The World of 2025
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James Joyner | Friday, November 21, 2008 |
Thomas Fingar, the chair of the National Intelligence Council, spoke to the Atlantic Council last night on the release of “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World.” He and his team project nearly two decades into the future in order to “stimulate strategic thinking” among U.S. policymakers during this period of transition between presidential administrations. This undertaking is useful, as Council president Fred Kempe noted, “in a town that doesn’t tend to look past the current news cycle.”
The intelligence community, think tanks, and others have a notoriously poor track record when trying to project even a few years ahead, so this is, in one sense, an exercise in futility. As I argue in my New Atlanticist piece “Predicting the Future is Hard – And Necessary,” though, we don’t have much choice but to try.
In the first of many follow-up pieces, “U.S. Dominance Ending,” I take a look at the NIC’s forecast that the era of United States unipolarity will end, replaced by a multipolar world in which China, India, and Russia have much more influence.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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"Predicting the future is hard - and necessary"... indeed. It's done well and it's done badly, and we depend on this stuff! A
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