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

by George Friedman

All of nature is built on cycles, and therefore it would be very odd if human society did not also develop cyclically.

Political leaders spend years seeking power. The struggle to reach the top makes them painfully aware of the forces that they must master. Those forces continue to shape their actions while they’re at the top. Those who reach the pinnacle of leadership endured a grueling struggle.

Arguing that a president is a product of events and not their creator goes against the intense passions we feel for, or against, particular presidents. But the idea that impersonal forces govern us, and that we prosper to the extent we conform to those forces, is an everyday idea. It is how we think of the marketplace.

If there is regularity to history, and if presidents survive only to the extent that they recognize and conform to those constraints, then it is possible to benchmark where we are and to forecast where we are going.

He does not make history. History makes him.

There is also a deeper global current that affects how nations operate and establishes the hierarchy of dominance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, that current shifted away from Europe to the United States as the center of gravity of the world. The fact that the United States sits in this position means that its institutional, economic, cultural, and technical forces have profound effects on the rest of the globe. Consider the impact of the microchip or an American recession on companies, jobs, and people’s lives worldwide. In the same sense that Britain and Rome defined their worlds at the height of their powers, so will the United States.

The United States has become an empire. It is an empire of power and global reach, but of course not a formal empire. Its power derives from the size of its economy, its military, and the seductive power of its culture. These in turn derive from its regime, land, and people. It is all the more impressive because it has no formal structure. It simply is the most powerful agent, for good or bad, in the world. It is also a nation that is profoundly uncomfortable being an empire. The United States, in 1776, had the first modern uprising against an existing empire, and as a nation it does not welcome the dangers and complexities of global responsibility. It did not become an empire by choice, nor can it abandon the reality of what it is. The United States is a young country and an even younger empire. Its vast power maintains it even in the face of its ineptness or global condemnation. The United States is learning how to be an empire, creating enormous pressures on the world and on American institutions and the American public.

An empire exists when its power is so great compared with other nations that simply by existing, it changes the shape of their relationships and the way other nations behave. There are empires built out of intention, such as Hitler’s. There are empires that emerge without any intention. Rome didn’t intend to be an empire. 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.

From the beginning of its existence, the United States was engaged in diplomacy, power politics, wars, and every foreign entanglement imaginable. That was inevitable. Nations rarely last long if they aren’t aware of foreign threats and opportunities.

The industrial side of the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned against also became mammoth and in all practical terms under the control of the federal government.

Inevitably, the United States affected vast areas of the world and, in so doing, generated both hostility and a desire to align with the United States. But there was no empire of intent, no plan to dominate the world. On the contrary, the overriding impulse was to avoid extensive involvement or, when involved, to focus on spreading American values, rather than establish a system of exploitation.

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. At the same time, the United States is the largest importer in the world, although its imports are only 15 percent of its GDP. The point here is that foreign trade is useful to the United States, but not so useful as to need to impose an empire to assure it. It does not have to require massive imports, nor is it vulnerable to fluctuations in its exports. Indeed, rather than seeking to lock in trade agreements, the United States tends to want to leave, or renegotiate, those agreements, as we have seen during NAFTA and the China trade negotiations. The economic motive for empire isn’t there. Nevertheless, without intention, the American economy is so large and so dynamic that it is constantly affecting the rest of the world. A technical evolution in an American consumer product causes producers around the world to retool their factories. 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. In this sense, the United States constantly affects and irritates the world. Even more, the United States affects and irritates the world with its culture. American culture is both disruptive and irreverent. It does not resp...

Empires are resented and hated. They are also admired and envied. They define the culture of the world. By this definition, the United States is an empire. English has become the global language of business and government, and it has become an expectation that professionals around the world will speak English. I have been at meetings where the United States was vehemently condemned by foreign experts and politicians speaking English. The British opened the door to the use of English, but the Americans have taken it much further. The fact that American power exists without any formal structure indicates that the United States is more powerful than most empires have been, historically. 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.

redolent

sacrilege.

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

Managing an empire means using minimum force, because a global empire is likely to be constantly at war if its first response is to use its own military. The primary strategy for empires is to use diplomacy or the military of others, rather their own. Arming those forces, and giving them political or economic inducements to fight, at least contains the problem without involving imperial forces. The British controlled India with relatively few British troops, using this technique. Over the course of a century, the British used large-scale military force rarely. When they used it against America, they failed. When they later used it in the Boer War, they struggled to succeed. The British reserved their forces as the last resort, which rarely occurred. They managed the empire with local forces willing to fight for British interests for their own reasons.

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.

The Islamic war is the first war the United States has fought as an empire, but it has fought it as if it were simply a great power.

self-aware empire.

The United States was born in battle.

letup.

swath

In this way, the military gained the technology it needed to fight the Cold War. Scientists and other scholars had the opportunity to pursue research they otherwise could not have done. Corporations received government contracts and the opportunity to repurpose technology for the public. Yet it was the government that shaped the evolution of science and technology.

In a war, focus and predictability were essential.

This model is still very much in place. Look at the smartphone. 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. So what you have in the smartphone is a compendium of military hardware, much of it researched in universities and turned into weapons and products by corporations. Because federal inventions can’t be patented, companies like Apple took the technology and developed the smartphone. Science, industry, and the federal government, particularly the military, combined to drive the American economy. It was in the relationship between the federal government and a redefinition of institutions that we can see the triumph and failure of the system.

technocracy

What has to be remembered is that the political strife and noise are simply the outer wrapping around deep social and economic dislocation. 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. The first American cycle gave time for the political system to settle into place while maintaining social stability.

It was a normal process for the dominant class of the existing era to distrust the rising class and ethnicity of the forthcoming era.

Alongside this came a burst of entrepreneurial activity, heavily focused on the microchip.

The Roosevelt cycle corporation, symbolized by General Motors, had been an efficient organization for much of that period. But its ability to grow declined. The internal combustion engine had reached a plateau in dramatic innovation, and the vehicle it powered had reached a plateau as well. By the mid-1950s, the automobile had reached a form that required minor technical evolution, not radical change. The emphasis was then on styling and marketing.

investment firms and individual investors, defined as people who have more money than they need to live.

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

That is the process that we are living through at the moment. The Reagan era has reached its limits and can’t sustain the economy. The failure is in the process of creating a new set of competing social classes. This is reflected in the intensifying political crisis of the Trump presidency, in which the new social forces begin battling each other. This crisis will last through to the 2020s. In 2024, a new president will emerge who represents the values of the declining era. The failure of his presidency will bring to power the rising class who will impose a new economic orthodoxy. And finally, in the 2030s (following the storms that began in 2016), a new cycle will emerge. Over the following few years in the 2030s, the political confrontation, social tension, and economic dysfunction will be solved. The cycle will have created a new era, different from the past but built on the same foundation of invention, and it will endure for another half a century.

It is interesting to note that at the time of political instability there is frequently a new communication technology that is blamed for the dissemination of negativity or vitriol.

This division and rancor are not new. As the social and economic cycles shift, division and rancor are always there.

In a democratic society, being unable to petition or understand the federal government—except if one has the ability to maintain a staff of professionals—creates an inherent distrust of government.

The Reagan era had kicked off a wave of innovation and created a powerful class of entrepreneurs and technologists.

technocracy was built on the concept of nonideological solutions for government. Yet technocracy has now developed into an ideology in itself. Its vision of the world is that it is understandable and can be perfected by those who have the knowledge to understand and manipulate the world.

When technocrats move beyond their own area of expertise, they share a view of the world that is not equal (the financial inequality of the technocracy itself is massive) so much as freed from oppression. But technocracy does believe, above all, that someone must be judged on expertise and knowledge and not on incidental characteristics. To do so is oppression.

Racism has always been part of American history,

Andrew Jackson claimed the right to govern not because he was the smartest man in the room. He based it on his bravery and cunning. Being the smartest man in the room leaves anyone vulnerable. Things are expected of him that he cannot deliver, because intelligence by itself is insufficient to govern. In a society based on knowledge, it would seem obvious that those with knowledge would be the natural rulers. Things are not as simple as that. The technocrats laid claim to acquired knowledge. Those who argued for common sense and their notion of morality opposed them.

mores

pro forma,

cynicism

The problem of foreign policy is a dimension of the general crisis of institutions. The institutional shift will weaken the credibility of the technocracy heading into the 2028 election.

Another way to look at this is as the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is essential, but by itself it is insufficient.

arcane

The microchip was a transformative and core technology. It also reintroduced the tradition of inventors like Edison who combined innovation with business. The big question for the future is, what is the next transformative technology and how do we recognize it in its early form?