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?

Yet One More Recognition Of Reality

Will miracles never cease!

For the second time in as many days, an official US government agency has admitted the truth of what has long been bruited about by people with a firm grip on reality. This time the teller of true tales is the National Intelligence Council which represents all sixteen (that's right sixteen! US intelligence agencies or services.)

In what should be a stop-the-presses-there's-a-remake-of-page-one news, the NIC in its "Global Trends 2025" report foresees the full re-emergence of a multi-polar world. The US will, it is projected, be only one of an international troika. The other two Great Powers are predicted to be India and the Peoples Republic of China.

Arguably, the NIC should have projected a four power structure since Russia is far from being down and out as recent events have demonstrated. Given the historical resiliency of Russia as well as the success to date of its statist approach to economics and the continued presence of significant strategic natural resources, Russia has both the latent will and ability to function as a Great Power. The Geek contends that the Russians are more suited to the Great Power role than the Indians.

The important point is not the number or even the identity of the other poles in a multi-polar global political gavotte, but rather that the short lived American dominance of the world's stage has ended. While no person well oriented as to time and place thought that the US unipolar role would last in perpetuity, it is fair to propose that the idiocy of the neocon ninnie ideology put into practice with such a heavy hand by the W. Bush administration hastened the end of the American pre-eminence.

The Deep Thinkers of the NIC showed an appreciation of history in their report by noting that the world of 2025 would be inherently unstable. Multi-polar global politics in the past have demonstrated convincingly that the more poles there are, the more the world wobbles on its multiple political axes.

All one needs to do is think back to the 1930s. The world was multi-polar at that time even though two of the poles--the US and USSR--were more potential than real. The emergence of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan were alive, well, kicking and laden with ambition for regional hegemony at the least. Although crippled and weakened both in political will and material resources by World War I, both the British and French empires were in existence and served either as foils to ambitions or rich areas to be dominated and plundered.

As had been the case in earlier periods of extreme multi-polarism such as the decades before World War I and in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, alliance systems between more or less congruent polarities emerged. The coalescence of polarities into alliance systems resulted in war.

An argument may be made on the basis of history that a bi-polar political structure such as existed during the Cold War or earlier during the years of Anglo-French rivalry can be both stable and risky. The Geek is unwilling to push argument by historical analogy too far as the risk of the Cold War period have often been understated and the stability was more apparent than real if one examines the entire world rather than staring only at the two Great Powers.

The emergence of China as an unquestioned Great Power should not give the American analysts or We the People any comfort. Perhaps it was the very disconcerting acceptance of the fact of China's arrival at Great Power status that persuaded the members of the NIC to put India on the list of tomorrow's Big Players. China and India have a long and not particularly peaceful history of contesting over regional hegemony. Does it stretch credibility beyond its Young's Modulus to assume that the prognosticators of the NIC are hoping that the two uneasy Asian bedfellows will be so preoccupied with each other that they will ignore the rest of us?

(In the past century American policy makers have often wished for an Asian duality which would assure that no country would emerge with regional hegemon status. Theodore Roosevelt hoped that Japan and Russia would keep each other in the crosshairs so that the Open Door in China would not be slammed in our face. Later, the Cold Warriors of the post-Eisenhower years bet on China and the USSR being locked in a sumo wrestler's embrace leaving us free to pursue our goals.)

The long and bloody record of history shows that competition over critical resources has been a cause of war more times than can be counted conveniently. The NIC prediction correctly notes that the resource base of the world is not getting larger. It stays the same or shrinks (as in the case of oil still in the ground) while the global population grows, and grows and grows.

Even if one does not subscribe to the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis, it is well established that many areas of the world (can we say, "Africa?") have population growth that far outstrips the carrying capacity of the continent's arable land. There are more than a few places around the planet where the supply of potable water is less than that required for basic human needs let alone any requirements of agricultural or industrial use.

Malthus may have been wrong generally, but that does not imply that the much maligned man's notions did not have applicability in particular situations. Social and political unrest, open violence both intra- and inter-state in nature, and recurrent humanitarian crises are the necessary and inevitable consequences of population needs which cannot be adequately met by readily available resources.

The NIC report was bang on in its pessimistic view of the future where and when these factors are considered. The group was also dead right in another, very critical human factor.

That factor?

Extremism. The day of al-Qaeda may have long gone by 2025 as NIC predicts. However, extremism will be far from a feature seen only in history texts. Resource scarcity or maldistribution breed desperation. As the Geek has written before: Desperate people (and states) do desperate deeds.

It may be taken as a given, even as axiomatic, that the wealth and resources of the world in 2025 will be unequally distributed among the people of the globe. It may be taken as a given, even if not quite so axiomatic, that many people will suffer a greater level of scarcity than that which exists today.

It follows with horrid but almost geometric logic that desperation will emerge to even greater proportions world wide than is the case today. The ambitious, the megalomaniac, the ideological True Believer will find ears eager for a message--any message--of hope, hope for a change, hope for a future better or at least not worse than the present.

This is the perfect formula for extremism: People who see no reason for living and leaders quite willing to rise to greater power on the corpses of the dead.

A realistic look at the world of today and thus of what is likely to exist less than two decades from now, forces agreement with the report's observation that some countries in Africa and Asia will go out of existence. The existence of countries which have no organic reason to exist is incontrovertible. The failure and collapse of such geographic expressions which have been elevated to the status of "states" by the actions of colonial powers or other external actors should be accepted as a fact of global political life.

Arguably, the attempt by well-intentioned(?) external entities to prop up collapsing states will ultimately serve only to stoke the fires of extremism. Certainly it will only prolong both the agony and the bloodletting.

The challenge today is not to stop trajectories already well in place or to attempt to implant foreign ideas on infertile human soil as the Administration of George W. Bush has done with such negative consequences. Neither is the challenge one of improvising a "Global Government" from the borning multi-polar environment.

The challenge for the next administration and We the People is quite different. Our challenge is harder. It is to determine just what our national interests are in the next few years and beyond. Our challenge is to realistically parse not only our genuine interests as distinguished from values or passing winds of enthusiasm but also our authentic strengths and weaknesses.

Only by determining realistically what our interests are and how we can best use our strengths and off-set our weaknesses in achieving our goals can we find the world of twenty years from now to be acceptable. Not pleasurable perhaps, not satisfying in a wave-the-flag way, but acceptable to ourselves and our progeny.

If we delude ourselves as we have in all-too-many years since the end of the Cold War, we will in all probability find ourselves living in a world of bloody turmoil. We may well find ourselves living with another prediction from the NIC: A world where nuclear proliferation is the rule and not the exception. A world in which extremists--"wild eyed pistol-wavers who aren't afraid to die"-- wave not pistols but nuclear weapons.