BUMPS ALONG THE ROAD TO AN AMERICAN GOLDEN AGE
A flawed argument that renewal is coming after a cycle of discord
In the 2020s, according to George Friedman, two geopolitical cycles will converge for the first time in American history. The end of our nation’s third institutional cycle (which controls the relationship between the federal government and the rest of society, and lasts about 80 years) and its fifth socioeconomic cycle (during which, in 50-year intervals, class structures and dynamics are altered), will create a crisis. “With its vast economy and military and seductive culture,” Mr. Friedman declares, the United States will emerge from the storm as it always has, sustaining itself, and creating solutions in a “golden age with a diamond at its center.”
The founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a digital subscription platform, Mr. Friedman is the author of nine books, including “The Future of War,” “The Next 100 Years” and “The Next Decade.” Like its predecessors, “The Storm Before the Calm: America’s Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond,” is a provocative attempt to connect past, present and future, that, in my judgment, shines a spotlight on the flaws of futurology.
Mr. Friedman’s examination of American history, the foundation of his theory, is a mix of conventional wisdom and vague, simplistic and dubious claims. Immigrants, he reminds us, “invented” the United States. With a sense of urgency to make their lives better than they had been, newly minted Americans designed institutions that dominated nature through reason, science and technology.
Fair enough. But what about George Friedman’s many other generalizations? Did the people who came from Africa “cling to the past” more than those whose roots were in England, Ireland and Poland? Did the United States in the late 19th-century lack valid economic reasons to build an empire?
Did Pearl Harbor make the Soviet Union “more than an adversary”? Or was it the advent of nuclear weapons? Did Hillary Clinton’s role in deposing the dictator of Libya “hurt her the most” in 2016? Is today’s Supreme Court run by experts in the law who lack common sense? Or is the principal problem partisan polarization? Is the cultural divide between America’s geographical sections more important than differences between inhabitants of cities, towns, and rural areas? Are financial institutions currently finding it difficult to find businesses in which to invest? What is “cultural mobility”? Is the United States a “warrior culture”?
Despite his claim that fixed intervals “are real and too odd to be a coincidence,” Mr. Friedman’s choice of cycles seems designed to fit his Procrustean beds. Why doesn’t the Great Recession of 20082009 qualify as a trigger for a socioeconomic cycle? Why don’t the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, or 9/11 mark the beginning of institutional cycles?
The underlying assumption of “The Storm Before the Calm” — that the onset and outcome of cycles are inevitable because the “deep structure” and its development “control actors and events” — should also be met with skepticism. Was President George W. Bush’s preemptive attack on Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, an action with enormous geopolitical and socioeconomic consequences, inevitable? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to analyze the relationship between deep structures and actors and events?
And Mr. Friedman’s book is awash in faux precision. Following the outcome of the 2028 election, he writes, technocrats will be stunned by the speed in which the new government abandons their fundamental assumptions.
Ironically, George Friedman’s vision for the 2030s is grounded in his own experiences. His attempt to avoid registering for Medicare, he implies, exemplifies why government will be forced to substitute intent for “rigidly engineered rules.” Mr. Friedman refers to his time as a graduate student at Cornell (where the beautiful setting did not help him learn), before making the manifestly impractical recommendation that universities reduce costs, cut tuition and reclaim their role as engines of opportunity by selling the land they own and moving to more spartan quarters. Indicating that global warming involves “complexities that I can’t scramble” and that “an unknown variable might moot findings” of calamity, Mr. Friedman (as “rare advocacy”) suggests that space-based solar power might end the overuse of hydrocarbons and “the danger of climate change.”
Kinda’ makes my head spin. “The Storm Before the Calm” may — or may not — make readers wonder what Mr. Friedman maintains is in store for us in 2080, when the next socioeconomic cycle arrives.
“THE STORM BEFORE THE CALM: AMERICA’S DISCORD, THE COMING CRISIS OF THE 2020S AND THE TRIUMPH BEYOND”
By George Friedman Doubleday ($28.95)