I said to strap in because the 2020 election would get rough. Our divisions and unrest are not because of Trump. So please keep your seat belt fastened until the decade has come to a complete halt. But don't panic.
Reading George Friedman's The Storm Before the Calm about America resetting and reorienting in the 2030s, I wonder if I have been grappling with that future realignment of ends and means in the foreign policy area.
Friedman writes about links between wars and forms of governance as an institutional cycle; as well as a socioeconomic cycle of domestic prosperity and social system realignment. These two cycles are ending and reforming at the same time right now for the first time ever. Oh joy.
On the governance and foreign policy cycle he writes:
Consider foreign policy, an area that is the central responsibility of the federal government. As we have seen, the three prior institutional cycles emerged from war. The fourth one is now starting to emerge from both a war and a massive geopolitical shift. The war is the one that began on September 11, 2001. But the critical thing to remember is that since 2001 the United States has been in a constant state of war, even if not on the scale of World War II or the Civil War. But it is a war that has lasted far longer than any other in American history. And the inability of the government to frame the war in such a way that it might be won, the institutions of the United States revealed their fundamental weaknesses. War requires a simplification, an understanding of a desired end, clarity on strategy, and allocation of resources appropriate to both. The government proved incapable of the clarity needed for a war because it could not simplify. The complexity of the government was translated into a complicated plan for the war, and the complexity trapped the warriors in a confusion that undermined their mission. [The geopolitical shift was the collapse of the USSR.] ...
Except for Desert Storm, the United States has failed to win a war since World War II. Successful empires use as little military force as possible, depending on the regional tensions between nations to maintain their interests.
Note that Friedman does not use "empire" as a term to describe American control, as past real territorial empires controlled people and territory. But America defends the international system we designed after World War II. So looking at how empires defended their mini-systems within their empires is useful for that angle--and that angle alone.
I disagree on some things, like the idea that America has largely failed to win wars since World War II. And I do think that our war on terror objective is clear if difficult to wrap our heads around: contain the jihadis in a holding action while helping moderates win the Islamic Civil War:
I will never claim that we can kill our way to security. But killing the jihadis is what we need to do to hold the killers at bay until the Islamic world can resolve this aspect of their civil war in favor of a more modern version of Islam that does not seek to kill those who will not submit to the jihadi version of what Islam should be.
I know the Arab Spring is much maligned these days. But it did signal a hope that Moslems see democracy as the alternative to either autocracy or Islamist rule.
I still hope that seeds have been spread that if nurtured will create a less deadly version of Islam that becomes the consensus ideology of the vast majority of Moslems, leaving the fanatics isolated and marginalized, unable to terrorize the majority into passivity or cooperation in a new jihad that strikes in our cities.
But I have come to more clearly agree with the idea that we need to minimize our effort. I was long against the idea that we could go in massively to Iraq or
Afghanistan and expect results before the burden of that large sacrifice
wore away our resolve to win. A slow win you can actually achieve is
better than futilely trying for a quick win that can't be sustained. And at home I rejected calls for a needless draft or massive tax increases as just a means to get Americans tired of the Long War in order to admit defeat.
In posts here, here, here, and here I've addressed a role that defends America's position in the world affordably without routinely applying massive force in response to threats. Indeed, pre-blog just after 9/11 I wrote about pacing ourselves for a long struggle (longer than I anticipated, I admit).
This is difficult to accept. The Civil War and World War II set the template of massive mobilization efforts to decisively defeat an enemy that threatens our security at home. World War II especially established that "ideal" military response.
The Cold War forced America to operate in an era without the shield of friends that could contain a threat abroad until America could mobilize massively and intervene decisively, if necessary. The collapse of the USSR changed things massively again and we need to adapt.
My posts on the Global Troubles outlook are perhaps the most on point about coping with military threats over long periods without exhausting ourselves with big (and futile) efforts, with the earlier posts addressing the benefits of defending the international system we built and an early guess at the big picture of that system developing.
At home, I've touched a number of issues that Friedman discusses in the socioeconomic cycle we are in without really going in depth. Not my lane. Still, his analysis resonates with my experience (growing up in a blue collar family and being the first to get a college degree) and limited education and reading on that last era's end. If you thought that we reached peak domestic division and unrest during the Trump/Resistance era, I hate to tell you this but the Capitol Building riot was not the dramatic punctuation ending that period of division. We have a decade of storms give or take a couple years to endure before the domestic division is calmed by a shift in political support to a new majority approach for how our institutions will govern us.
And that new institutional form will more effectively support our foreign policy. Mind you, the new "calm" is about settling on an approach to the foreign threats to the international system and not the absence of threats. Of those we have plenty. And the rise of China and renewal of Russian threats makes the adaptation different than only adapting to the Long War on terror. Although managing those threats affordably without resorting to massive World War II/Civil War efforts to resolve threats is a constant.
We're America. We will get through this period as we have passed through earlier storms to emerge stronger.
I don't always agree with Friedman. But I respect his knowledge and analysis. And Lord knows it is a comfort to look for the end of this period and anticipate better times. If he's right, of course.
NOTE: I've been sitting on this draft for a while. But rather than tinker with it I'm just putting it out as is right now (duh, that's what blogging is, eh?). I think we can use some hopeful thinking about the age we are living through.
And my apologies. I accidentally published this earlier in time on Thursday when I meant to publish it Friday morning. I put it back in draft and re-published for Friday.
UPDATE: A quick explanation of why just after 9/11 I did not think the war on terror would last this long. I did not initially see it as essentially an internal Islamic Civil War. I recognized the feature within Islam that generated terrorists, of course. But I saw the coming war as one that would end state support for terrorism, thus keeping the Islamist danger contained to the Moslem world for them to deal with rather than being a threat to us. So close, but no cigar.
UPDATE: And I should mention that the socioeconomic cycle will result in less bitter divisions at home until the evolving population's needs better served by the new but static system start to be served less effectively, building up the divisions again. But that's a matter of interest rather than a usual subject of this online journal that resembles a blog.
UPDATE: As long as I cited Friedman's book I should link to his direct thoughts on the Capitol Building incident. I strongly disagree with his statement that it was a coup attempt. It was a spasm of frustration that had zero chance of changing the election. And really, every protest and not just this one--which spawned the assault--is an attempt to change policy or the government itself in some way. Massing lots of people for even a peaceful protest is always an implicit threat at some level. Why else have large protests rather than sending a small group with a petition signed by a million? Storming the Capitol Building was awful. Let's not elevate it.
UPDATE: Also I should add that while having disagreements with Friedman's analysis in some cases, I trust his motivations.
