Crisis and Rebirth: America's Dangerous Decade Ahead
The Crisis is upon us. What happens next will determine America's fate for decades to come.




NOTE: I have spent a good bit of time talking and writing about the cycles that exist within linear history. Most ancient cultures assumed that history was cyclical, and thus that no progress was possible. The idea of linear time and historical progress is distinctly Christian, though it has been taken up since by others. This is the correct view, but it does not negate the existence of cycles, a facet of reality that the ancients saw without realizing it was merely part of a greater whole.
I have particularly focused attention on Neil Howe’s work (see my short review in “My 10 Favorite Books of 2024”), but that doesn’t mean other theoretical frameworks don’t exist or aren’t valid. George Friedman here posits two different cycles whose ends are about to converge, with each other and with Howe’s. The latter speaks of an ekpyrosis, the ancient Greek term for “Crisis” or general conflagration. Past Crises include the Great Depression-World War II era, the Civil War, and the American Revolution: three moments of existential danger, producing new, starkly different eras after.
Coming from different models, George and Neil both believe (as do I) that we are in the midst of exactly that Crisis: the Ekpyrosis. The worst, as well as its resolution for good or ill, is still to come. — RDM
Crisis and Rebirth: America's Dangerous Decade Ahead
by George Friedman
February 1, 2025
If it feels as though the world is changing, that’s because it is. Global economic reconfiguration, demographic decline and geopolitical realignment have fundamentally altered long-held conventional political wisdom, perhaps nowhere more markedly than in the United States.
Like all countries, the U.S. is mutable. But unlike most others, changes there have global consequences. The situation in America signals a break in the natural process of a country. America has surprised the world many times, and it is doing so again.
Many look from afar at the current political, social and economic turmoil in the United States and see it as a sign of American decline. In my most recent book, The Storm Before the Calm, my goal was to explain the patterns in the U.S. that look like evidence of weakness but in fact show the country’s unique strength through remaking itself.
I write: “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 the economic policy, the political elites and the common sense that had dominated the country for the 50 years since Franklin D. Roosevelt replaced Herbert Hoover.
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 once-successful social and economic systems. 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, Donald Trump exploited the crises in the elections of 2016 and 2024 to side with those who suffered the most economically and those who doubted the experts. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris 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. Those who resisted were portrayed as ignorant, and those suffering economically and socially were seen simply as paying the price necessary to protect themselves. Those who doubted this perspective were deemed at least irresponsible.
On the other hand, those who accepted the technocratic solution of the medical establishment during the COVID-19 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 views, nor did all of Biden’s and Harris’ supporters agree with theirs. But the 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’s first term was a Democrat. This was not because the shift depended on party politics. Following the election of a 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, it would seek to return to a stable norm.
In the last 50-year cycle (1930 to 1980), the political chaos of the Nixon years – which really began with the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson – was followed by the presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Each sought to normalize the system. As Ford put it after pardoning Nixon: “The long national nightmare is over.”
Indeed, the political nightmare was over, in the sense that Ford and Carter were both operating within the behavioral norms that were personified by John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This was possible because they all shared core beliefs: assertive foreign policies, supporting social security, federal responsibility for economic performance and racial integration.
In other words, they shared key principles that were forged during Roosevelt’s first term to replace the then-failed policies of the previous era.
When Nixon became president, many of those policies 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. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act, Black Americans were still on unequal social and economic footing with their white counterparts. The Roosevelt era, which in a sense was drawing to a close with Johnson’s Great Society, ended when Nixon was forced to (wildly unsuccessfully) impose a national compulsory wage and price freeze to control the first surge in 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 the most victimized class in the Great Depression. The tax code and other tools were created to achieve higher consumption. Over time, higher consumption lowered available investment capital, and industry became less efficient, less innovative and less able to compete on the global market. Nixon said “we are all Keynesians now” and intensified the movement of capital for consumption.
The lack of investment capital created an under-invested economy with increased 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, which would use the difference to increase purchases and generate economic activity. Carter followed the playbook of the Roosevelt era, but the play didn’t work.
Most important, 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 class.
At the end of a cycle, it is hard to see that everything has changed, so any political stabilization is, at best, temporary. The election of Ronald Reagan bore this out.
The phase after the 2020 U.S. presidential election resembled the Ford-Carter political era. It represented the stabilization of a political period as the economic and social crises intensified. Its intensification was, as usual, made more extreme by the inability of the political system to mitigate or even recognize the tensions.
If the economic tension of the Roosevelt era stemmed from insufficient investment capital, the economic tension of today 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 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 is the decline of major firms whose size either makes them unmanageable or exposes them to political pressure.
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 in the 1980s. This shift 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 preeminence as permanently redefining America.
All dominant classes redefine the U.S., but none are permanent. As microchip technology matures, it will of course remain an important part of the nation, but not its entire future. I do not consider artificial intelligence a new technology, but merely the advancement of the same microchip technology. And as competitive economic pressure and the inherent obsolescence of all industries take hold, this class will begin to decline from the pivot point into just another class of aging professionals. That will happen alongside the economic crisis that will crop up as the oldest millennials reach their 50s, recreating the malaise that we saw in the 1970s.
The economic crisis caused by the success of the Reagan era in producing wealth from innovation reversed the changes of 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 same means as the Roosevelt, 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 years of this disjuncture between economic and social reality on the one hand and the political system on the other. We have to see if Trump in his second term will be aligned with the new era or the old. After Nixon came a period of political stability. Most likely a new American era will emerge in 2028, changing the way American society and institutions work.
Biden may have brought a semblance of normalcy back to politics, but he was not able to come to grips with the deeper problems. It is not yet certain that Trump will be able to do so, but neither is it very important. It is the 2028 election that will matter, in the same way that 1980 and 1932 did.
— This essay originally appeared at Geopolitical Futures.
Interesting essay! Jimmy Carter, may he rest in peace, was often associated with the term "Trilateral" due to his association with the ideologies of the Trilateral Commission and the fact that much of his admin was staffed by them, he presided over a historically pivotal shift into the so called Neoliberal Era. This era marked a transformation of the US economy from one largely governed by competitive market structures to one dominated by private sector central planning. While the groundwork for these changes had been laid over decades, Carter's administration oversaw their formalization, pursuing policies that led to private sector cartelization, and he advanced the dismantling of many of the beneficial financial and banking architectures that had existed since the 1830s (140 years!). These included policies that had promoted regional economic balance, decentralized financial power, a heterogenous, diffused and redundant economy which by extension was a big part of why we had an amazing heterogenous, diffused and redundant scientific and engineering research and development ecosystem, and a host of limited but when done well still substantial community banking capabilities that not provided social benefits and a modicum of local economic agency but also often kept local economies humming and contributing to our greater whole. Despite being remembered by many as a man of peace, Carter’s foreign policy legacy is complicated. While he notably pressured authoritarian regimes in South America to reduce human rights abuses, his administration also initiated or supported aggressive interventions elsewhere, such as in Afghanistan, where his actions sowed seeds of future violence. And the list of ultimately toxic domestic polices, such as the Bayh-Dole Act, that happened under his watch is fairly long and they have a common pattern….
This was one of the best and most well-written articles I think I’ve ever read! Thank you gentleman! George Friedman and Neil Howe both deserve a Pulitzer Prize for their respective books! This article is packed with a treasure trove of valuable historical insights! They are 100% right that history and time too are linear but they still move in cycles-patterns one can clearly see. Their predictions are rarely wrong and I see very clearly the trends they speak of in this article throughout our history. I will be to purchase both of these essential books every American must read! I definitely agree, 2028 will be the most important Presidential election since 2008 when Barack Obama rose to the White House. It also I think will the beginning of times starting to get better and America and the West getting back on track. I definitely believe the United States and the West in general have a bright future and that we can weather the storm of the past few years. The third world’s future I think depends on where we’re talking about. Outside of Israel, the rest of the Middle East I fear will only continue to see turmoil and war for the foreseeable future. Iran will become a pariah state in the region given their colonization of many countries, building of nuclear weapons, gender apartheid, and authoritarian leadership. I think more Muslim nations will join the Abraham Accords. Gaza will take decades to rebuild. Sadly, I see no Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accords coming anytime soon. Qatar and the Gulf States will be key players in the future of the region. Latin America I doubt will see the needle moved much either. I don’t see the political and societal instability in the region getting any better given the power of the drug cartels, dictatorships, unstable governments, high crime, racial tension, and high rates of unemployment, poverty and food insecurity. Asia I see having a bright future. Japan and the Asian Tigers will rebound, China is gradually on the decline, India is rising, and the Indo-Pacific is the center of attention for the United States. Japan will continue to rearm. India I think will come to rival China as the leading nation in Asia I think. I see America, the West and Israel forging closer ties with India. I see North Korea slowly but surely becoming more open as they will more and more depend on trade with the outside world. Africa will continue to be poor, but I also see some African nations making great progress. Cuba seems to be stubbornly sticking to its old Communist ways so I don’t see things there changing much anytime soon. I see the EU and Brazil as future potential superpowers. For the time being, political populism in the western world will continue to go strong.