Book Review: “The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond” by George Friedman

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In the classic Western movie “High Noon” a lone lawman took on four bloodthirsty outlaws. His people had already scurried back to their homes. His new bride urged him to leave for a better place with her. He stayed put, however, bracing for death rather than cowardice. Honor had him fight the gang head-on, but love had his woman come to his rescue in an unladylike manner. When the gun smoke cleared, love won. 

The moral of the story? You need to hold your ground. You need to fight dirty in order to get a clean shot at the oncoming evil. You are in a High Noon moment. 

A High Noon moment will be a defining moment for America, if and when the world’s cop suddenly finds himself standing alone, with a world order to keep and a national honor to defend. 

That, I think, is the main thrust of this book.

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This book is all about America’s defining moments—past, present and future, especially future.

America’s defining moments in the past were a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

For example, the Declaration of Independence takes it for granted that all men are equal. That is good. Yet, as a sop to Cerberus, the U.S. Constitution (1787) legally defined and thereafter culturally institutionalized Africans as subhuman, just to keep the slave states of the South in the Union. That is both bad and ugly. 

The other American sin, of course, is the genocide against Indians (Native Americans), although European diseases were responsible for 90% of the killings that “cleared” the field for the advancing Americans.

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As indefensible as genocide is, it is nevertheless my understanding that Indians were not, as a whole, helpless victims in the face of Europeans or Americans. In “The Comanche Empire” by Pekka Hämäläinen, the Comanche Indians, once having mastered cavalry warfare learned from the Spanish conquistadors, built a native conquistadors’ empire between the Rockies and today’s Texas. Within their core zone, the Comanche Indians were as civilized as any Europeans or Americans could be. Outside their core zone, however, they would and did subject other Indian nations to slavery and genocide as much as any Europeans or Americans could have done. 

I should also point out that the Indian nations in North America were not like the nomadic tribes in Central Asia. Unified under Genghis Khan, the Central Asian nomads could and did take Eurasia by storm. There had never been a leader unifying all Indian nations. Instead, Indians lived in a perpetuity of warring states. Divided, they lost to the United States eventually. 

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Slowly but surely, America has been turning over a new leaf since the end of the bloody Civil War in 1865. Make no mistake. Racial tension could still be lurking around, as the late Iris Shun-ru Chang argued in her book “The Chinese in America” (2003).  

But honestly I am much more worried about the CCP-sanctioned religious cleansing and related sinful practices against Tibetans, Uighurs and other minorities, which amounts to a collective crime against humanity. That is why Americans (wherever they come from) should always practice “social distancing” from the infectious CCP and its collaborators. Frankly, even when the CCP’s regime is no more, I am afraid that the Chinese people may still owe the victimized minorities an apology. Call it “guilt by association”. 

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It is quite ironic that, in the middle of a virulent crisis hitting America, I am reviewing a book about America’s crisis. 

I am under the impression that the author has adopted Hegel’s theory of history which is optimistic in tone, progressive in ideology, and cyclical in nature.

The current crisis may be unique, but it is also a cyclical challenge to America as a nation of inventors. We invented the United States of America to address the challenge of a global superpower, namely the British Empire. We also have inventors like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as our founding fathers. Indeed, our list of inventors never ends.

Who knows? Maybe we are about to develop a vaccine for the CCP virus. At the same time, we had better come up with an innovative socioeconomic system good for investment as well as invention. Indisputably, American inventors can be astute investors. We need more inventors-cum-investors. We will have more inventors-cum-investors. 

I imagine that the U.S. military will continue to play a key role in technological breakthroughs in, say, quantum computing. It already did in the developments of nuclear technology, internet, microchip, GPS, etc. After all, give or take, 100 million Americans are impacted directly or indirectly by the U.S. armed services today. 

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One more thought.

For Americans, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of PERSONAL happiness, which makes room for private life so much so that individual creativity becomes a major source of personal and national pride. 

No wonder Doctor Zhivago fell silent when he heard from his captor that “private life is dead.” He had to accept that Soviet life would go on. What a rude awakening!

Hopefully there are people in China checking out “Doctor Zhivago” these days.

How about checking out this book, too?

——Lingyang Jiang