[Bruno Maçães, History Has Begun. The Birth of a New America. Hurst and Co. London, 2020. 203 p.]

review / Emili J. Blasco

What if the United States were not in decline, but quite the opposite? The United States could actually be in its beginnings as a great power. This is what Bruno Maçães argues in his new book, the degree scroll -History Has Begun- in a certain sense refutes Fukuyama's end of history, which saw the democratization of the world at the end of the 20th century as the culmination of the West. Precisely, the hypothesis of the internationalist of Portuguese origin is that the USA is developing its own original civilization, separate from what has been understood until now as Western civilization, in a world in which the very concept of the West is losing strength.

Maçães' work follows three lines of attention: the progressive separation of the USA from Europe, the characteristics that identify the specific American civilization and the struggle between the USA and China for the new world order. The author had already developed aspects of these themes in his two immediately preceding works, already reviewed here: The Dawn of Eurasia y Belt and Roadand now focuses on the US. The three titles are basically a sequence: the progressive dissolution of the European peninsula in the Eurasian continent as a whole, the emergence of China as the superpower of this great continental mass and the remaining role of Washington on the planet.

As to whether the U.S. goes up or leave, Maçães writes in the book's introduction, "Conventional wisdom suggests that the United States has already reached its peak. But what if it is simply now beginning to forge its own path forward?" The Issue is written before the coronavirus crisis and the deep unease now apparent in American society, but even before that some signs of U.S. domestic unrest, such as political polarization or divergence over the direction of its foreign policy, were already evident. "The present moment in the history of the United States is both a moment of destruction and a moment of creation," says Maçães, who considers that the country is going through "convulsions" typical of this process of destructive creation. In his opinion, in any case, they are "the birth pangs of a new culture instead of the death throes of an old civilization".

It could be thought that the United States is simply evolving towards a mixed culture, the result of globalization, so that the influence that some European countries have had in shaping U.S. society in recent centuries is now being joined by Asian immigration. In fact, it is expected that by mid-century immigrants from the other side of the Pacific will outnumber those arriving from Mexico and Central America, which, although imbued with indigenous cultures, largely follow the Western paradigm. Between the first European and the new Asian heritage, a "hybrid Eurasian" culture could develop in the United States.

In fact, at one point in the book, Maçães asserts that the United States "is no longer a European nation," but "in fundamental aspects now seems more similar to countries like India or Russia or even the Republic of Iran." However, he disagrees with this hybrid Eurasian perspective and argues instead for the development of a new, indigenous American society, separate from modern Western civilization, rooted in new sentiments and thoughts.

When describing this different way of being, Maçães deals mainly with some manifestations, from which he gradually deduces deeper aspects. "Why do Americans speak so loudly?" he asks, referring to one such symptom. His theory is that American life emphasizes its own artificiality as a way of reminding its participants that, at bottom, they are experiencing a story. "The American way of life is consciously about language, storytelling, plot and form, and is meant to draw attention to its status as fiction." An entire chapter, for example, is devoted to analyzing the importance of television in the US. In the midst of these considerations, the reader may come to think that the reasoning has been drifting towards a cultural essay , leaving the field of international relations, but in the conclusion of the work the ends are conveniently tied up.

Having left this loose end here, the book goes on to analyze the pulse between Washington and Beijing. He recalls that since its rise as a world power around 1900, the permanent strategic goal of the United States has been to prevent a single power from controlling the whole of Eurasia. Previous threats in that sense were Germany and the USSR and today it is China. Normally, Washington would resort to the balance of power, using Europe, Russia and India against China (using a game historically employee by Great Britain for the goal of preventing a single country from controlling the European continent), but for the time being the US has focused on directly confronting China. Maçães sees the Trump Administration's policy as confusing. "If the US wants to adopt a strategy of maximum pressure against Beijing, it needs to be clearer about the end game": is this to constrain Chinese economic power or to convert China to the Western model , he asks. He intuits that the ultimate goal is to "decouple" the Western world from China, creating two separate economic spheres.

Maçães believes that China will hardly manage to dominate the supercontinent, since "the unification of the whole of Eurasia under a single power is so far from being inevitable that in fact it has never been achieved". In any case, he considers that, because of its interest as a superpower, the US may end up playing not so much the role of "great balancer" (given the weight of China it is difficult for any of its neighbors to exercise a counterweight) as that of "great creator" of the new order. "China must be trimmed down in size and other pieces must be accumulated, if a balance is to be the final product," he asserts.

It is here that the American character as a builder of stories and narratives finally comes back into the picture, with a somewhat flimsy argument. Maçães can see the US succeeding in this task of "great creator" if it treats its allies with autonomy. As in a novel, his role as narrator "is to bring all the characters together and preserve their own individual spheres"; "the narrator has learned not to impose a single truth on the whole, and at the same time no character will be allowed to replace him." "For the United States," Maçães concludes, "the age of nation-building is over. The age of world building has begun."

[George Friedman. The Storm Before the Calm. America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond. Doubleday. New York, 2020. 235 pp.]

review / E. Villa Corta, E. J. Blasco

The degree scroll of the new book by George Friedman, the driving force behind the geopolitical analysis and intelligence agency Stratfor and later creator of Geopolitical Futures, does not reference letter to the global crisis created by the Covid-19 pandemic. When he speaks of the crisis of the 2020s, which Friedman has been anticipating for some time in his commentaries and now explains at length in this book, he is referring to deep and long-lasting historical movements, in this case confined to the United States.

Beyond the current pandemic, therefore, which is somewhat circumstantial and not addressed in the text (its composition is previous), Friedman suggests that the United States will reinvent itself at the end of this decade. Like a machine that, almost automatically, incorporates substantial changes and corrections every certain period of time, the US is preparing for a new leap. There will be a prolonged crisis, but the US will emerge triumphant from it, Friedman predicts. US decline? Quite the opposite.

Unlike his previous books, such as The Next Hundred Years or Flashpoints, Friedman this time leaves Friedman's global geopolitical analysis to focus on the United States. In his reflection on American history, Friedman sees a succession of cycles of approximate length. The current ones are already in their final stages, and the reinstatement of both will coincide in the late 2020s, in a process of crisis and subsequent resurgence of the country. In the institutional field, the 80-year cycle that began after the end of the Second World War is coming to an end (the previous one had lasted since the end of the Civil War in 1865); in the socioeconomic field, the 50-year cycle that began with Ronald Reagan in 1980 is coming to an end (the previous one had lasted since the end of the Great Recession and the arrival of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House).

Friedman does not see Donald Trump as the catalyst for change (his effort has simply been to restore the status created by Reagan for the working class average , affected by unemployment and loss of purchasing power), nor does he believe that whoever replaces him in the coming years will be. Rather, he places the turnaround around 2028. The change, which will take place in a time of great confusion, will have to do with the end of the technocracy that dominates American political and institutional life and with the creative disruption of new technologies. The author wants to denote America's skill to overcome adversity and take advantage of "chaos" in order to achieve fruitful growth.

Friedman divides the book into three parts: the creation of the nation as we know it, the cycles we have gone through and the prognosis for the next one. In this last part he presents the challenges or adversities that the country will have to face.

Regarding the creation of the country, the author reasons about the subject of government created in the United States, the territory in which the country is located and the American people. This last aspect is perhaps the most interesting. He defines the American people as a merely artificial construct. This leads him to see the U.S. as a machine that automatically fine-tunes its functioning from time to time. As an "invented" country, the U.S. reinvents itself when its cycles run out.

Friedman presents the training of the American people through three overlapping types: the cowboy, the inventor and the warrior. To the cowboy, who seeks to start something completely new and in an "American" way, we owe especially the social construct that is so unique to the United States. To the inventor belongs the drive for technological progress and economic prosperity. And the warrior condition has been present from the beginning.

The second part of the book deals with the aforementioned issue of cycles. Friedman considers that US growth has been cyclical, in a process in which the country reinvents itself from time to time in order to continue progressing. After reviewing the periods so far, he locates the next great change in the US in the decade that has just begun. He warns that the gestation of the next stage will be complicated due to the accumulation of events from past cycles. One of the issues that the country will have to resolve has to do with the paradox between the desire to internationalize democracy and human rights and that of maintaining its national security: "liberating the world" or securing its position in the international sphere.

The present moment of change, in which, agreement to the author, the institutional and socio-economic cycles will collide, is a time of deep crisis, but a long period of calm will follow. Friedman believes that the first "tremors" of the crisis were felt in the 2016 elections, which showed a radical polarization of American society. The country will have to reform not only its complex institutional system, but also various socio-economic aspects.

This last part of the book - dedicated to the resolution of problems such as the student debt crisis, the use of social networks, new social constructions or the difficulty in the educationalsector educationalis probably the most important. If the mechanicity and automatism in the succession of cycles determined by Friedman, or even its very existence, are questionable (other analyses could lead other authors to consider different stages), the real problems that the country has today are easily ascertainable. Thus, the presentation of proposals for their resolution has an undoubted value.