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The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond Hardcover – February 25, 2020

by George Friedman (Author)

4.5 1,638 ratings

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*One of Bloomberg's Best Books of the Year*

The master geopolitical forecaster and New York Times bestselling author of The Next 100 Years focuses on the United States, predicting how the 2020s will bring dramatic upheaval and reshaping of American government, foreign policy, economics, and culture.

In his riveting new book, noted forecaster and bestselling author George Friedman turns to the future of the United States. Examining the clear cycles through which the United States has developed, upheaved, matured, and solidified, Friedman breaks down the coming years and decades in thrilling detail.
American history must be viewed in cycles—particularly, an eighty-year "institutional cycle" that has defined us (there are three such examples—the Revolutionary War/founding, the Civil War, and World War II), and a fifty-year "socio-economic cycle" that has seen the formation of the industrial classes, baby boomers, and the middle classes. These two major cycles are both converging on the late 2020s—a time in which many of these foundations will change. The United States will have to endure upheaval and possible conflict, but also, ultimately, increased strength, stability, and power in the world.
Friedman's analysis is detailed and fascinating, and covers issues such as the size and scope of the federal government, the future of marriage and the social contract, shifts in corporate structures, and new cultural trends that will react to longer life expectancies. This new book is both provocative and entertaining.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"[A] prescient anticipation of our current woe... the book contains real insights.”
--The Wall Street Journal

“The vitriol of the Trump era masks crises in our economy and governing institutions that will deepen before resolving themselves, according to this probing and ultimately hopeful diagnosis of America’s discontents . . . Friedman offers a lucid, stimulating assessment of which way the wind is blowing.”
--Publishers Weekly

“[Friedman] offers a sharp analysis of American life, especially the roots of the knack for reinvention that allows the nation to start over after crises. Americans invented their country, he writes, and lacking shared history and culture, 'invented themselves.' Friedman also discusses the nation's reluctance to accept its responsibilities as the 'sole world power' and the tensions between its technocratic and industrial working classes. A provocative, idea-filled burst of prognostication.”
--Kirkus

"Friedman’s well-written book lays out convincing cases for how the institutional and socioeconomic cycles have played out repeatedly since America’s founding and how the two patterns will, for the first time, almost converge during this decade."
--Lone Star Literary Life

“This book is of obvious general interest but is essential reading for anyone with a role in strategic planning. It combines clear, interesting prose with a thought provoking projection of upcoming challenges and ultimate outcomes.”
--Douglas Duncan, Chief Economist, Fannie Mae

“In The Storm Before the Calm, George applies his geopolitical forecasting model to the United States and tells a unique story of American history from our founding to today. The result is a useful dispassionate framework for understanding where we are now and where we are likely going as nation.”
--Joe Daly, Gallup Senior Partner

About the Author

GEORGE FRIEDMAN is founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, which specializes in geopolitical forecasting. Prior to this Friedman was chairman of the global intelligence company Stratfor, which he founded in 1996. Friedman is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The American Regime and a Restless Nation

On the last day of the Constitutional Convention, right after adoption, a woman waiting outside the old Pennsylvania State House asked Benjamin Franklin whether the nation would be a monarchy or a republic. His answer was “A Republic, if you can keep it.” The Constitutional Convention invented the American government. It was an invention in two ways. First, it created a government where none had existed. Second, it created a machine, the machinery of government, which had sprung from the minds of the founders. Unlike other governments, it had no past. This government came into existence through design, architecture, and engineering.

The machine was built on two principles. First, the founders feared government, because governments tended to accumulate power and become tyrannies. Second, they did not trust the people, because the people—in pursuing their private interests—might divert the government from the common good. Government was necessary, and so of course were citizens, but both had to be restrained in such a way that the machinery of government limited their ability to accumulate power. The founders had created such a machine.

The founders were trying to invent a machine that restrained itself, thereby creating a vast terrain in American life that was free from government or politics. They sought to create a sphere of private life in which citizens would pursue the happiness that had been promised in the Declaration of Independence. The private sphere would be the sphere of commerce, industry, religion, and the endless pleasures that were the domain of private life. The most important thing about the machine they invented was the degree to which it was restrained from intruding on the things they held most important, the things that were not political.

It is one thing to invent a machine and another to make it run without extensive maintenance. The solution for this invention was to make it inefficient. The balance of powers that were created achieved three important things: first, it made the passage of laws enormously difficult; second, the president would be incapable of becoming a tyrant; and third, Congress would be limited by the courts in what it could achieve. The founders’ remarkably inefficient system of government did what it was designed to do; it did little, and the little that it did, it did poorly. The government had to protect the nation and maintain a degree of internal trade. But it was private life that would create a cycle of creativity that would allow society, economy, and institutions to evolve at remarkable speed yet not end up tearing the country apart, save for some near misses. This is why Benjamin Franklin left the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia both confident and cautious. He knew that the regime was designed to balance powerful and dangerous forces, and he knew that it was a new and untried form of government.

This was not simply a matter of the legal phrases contained in the Constitution. It was even more a matter of creating and enshrining moral principles, some only implicit and others clearly stated. Limits on society, both public and private, can be imposed not by political fiat or documents but by rendering the extraordinary moral vision as merely the common sense of the nation. The moral principles were complex and sometimes at odds with each other, but they had a common core: each American ought to be free to succeed or fail in the things he wished to undertake.

This was the meaning of the idea of the right to pursue happiness. The state would not hinder anyone. A person’s fate would be determined only by his character and talents. The founders did more than separate the state and private life. They created an ongoing tension between them. Visit a meeting of any local public school board, where the realities of the government meet the needs of the people. The desire not to have increased taxes—but to deliver increased services—confronts a government that constantly seeks to expand its power and funding, without committing itself to any improvements. The pressure accumulates on the democratically elected members of the school board who are caught in between. This is the microcosm of the tension, which leads from the local level to Washington.

The Republic, in principle, was not wedded to any particular place or people. The founders saw it as the form of government and society that was the most natural and moral. It could have been an ideal form of government anywhere. The Republic could have failed in the United States, yet whether it was in existence elsewhere or nowhere, in the eyes of the founders it would still have remained the most just of political orders.

This meant that the regime was unique. It was not connected solely to the people who lived in America. It was theirs if they kept it and belonged to others if they chose to have a regime like this. That made the United States radically different from other nations, which are rooted in a common history, language, culture, and place. For example, France and Japan are deeply tethered to their past. America is rooted in an invention, a form of government designed with a moral and practical end, but not, in principle, rooted in the American people. Hence Franklin’s warning. The very concept of the American republic is artificial, unconnected to the past.

The regime is called the United States. The country is called America. The regime and the country are linked by the country’s accepting the principles of the regime. It need not do so in order for America, the country, to exist. Americans could have chosen to switch to a different form of government—a monarchy, for example—and the country would have remained America. But we would no longer have been the United States, in the full institutional and moral meaning of the term. The United States of America is the place where the principles of the regime govern the country. This is a very different understanding from what exists in most other countries, and it has profound, and sometimes not recognized, consequences.

You can say that you are a citizen of the United States, but you cannot say I am a “United Statian.” The language doesn’t permit it. Your natural relationship is to America, your homeland. Saying you are American is easy. But your love of the land and of the people, and your relationship to the United States, are very different things. One of the constant challenges of the Republic is to keep the two aligned, for our natural inclination is to love our home, and loving the Republic is an intellectual exercise. The two need not be one, but the American founding is designed to make certain that there is no unbridgeable distinction. Mostly it works. When it doesn’t, there is tension.

Shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin formed a committee to design a great seal for the United States. Given that the United States had been plunged into war by the signing of the declaration, this would not have seemed a priority. What these three men knew, however, was that the United States was a moral project and moral projects require icons, things that define the moral mission and carry with them a sense of the sacred. It took years to produce the Great Seal. In 1782, Charles Thomson, secretary of the Continental Congress, was asked to take this project to conclusion. He did, and the final product now rests in several places, as sacred in American life as the Republic’s principles. The most important place you will find it is nearest to the hearts of Americans: the dollar bill.

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. Partly it has to do with the government. Partly it has to do with the principles of the nation, the things that tell us what kinds of people we are and ought to be. There can be weighty tomes written on this subject, but Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin provided the nation with a great seal that was to be a prism through which we looked at ourselves and that explains why we behave as we do. The Great Seal is symbolic and the symbols must be decoded. But in those symbols, we can find what they thought Americans should be and what citizenship in the United States must be.

We should take the Great Seal seriously because of the three men who called it into being. They not only were among the most extraordinary members of a group of extraordinary men but also represented all the major factions of the revolution. Jefferson was a democrat. Adams was a Federalist. 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. It is amazing that three minds such as these—a philosophical genius, a legal genius, and a genius at living well—were able to share a single vision of who we were and who we must remain.

On the front of the seal is the eagle, said to represent the strength of America. Benjamin Franklin actually objected to the choice of the eagle, explaining his rationale in a letter to his daughter:

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.

Franklin is said to have preferred the turkey, a more honest bird. He most likely couldn’t tolerate the cliché of an eagle. Franklin was being funny, but he was also making the serious point that symbols matter.

On the banner, next to the eagle are the words E pluribus unum, meaning “From many, one.” It was said at the time to refer to the thirteen colonies, the many joining together and being one. Over time, however, history has given a different meaning to the phrase. Once the waves of immigration washed across the United States, the motto was used to refer to the manner in which the many cultures that had come to America had become one nation. It is unlikely that the founders ever envisioned the diversity of immigration, although the Constitution clearly anticipated it because it set the rules for naturalization. The Scots-Irish—Protestant Scots from Ireland who arrived after the English—were loathed as violent and unassimilable. It is an old story in the history of American immigration. The Great Seal is fixed in principle. It evolves in practice. Out of many, one, turned out to be the basis on which the American people were founded, but never easily. Here we are, 250 years later, and the principle of immigration still tears at the nation.

But the original meaning of E pluribus unum pointed at another, deadly problem that led to the Civil War. It is easy to forget how different the colonies were from each other and how aware they were of their differences. Rhode Island differed from South Carolina in geography, customs, and social order. Those differences endure today, but as a shadow of what they once were. E pluribus unum was chosen as a motto not because the new states had much in common but because to some extent they regarded each other as strange and exotic foreigners. Today we may not be strangers, but a New Yorker is frequently exotic to a Texan, and vice versa. The tension endures.

On the back of the seal is an unfinished pyramid, an interesting choice for an emerging modern country in a time when pyramids had not been built for many centuries. But its symbolism is powerful. A pyramid is a massive undertaking, involving the wealth and resources and labor of a nation. It is a unifying principle. The pyramid ties the Republic for which it stands and the people who built it into one. It tells us that the Republic is not simply a concept but the product of a people, and that ties the Republic to a nation.

The seal also signifies that the Republic is a work in progress and must evolve through the intense labor of Americans. The people endlessly build the pyramid on the land. A pyramid has a shape that compels the work to proceed in a certain way. You make the brick, you make the mortar, you lay the brick in an endless cycle. The pyramid gives labor its form and its predictability. Labor also has its moments of crisis and of success. This describes what American life will be like.

Above the pyramid are the words Annuit coeptis, meaning, “He has favored our undertaking.” “He” is assumed to be God. Yet it was decided not to use the word “God.” There is a great controversy in America between those who argue the United States is a Christian country and others who claim that it is completely secular. The creators of the seal clearly understood this issue. Whether they compromised or whether they were unanimous, there is no mention of Christ or even God in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Yet there is a clear reference to something beyond humanity who judges and favors the undertaking, a providence, as it is called in the Declaration of Independence. The founders could have referred directly to Christ, or they could have avoided any reference to the divine. They did neither. They did not simply embrace the secularism of the Enlightenment nor the religiosity of England. They refused to name the providential force, but they made it clear that there was one. The ambiguity was, I think, deliberate. It developed a creative tension that endures.

Beneath the pyramid is the third motto on the seal: Novus ordo seclorum, which means a “new order of the ages.” This is how the founders viewed the founding of the United States. It was not simply a new form of government but a dramatic shift in the history of humanity. That was radical enough. However, Charles Thomson, who crafted the phrase, said that what it represented was “the beginning of the new American era.” The most reasonable way to interpret this is that a new age has begun, and America would be at the center of the new age. There was nothing reasonable about this assertion at the time. In fact, if was downright preposterous. America was in its infancy, sharing a world filled with countries that had existed and evolved for centuries, if not millennia. The age that Europe had defined was far from over, and a new age, transcending the European age, was not yet visible.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Doubleday; Standard Edition (February 25, 2020)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0385540493
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0385540490
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #416,117 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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George Friedman

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George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Futures, an online publication that analyzes and predicts the international system.

Friedman is a New York Times bestselling author and his most popular book, The Next 100 Years (2009) is kept alive by the prescience of its geopolitical predictions as they unfold in many countries. Other of Friedman’s best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into over 20 languages.

Determined to discover those principles of logic that govern the world, George received his PhD in government from Cornell University, granting him access to some of the most brilliant thinkers in the field… in the US and across the globe.

George’s unmatched analysis in geopolitics has led him to regularly brief military organizations and consult for Fortune 100 executives. He also founded the geopolitical intelligence consulting firm Stratfor in 1996 and left Stratfor in 2015 to start Geopolitical Futures.

You can read all of George's current thoughts and analysis by visiting his website, http://www.geopoliticalfutures.com.

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Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2020

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I am a professional historian. This means that for a large part of my career, I was paid a more-than-livable salary to teach college history, and to write a bit of it, too. I also worked in technology-transfer for fifteen years at a federal lab. I offer these details only so that you can put my review in context for your own analysis.

This book succeeds on a number of levels. At the same time, it contains what my major professor (and mentor) termed “factual blunders.” A few of those lie in the realm of graduate-history-seminar-level quibbles, and I will leave them unstated. Others bear mention, and two examples will suffice.

THE BAD

When the author says that federal inventions cannot be patented, he is flat wrong. I wrote two patent-license deals for the government and filed a number of patent applications (which were awarded), all for the benefit of federal inventors. Ironically, this error doesn't detract from the author's thesis. In fact, had he stated the actual case accurately, his argument would have been rather stronger.

Another is his statement that the size of the federal government in terms of employees has remained roughly static since 1966. In one sense, this is true. In quite another, it is patently false. In my office, I had more contractors working for me than federal persons (that is, either civil-service or military persons). When the Clinton administration reduced the number of civil-service employees in the Department of Defense by a large amount beginning in 1993, the mission didn't go away, just the “feds” to do it--and managers immediately began hiring contractors to take up the slack.

(This state of affairs yields some odd conundrums, particularly in the realm of who can legally do what, but I digress.)

Since its inception, the Department of Energy (the Carter years, i.e. post-1966) has been roughly 90% contractors. Much of the Department of Defense has become so, though not to that degree. And as Friedman quite rightly points out, because of stove-piping, I cannot say much about other federal departments or agencies, but I can say that they have gone the contractor route to some degree also. (The State Department casualties in Benghazi included ... contractors...)

All this serves to make the point that Friedman's argument would have been stronger in terms of government “size and reach” had he included non-federal employees who have the same authority as federal employees in most cases. Moreover, his statistic says nothing about the effects of computerization. For example, fifty years ago, many civil servants were in the habit of typing and copying memos and other documents, answering phones, etc. Now, where I used to work, department secretaries have been replaced by divisional secretaries (one shared by four departments). The “slots” have gone to other technocrats, thereby strengthening the model. And department heads (to say nothing of those below them) type and send their own e-mails and documents.

THE GOOD

His discussion of cycles and the American character is quite cogent. Were I to go into detail, I would provide spoilers, in effect, and I shall not do that. No matter what else you read in this review, this book is recommended, with a “yes, but” here and there. The things that make one's head nod are numerous.

THE UGLY

The author says he will not engage on “climate change,” and then he goes on to do exactly that. He is right when he says the models should not be commented on for reasons too many to go into here. To keep it simple: having managed numerous scientists and engineers (and their inventions), I can conjure more persons to make arguments for and against either side of the “climate change” question than you can shake a stick at (as my mother would have said).

No less than the Air Force Chief Scientist wrote a scathing article some years ago on the fallacy of space-based solar power, particularly debunking the environmental “benefits.” (Launching rockets is environmentally ugly.) But the author doubles down on his prediction from his previous book that this will and should be done without any evidence of success in more-recent efforts.

For my own view, if the weather-guessers can't get the weather-guess right when they are discussing your weather two weeks out, how can they get it right for the entire world one hundred *years* out?

I know... Writing that sentence is like raising a golf club high atop a huge mountain in a thunderstorm...

READ THIS BOOK

It will orient you, and put things in a solid perspective. I will not criticize the book for things it didn't undertake, as too many “critics” are wont to do. But keep in mind a number of cycles that are part of American history that could work into the future, in sync with Friedman's predictions. For example, America has experienced a number of revivals (or “awakenings”), stretching back to before the Revolution. Two of them correspond to the 1960s and the Great Depression (two big events in the author's thesis).

Read what Friedman has to say, and you will be well served. But after that, please do think for yourself. Americans are forever in search of The Silver Bullet (or, if you prefer, The Answer for All Things). This book is A silver bullet (or, if you prefer, AN answer to SOME things).

208 people found this helpful

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Amazonian

Good perspective, incomplete analysis

Reviewed in the United States on April 23, 2022

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Against the backdrop of the cacophony of shallow mainstream media, this book offers a serious discussion that helps to keep current events in perspective.
Since United States is a young country populated by immigrants from all over the world bound together primarily by ‘persuit of happiness’ aka ‘American dream‘ (whatever that means), they don’t have much of a common history that may offer some perspective to citizens of other countries with long history. As a result, most of the discussion in mainstream US media is full of superlatives like ‘biggest ever’, ‘best ever’, ‘worst ever’, ‘first ever ‘, etc. This book is an antidote to that immature and shallow discussion. By showing historical precedents for most of what we observe today, it tries to present a more balanced view. In that respect, this book reminds me of Neil Howe’s Fourth Turning.
Where this book falls short, in my opinion, is in its analysis of how things have changed in this century due to globalization which itself was facilitated by America’s out-of-control capitalism and its corrupting influence on almost all American institutions. It also fails to discuss the impact of rising large Asian economies on both American republic and empire. I’d have liked to see in this book an analysis that shows how a largely pessimistic view on America’s future painted in books like ‘Time to start thinking’ by Edward Luce has historical precedents and hence it’s no big deal which is what this book seems to claim. Due to this shortcoming, I don’t fully share the optimism of the author about future of US power and its role in the world.
Overall though, this book is definitely worth reading. In fact, I’m posting this review after reading it second time!

17 people found this helpful

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Paul

A very well thought through and informative book

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2024

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In reading this book, I could finally see some of the threads that make up the pattern of these turbulent times. It also gave cause for optimism as it explains that the USA has been through, survived and thrived through many such periods in it's history.

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George V Loughery

Unsettled Times in the American Empire

Reviewed in Canada on July 19, 2022

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Written before the current Ukrainian invasion by Russia. A continuation of Friedman's other books- he scrolls through the shifting geopolitical sands. The world is still a dangerous place and the US is still the puppetmaster although they may feign reluctance to use their great power. A clear rebuttal to hopemasters like Stephen Pinker who would like to think that the world is less violent. An interesting view on upcoming shifts in American cycles which he believes should impact in the next ten years.

Joaquin G.

No es el mejor de sus libros

Reviewed in Mexico on May 22, 2021

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Pudo haber sido un ensayo largo en lugar de un libro.

El inicio es interesante por el contexto histórico, pero se extiende demasiado al igual que en la conclusión.

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Wellington Amorim

Livro instigante

Reviewed in Brazil on June 23, 2020

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George Friedman foi o fundador da consultoria Stratfor, da qual saiu para fundar a Geopolitical Futures. Ótimo argumentador, também possui um estilo de escrita agradável e irônico, pendendo para o lado realista e mais conservador das Relações Internacionais. No entanto, suas ideias valem a pena ser lidas e debatidas, pois inclusive norteiam muitos dos integrantes das diversas elites políticas e militares das chamadas potências. Neste livro, a preocupação básica de Friedman é com os EUA; ele identifica ciclos longos institucionais (de governança propriamente dita) de 80 anos e ciclos socio-economicos de 50, ao longo da história daquele país. Claro que o estabelecimento de ciclos longos para análise (seja de Kondratieff para economia, Juglar para negócios ou de Arrighi para hegemonias) sempre acarreta uma certa padronização ou mesmo engessamento na análise, "forçando" em maior ou menor grau certos acontecimentos no padrão geral estabelecido. Mesmo com essa ressalva, a análise histórica é sedutora e com vários pontos de interesse, mesmo que possam ser criticados. Segundo Friedman, nesta década começaremos a presenciar o entrelaçamento do final de dois ciclos, não exatamente superpostos mas quase. Exigência de maior eficiência na governança, maior acesso da população à educação de qualidade e estímulo à tecnologia, embora temas repisados em quase qualquer análise dos tempos atuais, são elegantemente incluídos na abordagem de Friedman.
Em suma, um livro que vale a pena, nem que seja para discordar de boa parte dele, para os que não comungam das ideias do autor. Bem escrito, com ótimo estilo, alcançou ainda mais sucesso depois dos conflitos pelos quais os EUA estão passando, após a morte de George Floyd (um dos pontos-chave do livro é a questão do racismo, que conspurca a visão filosófica dos próprios EUA desde a sua fundação).

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Amazon Customer

History does not necessarily repeats itself

Reviewed in India on February 13, 2021

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George has assumed that history will repeat itself in cycles . He has made a fundamental error by not recognising the rise of China . Last 4/5 American Presidents have failed to arrest the rise of China . With this rise, power will shift and yes , there will be a storm leading to sunset in America . Night will be chilling .