This is the age of violent change and wars; between just around the peak of the economic change cycle (2006) and just after the peak of the national wealth cycle (2021).  The following method was used on 1000 years of war cycle history; my 300 years in Roman times, the last 500 years in Europe according to Joshua Goldstein, and my 200 years of American wars.  I used the top two wars in each cycle, with 10 points to the top war and 5 points to the second largest death total war, all posted to the current cycle.  In the 27 year half cycle period of 2004 to 2031 comes 93% of this major war activity, with 7% in the 27 year peace cycle.  So we are currently in the middle of the war cycle that began one year early with the Iraq war in 2003.  This compares to the immediate prior war period of 1950 to 1977 that started with Korea in 1950.  The previous period can help us suggest the patterns of the current period and upcoming period.  Civil rights and wars dominated the last period as well as the current period. 

Economic Growth

            The wellspring of all these things, wars, tensions, terror, and domestic struggles is the fact that economic growth changes our ways of thinking and allows us to think new possibilities of all kinds.  Revolutions do not occur in bad economic times so much as after things start to get better.  The boundaries between justice and war get blurred.  So an act of war can be terror, and justice struggles often come with violence.  So when Churchill gives his "Iron Curtain" speech is that the beginning of the Cold War or the beginning of a justice movement in Eastern European countries occupied by the Soviet Union?  History now tells us that both views had a little truth in them.

War and Terror Patterns

            The current terror in France, Charlie Hebdo in January and Friday the Thirteenth in November 2015, relate to events of 54 years ago in 1961.  Then we had the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin Wall and the next year the Cuban Missile Crisis. Likewise, a few years prior, we had 2011, a lot like the year 1956 fifty-five years before.  In 2011 we had the Arab Spring, in 1956 we had the Hungarian revolt. Both Egypt and Hungary ended up in the hands of the military.  In 1956 the British French and Israel took back the Suez Canal, until the US made them back down.  In 2011 Khadafi and Assad started murdering their people to stay in power, the US intervened to liberate Libya but left Syria alone leading to the ISIS terror attacks in Paris in 2015.

Civil Rights Patterns

            The mid century civil rights struggle began in earnest with the Brown v Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954, then elected the first black president 54 years later in 2008.  Hollywood blacklisted many people thanks to Wisconsin US Senator Joe McCarthy who overstepped in 1957 then died in office that year.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott success in 1957 began the career of Martin Luther King, Jr.  54 years later, Scott Walker Governor of Wisconsin began the labor rights reversal trend of the Tea Party when he overcame the Wisconsin Uprising of 500,000 in the streets over four weeks against him. Thanks to massive protests in Saint Louis, New York, and Baltimore in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement against police shooting to death unarmed young black men developed into the Chicago march on Black Friday November 2015, 52 years after the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963.  The backlash in 1964 turned the Solid Democratic South into the Solid Republican South of today.  The election of the first black president lead to the Tea Party takeover of congress beginning with the 2010 election that gave Republicans complete control of 26 States, with labor rollbacks in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan.  Gerrymandering has virtually assured a Republican congress for the decade after 2010.

Other Consequences 

            The US closed its embassy in Cuba in 1961, only to re-open it 54 years later in 2015.  A major war like a new Vietnam or worse is likely historically in the year 2025 give or take a year or two or more.  In the previous cycle, police were more like social workers, today they are more like soldiers.  Even so, the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 will long be remembered for the police riot against antiwar demonstrators.  But they used billy clubs then, now they are trained to shoot first and ask questions later with unarmed young blacks.  Now there are six times the black men in prison compared to 1980 when Jimmy Carter was president.  

Here is an excellent example of how war spending and the domestic crime scene are linked:

https://www.academia.edu/4862977/CRIME_and_the_Military_1989-1999_3p._1999

Hint: to read this paper for free, you must click on the tiny word "read" in the middle of the bottom of the screen after you go to the above link on academia.edu.