Considerations

So I recently came across a report writ­ten last year by the U.S. National Intel­li­gence Coun­cil on what the world may look like in sev­en­teen years. Here is a summary:

The whole inter­na­tional system—as con­structed fol­low­ing WWII—will be rev­o­lu­tion­ized. Not only will new players—Brazil, Rus­sia, India and China— have a seat at the inter­na­tional high table, they will bring new stakes and rules of the game.

The unprece­dented trans­fer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will con­tinue for the fore­see­able future.

Unprece­dented eco­nomic growth, cou­pled with 1.5 bil­lion more peo­ple, will put pres­sure on resources—particularly energy, food, and water—raising the specter of scarci­ties emerg­ing as demand out­strips supply.

The poten­tial for con­flict will increase owing partly to polit­i­cal tur­bu­lence in parts of the greater Mid­dle East.

The full report is here. (The NIC is also pre­dicted trends for 2020.)

Firstly, one inter­est­ing obser­va­tion is how dif­fer­ent news­pa­pers inter­pret the find­ings. The Times of Eng­land’s head­line men­tions “super­power strife” and the increas­ing prob­lems that will face the United States and Euro­pean Union. The Guardian of Eng­land’s head­line flatly pro­claims “the end of U.S. dominance.”

Amir Mizroch, the news edi­tor of the Jerusalem Post, sum­ma­rizes the find­ings this way:

Fif­teen years from now Amer­ica is still glob­ally pre­em­i­nent, yet its rel­a­tive power is in decline. The US faces mul­ti­ple threats from state and non-state actors, some of which have super­seded their nation states and could be in pos­ses­sion of weapons of mass destruction.

Mega-cities forge their own poli­cies and partnerships.

Com­plex threats tran­scend geo­graphic bor­ders and orga­ni­za­tional bound­aries, and small local skir­mishes quickly esca­late into world­wide shoot­ing wars. Asia and the Mid­dle East are awash with WMD; space, the Arc­tic and cyber­space become increas­ingly mil­i­ta­rized. Gov­ern­ments around the world take a zero-sum atti­tude to inter­na­tional affairs and retreat from free trade agree­ments, while sim­mer­ing com­pe­ti­tion between nations results in a grow­ing wave of nation­al­ism, reviv­ing his­toric tensions.

All of these inter­pre­ta­tions are accu­rate, but they are dif­fer­ent. This just goes to show that it is impos­si­ble for jour­nal­ists to be objec­tive — and, as a for­mer one myself, I should know. What jour­nal­ists should be is fair.

Sec­ondly, the pre­dic­tions them­selves. As Mizroch notes:

…the report looks at how identity-based groups sup­plant the author­ity of nation-states, com­pet­ing with one another for influ­ence in a chaotic polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment. By 2025 a sub­tle but unmis­tak­able power shift has enabled identity-centric groups to grad­u­ally sup­plant the author­ity of tra­di­tional nation-states. National lead­ers fre­quently find their author­ity chal­lenged in a vari­ety of indi­rect ways: mega-cities forge their own poli­cies and part­ner­ships, a mul­ti­tude of social and polit­i­cal move­ments lobby for change, and ide­o­log­i­cally moti­vated groups cause vio­lent disruptions.

In an ear­lier post, I observed that increas­ing cul­tural nihilism is a symp­tom of the West­ern world’s sub­con­scious despair at their coun­tries’ seem­ing declines. (For the long-term effects, see Japan.) The report is cor­rect in not­ing that the inter­na­tional sys­tem of nation-states in place since the Treaty of West­phalia in 1648 will become increas­ingly vul­ner­a­ble. As peo­ple through­out the world increas­ingly embrace their eth­nic and reli­gious iden­ti­ties — partly as a defense mech­a­nism to com­bat their fears of glob­al­iza­tion and what the future may hold — they will demand polit­i­cal rights as well. Coun­tries that have his­tor­i­cally been a het­ero­ge­neous col­lec­tion of nation­al­i­ties and reli­gions — like, for exam­ple, the United States, Rus­sia, and United King­dom — will might come close to break­ing apart because they are in the lat­ter stages of the often-cited Tytler Cycle. When young peo­ple see what the world might look like in 2025, it is no won­der that they are extremely upset to the point of pos­si­bly com­mit­ting inter­gen­er­a­tional war­fare in the future.

As the NIC notes, “the unprece­dented trans­fer of wealth roughly from West to East now under way will con­tinue for the fore­see­able future” — until the West­ern world can kick its addi­tion to oil and then stop fund­ing auto­cratic regimes that in turn fund Islamic extrem­ism under a Devil’s bar­gain to stop the ter­ror­ists from attack­ing them.

Coun­tries like China, India, and Brazil will become increas­ingly pow­er­ful — per­haps to the point of dom­i­nance by bring­ing “new stakes and rules of the game” — because they are tak­ing advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ties pro­vided by glob­al­iza­tion while the United States is not. (I do not men­tion Rus­sia, because that coun­try is declin­ing as well as a result of below-replacement-rate demo­graph­ics, ten­sions inside between eth­nic groups, and those out­side with China. Russia’s cur­rent aggres­sive­ness is like the last, vio­lent rat­tle of a body five sec­onds before it dies.)

Of course, past trends to do not guar­an­tee future results. But these changes are evi­dent enough to those who have been pay­ing atten­tion. Inter­est­ing times, and all.

Related posts:

1. 2025
2. Mov­ing to Israel
3. Twenty-One Ways to Save the World
4. Would the World Be Bet­ter With­out Israel?
5. Why ‘They’ Hate the United States