In 1818, Connecticut preacher Lyman Beecher fought furiously, and vainly, to prevent his state from disestablishing religion.1 We often think of the first amendment of the United States Constitution as establishing “the separation of church and state,” but that is not quite right. Even disestablishment’s greatest supporter, Thomas Jefferson, used the phrase—which is not in the Constitution—to argue that there would be no national church.2 Indeed, the phrase did not gain purchase in American jurisprudence until well after the Civil War.3 Several states in New England supported Congregational churches through taxes levied on all of their citizens, with Massachusetts being the last to end the practice in 1833.
Beecher was convinced that Connecticut’s decision—which was wrapped up in the politics of a dying Federalist party in the years after the War of 1812—would lead to a collapse in religiosity and a rise in immorality: “It was as dark a dark a day as I ever saw. . . . The injury done to the cause of Christ, as we then supposed, was irreparable.”4 As Beecher was soon to admit, however, disestablishment had the opposite, unintended effect: It helped propel the Second Great Awakening. In the years that followed, the United States experienced an unprecedented, massive increase in religious observance and faith. Beecher himself became a national leader of an evangelical movement that transformed the nature of America’s society, culture, and politics in ways no one anticipated or could have predicted. Looking back, Beecher acknowledged that, to his great surprise, disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the state of Connecticut.”5
Freed from politics while denied the revenue from the state, preachers and churches had to compete to win adherents, improving their sermons, services, and appeal. Sects old and new—from Beecher’s Congregational denomination to Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and beyond—worked and traveled to build their congregations. But instead of fighting, the multitude of new sects often cooperated by creating interdenominational benevolent associations. These new churches and missions played on the spirit of volunteerism and self-government that shaped the small towns, farming communities, and frontier of a rapidly expanding United States, encouraging the nation’s entrepreneurial and small “d” democratic tendencies. Economically, their message emphasized hard work, thrift, private property, and generous charity.
This wave of religiosity affected moral life, as many of these new preachers embraced temperance. In 1825, the average American male over the age of fifteen consumed over 7 gallons of alcohol per year, usually in the form of hard cider or whiskey, with often terrible consequences for public health, civil order, and domestic violence. That number fell dramatically to 1.8 gallons by the late 1840s.6 Just as important, this temperance movement demonstrated the power of non-state actors to organize and generate profound social change in the United States. The lessons taken from the temperance crusade were incorporated into powerful new movements, often encouraged by the religious fervor of the Awakening, to support widespread public education, build colleges and universities, expand women’s rights, and end slavery. Disestablishment helped generate profound, unexpected outcomes.
This effect highlights the challenges of making consequential decisions in the face of uncertainty: We do not know what the future holds or how best to navigate it. And often, our hopes and choices produce the opposite of what we expect to happen, as Reverend Beecher experienced. This is true even of events that appear, as political scientists say, “overdetermined.” We look back at the Second World War and believe that America’s overwhelming economic power guaranteed total victory. But imagine you were living in the United States, assessing the world in May 1942. How confident would you have been that things would work out well? Japanese forces had convincingly bested American, British, and Dutch forces and appeared unstoppable in Asia, while the Wehrmacht controlled much of North Africa and Europe, looming as well on the outskirts of Leningrad and not far from Moscow. The Luftwaffe’s raids brought terror to Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York, and Canterbury in Britain. U-boats were sinking Allied shipping at an alarming rate. In the United States, economic controls, shortages, corruption, racial division, and the internment of Japanese Americans weakened a previously solid domestic front, foreshadowing a fall midterm election that saw Democrats lose fifty-five seats in the US House of Representatives and nine Senate seats. Three years later, of course, the Allies had destroyed Nazi Germany, and the United States was on the way to forcing Japan’s surrender in the Pacific. Looking back, it seems like that outcome was almost predetermined. In the spring of 1942, however, that result seemed anything but inevitable.
I thought of these dilemmas surrounding uncertainty and the future as I read the excellent articles in this issue. Deploying impressive multi-archival skills, the historian Simon Miles argues that the West focused on denuclearization in its policies toward Ukraine in the early 1990s, to the exclusion of the country’s economic development or incorporation into a broader European political or security architecture. At the time, these choices made some sense—the greatest security challenge facing the United States was, arguably, the fear of “loose nukes.” Few anticipated that Russia would seize Crimea in 2014 or invade Ukraine in 2022. If Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons (bearing in mind that its control of these weapons was uncertain at best), would that have deterred Russia decades later? Or might a nuclear Ukraine have encouraged other states in Central Europe, like Poland or even Germany, to acquire their own weapons? In 2026, knowing what we do now, it seems obvious that the West should have done more to focus on Ukraine’s security and to better aid its economic and political integration into Western Europe. But facing an uncertain future, the concerns of the West lay elsewhere: sensitivity to Russia’s fallen status, political stability in Central Europe, and a focus on the long-forgotten question of the military and political intentions of a newly unified Germany.
Other articles also surface these dilemmas. In civil-military relations, much of the scholarship has focused on preventing militaries from overthrowing their governments. But concentrating on this scenario may have blinded us to another: militaries who stand aside or even support civilian coups, as Lami Kim and Carrie A. Lee highlight in their bracing article on President Yoon Suk Yeol’s effort to “self-coup.” Exploiting America’s innovative finance practices to support improving the military-industrial base may, according to Sama Noori, expose such efforts to capital sources who may not share United States interests. Shawn T. Cochran’s insightful history and analysis of smart bombs—which are the result of extraordinary technological improvements in precision—often have unexpected political consequences. And Ryan C. Van Wie reminds us that to truly measure projectable power, we need to get beyond the broad, sweeping arguments often made by analysts of grand strategy and international relations to better understand the logistical and operational requirements needed to deploy power abroad.
I often wonder—assuming I am still around—what issues and concerns will shape our world twenty years from now? The exercise requires a great deal of humility. What we expect to happen often does not. I try to picture Karl Rove after he had engineered President George W. Bush’s reelection two decades ago. He believed he had created a permanent Republican majority based on low taxes, entitlement reform, the personal values and integrity of the candidate, and wise immigration policies, among other issues. Imagine telling him right after President Bush’s second inauguration that the next twenty years of American presidential politics would be dominated by an African American community organizer whose middle name was Hussein and a bombastic, thrice-married New York game-show host whose businesses filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy six times? Interrupted only by a Delaware senator whose 1988 presidential campaign was so terrible it didn’t make it to 1988, ending just after summer faded in 1987? Rove would have thought you were delusional. But the surprises that have marked our recent politics are more the norm than we like to acknowledge; two or three years before their elections, few people thought Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, or Bill Clinton possessed a realistic shot at the presidency.
Uncertainty in international politics is, by its nature, significantly more complex and uncertain than our domestic scene. Will the United States and China—the current obsession in our national and international community—go to war in the decade or two to come? If the answer turns out to be yes, that conflict will likely shape how we understand everything that came before that terrible day. But perhaps it is just as likely that our future will be determined by events or phenomena yet unseen. If and when this does happen, these unexpected forces will likely drive our narratives and shape our conceptual lenses, to say nothing of how we write our histories, slowly and quietly dissolving the uncertainty and chasing away much-needed epistemological humility. This is worth keeping in mind as we mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, events that few saw coming but that upended our world.
Life, as they say, comes at you fast. And we at Texas National Security Review will continue to do our best to keep up and make sense of it all, all while expecting the unexpected.
Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He serves as chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review. He is the author of, most recently, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era (2024), Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy (2025), and Wonder and Worry: Contemporary History in an Age of Uncertainty (2025).
Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC, USA, email: fgavin@jhu.edu