come to a strange land and make a living, the ability to live with constantly changing technology and customs, the ability to remain oriented in land constantly being redefined, requires a great deal of subtlety and depth. This is where American resilience comes from, and nowhere is resilience more recognizable than in the myth of the cowboy.

Let’s begin with the quintessential American image: the cowboy, presented in the quintessential American art form, the movies. The cowboy is what Europeans accuse Americans of being and what defines manliness to both American men and women. A cowboy is strong, laconic, fearless, and with an unshakable will to do what is right. His virtue is not in his depth but in his actions.

There is a rootlessness in America that is part of its strength. People move about freely without the constraint of family and tradition. The people who moved to Kane’s town did not have generations of community to draw on any more than a new arrival to Chicago did. The rootlessness of America is simultaneously liberating and frightening, containing the fear of an unknown evil lurking in the darkness. The police are far away, and the neighbors are as afraid as you are.

Women also won World War II in a radically new way. It was an industrial war. U.S. success had to do with production. Sixty-five percent of the U.S. aircraft industry workers were women. Twenty-five percent of married women worked outside the home, and 37 percent of the total workforce during the war was composed of women. In all 350,000 women served in the armed forces. The pilots who flew the bombers from the factory to the combat airfield were women. The United States could not have defeated the Germans and Japanese without women. The Soviet Union and Britain were able to resist and destroy the Germans only because of the equipment the United States gave them. It was the Soviet army that broke the back of the Wehrmacht and made the conquest of France possible. They broke the back of the Wehrmacht only because of the equipment produced by American women. The core of all cultures is the relationship between men and women. For most of human history, the relationship was defined and constrained by biological and demographic reality. For the population to be stable, women needed to give birth to as many children as they could before they died, often in childbirth. Men labored and often had multiple wives in parallel or in sequence. Marriage was about social and personal necessity. Women were essential, and yet the key role they played in human reproduction put them at severe risk. The evolution of modern medicine and sanitation changed all this. Women lived much longer, perh...

We have gone from an inescapable and desperate struggle to reproduce…to marriage as the result of romantic affinity and free choice…to the virtual collapse of the courtship ritual.

The unification of sex and reproduction within marriage used to define the role of women.

Edison had made his fortune inventing applications for electricity. He did not discover electricity, nor was he the first to understand its importance. Benjamin Franklin had plumbed its complexity. What Edison did do was to create an organization designed to find applications for electricity, and to create a business to turn those applications into wealth, sometimes by building and selling the product, but far more often by selling the applications to other businesses that took on the task of marketing and selling the product.

It was not enough to be a scientist or an engineer. It was also necessary to be a sociologist.

the inventor had to have a user and that business was the bridge between the two.

Edison’s most important contribution was a structure for inventing things. He created the first industrial research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, by designing a method for invention that used teams.

The goal is not to make basic scientific discoveries but to apply science to products.

the purpose was to make enormous amounts of money, but at the same time there was an unintended political end, which was to enhance democratic life by increasing happiness.

Business existed as the counterbalance to the state. The founders mistrusted the state, but it was the repository of military power. The corporate world, itself fragmented, was the repository of wealth.

America is a warrior culture. That would seem to be contrary to the discussion of Thomas Edison, not because he was a pacifist, but because he was a technologist and a businessman. Technology and business are dedicated to pleasing customers and making money, to pursuing happiness. War is about sacrifice and duty. I can say that America is about business. I can also say that America is about making war. The contradiction is real, and it is hard to reconcile. Yet in speaking of the subtlety of the American people, I will argue the two have lived side by side from the beginning.

A simple answer is that warriors have always occupied a unique place in societies. Placing oneself between one’s beloved home and war’s desolation has been seen as the noblest of things. War has traditionally been a test of manhood, of courage, duty, and strength.

There are three parts. The first is basic science, the understanding of the underlying reality of nature. The second is technology, the transformation of basic science into tools for using nature. The third is the product, something that can be used to achieve certain ends.

The battle of High Noon was fought in New Mexico, which was also the home of the greatest scientific battle, the development of the atomic bomb. The lonely deserts and towns of New Mexico were the places where the atomic bomb was designed, assembled, and tested. It was the place where the university met the military. The scientists, like Kane, gave everything to confront and destroy the evil that was stalking the earth. Ever since the Manhattan Project built the bomb in New Mexico, the military has been obsessed with basic science and with the scientist. In their work, scientists laid the ground for defeating the enemy and building American power beyond what was dreamed. New Mexico was a vast and empty space, in the part of the American West where wood, water, and people were hard to come by. It was a place where things could be hidden out in the open.

Whether the Colt .45 or the bomb called Little Boy, the morality and the weaponry are joined together in American culture. After World War II, the intimate connection between war as a moral project and technology intersected to create a new foundation of American society. For example, the Department of Defense needed a very lightweight computer for its Minuteman missile’s guidance system. DOD approached civilian scientists and engineers to create it. In 1956 Jack Kilby, who worked for Texas Instruments, invented the integrated circuit, the microchip. It was installed in the Minuteman missile in 1962. The prototype of a microchip-based computer was created to guide ICBMs. By the 1970s, it was being integrated into systems created by Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to create the home computer.

The NAVSTAR system was introduced by the Department of Defense in 1973. 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. The Department of Defense built a constellation of satellites around the physicists’ work that made precision navigation and guidance for weapons possible. Its popular name became GPS, and it became a commonplace part of everyday life.

During the 1960s, U.S. secret research facilities needed a secure method for rapidly sharing data. The Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense was the first to apply the well-known theory of the movement of data over phone lines. The system developed from this application was called ARPANET, and it evolved into today’s Internet. The degree to which the Defense Department reshaped everyday life is rarely fully appreciated.

The founders therefore solved the problem with what can only be considered a moral crime. Because all men were created equal, Africans were declared less than human, and the Constitution institutionalized their moral worth at three-fifths of a white’s. 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.

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.