This paper critically examines the National Intelligence Council's 2008 report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World alongside the 2010 U.S. National Security Strategy, evaluating how well the latter prepares the United States for the geopolitical landscape predicted by the former. The analysis focuses on three key NIC predictions: the relative decline of American dominance as China, India, and Brazil rise; the disruptive consequences of transitioning away from fossil fuels; and the geographic expansion of conditions favorable to terrorism, partly driven by climate change. The paper argues that both documents rest on flawed assumptions about the permanence of the status quo, and that the National Security Strategy is optimized for a world that may not exist by 2025.
The paper employs comparative policy analysis: it places two primary government documents in dialogue with each other, identifying where their underlying assumptions converge, diverge, or contradict observed reality. This technique is strengthened by the author's use of real-world events — the S&P downgrade, the Arab Spring, the 2016 Olympics — as evidence that assumptions built into both documents had already been falsified at the time of writing.
The paper opens with a thesis-driven introduction previewing three NIC predictions. It then devotes one body section to each prediction (U.S. power distribution, energy transition, terrorism and climate change), before pivoting to a two-paragraph critique of the National Security Strategy using those same three predictions as lenses. A concise conclusion synthesizes the critique. This funnel structure — from empirical predictions to policy evaluation — is well-suited to analytical essays in political science and security studies.
The National Intelligence Council's 2008 report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World attempts to provide policymakers with a summary of the probable, possible, and plausible changes most likely to affect global governance and stability over the course of the next decade and a half. The report covers a wide range of topics, but perhaps the most salient predictions — and those which ultimately serve to reveal the shortcomings of the United States' most recent National Security Strategy — are those discussing the United States' assumed continued dominance as a global power even as countries like China and Brazil rise, the disruptive potential of developing energy technologies, and the geographical expansion of the social, economic, and political conditions most conducive to the emergence of terrorist groups.
Both the NIC report and the National Security Strategy are flawed and rely on assumptions regarding the maintenance of the status quo that have been proven wrong even in the short period since their original publication. Nonetheless, examining the predictions most immediately relevant to U.S. national security serves to reveal the extent to which the most recent National Security Strategy presents a strategy optimized for a world that will not exist in 2025 — and one that did not even exist in 2011.
The first major prediction in the National Intelligence Council's report is the assumption that "by 2025, the United States will find itself in the position of being one of a number of important actors on the world stage, albeit still the most powerful one" (NIC, 2008, p. 29). While the report's conclusions regarding China, Brazil, and India's potential rise to the top of the geopolitical order — likely at the expense of a marginalized Europe — ring true, the report fails to offer any evidence as to why the United States should retain its preeminent status. This is evident when considering the speed with which China has sought to expand its military presence in the Pacific and encourage domestic infrastructure development, Brazil's booming population and increased international profile as a result of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, and India's goal to serve "as a cultural bridge between a rising China and the United States" (NIC, 2008, p. 30).
Instead of providing evidence, the report simply assumes that the United States will retain its political and economic clout on the grounds that "although […] China and India will continue to rise, their ascent is not guaranteed and will require overcoming high economic and social hurdles" (NIC, 2008, p. 29). The report includes a graph purporting to show "measurements of state power as a percentage of global power," and it helps to demonstrate the assumption that the United States will retain its power by default so long as other countries do not succeed.
In reality, the United States could very well lose its political and economic clout on the world stage as a result of domestic issues that prevent effective governance — as was the case when Standard and Poor's downgraded the government's credit rating in response to the legislature's prolonged standoff over the debt ceiling, an artificially imposed problem that only served to diminish American credibility. Thus, while China's expansion into the Pacific offers the clearest external threat to U.S. national security interests by encroaching on the hegemony established through America's military presence in Japan and the surrounding region, in reality the single greatest factor dictating the distribution of power fifteen years from now concerns internal American politics rather than the rise or fall of other countries — which, in the case of China and Brazil, is occurring almost in spite of American efforts.
Just because the report's prediction of the power distribution in 2025 assumes continued American dominance without providing supporting evidence does not mean the prediction is entirely unhelpful. It serves to highlight an assumption that underlies American policy — and especially the policy expressed in the 2010 National Security Strategy — which warrants critical scrutiny.
The second crucial prediction covered by the report concerns the eventual transition away from a carbon-based energy economy toward biofuels and eventually hydrogen. Once again, the report's predictions rest on an assumption that the status quo will hold, this time coupled with a failure to account for the extent to which technology develops exponentially. The report is generally pessimistic regarding the likelihood that the world will have effectively transitioned away from a carbon energy economy by 2025, and it tends to focus too heavily on the potential of euphemistically named "clean coal." It does, however, identify a particularly relevant consequence of this transition, whether it occurs by 2025 or not: decreased demand for fossil fuels will serve to undermine those regimes that rely on fossil fuel revenues to maintain their authority. Authoritarian governments in the Middle East will be forced to negotiate "a new social contract with [their] public as [they] try to institute a work ethic to accelerate development plans and diversify the economy" (NIC, 2008, p. 46).
This weakening of regimes that rely on oil wealth to maintain power will have significant effects on American national security and imperial hegemony, because the two countries most likely to be affected in this way are Saudi Arabia and Iran — an American ally and adversary, respectively. If either of these repressive regimes is not overthrown in the kind of popular revolt seen during the Arab Spring, they will nonetheless see their power diminish greatly as a result of the transition away from fossil fuels, to the point that open revolution may not even be necessary. On balance, this will likely produce a stabilizing effect on international politics and thus represent a net benefit for U.S. national security, because the weakening of regimes that maintain power through force and repression generally yields greater stability than the continuation of those regimes — regardless of U.S. policy toward the dictatorships in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen.
While both the National Intelligence Council's predictions regarding the state of international politics in 2025 and the 2010 National Security Strategy are woefully flawed and rest on numerous assumptions about the future success of American empire, the former nonetheless offers insight into the ways in which the latter is ill-prepared to deal with the actual threats to national security the United States will face in the coming decades. In particular, the NIC report highlights the faulty assumption that the United States can continue as a dominant power in spite of internal problems, underestimates the disruptive effect of a transition away from fossil fuels, and underappreciates the increased threat from terrorism as a result of climate change. Taken together, these gaps suggest that a fundamental reassessment of U.S. national security priorities is not merely advisable but essential.
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