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The latest offering from the US intelligence community
paints a picture of a fragmented world over the next 20
years.
The predictions are contained in a report called Global Trends
2025 from the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which brings
together all the US intelligence agencies. The Global Trends
reports are issued every five years and this is the fourth of its
kind.
Among its predictions: the US will remain the most powerful
country but will be less dominant; power will shift from West to
East; the appeal of al-Qaeda will lessen; a multipolar world will
emerge with China, India and others playing greater roles; an "arc
of instability" will stretch round the world among countries with
young populations.
First, a note of scepticism about these reports.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was campaigning against President
Jimmy Carter for the US presidency, he did so on the basis that the
United States was about to be overwhelmed by the Soviet Union and
Japan. At that time, Japan filled the role that China does now - it
was going to take over the world with its economic muscle.
United States
In fact it was the US that reasserted itself. Part of it was the
Bill Gates effect. A whole new industry was invented to help
cushion the impact of the death of the old. Microsoft ruled the
world. It was Japan that entered a long period of relative
stagnation and indeed is hardly ever talked of these days as a
world influence. As for the Soviet Union, we know what
happened.
That collapse in itself should give us pause when looking at
this kind of long-range report. Almost nobody predicted it. Those
that did were crying in the wilderness. The same people who failed
in their predictions were then wheeled out to explain why the
collapse they had not foreseen had taken place.
The same thing is going on right now over the financial
crisis.
Russia
If you look back at the Global Trends report issued in 1997,
which peered ahead to 2010, the nearest time to our own, you can
see the problems of prediction. That report said of Russia: "The
erosion in the authority of the central Russian government that has
occurred will not be easily reversed."
President Putin has already reasserted central control and we
have over a year to go before 2010. Further, the 1997 report was
quite optimistic about democracy in Russia: "President Yeltsin's
successors could try to arrest the current sense of drift in
Moscow. That said, authoritative leadership would not necessarily
be the same as authoritarian rule. Strong leadership could buttress
democratic institutions and norms still in their infancy..." Has
that happened?
To be fair, that report did accurately forecast one future trend
of Russian policy: "The most likely outlet in foreign policy would
be Russian efforts to rebuild a sphere of influence over its
immediate neighbours."
And I noticed that, on Iraq, it correctly said that Saddam
Hussein would be gone.
So one must arm oneself with prudence when reading these
reports. They are often influenced by what is going on right now,
which they then simply project into the future. For example the
current report appears to have been written before the worst of the
current credit crunch and assumes that economic growth will
continue in much the same way that it has in the past.
There are also flashes of the blindingly obvious. If oil prices
go up, we are told, major exporters will do well. If prices come
down, they will not. Yes.
But having said that, there are some useful indicators and
overall the importance of a document like this, if it does its job
properly, is to remove from national leaders any suggestion that
they have all the answers.
This report will be welcomed round the world and by many in a
United States that has just elected a new president committed to
changing the way America does business. It puts an end to talk that
came to the fore just before the Bush administration took office in
2001 - which was that a "New American Century" was at hand, in
which the US would use its power to assert its beliefs for the good
of the world as it saw fit.
The report says that the Western model of economic liberalism,
democracy and secularism "may lose its lustre". The implication of
that is we will hear less about democracy as a way of justifying
policy than we have in recent years.
That will not be welcome to those for whom democracy is a
beacon. But it is probably a realistic expectation.