George Friedman is Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Futures. The insights presented in this essay are partly drawn from the author’s 2020 book The Storm Before the Calm. You may follow him on X @George_Friedman.

 

American Strategy & Society at the End of a 50-year Cycle

 

The United States is in an election year while also supporting two foreign wars. Amid the noise and anger of internal political fighting, we must remember that there are basic geopolitical patterns and deep-seated strategies incumbent in the United States since its founding. We can see these both in the foreign policy that Washington continues to pursue and in its internal socio-economic and institutional cycles.

 

Every nation has a foreign policy since each lives in a world shaped by other nations—all seeking security and wealth. These emerge from geography, the wealth of the place the nation inhabits, and the ability to defend their nation, defend against other nations and to dominate them. Foreign policy is not so much the sphere of statesmen as it is the sphere of power.

 

The foreign policy of the United States emerges, as with all nations, with a geographic imperative. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that cannot be invaded by land. The northern approach to the United States is from Canada, and the southern approach is from Mexico. Neither has the social or military power to invade the United States. But as all sovereign nations, the United States has fears for its national security. If secure by land, it is endangered by the sea.

The faces of America’s cycles

 

The Germans and the Japanese both could have conceivably attacked the United States during World War II, the former from the Atlantic and the latter from the Pacific. The German and Japanese navies were both significant threats. World War I and II were predominantly naval wars for America. Defeating Japan or Germany meant bringing massive force to bear. Of course, there were other dimensions to the war, but the invasion of Europe and the isolation of Japan were naval actions.

 

During the Cold War, the United States had two imperatives. The first was control of Europe’s and some of Germany’s ports. This would allow American forces to land in Europe if necessary. The second imperative was the denial of those ports to the Soviets. With control of those ports, the Soviets would cut American access to Europe, using excellent submarines they had built. From the standpoint of most Europeans, the Cold War was a land confrontation. For American and, to a lesser extent, Soviet planners, it was a naval war.

 

Control of the seas was not only a military issue. The United States was linked to the European economic system. Selling and buying from Europe depended on access to the Old Continent, as it did to Asia. When we look at the U.S. military force, we can see the primacy of the navy and the naval air force. The primary naval focus has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The goals, command of the sea and guarantee of trade routes, remain intact. The pursuit of American interests also has a land dimension. The United States at times chooses to restrict access in the Atlantic and Pacific by retaining the ability to block strategic ports, either by political or military means. During the Cold War, the United States focused on northern European ports.

 

The naval interest is not only a naval problem. Command of the sea requires a degree of control of the land. For the United States, complex alliance systems are useful to secure the sea by controlling the land. Along the Asian and European coasts, the United States built a complex political system of alliances based on protecting some nations but more often creating economic advantages sufficiently great to create a land reserve to the naval blockade.

 

Obviously, this is a superficial sketch of American strategy, which has many dimensions. However, when we look at the current Russian-Ukrainian war we see this underlying imperative at work. In order to support any land war in Europe, the United States must continue to limit Russian power in the North Sea, and block them from moving to the west seizing more essential ports. The United States, along with NATO, must remain in control of the Mediterranean and have access to the Black Sea. The Russians of course understand this and focused for a while on the Black Sea and sending a number of warships to Cuba to remind the United States of Russia’s potential to threaten it in the Gulf of Mexico. The Russians couldn’t bring enough force to bear so far from home, but the action did remind Washington that Russia understands the importance of naval access to the United States.

 

This strategy was laid out in the nineteenth century by Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who made the case that the oceans are at the heart of American strategy. He acknowledged that this also requires domination of certain land masses, but what has evolved is a political and economic incentive for alliances, and that the process focuses on avoiding direct combat for the most part, as being too costly, dangerous, and inefficient. But even if not often used, the American option for direct combat can shape the political process in the areas crucial to it. The United States acknowledges the limits to this view, moving to political solutions, but sees it as difficult to exert power in areas beyond the oceans by creating political solutions with minimal naval and military cost.

 

Every country has a national strategy for defending its interests. Many living in a nation don’t know they have a strategy and, even if it is known, everyone believes their policies are natural and reasonable. For the most part their neighbors think differently. So, in the case of the United States, there is little difference. The idea that they are not ruthless in defending the interest of their nation comforts them, but not as much as knowing that they are safe. Perhaps I have been too blunt. However, the United States is the most powerful country in the world and therefore, frequently, the most disliked.

 

America’s Cycles

Many also look from afar at the current political, social, and economic turmoil within the United States and see it as a sign of America’s decline. In January 2020, my book The Storm Before the Calm was published… a few days before the U.S. was shut down from COVID-19 and the world became preoccupied with the threat from the pandemic. My goal in this book was to explain the patterns in the United States that appear as demonstrations of weakness but in fact show its unique strength through remaking itself.

 

“American society and the American economy have a rhythm. Every fifty years or so, they go through a painful and wrenching crisis, and in those times it often feels as if the economy were collapsing, and American society with it. Policies that had worked for the previous fifty years stop working, causing significant harm instead. A political and cultural crisis arises, and what had been regarded as common sense is discarded. The political elite insists that there is nothing wrong that couldn’t be solved by more of the same. A large segment of the public, in great pain, disagrees. The old political elite and its outlook on the world is discarded. New values, new policies and new leaders emerge. The new political culture is treated with contempt by the old political elite, who expect to return to power shortly when the public comes to its senses. But only a radically new approach can solve the underlying economic problem. The problem is solved over time, and a new common sense is put into place, and America flourishes – until it is time for the next economic and social crisis and the next cycle.”

 

It has been nearly 50 years since the last cyclical transition occurred. In 1981 Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter as president, changing economic policy, political elites, and the common sense that had dominated the United States for the 50 years since Roosevelt replaced Herbert Hoover.

 

As I have already written in an earlier edition of Horizons, the 2020s have brought the convergence of two major crises: the institutional breakdown of a federal government desperate to preserve its position (while failing to function effectively), and the collapse of a once-successful social and economic system. Both systems, quite crucial in the past, are no longer serving their purpose, leaving instability and disorder in their wake. These crises often come to be personified by certain individuals. From the standpoint of the model in my book, Trump exploited the crises to side with those who suffered the most economically and those who doubted the experts. Biden sided with those who saw themselves as incurring less cost and social pain and those who trusted the federal government. Each side held the other in contempt. The resisters were portrayed as ignorant, and those suffering economic and social costs were seen simply as paying the price necessary to protect themselves, while those who doubted this perspective were at least irresponsible.

 

On the other hand, those who accepted the technocratic solution of the medical establishment during the Covid pandemic were unaware of the hidden intentions of those who advocated the solution, or at least unaware of the limits of their knowledge. They were trapped in the systematic lies. The idea that reasonable people could disagree was completely absent. All disagreement was seen as either idiotic or monstrous.

 

Not all of Trump’s supporters agreed with his view, nor did all of Biden’s supporters agree with his. But the deep dynamic was driven by passion, which itself was driven by the social, economic, and institutional tensions tearing at the country’s fabric. The next phase of a cyclical shift is what might be called pseudo-normalization. As my book predicted, the next president after Trump would likely be a Democrat. This was not because the shift depended on party politics. Following the election of the disruptive president, and stunned by the political disruption, the political system would seek to stabilize itself without fundamental economic or social shifts. In other words, the political system would seek to return to a stable norm.

 

In the last 50-year cycle from 1930 to 1980, the political chaos of the Richard Nixon years—and beginning with Lyndon B. Johnson—was followed by the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Each sought to normalize the system. As the former put it after pardoning Richard Nixon: “The long national nightmare is over.” The political nightmare was over, in the sense that Ford and Carter were both operating within the behavioral norms that existed with Kennedy, Eisenhower, Truman, and Roosevelt. This was possible because they all shared core beliefs such as following assertive foreign policies, supporting social security, and federal responsibility for economic performance and racial integration. They shared core principles that were generated during Roosevelt’s first term to replace the then-failed principles of the previous era.

 

When Nixon became president, many of those principles were failing. The Vietnam War called into question an assertive foreign policy. The economic system was beginning to produce results that were unacceptable from the standpoint of a New Dealer. The assault on integration had generated significant unrest in the Black community—as the end of segregation did not generate anything close to social and economic equality. The Roosevelt era, which in a sense was drawing to an end with Johnson’s Great Society, ended when Nixon was forced to impose a national, compulsory wage and price freeze in an attempt to control the first surge of inflation.

 

The underlying problem was economic and social. The Roosevelt-era model saw the fundamental problem as a lack of demand for goods that had to be solved by funneling money to the industrial working class, which had been most victimized in the Great Depression. The tax code and other tools were created to achieve higher consumption. Over time, higher consumption decreased available investment capital, and industry became less efficient, less innovative, and unable to compete on the global market. Nixon had said that “we are all Keynesians,” and intensified the movement of capital for consumption.

 

The lack of investment capital created an under-invested economy with increasing demand that led to rising costs alongside rising demand, which resulted in the massive inflation of the 1970s. This was compounded by the assertive foreign policy that triggered the Arab oil embargo. Inflation lowered consumption, weakened businesses, and raised unemployment. The 1970s was a decade of failure.

 

Ford and Carter sought to return things to normal. The latter sought to offset shortages of investment capital by cutting taxes for the middle and lower classes, who would use the difference to increase purchases and generate economic activity. Carter followed the playbook of the Roosevelt era—the play didn’t work. Most importantly, Carter and Ford sought to resurrect the norm in politics, but they could not see that the problem was not at the political level. The industrial working class, poor and struggling with unionization, was no longer the victim or the challenger of the system. Socially, the center of gravity had shifted to the suburban professional and industrial class. At the end of a cycle, it is hard to see that everything has changed, so any political stabilization is, at best, temporary, as the election of Ronald Reagan showed.

 

The next phase of the cyclical change after the 2020 U.S. presidential elections resembled the Ford-Carter political era. It represented the stabilization of a political period as the economic and social crisis intensifies. Its intensification was, as usual, made more extreme by the inability of the political system to mitigate or even recognize the tensions.

 

The economic tension of the Roosevelt era stemmed from insufficient investment capital. The economic tension of Biden’s term in office and perhaps his successor’s is a surplus of investment capital and a lack of investment opportunities. As discussed in The Storm Before the Calm, we are at the stage of the maturation of the microchip culture, and this will show itself in two ways. The first is a growing lack of innovative and marketable opportunities. The second will be the decline of major firms whose size either makes them unmanageable or exposes them to political pressure.

 

One consideration in all this should be social media. Its business model is far from new, having originated in the 1920s with radio. Radio stations provided free programs that attracted audiences. The station then sold this audience to advertisers, who generated sales from the ads. Then came television. There was zero cost for the user, and profits were similarly generated by selling ads. The difference for social media—and what makes it so profitable—is that it provides little to no programming. The users are the programming views. By accessing their information, companies can traffic in data, which they sell to advertisers—without having to incur the cost of producing content and, in another sense, create an audience simply by providing a sense of access to others.

 

It’s fitting that social media heralds a near-irreversible change to the conventional media industry. Industries decline, of course, and media industries have the habit of declining unexpectedly and precipitously. Until the 1950s, radio was wildly profitable. Then TV reigned supreme. The sudden decline of industries is not new. In the Roosevelt era, the automobile industry dominated the economy, and companies like Ford and General Motors seemed eternal. By the 1970s, as the Roosevelt era was reaching its end, these industries began their rapid descent. The decline of industries is frequently unthinkable until it happens, and their declines align with the end of eras. This, alongside associated financial dilemmas, will create massive social problems.

 

The industrial working class was supplanted as the center of gravity of society by the suburban professional class, which took power at the beginning of the Reagan era. It culminated in the urban technological class (technologists or workers in associated professions), which had a different cultural aesthetic but a similar cultural reality. Like suburban professionals, the urban technologists lived by the production of ideas to solve problems for businesses and individuals. And like the suburban intellectuals, they saw their pre-eminence as permanently redefining America.

 

All dominant classes redefine the United States, but none are permanent. As the microchip technology matures, it will of course remain an important part of the nation but not its entire future. I do not consider AI as a new technology, but merely the advancement of the same microchip technology. And as competitive economic pressure and the inherent obsolescence of all industries takes hold, this class will begin to decline from the pivot point into just another class of aging professionals. That will happen in parallel with the economic crisis as the oldest millennials reach their 50s, creating the deep malaise that we saw in the 1970s as the GI Bill generation aged.

 

The economic crisis caused by the success of the Reagan era in producing wealth from innovation reversed the Roosevelt period in terms of the value of money but created the same political stress and forced a systemic rotation in innovation and industries. Just as Carter tried to solve the problems caused by the Roosevelt era by the means of the Roosevelt era, so too will the presidents of this decade use Reagan-era solutions to deal with the failures at the end of the Reagan era, focusing on maximizing available capital in a period where the problem is excess money. In the 1970s, a Republican and a Democrat both acted the same way. Partisan politics are irrelevant to historical forces.

 

If my model is correct, we are facing roughly another four to eight years of this disjuncture between economic and social reality on the one hand and the political system on the other. Trump, like Nixon, was politically destructive, but both destroyed themselves by not being aligned with the era. After Nixon came a period of political stability overlaying growing economic and social dysfunction. Most likely in 2028, or possibly 2032, a new American era will arise, changing the way both American society and institutions work. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 means we are on the path. He may have brought a semblance of normalcy back to politics but was not able to come to grips with the deeper problems. It is not certain who will win the 2024 election, but neither is it very important. It is the 2028 election that will matter, in the same way 1980 or 1932 did. Until then, everything will seem calm, and little will feel right.

 

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