The U.S. may need a new crystal ball

by John Brady Kiesling

Through the miracle of email I know I have at least one regular reader outside my immediate family. I therefore dedicate this column to Dr David Green, who suggested that I discuss "Global Trends 2025", a 120-page opus just released by the US National Intelligence Council (the text is free at http://www. dni. gov/nic/NIC-2025-project.html). As the title suggests, the report sets out to describe the global trends that will shape the world in 2025.

The NIC was created to coordinate and, where possible, popularise the work of the 16 official members of the "US Intelligence Community". Hollywood notwithstanding, this does not mean that 13 other agencies - the really secret ones, unlike CIA, DIA, and NSA ­ are tunnelling under the Acropolis to upload mind-control software into key Greek politicians and their spiritual advisers. Instead, the majority of intelligence community employees belong to overt outfits like the Treasury Department and Coast Guard, with jobs depressingly like my current one. They surf the internet, read newspapers, have coffee with each other, sneak off to the gym, and then write articles that will one day, if they are lucky, be honoured by an email from Dr Green.

In his email to me, Dr Green summarised the NIC study well enough that I don't need to.

"It paints an emergent global canvas uncannily like the decline of the British empire, eg decreasing American leverage in world politics, a paradigm economic shift from West to East, increased local nationalist disputes and a decline in the power of the dollar. It envisages a multipolar world by 2025 with increasing conflicts over water, oil, food etc."

Of course, what Dr Green was too polite to say was that this is not a description of what the world will look like in 2025; it is a description of the world looked like a few months ago, precisely when the NIC undertook its latest crash program of dining out with eminent international pundits. Pundits figured out centuries ago that the safest way to maintain a reputation for punditry is to predict the present rather than the future. And since, as Voltaire's Dr Pangloss (or maybe it was Leibniz) pointed out, we live in the best of all possible worlds, it would be impious to foresee a different world in any case.

Anti-Americanism will fade of its own accord, the NIC opines, collateral damage from America's shrinking power. Yes, but in that case so what? America needs global popularity only if it wants to be a global player. Terrorism will also subside, the NIC tentatively suggests, unless it doesn't. Unfortunately, when it comes to terrorism the NIC has a short, America-centred memory. It sees terrorism as a Middle Eastern phenomenon, the product of religious fanaticism and lack of democracy. If the NIC understood that terrorism is a tactic routinely used by the weaker side in power struggles, it would take a less languid stance towards the intensifying competition for resources within states already on the verge of failure.

If the weakness of the NIC is its parochialism, its strength is the leisure, money, and prestige to cozy up to actual scientists in possession of actual data. I was hoping, therefore, to learn what the US government really thinks will happen to global sea levels, at least a consensus guesstimate. But Vice President Cheney's icy claw apparently still loiters perilously close to Washington's collective windpipe. On global climate change, therefore, the NIC offered an uncontroversial Hollywood scenario, a freak hurricane putting Wall Street under water. This will happen some day, but worse things will have happened first.

What good are pundits if they have only weasel words for the impact of migration patterns that are already undermining European and American commitments to democratic values? How many millions of people will be put on the march by climate change is a question with deadly-serious implications for the future of democracy. Nor does the NIC seriously address the question of who will run out of irrigation water when. If an enlightened democracy like Greece cannot impose groundwater conservation on a few thousand cotton and citrus farmers, we can extrapolate the certainty of civil war and humanitarian catastrophe due to groundwater depletion in parts of Africa and Asia.

When a pundit washes his hands of catastrophe by saying the world will be multipolar, it is time to change the channel on your crystal ball. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, "bipolarity" was a psychiatric disorder, not a description of the international scene. Viewed in enough detail to be meaningful, the world has never been anything but multipolar. At the height of US "unipolarity" in 2002, a dozen tribal chieftains, militant mullahs, Pakistani intel officers, or narco-traffickers still possessed the same capability as the US government to project power (eg, fifteen armed men or $20,000) into a given Afghan village. Adding Chinese or Indians to the mix, an important but also obvious NIC prediction for 2025, only reinforces the common-sense message that what proved impossible for a rich and self-confident superpower may also be difficult for a Iraq-scalded and indebted one. So we must build international institutions sturdy enough to cope with the huge, complex emergencies that will be taking place simultaneously in many parts of the globe.

The main point of making dire predictions is to change our behaviour enough to make our predictions turn out wrong. The NIC staff timidly invites the next US president to take measures to change the future, but is not brave enough to suggest how. Perhaps this fuzzy, harmless report will help President-elect Obama forgive the NIC's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction." But unless the experts go out on a limb by suggesting pragmatic solutions to a few of the perfectly predictable demographic/envi- ronmental, economic/political crises looming before our noses, new secretary of state Hillary Clinton will end up stuck in a present no less ugly for the remarkable ability of US-sponsored pundits to "predict" it accurately.