PAPER: QICR Scenarios: Alternative Futures the IC Could Face, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, January 2009

Key excerpts:

Scenario 1: A World Without the West
In 2025, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) expands to include Russia, China, India, and Iran, creating a fragile new coalition. Antagonism toward Western protectionism and complementary interests drives this coalition. Although the U.S. and its European allies remain an important counterweight, the world focuses on the dynamic of this new coalition, hence a "World Without the West." Framing their cooperation as a new counterbalance to "Washington Consensus" economics and American military preeminence, these countries leverage their vast energy reserves, huge populations, and high level of technological development to challenge U.S. economic, military, and technological supremacy.

Scenario 2: BRIC's Bust Up
In 2025, a series of energy and resource shortages, particularly acute in Asia, disrupt what had promised to be a steady period of growth led by the BRIC countries. Governments around the world take a zero-sum attitude to international affairs and retreat from trade commitments, adopting mercantilist economic growth slows as states champion domestic technology initiatives and national conglomerates. These actions constrain the flow of goods, capital, and information across borders. Intense energy competition and transient shifting alliances lead to a rise in local skirmishes and an escalating threat of interstate war. This lack of international cohesion allows nuclear weapons to proliferate in Asia and the Middle East, leading to a precarious balance of mutually deterrent powers that in some ways resembles a 21st-century replay of the years before 1914.

Scenario 3: October Surprise
In the 2025 world called October Surprise, governments and global elites pursue short-term economic gain above all else. Their aggressive focus on growth, efficient markets, and robust trade eventually causes financial volatility as a result of poorly organized, uncoordinated responses to crises in global health, environmental change, and other international issues. The global economic system appears robust and successfully promotes prosperity, but this type of globalization also has a dark side: trafficking of illicit goods, human rights violations, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Health and environmental disasters--some sudden and others slow-burning--frequently overwhelm domestic agencies, which are increasingly understaffed. Climate change becomes an acute concern, exacerbating resource scarcities and damaging coastal urban centers. One such climate disaster, a hurricane striking Manhattan with little warning (the "October Surprise") during a major world conference, demonstrates the danger posed by this world.

Scenario 4: Politics Is Not Always Local
By 2025 a subtle but unmistakable power shift has enabled identity-centric groups to gradually supplant the authority of traditional nation states. The rapid diffusion of mobile phones and internet connectivity enables much of the world's population to join networks that transcend national borders, giving voice to latent desires for affiliation based on religion, ethnicity, class, ideology, and other elements of self definition. National leaders frequently find their authority challenged in a variety of indirect ways: megacities forge their own policies and partnerships, a multitude of social and political movements lobby for change, and ideologically motivated groups cause violent disruptions. Peace and prosperity are far from universal as a rapidly changing cast of these non-state a chaotic political environment.

As always, uniformly bad for the West as a whole and the U.S. in particular, with--apparently--America being clueless along all paths.

But this is the reality of the IC's ideological limits: America must be zeroed out as a character.

Individually, "A World Without the West" has a glorious, non-economic-intelligence to it, showing, I would say, how unlikely a recreation of East-West Cold War dynamics are (but you can't blame them for trying!).

The "BRICs bust up" looks a bit weak after the 2008-09 crisis has passed, as it takes on a vague sort of vibe that says, "Oh yeah! Well, you just wait! Next time they'll all tank!" Frankly, it's just--as it admits--just another attempt to claim that today's globalization is just a rerun of the colonial-era, pre-WWI model. My, that's truly innovative!

Okay, so far we've got a Cold War rerun and the usual pre-WWI Norman-Angel-was-wrong bit.

Then, just to make Al Gore happy, we get a big climate-change-slap-upside-the-head bit that reads like a Toby Emmerich movie plot. Hmmmm, I hope they didn't spend too much money outsourcing that one to Hollywood.

And then, just when I was hoping for a 1930s rerun, we get the now, almost too-familiar bit about states losing all power and we all go back to a pre-Westphalian system, supposes, as this scenario always does, that all these cross-border ties cannot possible live in concert with good and strong governance, even though it's clear that the most globalized states are those featuring strong and ambitious governments.

In sum, a rather sorry lot, full of the usual lack of imagination and stocked with the usual suspects.

Then again, I like my intelligence dumber than my military, my military dumber than my politicians, and my politicians dumber than my businessmen (yes, yes, but just think about the contrary position in each pairing and see if you like that better!).

So how disappointed can I be?

(Thanks: Thomas Cook)