The sobering judgments of the US National Intelligence Council’s forecast, Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed is a reality check long overdue. It states that the US will be “less dominant” over the coming years, and few of the world’s powers are equipped to deal with the threats of informal conflict, pandemic and climate change.
This puts paid to the militaristic triumphalism of the Bush years, the notion of US exceptionalism that colored the Cheney-Rumsfeld outlook on the world. The US would succeed, according to the neocon sect, because it had the technical means to effect “full spectrum dominance” in any battle space, and deep in its heart the US is founded on democracy and justice — whatever it may get up to in its detention centers and torture chambers.
The report puts a full stop to a trend which had set in long before Cheney and Co. got back to power in 2000. It turns on its head the thesis of books such as Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History,” which proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy and the free market at the end of the Cold War, and the collapse of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe from 1989 to 1991.
In tone it is far closer to an earlier polemical masterpiece of geopolitical triumph and disaster, Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” which appeared at the end of World War I. Spengler sought to get rid of the shackles of history, and the legacy of militarism that had destroyed Europe. Paradoxically the NIC report shows how the future of humanity is now shackled to geography, and the natural and human environment.
By 2025 big environmental changes, already visible in the rapid melting of the icecaps, will be having a direct human impact. It predicts mass forced migration by dramatic climatic changes, rising sea levels, growing deserts, momentous natural convulsions like hurricanes and floods.
The eye-catching headline in the report is the suggestion of the decline of the US as world superpower. This has long been predicted — the US is currently proposing to spend approaching $700 billion on its defense budget, which still can’t buy guaranteed success in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the middle of the century, however, the US will be the leading military superpower. Like Mark Twain’s premature obituary, news of the early death of America’s superpower status may seem exaggerated. But technical military might correlates less and less to real power and influence in the world. Already US diplomatic leverage is much less than it was in 2000. The White House has less influence than ever on the Middle East peace process between the Palestinians and Israel — and not only because of the follies of Bush’s Iraq adventure and posture over the July 2006 Lebanon war.
The US way of hyper-technological digitalized warfare is now well-suited to what the NIC report calls new modes of “asymmetric warfare”. This has been understood for a decade or two now. The new guerrilla gangs and war bands have learned how to fight below the “threshold of sophistication”, as the jargon puts it, of modern armies. In Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, there are still no foolproof counter measures to the buried roadside booby trap and the suicide bomb.
Informal warfare, in which the protagonist does not operate in formed disciplined armies, has been signaled for some time now. The new age of the guerrilla began with the wars of national liberation since World War II. After NATO’s first military operation against Kosovo in 1999, the new way of fighting was given a doctrine in a pamphlet by two senior Chinese generals called Unrestricted Warfare. It suggested that the Americans had shown such technical prowess in bombing the Serbs in 1999, that the only way to defeat them was by adopting all and any other means of fighting them, the fouler the better. One of the most potent components in the new forms of conflict and war is criminality, organizations that acknowledge no power of the law and the state. Combating organized crime has been on the security agendas of Western powers for a long time — but as important, and if anything more intractable is disorganized crime, the manifestations of general criminality, like the pirates of the Somali coast and the Straits of Malacca. The pirates have managed to elude half the world’s navies, and bag the world’s biggest supertankers with seeming impunity. As states like Congo, Somalia, bits of Pakistan and the wilder parts of the Caucasus, slide toward nonstatehood and anarchy — the real meaning of the “failed state” tag I suppose — the commerce of hijack, kidnap and ransom will spread.
The NIC doesn’t hold out much joy for Europe, either. The EU bloc is likely to stagnate, and decline even, as Brazil, India and China overtake it. In the next two or three generations, Western and northern Europe will face an enormous demographic challenge in modern history. Since the Dark Ages, Europe has been more populous than the lands and communities in a thousand-mile radius around it. Now that is being reversed as the density and pressure of populations on the periphery matches and challenges those at the center. This was noted in a curiously underreported and visionary speech a year or so ago by David Miliband.
