Last week, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a part of the U.S. intelligence community that does long-term strategic analysis, published “Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World,” its quadrennial unclassified assessment of the “forces and dynamics ... likely to shape the national security environment over the next 20 years.”
Global Trends is always an intriguing read. Published since 1997, it aims to give each new administration an idea of the world that it will confront. Insight, however, no matter how good, is wasted when policymakers aren’t paying attention — a lesson that the Global Trends report makes painfully clear.
The NIC does a wide range of work — it produces national intelligence estimates, among other things — and the Global Trends report is an especially thoughtful analysis. It looks over the horizon to espy the trends and trajectories that matter, without going so far into the future as to be meaningless. (Most experts agree that 15-20 years is as far as anyone can look before uncertainties and contingencies render anything possible.) The regularity of the report — it comes out every four years — makes it easy to evaluate previous efforts.