A 1986 Polish underground document and a 2012 interview with peace scholar Johan Galtung share an identical title, but they reached different conclusions. Anna Nakai reads both against and along with the present.
The archive is never a mere repository. What you find within its walls connects to something beyond them; tracing those connections is what gives documents historical significance and contextualizes their meaning in the present.
”Will America Survive Until 2020?”–From the Cold War to the Present
A 1986 Polish underground document and a 2012 interview with peace scholar Johan Galtung share an identical title, but they reached different conclusions. Anna Nakai reads both against and along with the present.
The archive is never a mere repository. What you find within its walls connects to something beyond them; tracing those connections is what gives documents historical significance and contextualizes their meaning in the present.
Inside the Archive
In June 2026, during my stay in Budapest as a Visegrad Fellow at the OSA Archivum, I came across an intriguing document from the Polish Underground Publications Unit. It was a seven-page typescript document bearing the uncanny title: ”Czy USA przetrwają do roku 2020? –“Will America Survive Until 2020? ” (HU OSA 300-55-10:9/14)
2020 was the final year of Donald J. Trump’s first term, shortly followed by the Capitol attack in January 2021. Then, the power was transferred to Joe Biden’s Democratic administration. This process was so staggering that one could have reasonably said, even then, that America had in some sense come to an end. America still exists, as of today. But how many people find an unsettling recognition in the question: ”Will America survive until 2020”?
Written in February 1986, we can identify it as the work of Ruch Polityczny “Wyzwolenie”, or the Political Movement “Liberation”, based on the signature, the format, and the content. This movement was one of the many groups active within Poland’s “Solidarity” period at that time.
In the summer of 1980, labor unrest surged across Poland. In the shipyard of Gdańsk, the “Solidarity” movement (NSZZ “Solidarność”) was born. Originally a labor union movement, it challenged the policy of the Polish United Workers’ Party to assert the rights of workers. In December 1981, martial law was declared in an attempt to suppress and illegalize the movement. As a result, the Solidarity went underground. As it spread across the country, the movement’s aims broadened to challenge the socialist system itself.
By early 1986, when “Will America Survive Until 2020?” was written, martial law had been lifted. However, the arrests and trials of the movement leaders kept anxiety running high. Within the movement, there were many groups coexisting, each with distinct political views. While the mainstream prioritized dialogue and international coordination, the political movement “Liberation”, by contrast, was composed largely of young urban journalists and educated people of right-leaning, (ethno-)nationalistic, and openly supportive of America’s “peace through strength” under the Reagan administration.
The document began from a stark premise: the authors from the “Liberation” group identified the Soviet Union as a malicious empire and argued that America could not hold Soviet expansion in check only by asserting its own hegemony. As the document stated,
“for these 40 years of the postwar [1945-1985], the American government failed to adequately recognize the character of the Russians, and acted as if unaware that Russians are characterized by duplicity, cunning, deceit, cynical violations of international agreements, disregard for their own constitution, national chauvinism, vindictiveness, and scheming. Russians cannot and must not be trusted.”
In other words, the group of Poles worried over America’s defenselessness in the face of Soviet tactics. As the document insists, this was a warning from a people with a long history of conflict and grievance with Russia. The authors did not hesitate to also make predictions. They claimed that the next 40 years would be decisive. Should America fail to correct its course, it would be destined to be “transformed into a People’s Republic.”:
“The ideological and political expansion of communism driven by the Soviet Union is so intensive that, if America and the Western countries continue to respect the Bolshevik doctrine of peaceful coexistence among countries of different socioeconomic systems for the next 40 years,
America will become a white enclave surrounded by communized countries of Central and South America and the communized countries of the Pacific. The Soviet Union will then strangle America economically, and by 2020 will certainly transform it by force into a People’s Republic.”
Written as a polemical political statement, the 40 years reference was more a rhetorical tool than a well-grounded calculation. The political declarations prevailed throughout the text, as the group questioned the principle of democratic transparency in information, and called America to “fulfill its historical mission.”:
“The United States and other Western countries act in complete openness, in accordance with the democratic freedom of the mass media; exposing themselves with inexcusable naivety, like a player who has no trump cards and no longer cares whether he wins or loses. […] We Poles are particularly irritated and alarmed when we read in the press about military details of the United States that should be closely guarded secrets, so as not to facilitate Soviet attack plans. Communist countries never publish their military budgets, yet America always does. Is this not a grave mistake? […] For America to accept its historical fate and carry out this historical mission is a matter of the dignity and honor of the American nation.”
A reader could state that some of these passages could have been written nowadays. For anyone who has followed the peace negotiations over the war in Ukraine under Trump’s second term, the resemblance to current discourse is so striking that the 40 years indeed did not make a huge difference.
Outside the Archive
After reading through the text and consulting the existing literature on the “Liberation” group, I just typed the Polish title—”Czy USA przetrwają do roku 2020?”—one more time in the search engine (Google), trying several different keyword combinations.
One result surprised me a lot. There was an article assuming the very same title, verbatim, but published in July 2012. It was an interview for the Polish online journal Polityka.pl. The interviewee was Johan Galtung (1930—2024), a Norwegian peace scholar known for theorizing the distinction between “positive peace” and “negative peace” as well as for a series of geopolitical predictions that proved accurate many times.
The interview was originally conducted in German for the Süddeutsche Zeitung by journalist Frederik Obermaier. As I could not obtain the original German article, I read the Polish translation.
The topics of the conversation ranged widely: terrorism, Barack Obama’s drone strikes, North Korea, and the Breivik massacre. Then, steering toward the end, the interviewer thus added an observation:
“In the past decades, your predictions have mostly proven correct. You predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, and later the rise of Islamism.”
Galtung responded to this commentary with another prediction:
“Yes. And now I say: by 2020, the American empire will no longer exist. If a Republican were to be elected president, the collapse would come even sooner.”
The reasoning behind “2020” likely factored in Obama’s term and the cycle of the American electoral system. After all, Obama served two full terms till the end of 2016. In that year, the Republican candidate Trump won against Hillary Clinton. And in January 2021, the Capitol was stormed by rioters.
Making Sense of the Archive
These two texts, highlighting the same question in the headlines, 26 years apart, arrived at the same conclusion from entirely opposite starting points.
On the one hand, the Polish “Liberation” group earnestly warned against a communist takeover brought about by Soviet diplomatic and military victory. On the other hand, Galtung diagnosed America itself as the empire, one destined to collapse from within. One text located the threat coming from Moscow. The other, from Washington, D.C.
Galtung’s argument, developed from the early 2000s onward, held that the American empire was destroying itself through military overextension, internal inequality, and the erosion of its stated values. Moreover, the peace scholar was not even an outside observer of Eastern European affairs. In fact, Galtung visited Poland in August and September of 1980, just as the “Solidarity” movement was taking its first steps, and he witnessed its birth in real time. The peace scholar had engaged since the 1970s with Eastern bloc countries, including Romania, through futurologist networks, and published an essay on the workers’ demands of the “Solidarity” movement.
Nothing about “2020” appeared in those analyses, though. Galtung almost certainly did not know about the Liberation group; the identical title is, as far as I can determine, a pure coincidence. Thus, America survived; perhaps in a slightly different way than one could imagine. Neither text proved entirely correct. Yet the question, both arrived at from different times and polars of the Cold War, was the right one to ask. The archive, in this case, did not offer an answer, but left a sharp resonance with our present.
Anna Nakai is an intellectual historian affiliated with Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Her research focuses on East-Central European cultural and political dissent. She was on a Visegrad Fellowship at the OSA Archivum in Budapest in June 2026. Her ongoing project examines Poland Monthly (Porando Geppō), a Japanese-language bulletin published in Tokyo from 1981 to 1991, and analyzes the reception of East-Central European alternative socialist thought in postwar Japan. She also conducts her transnational research on samizdat circulation as a four-year project with the JSPS (Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science) individual fund.
This article belongs to our series, called Challenging Archives, jointly organized by Review of Democracy and Blinken Open Society Archives, based in Budapest.
The Blinken Open Society Archives, or the OSA, is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. One of the most important parts is Radio Free Europe’s archives. It is not only an archive; it is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, state socialism, human rights, and surveillance.
The OSA Archivum is an activist archive that strives to publicly reflect on matters of social interest, including revisionism, falsification of history, and violation of human rights. They also provide fellowships for promising researchers who want to investigate the archival funds. In particular, the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists, journalists, and scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials. Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries.
In our series, we invite the Visegrad Fellows who share their experience with working with this fascinating archive.
