Welcome To A (Very) Dismal Future

Psychologists and their ilk have tried to topspin depression with studies showing that depressed people are more realistic in assessing their current and future situations than people who are not depressed. Perhaps this is true. It seems the US intelligence community thinks so.

Reading the Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (QICR) with its dystopian view of the world and the US in 2025 is guaranteed to bring depression in its wake. This depressed state is enhanced by seeing the predictions as perhaps erring on the optimistic side.

The major take away of the QICR is that while the US will still be a Great Power, it will be far less of a Great Power fifteen years hence than even its diminished state today. The really Great Power will be China. While not stated with this bluntness in the QICR, it exists as a subtext in most of the document's four sets of scenarios.

Certainly the goal of the Gnomes of Beijing is that of presiding over China's emergence as the Really Great Power. That goal was explicit even in the snit thrown the other day in Copenhagen by the Chinese Prime Minister, who was bent out of shape by President Obama's unexceptional call for full transparency and accountability through international monitoring as regards emission controls and their effectiveness.

The Chinese shouted that such a monitoring and verification effort would compromise Chinese sovereignty and limit the country's economic growth. Even if this is not a necessary interpretation of the need for verification, any such international effort would carry the potential of impairing China's trajectory to Really Great Power status.

The QICR does call the nature and character of Great Power status into severe and genuine question in the first of its four sections. Entitled "Politics Is Not Always Local" this portion of the review raises the specter of transnational groups based on identity politics with access to weapons of mass destruction as well as high level capacities in cyberwarfare.

Identity politics has become a massive motivator of human behavior over the past fifty years. It doesn't matter if the basis of identity is racial, ethnic, religious, or ideological, when people derive their core identity from some external aspect, the capacity for True Belief and its implications becomes very high. Identity politics produces extreme actions. Extreme actions produce galloping instability in either a national arena or the global one.

The nation state as currently known will be under attack by identity politics powered groups including sub-national defensive insurgencies such as the Russians have become so familiar with in the Caucasus. China, even a China which is the Really Great Power of the 2020s, will be threatened with the same given the plethora of minorities under the Han yoke.

The nation state and its international system will also be under continued (and probably massively enhanced) pressure from Islamist practitioners of identity politics. The probability of this is, if anything, somewhat understated by the producers of the QICR. With the growing likelihood of Egypt going the way of Iran in the next few years, the number of potential sponsors or facilitators of Islamist jihadism is not going to lessen. It can only increase.

Should Pakistan go down the route pioneered by the mullahs of Iran, the Islamist jihadists would have not one but two potential nuclear suppliers. The use of such weapons by True Believers should never be underestimated. (Nor should Egypt's past and present role as a proliferator be overlooked, particularly with the high probability of the Muslim Brotherhood taking over long before 2025.)

The spooks correctly predict the further decline of the West. In the section "The World Without the West," the planners foresee a global dynamic in which Europe and the US are largely irrelevant, capable of being ignored with impunity by Iran, Russia, China, and India. (And others as well.) This projection seems counter intuitive given the size and economic strength of the European Union, but can be easily justified by the erosion of political will and national self-confidence on the part of its major constituent nations.

The same loss of political will can be envisioned for the US. The aftermath of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the effects of demographic changes in the American population as well as the economic consequences thereof will be profoundly weakening of both political will and material capacity to act independently on the global stage.

In this context it is worth noting that recent opinion polls show that a high percentage of We the People expect that China will surpass the US in all the measures of hard power over the next twenty years. There seems to be no odor of despair over this eventuality. Neither does there appear to be much desire on the part of the US government to take measures which would reduce the disparity between Chinese and American hard power capacities.

In what should be a modestly optimistic section of the QICR, the prognosticators of spookdom see the BRIC as crumbling. The ending of any alliance potential between Brazil, Russia, China and India is a tribute to the continued power of nationalism. While nationalism may be anathema to the elites of the US and Europe, it is and will continue as a major force in other areas of the world. Ironically, the competition for resources and markets between Marxist tinged states such as Russia and China may prove yet that Marx was right about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.

When taken in conjunction with the impact of sub-national and trans-national non-state actors, the competition between Really Great Power China, Sort of Great Power Russia, Wannabe Great Power India and Regional Great Power Brazil will serve to diminish the threats all present to the interests of the US. This area seems to be one which can be explored by future US administrations with profit for the American national and strategic interests.

The neo-neo-mercantilism which will govern the actions of the BRIC nations will be complicated by the emergence of what the spooks term "mega-cities" forming their own policies regarding trade, economic goals, migration, and even "national" security. Mega-cities with their intense concentration of people, skills, markets, money, and (in some cases at least) intellectual property will be a major force in international affairs which has been undervalued before this QICR.

Mega-cities have the capacity even today to profoundly influence national policy. With the probable decline in power held by central governments for the reasons previously adumbrated, the ability of these massive congeries to practice independent operations regardless of central government desires will be a major complication for future American policy makers.

The most important consideration (leaving aside the relative decline of the US) is that the world of 2025 will be chaotically multi-polar. The proliferation of actors ranging from identity politics driven groups to mega-cities and trans-national corporations will combine with the erosion of central governments, the reduction of international restraints, and the spread of weapons of mass destruction to bring wars large and small into existence.

Problems ranging from crime to climate change, from migration control to the militarization of the arctic and cyberspace, from the erosion of ethical standards in biotechnology to the depletion of energy prime mover reserves will not only increase dramatically but threaten to spin beyond the control of people to handle. Overall the picture ain't at all pretty.

We are blessed (or cursed) by living in interesting times. The future appears to be even more interesting.

Are you feeling depressed yet?