While we remain almost totally immersed in domestic concerns, others are busy monitoring major trends that are rapidly reconfiguring the world as we know it. Among the global futu-rists is the United States (US) National Intelligence Council (NIC), which coordinates analysis from all US intelligence agencies. The Guardian newspaper in Britain devoted its page one lead story and another couple of pages on November 21 to the latest four-yearly report of the NIC, 'Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World'.
This is something one is not likely to see in Jamaican media, although The Gleaner must be commended for carrying excerpts of the Chinese policy for Latin America and the Caribbean. The full NIC report can be found at www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html
"We prepared Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," the NIC said, "to stimulate strategic thinking about the future by identifying key trends, the factors that drive them, where they seem to be headed, and how they might interact. (The report) uses scenarios to illustrate some of the many ways in which the drivers examined in the study (e.g., globalisation, demography, the rise of new powers, the decay of international institutions, climate change, and the geopolitics of energy) may interact to generate challenges and opportunities for future decision-makers. The study as a whole is more a description of the factors likely to shape events than a prediction of what will actually happen."
And what do they see? Drawing from The Guardian summary, the widely consultative report is warning that the world is entering an unstable and unpredictable period in which the advance of Western-style democracy cannot be taken for granted and the US will no longer be able to 'call the shots' alone as its power begins to wane. This view is not, of course, beyond challenge. The 2004 report for 2020 had confidently predicted continued US dominance, with most major powers forsaking the idea of balancing the US.
broken global financial system
The NIC is now seeing emerging big economies, such as China, India and Brazil, growing in influence, and doing so at America's expense. These countries, and others of 'influence', were participants in the G20 meeting in Washington two weekends ago, which was called by the US to fix the broken global financial system.
The European Union (EU) will be "losing clout", the report is predic-ting, and a 'democracy gap' separa-ting Brussels from voters will help to make the EU a "hobbled giant" unable to translate its economic power into global influence.
"China," the report predicts, "is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country," with the second-biggest economy, as the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter, and as a leading military power having vast capacity for cyber warfare.
The world of 2025, a mere 17 years away, through the visioning eyes of the NIC, will be a fragmented world in which conflicts over scarce resources are on the rise and poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions, while nuclear proliferation, parti-cularly in the Middle East, and even nuclear conflict, grow more likely. But these, in my view, are precisely the conditions in which a world hungry for peace and safety above everything else will be desperately hunting for a superleader and a superstate. Global Obamamania is a sign of things to come.
The report, from its strong American angle of vision, is warning that the spread of Western democratic capitalism cannot be taken for gran-ted as it was by President George Bush and America's neo-conservatives. "The Western model of economic liberalism, democracy and secularism which many assumed to be inevitable, may lose its lustre - at least in the medium term." But, it is not just a failure of expansion of Western liberal democracy and capitalism that the world is now facing; it is its contraction - everywhere.
capitalist economies
The current financial crisis has seen a sudden and massive expansion of state intervention in and ownership of the commanding heights of capitalist economies and deepening public distrust of capitalism. And the world has been looking to America for leadership out of the crisis. So much for the decline of American power! "Today," the report says, "wealth is concentrating more under state control. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the state's role in the economy may be gaining more appeal in the world."
The earlier and ongoing 'War on Terrorism', plus fighting increasing internal lawlessness, had seen a progressive constriction of civil liberties in Western democracies. The citizens of Britain, for example, the home of modern parliamentary democracy and a liberty leader, are now the most watched in the world. Closed-circuit television is everywhere, a situation unmatched by any of the few remaining totalitarian states, and all in the interest of security and public order.
Of particular interest to Jamaica, the NIC report is predicting more failed and lawless states, like Somalia, by 2025. There will be a shift in some places from the state to non-state actors, such as corporations, tribes, religious groups and criminal gangs. "Several countries could even be taken over and run by criminal networks. While the eyes of the NIC are focused on 'backward' Africa and South Asia for this kind of meltdown of the state, they may be reminded that the disintegration of the state has played out in recent times in the Balkans in Europe and America itself, and much of the rest of Europe is facing 'fragmentation' into conflicting factions of various sorts. The solution will be more and more draconian anti-liberty measures for cohesion and order."
The world of 2025, just around the corner, will see conflicts over scarce resources, from oil to water. Scarcity of land, water, oil, food and 'airspace' for carbon emissions, with a global population of eight billion, will be the hallmarks of the times.
multi-polar world
The NIC's 2025 report fails to reconcile its predictions of weak international institutions like the United Nations being unable to handle the mega-problems of the planet and the declining power of the US, with a multi-polar world emerging. Where is that going to come from? "While the NIC's conclusions are in accord with President-elect Obama's stated preference for multilateralism," The Guardian says, "they suggest that it could become harder for Washington to put together 'coalitions of the willing' to pursue its agenda."
A far likelier scenario for 2025 is that the USA and the EU, with their shared histories, culture, ideo-logy - and old religions - and their new problems in a decaying and chaotic world, will form a North Atlantic axis of power aimed at driving a new world order whose primary goals will be peace and order.
Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.