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Annotated Scenarios Bibliography excerpt from 2010 State of the Future report

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.  What happens when science fiction becomes battlefield reality?A Future of War Scenario (was presented at the 2009 TED Conference.)  P.W. Singer,  Penguin Press, January, 2009. New machines will profoundly alter warfare, from the frontlines to the home front.  This book takes the reader into a strange new world of war: odd-ball roboticists working in latter-day “skunk works” in the midst of suburbia; military pilots flying combat mission from their office cubicles outside Las Vegas; the Iraqi insurgents who are their targets; journalists trying to figure out just how to cover robots at war; and human rights activists wrestling with what is right and wrong in a world where our wars are increasingly being handed over to machines.   Amazingly, this is not the future.  It is happening today.  This is a revolution that is taking place on the battlefield, changing how wars are fought.  This revolution will  challenge political, economic, legal, and ethical tenants.   Imagine that one day in the near future, military officers will quietly acknowledge that new prototyes will soon make human fighter pilots obsolete while the Pentagon researches tiny robots the size of flies to carry out reconnaissance work that is not handled by elite Special Forces troops.  While robotics distances war from the homefront, it “paradoxically makes it plausible that new unmanned technologies will bring war closer to our doorsteps.”  [The following is an excerpt from the book:]  Scenario)  Moores Law is Operative, but so is Murphy’s Law – New Human Dilemmas.  Already in the prototype stage are varieties of unmanned weapons and exotic technologies, from automated machine guns and robotic ¬stretcher ¬bearers to tiny but lethal robots the size of insects, which look like they are straight out of the wildest science fiction. Pentagon planners are having to figure out not only how to use machines such as the PackBot in the wars of today, but also how they should plan for battlefields in the near future that will be, as one officer put it, “largely robotic.”  Robotics are changing the experience of war itself.  By 2020-2030, it will be typical for one to  “go to war” by commuting to work each morning in his Toyota to a cubicle where he could shoot missiles at an enemy thousands of miles away and then make it home in time for his kid’s soccer ¬practice.  Unmanned systems that have already been deployed to Iraq. 22 different robot systems are now operating on the ground.   A massive change is also occurring in the airspace above wars. Only a handful of drones were used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, with just one supporting all of V Corps, the primary U.S. Army combat force. Today there are more than 5,300 drones in the U.S. military’s total inventory, and not a mission happens without them.   Between 2002 and 2008, the U.S. defense budget rose by 74 percent to $515 billion, not including the several hundred billions more spent on operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the defense budget at its highest level in real terms since 1946 (though it is still far lower as a percentage of gross domestic product), spending on military robotics research and development and subsequent procurement has boomed.  By 2020  robots will continue advancing in artificial intelligence  and  ability to compute and then act at digital speed. “The trend towards the future will be robots reacting to robot attack, especially when operating at technologic speed. . . .  As the loop gets shorter and shorter, there won’t be any time in it for humans.” What happens to the human role in war as we arm ever more intelligent, more capable, and more autonomous ¬robots? IN this world, machines take over matrix-style.  Having humans “in the loop” of decision making is being redefined, such as , the world of 2020 could very well see it acceptable for robots to make decisions to fire back on their own.  With robots taking on more and more roles, and humans ever further out of the loop, the world of 2020 could see  human warriors eventually be rendered obsolete.  The most controversial role for robots in the future would be as replacements for the human grunt in the field. In 2004, DARPA researchers surveyed a group of U.S. military officers and robotics scientists about the roles they thought robots would take over in the near future. The officers predicted that countermine operations would go first, followed by reconnaissance, forward observation, logistics, then infantry. Oddly, among the last roles they named were air defense, driving or piloting vehicles, and food ¬service—¬each of which has already seen automation.  The average year the soldiers predicted that humanoid robots would start to be used in infantry combat roles was 2025.  With robotics already in place, it is possible that the connection between the citizenry and war will be lost. These technologies could “snip” the last remaining threads.  On the other hand, the trend toward video war could build connections between the war front and home front, allowing the public to see what is happening in battle as never before.    Scenario continued on the Future of War) “The Army of the Grand Robotic.”   Let’s imagine that such fantasies of cheap and costless unmanned wars were to come true, that we could use robots to stop bad things being done by bad people, with no blowback, no muss, and no fuss. Even that prospect should give us pause. By cutting the already tenuous link between the public and its nation’s foreign policy, ¬pain-¬free war would pervert the whole idea of the democratic process and citizenship as they relate to war. When a citizenry has no sense of sacrifice or even the prospect of sacrifice, the decision to go to war becomes just like any other policy decision, weighed by the same calculus used to determine whether to raise bridge tolls. Instead of widespread engagement and debate over the most important decision a government can make, you get popular indifference. When technology turns war into something merely to be watched, and not weighed with great seriousness, the checks and balances that ¬undergird democracy go by the wayside. This could well mean the end of any idea of democratic peace that supposedly sets our foreign-policy ¬decision ¬making ¬apart.  It’s a heady enticement, and not just for evil warmongers. The world watched the horrors of Bosnia, Rwanda, and Congo but did little, chiefly because the public didn’t know or care enough and the perceived costs of doing something truly effective seemed too high. Substitute unmanned systems for troops, and the calculus might be changed. Indeed, imagine all the genocides and crimes against humanity that could be ended if only the human barriers to war were lowered. Getting tired of some dictator massacring his people? Send in your superior technology and watch on YouTube as his troops are takedown.  Yet wars never turn out to be that simple. They are complex, messy, and unpredictable. And this will remain the case even as unmanned systems increasingly substitute for humans.

The World Order in 2050 – Model of the G20 by 2050.  Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC. Published April 2010/PDF/29pps./www. carnegieendowment.org. The world’s economic balance of power is shifting dramatically. By 2050, the United States and Europe, long the traditional leaders of the global economy, will be joined in economic size by emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. China will become the world’s largest economy in 2032, and will grow to be 20 percent larger than the United States by 2050. Over the next forty years, nearly 60 percent of G20 economic growth will come from Brazil, China, India, Russia, and Mexico alone. However, these emerging markets will not rise among the world’s richest countries in per capita terms: their average income in 2050 will still be 40 percent below that of the G7 states today. The G20’s recent transformation into the world’s principal economic forum highlights the beginning of a more integrated and complex economic era.   Over the next 40 years, the G20 GDP is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 3.6 percent, rising from $38.3 trillion in 2009 to $161.5 trillion in 2050, in real U.S. dollar terms. Nearly 60 percent of this $123 trillion dollar expansion will come from Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico (BRIC+M). These five economies will grow at an average rate of 6.1 percent per year, raising their share of G20 GDP from 18.7 percent in 2009 to 49.2 percent in 2050. By contrast, GDP in the G7 will grow by less than 2.1 percent annually, with their share of G20 GDP declining sharply from 72.3 percent ($27.7 trillion) in 2009 to 40.1 percent ($64.7 trillion) in 2050.  This report concludes with the following trends of the global economy to 2050: 1)  The world’s economic balance of power is shifting rapidly. China remains on a path to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economic power within a generation, and India will join both as a global leader by mid-century.  2)  Traditional Western powers will remain the wealthiest nations in terms of per capita income, but will be overtaken as the predominant world economies by much poorer countries. Given the sheer magnitude of the challenge of lower-wage competition, protectionist pressures in advanced economies may escalate. 3)  The global economic transformation will shift international relations in unpredictable ways. To retain their historic influence, European nations will be pressed to conduct foreign policy jointly—an objective implied by their recently ratified constitution—and will need to reach out to emerging powers. Japan and Russia will seek new frameworks of alliances. The largest emerging nations may come to see each other as rivals. 4)  Absolute poverty will be confined to small pockets in sub-Saharan Africa and India, though relative poverty will persist, and may even become more acute. Carbon emissions are also on a path toward climate catastrophe, and by mid-century may constitute a serious risk to the global growth forecast.  5)  International organizations such as the IMF will be compelled to reform their governance structures to become more representative of the new economic landscape. Those that fail to do so will become marginalized. The following scenarios assume that markets will stay open, macroeconomic policies remain sound, and catastrophes do not occur. Thus, they provide only an “educated assessment” of broad developments in the international economy.  [The following is an excerpt from the report.] Scenario 1) A Changing Paradigm in Global Economic Governance.  Despite impressive GDP growth in the developing world, relative per capita GDP (or wealth) will remain low. By 2050, the five largest economies, in both real U.S. dollar and PPP terms, will include three of the G20’s poorest—India, China, and Brazil. In 2009, by contrast, seven of the G20’s largest eight members were among its richest, in U.S. dollar terms.  The strong positive correlation between wealth and size, in real U.S. dollar terms, has been declining since 1990 among the G20 countries. Though it will remain significant through 2020, it is expected to virtually disappear, and turn negative in PPP terms, by 2050.  On an absolute scale, average income in the G20’s ten emerging economies (as defined by the IMF) will rise to only $22,000, less than 60 percent of the average present-day income of the G7 states. When calculated in PPP terms, the average income in emerging markets in 2050 will be slightly larger than that of the G7 in 2009, but still less than half of the G7’s income in 2050. As low and middle income economies become increasingly powerful, the traditional distinctions between countries will become outdated, raising new questions about global economic leadership. This dissociation between economic wealth and size will dramatically affect the role and structure of international organizations and financial institutions. As low and middle income economies in Asia and Latin America become increasingly powerful, the traditional distinctions between countries—developed versus developing, creditor versus debtor—will become increasingly outdated, raising new questions about global economic leadership. Will emerging markets’ influence grow with their GDP? Or will inertia keep authority in the hands of the richest and most advanced countries?  With forty years of inscrutable political and economic developments obstructing the view, answers to such questions are difficult to uncover. However, one fact remains certain: the landscape of the global economy is shifting dramatically. International institutions that lack flexibility and representative governance structures will gradually become marginalized. The recent promotion of the G20 over the G8 is just one signal that the power shift has begun. The rise of China, India, and other emerging markets has been anticipated for years by numerous economists, and the recent global recession has only accelerated this trend. New projections for economic growth through 2050 offer insight into the implications of this changing economic landscape.  Scenario 2) A New York Times News Article from the Year 2020 and Beyond – “China Has Passed the US as the World’s Largest Economy. February 21, 2040.”      Analysts report that China passed the US as the largest economy in the world last year. With a nominal GDP* of US$29,300 billion for year 2039, China is ahead of US with more than US$500 billion. China has tenfold their GDP over the last 35 years.  The US was the world’s largest economy for about a century, since the British Empire suffered severely in the Second World War. China can now look for a reign on the throne for about 30-40 years before the currently fastest growing major economy, India, is likely to surpass them. India became the world’s third largest economy in year 2034 with the help of their growing population and will challenge the size of the US economy in a decade. Even though China has passed the US in total, the US is still by far the nation with the biggest GDP per capita with US$73,830, followed by Japan, United Kingdom and France, among the largest economies in the world. China, as the second most populous country in the world, has a GDP per capita of US$20,610, more than twice as much as India on US$8,180.  (These numbers are based on the report Brazil, Russia, India and China - A Road in 2050 by Goldman Sachs, but have been revised according to the latest GDP data in the World Economic Outlook (September 2006 edition) from the International Monetary Fund.)

Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade.   Bill Emmott.  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. May, 2008/352 pages.  The Davos Scenario. National Intelligence Council, 2010.  Bill Emmot undertakes a bold study of how the three major Asian states are engaging in power struggles that will shape the future of international relations.   The author sees China as the middle country that will play the central role in defining the future of the Asian continent, Japan as powerful but aging, and India  in the process of shedding its confused view of its potential role in international affairs. For the first time in history, Asia will not be dominated by just one country or by outside powers. It will contain three large, economically powerful countries, all with interests and ambitions that range across the whole region, and the world. The future of the world economy will be determined by the competition between these three countries, as will world politics. “The rise of China threatens Japan. The revival of Japan challenges China. The arrival of India as an economic and political actor creates a balancing power.” This book is a “must read” and excellent supplement to the insights into the Davos scenario narrative written by the National Intelligence Council scenario report series.  The following scenario  provides an illustration of how robust economic growth over the next 15 years could reshape the globalization process—giving it a more non-Western face. It is depicted in the form of a hypothetical letter from the head of the World Economic Forum to a former US Federal Reserve chairman on the eve of the annual Davos meeting in 2020. Prelude to the Scenario) Under this scenario, the Asian giants as well as other developing states continue to outpace most “Western‿ economies, and their huge, consumer-driven domestic markets become a major focus for global business and technology. Many boats are lifted, but some founder. Africa does better than one might think, while some medium-sized emerging countries are squeezed. Western powers, including the United States, have to contend with job insecurity despite the many benefits to be derived from an expanding global economy. Although benefiting from energy price increases, the Middle East lags behind and threatens the future of globalization. In addition, growing tensions over Taiwan may be on the verge of triggering an economic meltdown. At the end of the scenario, we identify some lessons to be drawn from our fictional account, including the need for more management by leaders lest globalization slip off the rails.  This scenario shows that  growth in Asian markets would force domestic adjustments on the US and other Western countries that would need to be managed. If the global trading system became more integrated and complicated, it would be important to bring China, India and other emerging states more inside the tent, but this would require patience and potential trade-offs.  It is unlikely that the system would be self-regulating. A strong global economy, for example, would not lead automatically to a resolution of crises like Taiwan. This scenario illustrates the vast changes that would be likely to result from continued robust economic growth and the stresses and strains that could derail it. [The following is an excerpt from the report:] The Davos Scenario) A Davos World: Letter from the Head of the World Economic Forum to a former US Federal Reserve chairman on the eve of the annual Davis Meeting in 2020.  January 12, 2020.  Dear Mr. Chairman:   As you know, the last few years have been rough. I finally persuaded the Asians to drop their boycott, and this year we're meeting in China instead of Davos. From now on it will be Switzerland every other year and Asia in the alternate years. I thought at first that I could get the Asians to back down, but they are united. Even the Japanese were not willing to bend. I'm not convinced this was all one big Chinese plot as some are charging. I'm not even sure whether the Chinese were fully in favor of it. Once it caught hold, they had to show some leadership and support Asian claims, but I think they are so confident of their current status that meeting every year in Davos did not bother them. Hosting the sessions actually puts pressure on them to make concessions and deal with some of the complaints about how they do business.  This reminds me of a particular theme I've been developing in my mind as I reflect on how globalization has now evolved. At the turn of the century, we equated globalization with Americanization. America was the model. Now globalization has more of an Asian face and, to be frank, America is no longer quite the engine it used to be. Instead the markets are now oriented eastwards. That's not to say that the system runs on its own. Only after learning a couple of tough lessons did we see how much management was involved or how easily globalization could come off the rails. We business leaders have had to learn to step in more aggressively.  The 9/11 tragedy was a wake-up call. Terrorism still poses a physical and strategic challenge. In order to protect ourselves, we had to put up barriers, but there was a danger that we would do so much that we would undermine the very basis of globalization the free flow of capital, goods, people, etc. We tried to strike a delicate balance between security and openness. There's been a lot of criticism about US visa restrictions cutting back on the number of foreign students, and American scientists worried about the US's science and technology leadership slipping away to Asia.  This gets me to my second point. Ten or 15 years ago we did not realize the extent to which the Asian giants were ready to take up the slack. The Chinese and Indians have really maintained the momentum behind globalization. It started out as a US-China dynamic, but now the Asian market is self-generating and not so dependent on trade with the US. Moreover, the competition between China and India over energy supplies and markets has spurred further growth and innovation.  But we had a few sleepless nights over the years, particularly when China ran into financial problems. The fact that the recovery was quick was probably crucial. I think Beijing would have had trouble coping with a full-blown political crisis. Such turmoil could have stymied its economic rise for a decade or more. Fortunately that did not happen. Although the US helped, the really interesting thing was that China dug itself out without the kind of US or international help we thought it would need. Again we underestimated the extent to which China had created a domestic market that could jumpstart its economy.  What the downturn unfortunately did was ignite the latent nationalism that had been lurking below the surface, again increasing tensions over Taiwan. China has been "feeling its oats" and the risk of miscalculation is growing. I'm getting more and more worried as no one government or private sector is stepping into the breach to head off what could be a major security and business crisis.  Tensions were also on the rise between China and India and the other emerging states. The success of the Asian giants made it harder for the smaller guys to catch up. The huge pull from China and India on jobs was not just felt in the West. Now we see higher pay for China's workers finally leading to jobs being exported again to lower-wage economies. In part, this can be attributed to demographics China is a country that is suddenly looking older, its one-child policy coming back to haunt it.  Early on, the outcry in the West over outsourcing and migration could have stalled globalization, but what can we really do hold back the "tides" of progress in some rerun of Luddite madness? I detected below the surface a strong temptation in Washington and European capitals to play off the emerging countries against China and India by giving preference to non-Chinese products. On the positive side, it was high-tech breakthroughs that put some countries on the road to sustainable economic growth. Expanded food production from biotechnology innovations and clean water from better filtration systems were boons that helped eliminate the direst poverty and start an export-driven agricultural sector. China and the US finally ganged up on Europe about GMOs. --Higher commodity prices also have been a godsend much more so than any debt forgiveness scheme. A couple of the Asian-backed energy consortiums practically run two or three of the smaller states. They're popular because they provide not only their workers but all the surrounding communities with full heath-care. Malaria and TB not to mention AIDS are being tackled. I'm reminded that businesses if one thinks back to the East India Company's total rule over the subcontinent in the eighteenth century were at the forefront when globalization first got going. Have we come full circle with business taking over again from government?   We've seen some progress in the Middle East with a couple countries actually undertaking market liberalization reforms, but others are still stuck in a rut. Palestine yearns for a George Soros figure who can inject a lot of capital and develop an export outlet, but I don't see anyone willing to make the investment. Elsewhere, revenues generated by high oil prices have enabled the Saudis and others to stem what has been a plunging standard of living for most of them.  That's not good in the long run. I fear there's more to this story that we may not like.  Davos has done a lot, I think, in opening up the old exclusive Western club. I admit at first I did not really see it coming the fact that China and India with their burgeoning middle classes had begun to create such large markets.  In the last few years, the whole balance as I now realize has been shifting. Asian consumers are setting the trends, and Western businesses have to respond if they want to grow.  Fifteen years ago, few of us knew anything about Asian firms.  Now we have Wumart.  China also got Washington's attention when it started diversifying its foreign currency holdings and the US public awakened to the fact that it had been living way beyond its means.  By itself, Europe probably would have felt threatened by Asia's rapid rise, but funny thing a rising Asia was seen as a counterbalance to a dominant US.  Asia's growth also helped Europe get out of its slump.  The EU thinks it and China have a lot in common reverence for regional institutions.  China with its Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example.  I'm not so sure.  By the way, I heard that your granddaughter is also spending a semester in China, learning the language. Did you know that one of my grandsons is also there? Perhaps we can get the two of them together at the Davos-in-China meeting.

Exploring Development Futures in a Changing Climate: Frontiers for Development Policy and Practice. Emily Boyd, Natasha Grist, Sirkku Juhola, and Valerie Nelson. Development Policy Review 2009/27(6): 659-674. The recent Global Humanitarian Forum report estimates that 300 million people are already seriously affected by climate change (GHF, 2009).  This article discusses  three policy frontiers such as the adaptation of actions and finance; mitigation policies and their governance; and the implications for development planning. The second part of the article discusses approaches to adaptation to climate change and the financing and institutional structures needed for community based initiatives.  The third section concerns the governance and social consequences of mitigation and how new models for governance may construct more robust futures for development. According to the authors, the medium term future (over the next 10 to 40 years),  will see mitigation policy  that creates incentives for the greater involvement of industry and developing countries. In the longer term (up to 100 years), achieving and sustaining mitigation targets may require a total overhaul of energy systems in order to reach country commitments of up to 80% reductions in GHG emissions below 1990 levels by 2050. A key question is whether embedded socio-technical systems can be changed fundamentally, and quickly, avoiding crisis and extreme pressure. What can enable a positive shift to occur? What can be done to create windows of opportunity to transition to a pro-poor, low-carbon society? Moreover, whose views count in whether a transition is deemed positive or not?  A number of development experts believe that a normative climate change and development scenario will be one that pushes the policy frontiers. [The following is an excerpt from the report:]  Scenario) Pushing Forward the Policy Frontiers.   In such a world, low-carbon pathways become imperative for the development of lower-income countries in the light of the need to mitigate climate change in the long term, which has implications for all development policy currently under way.  Adaptation policies over the short term, medium term, and long term become integral to development and are aligned with development objectives. The practical side becomes more complex on all levels but resolvable with careful planning by the development-aid and climate-change funding communities. Realistically,  it takes 5-7 years to get national capacities improved.    Development expert Franke Urban demonstrates that this normative scenario can achieve combined emissions mitigation through low-carbon energy transitions with increased energy security and development gains.   Leadership in developing nations recognizes a resilience-based perspective, fundamentally restructuring economies and societies to create a new development trajectory. Both the social and the environmental sustainability of climate-change adaptations become top priority in policy and appropriate short-term adaptations assist the most vulnerable to adapt to climate change, but only for a short while as the most viable future option takes its course as climate-change impacts become more severe.  In this scenario, the challenges to livelihoods in certain places become insuperable.  In one semi-arid environment, for example, marginal short-term climate adaptation sees to sinking boreholes to sustain the population and avoid outmigration and related human and social costs.  But over the long term, investments go to other areas as the inevitable inability of the increasingly inhospitable physical environment forces more development in the areas of services, support, and livelihood options in areas of inward migration.   Hard policy decisions are made, as often, the most vulnerable people may not be supported over the short term.  There are significant equity implications in this scenario.  Policy becomes direct in achieving well being in energy, institutions, and fundamental approaches to development.  On the thornier questions of political motive and will in creating change, there is an inherent challenge worldwide on the variety of policy recommendations being proposed due to different underlying development goals, means and approaches, including the combination of market-led, state-led, or civil-society solutions which will be most effective.  Most OECD countries recognize that the most critical policy improvement that has to take place is the use of economic-growth models that invite constituencies to explore more integrated approaches to policy and practice.  For developing nations, this would ultimately benefit development agendas as well.  Practicing these new, or adapted models is the most urgent priority.  This scenario comes closest to closing the wide gap between local observations of climate change verses global/regional meteorological observation and climate-change predictions.   This gap becomes narrowed through use of the facilitation skills of development practitioners in local and regional contexts.

Shaping the Future: Geopolitical Scenarios to 2040.  Joseph S. Nye. McKinsey & Company, an international think-tank. February 26, 2009.  The McKinsey site, “What Matters”   evolved from a tradition of client driven research by adding a new tradition: knowledge derived from convening some of the best thinkers from around the world.  Conventional wisdom suggests that geopolitics in 2040 will be dominated by Brazil, Russia, India, and China. But this scenario assumes that their economic growth will rise in a linear projection and that they will experience only minor political disruptions, and it ignores possible conflicts of interest among them. Second, it’s important to remember, according to Joseph Nye, that the more precise the estimate, the more likely it is to mislead. There are many possible futures. To project a scenario, the author asserts the necessity of starting with critical assumptions (also known as predetermined elements)  such as: the populations of Europe, Japan, and Russia will continue to fall; India’s economy won’t surpass China’s; the giddy pace of technological change will continue to drive globalization; and the US economy will remain open and innovative.   “Relative certainties” of the global landscape to 2020, reported by the National Intelligence Report and mentioned by the author, include the following: 1) Globalization will continue but with a less Western orientation. 2) The world economy will be substantially larger but with important gaps between the haves and the have-nots. 3) Global companies will spread new technologies. 4) Asia will rise in importance. 5) In-ground energy supplies will be sufficient to meet demand, but supply disruptions are possible. 6) Nonstate actors, ranging from charitable organizations to terrorist groups, will grow in number and power. 7) Political Islam will remain a potent force. 8) Some states will increase the capabilities of their weapons of mass destruction, while others will seek to acquire them. 9) An arc of instability will span the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. 10) A world war among great powers isn’t likely. 11) Environmental and ethical issues will come to the fore. 12) The United States will remain the world’s single most powerful actor.  According to the Nye,  one of the “signal features” of geopolitics today is the rise of nonstate actors that are aided and abetted by technology. Forty years ago, instantaneous global communication was costly and restricted to governments and corporations. Today, it is cheaper and more powerful -  power can flow more easily.  These scenarios explore the implications.    [These are excerpted from the article:]  Scenario 1) A Plausible Geopolitical World in 2040.    This is a world that see power through three key political agents of change will shape geopolitics in 2040. The first is China and the way it uses its power. China’s income per capita is only one twenty-fifth that of the United States. By 2040 China’s total economy equals the US economy, with the US per capita income remaining four times greater. The key question for China by 2040 will be its internal evolution. Growth has lifted 400 million Chinese out of poverty since 1990, but another 400 million still live on less than $2 a day. This enormous degree of inequality could well become a source of instability. In addition, China over the next several decades hasn’t solved the problem of political participation.  It turns to aggressive nationalism as a social glue that generate conflicts. Alternatively, China deals with its problems pragmatically and become what World Bank President Robert Zoellick calls a “responsible stakeholder” in world politics. Political Islam and its development become the second key political agent of change through 2010 – 2040. The current struggle against transnational Islamist terrorism is sometimes characterized as a “clash of civilizations.” More accurately, it is a civil war, within Islamic civilization, between a radical minority that uses violence to enforce a simplified and ideological version of Islam and a moderate mainstream majority. The largest number of Muslims actually live in Asia, particularly Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. But they are influenced by what happens at the heart of this civil war, in the Middle East, which has lagged behind the rest of the world in globalization, openness, institutions, and democratization. If the Middle East catches up, the mainstream becomes strengthened by 2040.  The way Muslims are treated in Europe and America in 2010, as well as Western policies toward the Middle East, will be a major factor in attracting (or repelling) mainstream Muslims.  The last key agent of change in this world is the United States and the way it uses its power.  Although the United States will still be the world’s most powerful country in 2040, the paradox of its power is that this nation—the strongest since the days of imperial Rome—may not be powerful enough to protect its citizens by itself. The United States will remain militarily dominant, but it will not still be sufficient to deal with transnational threats such as global pandemics, climate change, terrorism, and international crime. These issues require cooperation and the soft power of attraction. Defeating Islamist terrorism, for example, calls for cooperation, such as the sharing of intelligence among the police forces of different countries. It will also be necessary to attract the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims. While US military power will remain crucial, used incorrectly it could undercut the soft power needed to win in the future. Other things being equal, if these three political forces play out favorably, the most likely future is a globalized world with an Asian face and protected by a Pax Americana. But this outcome is not inevitable. After all, economic globalization in the first half of the 20th century was reversed by the rise of communism and fascism, disruptive forces unleashed by growing social inequality. According to the author, top candidates for disruptive forces for a more unstable world in 2040 is illustrated in the following scenario.  Scenario 2)  The Geopolitical World of 2040 – Plausible Instabilities.  Political instability in China generates a prolonged slump, violence, and a more aggressive foreign policy. There are major Persian Gulf revolutions and other conflicts that disrupt access to oil reserves. A pandemic produces widespread death, economic dislocation, and the closure of borders. Acts of terrorism utilize weapons of mass destruction, leading not only to millions of deaths but also to protectionism and the loss of liberties; in the jujitsu of terrorism, where the smaller fighter tries to leverage the power of the larger one, this may be the greatest danger in the world of 2040.  Climate change, if it occurs more quickly than expected or leads to a catastrophic event—such as the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf and a rapid rise in sea levels—which changes world politics dramatically.  An infinite number of futures are possible in this world, but some are more probable than others, and our actions can affect those probabilities.

World Trade: Possible Futures to 2020.  A collaborative scenario workshop series led by the Foresight Horizon Scanning Center.  Contributors to the development of the scenarios include the following organizations:  Confederation of British Industry, Center for Economic Policy Research,  London School of Economics, Oxfam, Standard Chartered Bank and a range of Government departments.  2009/PDF/28pps/www.cepr.org. According to the Institute for Alternative Futures, “forsight is the capacity to anticipate alternative futures, based on sensitivity to weak signals, and an ability to visualize their consequences, in the form of multiple possible outcomes.” As part of the first UK World Trade Week, the UK Government’s Trade Policy Unit  commissioned a set of four contrasting scenarios (alternative futures)  which illustrate how world trade might develop between now and 2020. The structure for the scenarios was derived by identifying two factors that will clearly, according to the authors,  have a major influence on world trade over the next decade: the availability of natural resources and the willingness of global organizations to coordinate their actions. [The following is an excerpt from the report:]  Scenario 1) Global Innovation – Coordination, Scarcity.  The world emerged slowly from the recession at the beginning of the decade.  Energy and mineral prices stayed high, despite subdued demand, owing to a dearth of new discoveries and low investment caused by uncertainty over long-term prices. The second half of the decade was different. The ‘climate crisis’ of 2015 provided a wake-up call to international collaboration, with a number of positive consequences.  At the start of the decade, though, slow recovery in developed economies held back developing countries, which were buffeted by high and volatile commodity prices. While this worked in favor of some commodity exporters, population growth, resource depletion and climate change slowed progress on poverty reduction, and levels of inequality remained high. Oil and mineral-producing countries recycled some of their earnings into value-added manufacturing industries. Western firms benefited considerably by providing engineering and manufacturing consulting services and training to support these projects. - Despite the fact that the trade system remained open, only halting progress was made at the global level, and intercontinental trade was hit badly. Even though financing improved with the provision of international guarantees, volumes remained well below those of the early years of the century. High transport costs and weaker Western currencies slowed demand for goods from Asia. Regional trade picked up to offset some of the shortfall. This was in part because high oil prices discouraged the shipping of goods over long distances, but another factor was the bigger role played by regional trading blocs, which also benefited from the increased development aid made available to support regional integration and trade facilitation. Currency imbalances eased as the proportion of services versus goods traded increased. This was accompanied by diversification by Asian and major oil-producing countries into a wider range of currency assets alongside the US dollar.  - Access to resources became a significant trade issue, and a number of countries responded by restricting exports. As a result, greater emphasis was placed on tackling this trend in international trade agreements, leading to modest progress in introducing multilateral rules.  At the beginning of the decade, then, low growth, high energy and commodity costs and rising food prices had not met with a concerted international response. By 2013, however, increasingly aggressive and coordinated negotiating stances by the major oil and gas exporters, together with the threat of a new gas cartel, led to renewed interest in researching and developing new energy technologies.  - Then, in 2015, a series of severe weather incidents attributable to climate change struck at the same time across the world, causing failed harvests, severe flooding and major loss of life in several regions; governments suddenly found themselves under pressure to act more quickly and boldly. Within a year, a coalition of countries and regions had agreed to allocate revenues raised by carbon taxes to a new international fund that would invest in low carbon technologies and make them available around the world. Thanks to investments from the fund, major breakthroughs have been achieved in solar and tidal technologies. Carbon capture and storage has increasingly been included in new coal-fired power stations. This technology rush has created a huge market, boosting businesses across the world.  A side-benefit of this movement has been a more active set of global institutions with growing popular support. Better global coordination has had a remarkable impact in developing countries, where investments from the technology fund have led to thriving new businesses, and where IT-enabled trade facilitation and improved access to developed markets have contributed to economic growth, which has in turn led to much lower levels of poverty and deprivation. Scenario 2) Global Citizen  Coordination – abundance.  The large-scale fiscal stimulus applied in 2009 worked.  The world experienced a very sharp but short-lived recession which ended in early 2010 thanks in part to the contribution of large emerging economies in helping to restore global demand.  Chastened by the crisis, countries have increased their collaboration, strengthening national and international regulatory regimes and monitoring systemic financial risk. This has restored confidence in international trade and capital flows – trade is forecast to continue to grow steadily. The reformed International Monetary Fund (IMF) has taken on a broader and stronger supervisory role.  Progress has been made on establishing the rule of law in international trade and improving its application in national jurisdictions. The World Trade Organization (WTO) has played an important role since the Doha Development Round was agreed in 2010, giving developing countries, particularly smaller ones, improved  access to world markets, and the Jakarta Round is now under way. Intellectual property rights are better protected, and this has led to cross-border investments in a range of new technologies.  The IMF has become a major bond issuer; its bonds have proved popular with newly ­industrializing countries, which have increasingly preferred them to traditional sovereign bonds. One of the results of this has been a rebalancing of private savings, exchange rates, and budget deficits and surpluses across the globe.  The improved Intellectual Property Rights regime and a simplified global tax system have encouraged multinational companies to be more mobile. Manufacturing activity takes place closer to supplies of raw materials, and has provided an effective mechanism for raising standards of living. Efforts by civil society organizations around the world, and particularly in developing countries, have led to increased social protection. There has been a gradual relinquishing of national sovereignty in favor of global institutions, and within these institutions the West’s influence has declined. Although this has led to campaigns by nationalist parties in many countries, the ‘global citizen’ appears to have taken such changes in his or her stride. This was initially put down to relief at coming out of the 2008–09 crisis relatively unscathed, but recently there have been signs that the growing influence of global institutions is viewed as a positive development in its own right.  - Western countries and companies no longer call the shots in this world, in which the newly industrialized economies have – gradually and carefully – established their influence. Manufacturing has become ever more skills-intensive and, despite increasing specialization, some traditional exporters have found it hard to compete. Smaller countries have reacted by seeking closer trade ties with regional groupings.  Leading global firms, in particular the new breed of Asian multinationals, have forged ahead with innovations and design improvements in high-technology products. To compete in these fields, Western countries have sought to boost the number of science and technology graduates in order to increase the volume and quality of hi-tech skills among their workforce.  Western countries have maintained a lead in knowledge-based sectors such legal and financial services and marketing, while some have specialized in training overseas R&D workers and exporting educational services (although there are constant concerns about a ‘brain-drain’). In these cases, outward investment and a good awareness of local trading environments have proved crucial to success. Scenario 3) Fragile Alliances Fragmentation – Abundance. The quick return to growth after 2009 failed to provide the impetus for significant agreements on trade and climate change, or for radical international reform.  International trade balances improved, but global currency imbalances remained, and have threatened to destabilize world trade at various points during the decade.  Trade between human capital-rich and resource-rich countries has flourished, with powerful multinational lobbies taking the lead. But countries without the human capital or natural resources to participate in such exchanges have been left out. Rapidly industrializing developing countries have been on a constant, often frantic search for resource partners in order to maintain the growth necessary for their stability and development, and have been accused of making deals with oppressive regimes.  This has led to a ‘spaghetti’ formation of bilateral deals, broken up only by the activity of cartels of resource-producing countries, which have banded together to protect their interests and pool their negotiating efforts over resources from oil to rare minerals. These ‘country cartels’ engage in collective bargaining with global clients, who seek (often successfully) to pick apart these fragile alliances.  Trading blocs with discriminatory rules constantly form and disband; those that have lasted longer have often had a political agenda. Governments are eager to support their key industries with a mixture of subsidies and political incentives.  Although the earnings of resource exporters are spent on goods from industrialized countries, which therefore maintain a degree of prosperity, this trade generally takes place within the narrow framework of bilateral agreements and ad hoc trading blocs. The result has been huge inefficiencies and poor allocation of resources, resulting in a lack of innovation, low responsiveness to consumer demand and expensive and low-quality products.  Development aid has followed a similar pattern. Efforts to improve coordination have had little success, with aid being used more and more as a way of opening doors to support countries’ trade interests rather than to alleviate poverty.  The citizen-consumer has in any case retrenched and lowered his or her expectations. The failure of the trade and climate change negotiations, and increasingly inward-looking behavior, have seen a resurgence of nationalistic politics. Migration controls are tightened with few complaints.  The looming threat of severe climate impacts has been met by vigorous adaptation measures – which have had the advantage of mobilizing the domestic workforce and providing employment. Domestic energy production is favored, and some coal-fired power stations have been reopened. National energy research programs have been introduced to find solutions that will make countries less dependent on fickle trading partners. The lack of international collaboration means that new energy solutions are harder to find, and when they are found they are treated as a strategic asset and not shared. Carbon emissions have increased more rapidly than expected.  Energy policy has led to divisions between countries and within regions. Some developed countries with major industries and few domestic resources have signed long-term supply agreements with major oil and gas-producing countries, in exchange granting exclusive distribution rights in their territory. Nervous about losing control of their supplies, others have preferred to burn coal and wait for renewables and new nuclear build to come on-stream.  Corruption and organized crime are endemic in international commerce, and within many countries.  Scenario 4) Deglobalization. Fragmentation – Scarcity. The global economy hasn’t returned to growth.  Some blame a lack of coordination and the failure adequately to reform the international financial system. The result has been a downward spiral of global confidence. A recession lasting the best part of the decade has led to commodity price stagnation and a prolonged slump in trade and investment.  Countries have adopted different strategies to ride out the recession, including economic nationalism, bilateral deals and closer regional groupings. Weaker economies have sought shelter under regional umbrellas, while the capacity and willingness of stronger economies to support weaker countries have vanished. Public confidence in governments’ ability to shift the world out of recession has hit rock bottom. A ‘blame the West’ narrative has gained traction in the large industrializing countries.  Conflict has flared up regularly throughout the decade: ‘water wars’, resource grabs and contested claims to Arctic deposits. But despite frequent provocations and occasional skirmishes, none of the major powers has been drawn into the conflicts so far.  Droughts and climate shocks have disrupted food production, leading to export restrictions and high and volatile food prices, not to mention famine in several countries. Net food importers have been particularly hard-hit, and the more powerful have purchased land abroad to grow supplies, though this policy has met with fierce local resistance.  Food and energy security are at the heart of regional as well as national policy. Support for interventionist agricultural policies has grown at national and regional levels.  The nationalist and ‘regionalist’ response to recession has brought back protectionism in many guises, and ‘deglobalisation’ is under way. Trade agreements have started to unravel, with some countries seeking to pull out of the WTO when they are sanctioned for breaking its rules. One impact of this has been the shortening of supply chains, both geographically (suppliers are more local) and in corporate terms, with vertical integration making a come-back. There are increasing restrictions on foreign investment, both from countries that want to limit a foreign presence in their economies, and from countries that have restricted their own companies from off-shoring and ‘exporting jobs’.  In countries able to secure the necessary raw materials, some of the impact of the new protectionism has been perceived as positive, reviving low-value production and renewing a sense of national identity; there has been growth in associations, charities and volunteering. Innovation and wages have, however, fallen. Consumers are less spoilt for choice and face higher prices.  The main losers have been exporting countries, particularly single-commodity exporters and manufacturers of industrial goods where the local (or regional) market is unable to absorb the products that were previously traded internationally.  Where international trade does still continue, it is dominated by state-controlled multinationals, and corruption and links to organized crime are a common feature.  Developing countries experience ever-lower earnings from exports and sharply reduced levels of investment and remittances (migration controls are widespread and rigorously enforced). They are strongly reliant on help from the international financial institutions, whose resources are over-stretched. Inequalities between and within countries have increased sharply. Developing countries have also been hurt by increasing volatility in international food and commodity markets, due to the increased use of domestic subsidies and export restrictions.  Aid for poverty reduction has dropped down the agenda of Western countries, and where aid is still provided it is generally in an attempt to reduce migration pressures or to further strategic and security interests. Some effort is made to intervene in conflict situations where these are perceived to be a direct threat to a country’s interests, but in many cases conflicts are left to fester, with only token provision of humanitarian aid.

 

The 2025 World Security Environment. The Long Term Strategy Group. National Intelligence Council (NIC). Pub. March, 2008.  In this report, the Long Term Strategy Group  examined trends in interstate warfare, diffusion of technology, demographic trends, and the impact of nuclear proliferation on the geopolitical environment in 2025.  The goal was to assess an understanding of the potential scope and intensity of intrastate conflict and warfare conducted by non-state actors.  
Two major trends are happening in the geopolitical theater of war. First, nations are experiencing a decline in country-to-country warfare and second, nations are experiencing a rise in “intrastate conflict,” particularly by non-state actors.   A key finding in this report reveals that in the near-term future, there will likely be a marked increase in the potential for actors armed with nuclear weapons to cause instability in the part of the world that constitutes the zone from the eastern Mediterranean to and including Pakistan.  As a result of this finding, the NIC group assembled key indicators and driving forces, generating alternative scenarios that focused specifically on the impact of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the delivery capabilities on security in the zone bounded by Egypt, Turkey, and Israel in the West up to and including Pakistan in the East and Saudi Arabia in the South.   [NOTE: The complete scenario narratives  are available on the NIC website.]    Scenario 1) US Withdraws from the Middle East (“New Great Game”).  “Indicators of a shift in US policy leads to a significant reduction in American forces in the Middle East.  These include a massive resurgence in Sunni-Shiite violence in Iraq;  a new US relationship with Iran that is encouraged by Ahmadinejad’s deposition and replacement by less overtly hostile leadership; a US initiative outside the region that requires accomodating Iran by reducing US presence – e.g., a strategic partnership with India focused on Asia that requires American acquiescence to strong Indo-Iranian ties; apparent unjustified aggressive Israeli unilateral actions in the region begin to lead the United States to reduce its military commitment to Israel; shifts in the public discourse of Middle East leaders on the capacity of the United States to intervene and sustain interventions -- e.g., discussion of US casualty sensitivity; increased harassment of US official representation in the region, including diplomats and military personnel; increased harassment of remaining US friends and allies in the region, e.g. Israel.”  Scenario 2) Militarization of Energy Security and Chinese Response.  “While much of Asia has enjoyed a remarkable span of peace since the end of the Vietnam War, a conflagration in the Middle East leading to a dramatic spike in the price of oil provokes a variety of Asian actors, as well as other major energy consumers, to behave in a more nationalist and militarist fashion.  Under these conditions, China’s “peaceful rise” strategy looks as though it were failing or obsolescent, necessitating a resort to military means of securing oil supplies and transiting them to the mainland. Other elements include Japanese “normalization” means significant progress in the military sphere; acceleration in Indian military modernization and/or Indian attempts to erode Chinese gains in influence in Southeast Asia; Russian interference with Chinese relations in Central Asia, stoking Chinese energy insecurity; a dramatic shift in Russian foreign policy, involving rapprochement with the United States; a Chernobyl-like event within China.”  Scenario 3) A Weakened China.   “China today, despite its impressive record of economic growth over the past two decades, faces significant internal challenges, including restive minority populations and a Chinese Communist Party reputation for corruption. Indicators of a dramatic internal setback in China include a failure of Chinese domestic information control mechanisms; compromising the Party's means of shaping its image; the supply of unprecedented (in recent memory) levels of foreign support – including military aid – to dissidents in Tibet and/or Xinjiang; prolonged economic contraction – caused by, for instance, high oil prices and domestic inflation; a single major, or multiple concurring, catastrophe(s) – e.g., involving domestic infrastructure or the environment – leading to casualties in the hundreds of thousands and exceeding the cover-up and/or stabilization capacity of the CCP and PLA.”  Scenario 4) A Weakened India.  “For India, a dramatic internal setback occurs in the context of rising public opposition to free-market reforms and an economic opening to the world that hurts uncompetitive Indian farmers and businesses, potentially compounded by destabilizing forces in the region. Indicators include: rising Naxalite violence in eastern India, supported by PRC in response to perceived opportunity to weaken historical rival; a state failure in Pakistan that created a Punjabi remnant state seeking union with Punjabis in India.”  Scenario 5) Military Withdrawal of Europe.  “A Europe that recedes from playing a military role in the world, other than in direct self-defense, is indicated by: a decline in number and capabilities of European military forces appropriate for long range power projection, to include long range air transport and logistic structures, global communications infrastructure, and combined arms forces capable of sustained combat outside Europe; a decline in military training and exercises simulating sustained combat outside Europe; additional commitments to international agreements that limit the offensive capabilities of armed forces.”   Scenario 6) Diasporas Rise.  “Indicators of the growing importance of diasporas would include the emergence of organizations in diaspora communities that develop institutional links (e.g. communications networks and clandestine meetings) to political groups in a home country and which direct flows of funds and expert personnel to targeted activities.”

 

Iran, Israel, and Nuclear War.  Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy.  Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). November, 2008. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) examined the consequences of a future nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran, and the possible impact of its expansion to cover targets in Syria, Egypt, and the Gulf.  
This presentation provides a geographical survey of possible strikes and nuclear capabilities in this region. Based on the study, it appears Israel may have the ability to inflict more damage in the region over the short-term by targeting the Persian ethnic population and economy of Iran. Why?   Iran is geographically much larger than Israel, but its population is heavily urbanized and thus, vulnerable.  Throughout this region, Iran’s building of nuclear capability is a very serious concern.   The history and temperament of Israel reveals that this country will do whatever may be necessary to protect it’s interests.   Leaders and geopolitical analysts throughout the world agree that if catastrophe in this region is to be averted, then it is important for the global powers to act now  through the initiation of negotiations, diplomacy, and sanctions. “Otherwise, the rest of the world will be reduced to “observer status”  as Iran goes nuclear or Israel takes matters into its own hands.” (CSIS)  In these two scenarios, it is assumed that the US attempts to broker a peace deal, but it goes nowhere. [NOTE: A powerpoint presentation of this study is available on the CSIS website.]  Scenario 1)  Sometime Between 2009 - 2015: Iran Aquires Nuclear Capability.  “The Middle East  over the next five years becomes horrifically stormier than much of it’s recorded history.  Growing discord between Israel and the US and the Hezbollah loss in the Lebanese elections in 2009 are just some of the factors that are making for very rough political weather in the region. But the real problem on the horizon of 2009 - 2010 is the ever-growing possibility that Iran will achieve nuclear breakout capability.  By 2015 the prospect of nuclear capability becomes reality and one which leaves Israel stuck between two extremely unpalatable choices. The first is to do nothing and look-on as Iran becomes a nuclear power and regional hegemon. Instead of attempting to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities, Israel simply does nothing and learns to live with a nuclear-armed Iran.  Israeli strategic doctrine for defence takes into account this new reality.  For the Middle East, the various Iranian proxies in the region by 2015, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, are operating under Tehran's nuclear umbrella as they are approaching impunity, making a comprehensive peace settlement even harder to achieve in the Middle East than it was in 2009.  Middle East problems are compounded by the problem of a hostile, theocratic and millenarian regime possessing nuclear weapons.  In this scenario, Israel tries to make the best of a bad situation. As many as 30% of Israeli citizens, however, cannoto tolerate this condition and have emigrated from the country shortly after Iran attained a nuclear weapon.  Of the Israili citizens remaining, everyday seems more and more risky and devastating as Iranian leaders frequently make apocalyptic declarations about the future of the "Zionist entity".   Scenario 2)  Sometime Between 2009 – 2015:  US Supports an Israeli Attack Before Iran Gains Nuclear Capability.   “The alternative scenario sees Israel attempting a unilateral surprise bombing campaign against Iran's nuclear facilities in the knowledge that its air force can, at best, merely set back Tehran's nuclear ambitions. In so doing, a regional conflagration breaks out in which Israel would come under rocket bombardment from Hezbollah in Lebanon and ballistic missile fire from Iran itself and Syria too. Iran begins to launch missles at US bases in the Gulf.   The price of oil hits unprecedented heights to > $120 a barrel and deal a new blow to a weakened global economy, especially since tanker traffic through the Straits of Hormuz has been disturbed for significant lengths of time.  The consequences of an attack are extremely dangerous for Israel. The distance of Iran's nuclear facilities from Israel put them at the extreme limit of Israeli fighter-jets, they are scattered throughout the country and defended by advanced Russian-made anti-aircraft missles. Conditions become complicated and the Middle east becomes embroiled in a multi-front war and the target of international anger at having imperilled the security of the Gulf states and the global economy.   By 2015 it turns out that these Israeli air strikes did not not achieve even the limited goal of delaying Tehran's march to a nuclear weapon.”

 

Pentagon War Games Predict Future Threats.   US News and World Report (Anna Mulrine) and Mental Militia Forums. Pub. June, 2009.  Scenarios of the world in 2018-2020 were covered  in two seperate events in 2009:  the Army War College ideation sessions on future of security and the Warfare Analysis Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, run by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. 
On an annual basis the US military brings together the nation’s big thinkers, university professors,  retired generals, and officers from allied nations together at the Army War College to conduct brainstorming workshops on potential future scenarios of future wars,  particularly within those regions of current conflict and  potential security threats.  The goal is to make a grounded projection into the future and derive implications for the US military.  For many that were in attendance, the world in 2018 will be a grim place.  What was astounding is the number of plausible threats facing the Western World.  Themes included such things as multinational corporations employing increasingly thuggish private security forces that begin to undermine the traditional power of nation-states; or, countries vying for scarce natural resources, leading to armed conflict; or, North Korea launching a southern invasion by disguising two Army corps as groups of refugees fleeing across the border. Participants strongly felt that, among so many scenarios, there were “eventualities,” which include: the collapse of North Korea; a US blockade of Iran; Russian manipulation of natural gas prices; and increasing tension between China and Taiwan, leading to China dumping some of its US dollar holdings.  The following is a scenario of a string of events that may plausibly occur as a result of the current problem with Mexico’s drug cartels.  Scenario 1)  Latin America 2018:  Threats on US Soil.  “A notable scenario is the rare instance in which the Pentagon faces menacing threats on its home soil. According to U.S. officials, increasingly powerful gangs financed by Russia are arriving in Texas from training camps in Mexico. To the south, Venezuela continues to be a thorn in America's side, a nemesis, as the foreboding news narrator describes it, in a "historical ideological contest between left and right, funded by Venezuelan oil.  Bolivia requested US help, and obviously Venezuela isn't happy with that scenario. In retaliation, and "to make the U.S. government appear inept," Venezuela launches a cyberattack on U.S. oil distribution networks, causing domestic gas prices to soar.  US peacekeeping skills become crucial to help mediate increased and ever-more-violent competition for resources. Better dexterity in repelling cyberwarfare attacks become the key.”    Scenario 2) 2018: An Economic Warfare.  “At another war games event conducted at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland (run by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory),  an analysis was conducted on future economic warfare.  This is a world in which hostile nations seek to cripple the U.S. economy. To the participants, this seemed all the more real by the current global financial crisis.  In the future world of 2018,  instead of the military being involved in the plotting of  America’s defense, it becomes the hedge-fund managers, professors, and executives from banks  that increasingly play major roles in global strategies driven by a shifting balance of power between the world’s leading economies.   “In the end, there was sobering news for the United States.  By 2018, the savviest economic warrior proved to be China, a growing economic power that strengthened its position the most over the course of the seven years to 2018.  Economic turmoil produces political instability and “high levels of violent extremism,” not only in the Middle East and South Asia, but in Latin America, Africa and the former Soviet Union. The United States remains the world’s largest economy but significantly degrades its standing in a series of financial skirmishes with Russia.”  In a  post-Sept. 11 world, it becomes plausible that America’s position could be threatened by forces far from the battlefield. Current trends reveal a very powerful China. An example of the sort of “conflict” we may see in this future scenario is an event that took place in 2009:  China recently shook the value of the dollar in global currency markets merely by questioning whether the recession put China’s $1 trillion in U.S. government bond holdings at risk – forcing President Barack Obama to issue a hasty defense of the dollar.  Through the next seven years to 2018, we see these sort of events build into a very complex maze of shadowy “now you see it, now you don’t”  type-of interconnected acts of hegemony, militancy, and terrorism that are often unseen or unfelt while mitigations slowly tear down protective firewalls and paradigms of value.  

 

7 Deadly Scenarios: A Military Futurist Explores War in the 21st Century.  Andrew Krepinevich (president and CEO Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments).  Bantam Books,  Pub. January, 2009.
This much heralded book describes seven vivid scenarios that illustrate how recent changes in technology, demographics, economics and war-fighting could expose vulnerabilities that may lead to war and in some cases, to wildcard events (high impact/low probability). What if the worst that could happen actually does happen? How would we respond? Are we ready? Basing his analysis on open intelligence sources at the library, articles, books, interviews, and an assessment of the latest global geo political trends, Krepinevich composes seven plausible scenarios of future war.    He writes about an imaginative worldwide cyberattack to Pakistan falling apart.  He illustrates the current ambitions of rogue states, terrorists, and the likelihood of China on the march.  Krepinevich examines an array of responses that may be necessary, providing a formidable ‘early warning’ for leaders and military strategists alike. [NOTE:  The complete scenarios are outlined as chapters at in Krepinevivh’s book. As a further note, some of the chapters can be fully previewed on-line at Google Books.]  Scenario 1) The Collapse of Pakistan.  “The unraveling of the state of Pakistan. Pakistan’s collapse leads to a hunt for its nuclear weapons. The situation in Pakistan continued on a path toward deterioration as the world’s second-largest Muslim state slipped toward open civil war. The military was divided between army Loyalists, who had ruled the country off and on for decades amid various ineffectual civilian governments, and the Islamist army faction, whose sympathies are with the militant Muslim groups. The Loyalist army leaders attempted to perform their traditional role of imposing order within the country. This time, however, they had to contend with Islamist elements within the armed forces, led by a clique of young colonels and a few junior generals, who command perhaps a third or more of the country’s military. The Islamist faction supports the formation of a “true” Islamic republic, to be ruled by the country’s radical Islamist parties in league with the army’s “young Paks,” and with the support of many of the nation’s Sunni religious leaders. A quote at the beginning of this chapter reads: “A situation threatening the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and collapse of its command and control could only be brought about by subversion from within the military. Were this to happen, it would signify the Islamists’ penetration of the last bastion of credible power in Pakistan.” Brigadier Arun Sahgal United Service Institution.”   Scenario 2) War Comes to America.   “A nuclear attack on the United States happens with materials covertly transported across borders. Major U.S. cities are leveled by black-market nukes.  A quote at the beginning of this chapter reads, “Humans are creatures of habit. Furthermore, even when confronted with reasonably documented new facts that they understand intellectually, they frequently fail to grasp the new message at the visceral level. The opportunities for mass destruction and "Armageddon on the cheap" have proliferated. Communication and new means of transportation essentially have wiped out the comforts of international isolation. Geography still matters, but it no longer provides a safe haven for any state.” - Martin Shubik, "Terrorism, Technology, and the Socioeconomics of Death."  Scenario 3) Pandemic.  “A pandemic influenza sweeping across the globe. A global pandemic finds millions swarming across the U.S. border.”  Scenario 4) Armageddon: The Assault on Israel.  Escalation of an Arab-Israeli conflict toward a nuclear showdown. A quote at the beginning of this chapter: “You should know that the criminal and terrorist Zionist regime, which has sixty years of plundering, aggression, and crimes in its file, has reached the end of its work and will soon disappear off the geographical scene." President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Islamd Republic of Iran. (quoted by Reuters)  Scenario 5) China’s “Assasin’s Mace.”  “China’s growing civil unrest ignites a global showdown. A US standoff with China over Taiwan. Imagine, for instance, that China decides to seize Taiwan by force, sometime around the year 2017. As Mr. Krepinevich sees it, China's leaders are likelier to make such a decision in a period of crisis, when nationalist fervor will have to substitute for faltering economic growth as a source of the regime's legitimacy. Thanks to the one-child policy and favoritism toward males, China is saddled with a dangerous imbalance between young and old, and multitudes of unemployed young men eager for activity and inclusion,  even if it means having to go to war.  In every respect. China's military has adopted the concept of Shashoujian, or the "assassin's mace." The idea is to field relatively inexpensive weapons to disrupt America's expensive war-fighting capabilities, which rely heavily on satellite reconnaissance and networked digital communications systems.  An example of this happened in January 2007, when the Chinese destroyed an orbiting satellite with a missile. The Chinese have also reportedly invested heavily in cyberwarfare tools that could enter U.S. computer networks undetected, only to be activated automatically when the Pentagon moved to a higher state of readiness. Another indicator shows that China has put a lot of money in submarines as well, so one can imagine how vulnerable a $5 billion US capital ship may be to a $1 million Chinese torpedo.”   Scenario 6) Just Not On-Time: The War on the Global Economy.  The crippling of an increasingly fragile global economy. A quote at the beginning of this chapter:  “In September 2001, when US customs authorities stepped-up border inspections following the terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center in New York, auto plants in Michigan began shutting down within three days for lack of imported parts.” Mark Levison, The Box.  Scenario 7) Who Lost Iraq?   A US withdrawal from Iraq gone bad.  This is a scenario in which US troops engage in a massive withdrawal from Iraq after having remained in this country for a decade by 2012.  The US is unable to maintain coherence and there is a breakdown in US ability to preserve stability.  The consequences require global reaction.  

 

A Future War With Iran - Restructuring Defense For a New Era. The Value of Scenario-Based Planning.  (Excerpt from the book, “7 Deadly Scenarios” by Andrew F. Krepinevich.)   January, 2009.
Krepinevich believes it is the solemn responsibility of the military in any nation is to prepare for tomorrow's threats. Today, most Western nations are confronting a set of great challenges, but all too often, according to Krepinecich, militaries tend to prepare for an “updated” version of the last war, rather than prepare for the reality of the next war.    Rigorous scenario-based planning is as useful a tool to military foresight as it is to corporate foresight.  We cannot know the future, but by taking uncertainty into account, it can be better managed. According to Krepinevich, this is the best way that military planners and futurists can anticipate and manage for the future.  Properly crafted, scenarios provide a way of testing various options  that will shape the future environment.  In this scenario, Krepinevich writes about the future of Iranian relations with the Western world.  This is a world of peak oil (Iran is currently one of the leading oil producers in OPEC),  and financial turmoil.  In lieu of today’s events after the re-election of Ahmadinejad, it is worth taking  this excerpt of the scenario out of Krepinevich’s book, as referenced in the abstract above.  [NOTE: This scenario overlooks the power of the social networking technologies of twitter, I-pod, Facebook, and You Tube.  This has become  a world where the Iranian people may look more to the West for a sense of democracy rather than their own government.] Scenario)  The “Streetfighter” State.  “It is October 2016. the United States is about to confront the first major act of regional aggression in over a quarter century. This time the aggressor is Iran, but it takes a very different path than that chosen by Iraq in 1990. - For Iran the new century has meant both internal and external turbulence. Internally, the Iranian people have grown weary of over a quarter century of Islamic fundamentalist rule. The mullahs, in attempting to defuse growing discontent, have tried to apply the "Chinese" model by engineering rapid economic growth to mute political (and sectarian) opposition. Thus between 1998 and 2003 Iran adopts a much more friendly approach to the West. Tehran suspends its support of terrorism. Threats to blockade the Strait of Hormutz crease. Attempts are made to cultivate better relations with Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf States. - The reaction from the West is overwhelmingly favorable, except from the United States. Washington objects to Iran's decision to purchase commercial nuclear reactors from Russia, along with other arms purchases from China. Tehran retorts that it remains a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), that its nuclear program is peaceful and operating under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards, and that given the relative instability of the region, it is only prudent to engage in a slow-paced modernization of its armed forces. - Washington's European allies, growing increasingly distant from America over economic issues and NATO's inability to deal successfully with the Balkan crisis, embrace the Iranian peace initiative. From London to Paris, Berlin to Rome, the Americans are seen as catering to their long-term visceral dislike of Iran's fundamentalist regime. Soon European and Japanese energy firms are operating in Iran, focusing especially on developing that nation's huge reserves of natural gas. - Although the results are initially promising, sustaining high economic growth rates proves difficult to achieve. Indeed, developments "conspire" to work against the Iranian leadership's hope of pursuing the Chinese model. First, there is the continued transition in the developed world from "industrial" to "information" economies, which acts to flatten the growth of energy demand. This transition also is beginning to emerge in the newly industrializing countries, many of whom are skipping some phases of industrialization on their way to information-based economies. Second, alternatives to carbon-based fuels are coming "on line," especially nuclear power (in Japan and China) and renewable energy sources (i.e. solar, wind). Third, the long decline in Russia’s energy production is finally reversed in 2009. Fourth, the lifting of sanctions on Iraq in 2002 brings that country fully back into the oil market - while creating a growing security threat to Iran. - The Iranian fundamentalist leadership's inability to generate rapid economic growth through "accommodation" with the West is made clear with the reverse energy "shock" of April 2014, when the factors described above produce a temporary collapse of oil and gas prices. Efforts to enforce limited production agreements among exporting producer states prove fruitless. This leads to a political backlash in Iran, with hard-line fundamentalists in the ascendant. The hard-liners argue that Iran is again being exploited by the West, which is accused of depressing oil prices while supporting Iran's prospective enemies in Baghdad (through the lifting of sanctions) and Saudi Arabia (through the sale of advanced arms, including a theater missile defense system that is manned and maintained primarily by Americans). - the hard-line faction in Tehran argues that the only way to ensure Iran's economic growth and political stability is to achieve freedom from Western exploitation. This requires confronting the West and altering dramatically the world energy equation in factor of the "exploited" oil and fast-producing and exporting states. The Iranian military is instructed to prepare to execute long-held plans to block the Strait of Hormuz and to target Saudi and other Gulf oil state production facilities. the target date is November 2016. - It turns out that Washington’s suspicions regarding the Iranian nuclear weapons program are not without foundation.  By the fall of 2014 Iran has an inventory of eight nuclear weapons, which are mated to eight of its nearly 1,400 ballistic missiles. The Iranian military also boasts over 2,000 cruise missile systems, over 800 advanced conventional munitions (e.g. laser-and optically guided bombs), and wide access to commercial satellite communications networks. Iran also possesses limited chemical munitions stocks, nearly 7,000 antiship mines (some quite advanced), and some late-generation "traditional" systems (e.g. tanks, aircraft, surface warships), including five diesel submarines capable of conducting clandestine mine-laying operations. Finally, Iran has maintained a core terrorist network in the Middle east and Europe, with a limited network in the United States. -- Iran's political and strategic culture is such that it is willing to accept what the United States would consider a disproportionate amount of punishment, including casualties, and collateral and environmental damage, and to wage a protracted struggle if necessary to accomplish its strategic objectives. Finally, Iran's leadership understands the American political and strategic culture and is prepared to exploit it. - On November 6, 2016, Iran executes its war plan. Iranian ballistic and cruise missile forces disperse. Mine seeding of the Strait of Hormuz commences. Iranian submarines begin their "under watch" patrols of the mine fields. Antiship missile batteries (e.g. the Silkworm and Seersucker) position themselves along the approaches to the strait. Iran's small air force, equipped primarily with antiship missiles, disperses. - The Iranian leadership moves to deep underground shelters for its protection. Fiber-optic landlines and satellite "subscriber" service on systems like Iridium handle essential communications. Overhead reconnaissance is provided by Russian satellites. (Russia is only too happy to both reduce the influence of the United States and the European Union [EU] in the region and realize windfall energy profits during the crisis, and after, assuming the Iranian ploy is suvvessful. -  Next, the Iranian leadership declares that three conditions must be met before the strait will be reopened and the flow of oil resumed. First, all Western forces must depart the region, including U.S. support forces in Saudi Arabia. Second, Saudi Arabia must dramatically curtain its oil and gas production. Third, tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz must pay a transit fee to Iran. The mullahs believe that, if they can achieve these objectives, the key, enduring effect will be to make the Saudi Kingdom and the Gulf Cooperation Council states wards of Iran. - Recalling the Gulf War, Tehran issues a warning to all states in the region. Cooperation with any powers "external to the region" will lead to "dire consequences" being visited upon the cooperating state. Several options are open to Iran in making good on this threat. First, it might employ weapons of mass destruction, even though its arsenal is very limited. Second, it might conduct a precision strike on oil and gas fields in the region. Third, it could threaten environmental or "dirty" war, (e.g. destroying water supplies, detonating industrial plants that employ toxic chemicals, striking oil wells, etc.).  Iran's hope is that these threats will deter potential U.S. allies, especially within the region of conflict. Ideally, these concerns could be sufficient to preclude U.S. military action. As an aside, Iran pans to attack Israel, with a nuclear weapon if necessary (although Iranian leaders believe this will not be necessary), in order to weaken any U.S.-Arab coalition. - Still there is no guarantee that attempts to exploit fault lines in a U.S.-led coalition will prove successful. In short, the Iranian leadership realizes that it may find itself opposed by a U.S. led coalition prepared to take military action. Should this occur, Iran is prepared to make the war as sanguinary and protracted as possible. The hard-line fundamentalists are prepared to exploit the social dimension of strategy to offset Iran's clear disadvantages in the technical dimension. In short, Iran's leaders are banking that Americans do not have the will to engage in protracted conflicts, especially those that are bloody, if U.S. national survival is not perceived to be at stake. - If U.S. and other extra regional coalition members prepare to project their forces into the region, they will find themselves confronting several challenges. The Iranian armed forces are instructed to attack any port or airfield employed by the United States or its allies to introduce forces into the region. (The option also is to open to strike these targets preemptively, prior to the arrival of U.S. forces.)  This may include missile strikes, are another possibility. - The Iranians do not intend to challenge American and other coalition naval forces directly. Their objective is not command of the seas, but rather sea denial. Tehran uses information obtained through third-party commercial satellites to plot the movement of U.S. forces at sea, and for early warning and targeting purposes. Washington is faced with the dilemma of allowing its forces to be observed in this manner or of attempting to deny this information to the Iranians by convincing Russia to cease providing satellite information to Iran. Other alternatives involve electronic warfare against satellite or ground stations, or perhaps even contemplating attacks on the satellites themselves. - Iran lacks the means to conduct long-range strikes against the U.S. forces on the open seas with high confidence of success.  It hopes to make up for this shortcoming by combining its handful of modern diesel submarines and mine barriers to slow and canalize U.S. movement (an action that would be especially effective around the strait), and covering fires in the form of missiles or long-range aircraft that might be employed selectively against high-value U.S. targets (e.g. aircraft carriers), if they can be located. - If U.S. forces prepare for deep-strike operations on key Iranian targets, the mullahs intend to make these targets exceptionally difficult to strike, even with advanced conventional munitions and near-real-time intelligence. First, many key targets are "cloaked" with human shields of hostages (ideally American or coalition member nationals, many selected from firms operating in Iran). Second, key elements of the Iranian military are positioned in densely populated areas. In some instances, these elements are co-located alongside Iran's nuclear reactors or power plants, or industrial plants that utilize significant quantities of highly toxic chemicals as part of their manufacturing process (e.g. "Bhopal’s in waiting"). The Iranian people, declare the mullahs, are ready to die to defend their faith against the "Great Satan." - If need be, the Iranian leadership is prepared to intentionally destroy several "dirty" targets, while accusing the United States of causing the catastrophe (this scenario continues in the book).”

 

Deciding the Future: Energy Policy Scenarios to 2050.  World Energy Council (WEC). Pub. 2008. A series of 20 workshops were conducted in various regions of the world with over 400 principals from industry, government, academia, NGOs and trade groups providing their views on how to meet the need for energy that is accessible, available, and acceptable by 2020, 2035 and 2050. These experts came from the five global regions and from all facets of energy planning, energy production, finance, academia, civil society, and government.
The WEC began analysis of the future of energy with it’s  Energy for Tomorrow’s World projectpublished in 1993.  In 1998 Global Energy Perspectives, was published with the International Institute for Applied Sciences (IIASA), which  became a notable reference in the energy sector and the foundational work for this report.  Each scenario in this report covers detailed changes in the five major regions: Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. Taking a fresh approach, the World Energy Council (WEC) moved away from strict statistical modeling to a bottom-up approach encompassing regional views.  [NOTE: The complete scenario narratives and quantitative analysis are available on the WEC website.]   Scenario 1) The Lion.  “A highly skilled social animal that launches its forays after careful planning and in a highly cooperative effort, exercising great control and discipline, represents strong government engagement, together with close cooperation and deep integration of the public and private sectors, domestically and internationally. This is a world of a strong global economy, global pacts on emissions, and on dealing with energy poverty.  Overall, the lion scenario, with high levels of government involvement and high levels of cooperation and integration, proved broadly the best strategy for achieving WEC’s 3 A’s in all regions in the developed and developing world. Of the four scenarios, this approach produces the best estimates for maintaining a strong global economy while reducing energy intensity, tackling climate change, and improving access to modern energy sources and services. Governments and the private sector share their expertise and experience, bolstering regional energy integration. After intense negotiations, international agreements are struck to curb greenhouse gas emissions and eradicate energy poverty, although tensions persist. Living standards improve, energy access leaps ahead. Strong economic growth leads to higher per capita GDP, and as living standards improve, population growth rates decline after 2020. Better growth rates encourage more financing and technology transfer in the energy sector, and Africa adopts the latest technology. Governments tap the international public and private communities, and in a common goal to eliminate energy poverty develop secure energy supplies and services, and mitigate the effects of climate change.”  Scenario 2) The Giraffe.  “A highly adaptable and independent creature that thrives in an unstructured environment and sees opportunity at great distances, describes market-driven actions made with minimal government involvement but a high degree of cooperation and integration of the public and private domains, domestically and cross borders.  In this world, there are freer markets, a lifting of global GDP, and population growth eases.  With governments only minimally involved and strong cooperation and integration regionally and internationally, efforts are directed at freeing up global markets to boost economic growth, trade and affordable energy. Markets are emphasized, and governments stick to market regulation with little recourse to taxes and subsidies. There is freer movement of goods and services worldwide, and energy sources are more diverse. Population stabilizes and declines in some regions. Energy demand slackens, availability improves, energy access for all achieved. Due to strong involvement of the private sector internationally and continent-wide, innovation in energy technology is enhanced, reducing energy costs and boosting access to modern energy. CO2 emissions stay high, as government involvement remains low and coal and natural gas use rises, although biofuels are also adopted for transport. Without government incentives, renewables are adopted late. Energy efficiency and conservation are introduced due to more transfers of know-how and technology.”  Scenario 3) The Elephant.  “The elephant, a social animal with good memory that relies mostly on its own wellstructured family unit with little cooperation between families, characterizes government deeply engaged in policymaking, but with little cooperation between nations or integration of the public and private spheres. This is a world where energy supplies are more secure and diverse, and there is a slight cut in emissions.  In a scenario of strong government involvement in energy planning but minimal cooperation and integration by the private sector, governments make energy security a top priority by diversifying supplies and suppliers, leading to faster economic growth than under the leopard scenario, but not as fast as with lion or giraffe. Energy intensity eases everywhere for most of the period to 2050. Thanks to government pressure and government requirements to boost energy efficiency, energy demand rises initially and then tapers off.  Lack of international cooperation means emissions reductions remain limited.”   Scenario 4) The Leopard.  “The leopard, a solitary creature who is swift to act in isolation, and represents energy responses with little government involvement and little cooperation and integration of the public and private sectors. This is a world of slower economic growth, higher emissions, and greater uncertainty. In a scenario of light-handed government and little global or regional cooperation, countries are preoccupied with their own security of energy supply. Governments adopt few energy taxes and subsidies. Uncertainty leads to slower economic growth and underinvestment in the energy sector. Energy intensity worsens in the developing world, and declines less rapidly elsewhere. Greenhouse gas emissions rise until later stages, when technology advances eventually kick in. Energy demand continues to rise.”

 

Projections for the Geopolitical Economy of Oil After War in Iraq.  Paul A. Williams.  Futures  38.9 (Nov. 2006): p1074 (1)

How are events surrounding the latest Iraq war shaping the future global political economy of oil?  There is increasing competition to dominate energy-rich areas.   According to the author, the nature of the oil trade, Iraq's war and sectarian rise, and Chinese-American economic interdependence show that  in the future, there will be very difficult paths to the control of energy supplies.   This paper assesses three possible short-term scenarios with two key drivers:  1) China’s need for energy; and 2)  the rise of terrorism that has resulted from the Iraq war. As a result of the scenario study, the author concludes that: “reducing geographically expansive oil consumption could yield multiple benefits running the gamut of geopolitical, economic and even environmental concerns, if adherence to higher emission-reduction standards compels the implementation of less wasteful processes. None of these outcomes (in the scenarios) are preordained by extrapolating from present trajectories and they may even contradict each other at some level. Yet, events consistent with an unfolding of the third scenario could allow for considering how to boost minimum per-capita levels of energy use to a level that might allow for more sustainable population growth rates in the developing world, which accounts for a rising share of energy use and emissions.” Paul Williams
Scenario 1) Multiple Energy insecurity.   (Great-power competition and violent non-state reaction)   “Post-war constraints on Iraq's output stem largely from an insurrection that has targeted oil-sector activity, especially exports, while also deterring investment needed to restore a deteriorating infrastructure. Through March 2005, Iraqi oil assets had been attacked over 220 times, a number that rose to over 260 by the end of September of that year. Defending Iraq's pipeline network has diverted more aid and oil receipts towards security, including enlisting the services of tribes, some of whom have engaged in a type of protection racketeering.  The 'three-dimensional chessgame' metaphor in this scenario points to the difficulty of translating overwhelming 'top board' military power into favourable outcomes on the 'middle board,' where economic power is more evenly distributed among states, or on the 'bottom board,' where multifarious non-state actors, as in Iraq, exert veto power.  - The Iraq war metastasises networks of non-state resistance, involving terrorist organisations and local insurrectionists, and jeopardises long-term global spare production capacity. As Colombia, Chechnya, Iraq, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia attest, violence against oil infrastructure and personnel springs largely from specific grievances, but Al Qaeda operatives can, depending on local circumstances, contextualise these events within their global Islamist struggle.  - The exigency of restoring oil infrastructure highlights the critical role of foreign companies and contractors, which has led terrorists to extend the corresponding ambit of their operations.  - Similar problems afflict Saudi Arabia. Investment there is needed simply to sustain existing production levels, let alone expand OPEC's dwindling spare capacity. By early 2005, OPEC's collective capacity expansion had barely offset respective declines from Indonesia and Venezuela, and a plurality of this increase originated in Saudi Arabia, where state oil company Aramco boosted capacity enough to reach a maximum sustainable production capacity of 10 10.5 million daily barrels. In line with IEA estimates that its production has to double to meet forecasted 2020 world demand, the Saudi government has pledged to raise capacity to 15 million daily barrels by 2020. - During 1999-2004 alone, Chinese consumption grew by half, accounting for one third of the global increase, to reach 6.4 million barrels. A 20-percent yearly expansion in automobile ownership helps China surpass the United States in number of cars by 2030, but larger transportation energy use, growing from 10 to 15 percent of total usage over 2001-2025, will consume 5 million daily barrels, two-thirds of China's additional oil demand.  Yet, China has adjusted its sights closer to home. Russian company Yukos had been supplying most of China's Russian oil imports via rail, which increased from nearly six to nine percent of China's total import basket during 2003-2004 and agreed in June 2003 to construct a 2400-km pipeline to carry Siberian crude from Irkutsk to Daqing, China's large but maturing oil province. Although the Putin administration later confiscated and sold off this company to pliable state outfits and tussles have occurred over whether the pipeline should extend to China or to a Pacific port nearer to Japan, plans to build an initial pipeline spur in China's direction suggest prioritisation of Daqing. - This scenario also consists of China's geographically expansive search for energy supplies, as it has for the US, confronting non-state actors seeking to resist these forays. This could affect the supply of oil reaching, originating in, or leaving China's northwest Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.”
Scenario 2)  Mutual Energy Securitisation  (Inter-state collusion against non-state resource claimants)   “Relative-gains thinking characterising certain realms of interaction may not intensify great-power conflict when absolute gains from larger mutual interdependence outweigh them. In this scenario, economic growth underlying increases in China's imported oil demand may even reinforce an overarching Sino-American interdependence that promotes in oil-interest convergence. China has been running a USD 150-billion-plus trade surplus with the US, leading the latter to threaten import protections, permitted to an extent under the terms of China's 2001 WTO accession, and pressure Beijing to raise its currency value. Yet, the latter's willingness to cover US deficit-financing of imported goods by investing over USD 700 billion of foreign exchange reserves in US securities returns a stream of benefits to the US that allow it to purchase high-priced imported oil.  - Some oil interests, however, are inherently mutual. Although Beijing has been directing Chinese oil firms to acquire overseas assets since the ninth 5-Year Plan (1996-2000), it also seeks to attract foreign investment. - As long as China essentially pays for US purchases of its own goods, the US military will be less amenable, even if it could, to cutting fuel supplies than to collaborating to suppress non-state sources of supply disruption. - Indeed, China and the United States could have a mutual interest in 'securitisation' of energy supplies, depicting non-state resistance "as an existential threat, requiring emergency procedures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure"
Scenario 3) Multiple Energy Security  (Great-power curtailment of geographically expansive energy consumption). “In this case, the energy-consuming powers take action to lower (geographically) expansive consumption profiles, thereby also widening potential space for local resource claims to be addressed. This anti-geopolitical economy of oil would seem unlikely to materialise except for the mounting difficulties associated with the previous two scenarios. This scenario features reduction of US and Chinese domestic energy consumption, especially in the transportation sector, via market-governed regulation (i.e., rationalisation of subsidies and raising of gasoline taxes), higher energy-use efficiency and technological innovation, transfer of which US and Chinese membership in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) could facilitate. In some circumstances, however, environmental problems could worsen.  - As previously indicated, increasing oil imports are directly attributable to higher levels of personal access to motor transport. - Trends suggest that higher oil prices reflect, and have been advancing, shifts in energy consumption. At one level, rising prices reflect stronger environmental concerns, thereby promoting increased consumption of relatively scarcer supplies of less sulphuric crude-oil blends, which also exerts demand 'pull' on the more sour blends via the concomitantly higher profit margins associated with tailoring fuel qualities to meet stringent emission standards. However, this in turn is straining extant refinery capacity, its expansion potential already constrained by future profit-margin uncertainty and citing restrictions, supporting OPEC officials' assertions that high prices are less attributable to overall lack of crude supplies than to a refinery shortage especially in the US, where, although average per-refinery capacity increased almost 150 percent during 1970-2000, number of refineries decreased by over two fifths. - Regardless of their cause, higher oil prices and their perceived geopolitical ramifications are nonetheless altering energy-use patterns. Strategies centre on wider incorporation of available technology, like 'plug-in' capacity for hybrid electric vehicles, which could reduce gasoline consumption by 85 percent while doubling existing fuel efficiency to 100mpg, and flexible-fuel modifications, which, if supplementing 'plug-in' features, could raise fuel efficiency by another magnitude of five. These would lower 2025-projected expansion of US oil imports by nearly 8 million daily barrels, capping volumes near current levels.  - The key potential trade-off inherent in this strategy lies in the need to generate more electricity, which relies mostly on coal burning. China and the US, respectively posses over 1/10th and one quarter of the world's proven coal reserves and generate four fifths and three fifths of their electrical power from coal, but there exist no practical means of sequestering most of coal's carbon dioxide emissions. Trends project US and Chinese respective coal consumption to rise by two fifths and three quarters over the 2000-2025 period, accounting for one fifth and three fifths of world growth and equalling one fifth and over one third of the world's total 2025 consumption, while respective coal-based carbon dioxide emissions are expected to increase by two fifths and 114 percent, comprising nearly similar shares of world growth (nearly one third of total emissions growth) and the 2025 world total. - These forecasts suggest barriers to increasing general levels of compliance with the 2012 emission-reduction targets entailed in Kyoto Protocol's Annex One, which neither the US nor China has signed.”

 

Future Tense – The Coming World Order.  G. Dyer, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2004. Futures, 39.1 (February 2007): p117(3).

Terrorism may by overhyped.  US reaction to terrorism may have been an intentional manipulation for the US “overreact” - exactly what the terrorists may have wanted. The author asserts that, by its very nature, terrorism is a tool of the weak, and it only works by manipulating more powerful forces.   Dyer writes, "Almost all terrorism is a form of political jiu-jitsu in which the weaker side (the terrorists) tries to trick the stronger side (the government, the colonial power, etc.) into an overreaction that really serves the terrorists' goals. When military staff colleges teach the theory of guerilla war and terrorism to Western officers, the point they always stress is that the guerillas or terrorists are never trying to win a victory on the battlefield. They can't; they don't have enough force. Instead, they are using the very limited amount of force at their disposal in ways that will goad you, the army, into using your overwhelming force in ways that help their cause and hurt yours" G. Dyer The author hopes that more cooperative policies will be seen in future administrations.  If not, there will be a much more dangerous future of allies, alliances and arms races; essentially what the world experienced just before WWI, only with much more powerful weapons.  According to Dyer, “If the US is set on flouting international law and invading any country it likes, then most of the world has a strong incentive to get up and run in the arms race. Not only would this be a terrible waste of resources but would lead to a far more dangerous world.”

Dyer Scenario to 2017. The following is an excerpt of the Dyer scenario.   NATO would certainly be the first victim of a realignment of the great powers, though it is not true that 'the Atlantic is getting wider,' as some claim: the body of water that is rapidly expanding is the English Channel. Of NATO's three militarily significant European members, France and Germany have taken the lead in opposing the trend of American policy since 2001, while Britain remains indissolubly wed to the United States not only by the Blair government's choice but more profoundly through its dependence on the United States for key elements in its 'independent' nuclear deterrent force. - America's other allies in this changed world would include Canada (whether it likes it or not), Australia, Israel--and probably India. This is a world in which the American military presence in the Muslim Middle East would persist and might even expand, with possible invasions of Syria and Iran following those of Afghanistan and Iraq... It would be ... hard for the United States to resist the attraction of Indian military manpower if it were bogged down in a series of occupations of Middle Eastern countries.  - China, as usual, would be global odd man out ... the sheer scale of China makes the whole business of building an alliance less urgent in Beijing's eyes ... If there's a return to the old world with the old rules, then China would urgently build up its own military power, including most especially its nuclear deterrent power. It was genuine restraint, not lack of resources, that held China to fewer than two hundred long-range nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles all these years. - A Franco-German alliance would not counter-balance the military and economic power of the United States. Paris and Berlin would have to find a great-power partner with a big resource base and a serious nuclear weapons capability, and the obvious candidate is Russia ... If Russia concludes that its dream of a real partnership with Washington, even a junior partnership, is just a fantasy--and it is already pretty close to that conclusion--then a Paris-Berlin-Moscow deal is not a far-fetched alternative ... and it could grow into a serious strategic competitor to the United States in less than a decade to 2017.  - In sketching out this possible world of ten years in the future, I am drawing a not-quite-worst-case scenario that may never come to pass. It is possible that a change of course or of administration in Washington will quickly return us to the relatively safe and orderly world of the later 1990s, with little to remind us of this interlude except the mess in Iraq and a heightened consciousness about the risk of terrorist attacks. But if these informal alliances do begin to take shape, then the level of trust in the world will go down dramatically by 2017--think how short a time it took during the run up to the invasion of Iraq for many Americans to become persuaded that France, of all places, was their enemy--and vicious circles of entirely familiar historical types will start to rotate. At this point we would be in a situation that is probably more dangerous, though less overtly hostile, than the Cold War.”

 

The Middle East and the Rising Asian Powers: Imagining Alternative Futures.  Scenario prepared by The East Asia and Southwest Asia Programs at the Henry L. Stimson Center. For the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project Spring-Summer 2004.

The Henry L. Stimson Center released a set of papers that informs the debate about the future of Middle East-Asia relations and the role of the United States.  There is growing international interest in the Middle East and Asia.  The Center held a series of interviews with experts on these regions and describes the evolution of implications of: shifting Saudi thinking; China’s economic interdependency; regional dynamics; and, Islamic worldwide connections.  This paper describes a snapshot of the future to the year 2020.  Scenario: China and Saudi Arabia in 2020: Closer Ties but no Strategic Partnership.  Snapshot of 2020.  “By 2020, China is recognized as one of the most important external players in  the Middle East, alongside the United States and the EU. China’s overall approach is to  maintain friendly ties with all, to avoid the pitfalls of being seen as a patron of one  particular protagonist in the region’s chronic tensions and rivalries, and to avoid heavy reliance on any state that could face serious internal upheaval. These are lessons that  China takes away from the perceived failures of American policies towards Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict. China cares more about access to energy and stable economic relations than political transformation in the region, although  generational transition and gradual liberalization of China’s own politics make this subject to change. China tries to reassure the United States that its interests do not conflict with those of Washington, and it proposes some joint initiatives on humanitarian and development activities. Its key energy strategy is to maintain diverse supplies, with increasing emphasis on oil and gas that can be transported to China overland, to avoid vulnerability to disruption by the US or other unforeseen events. China gains marketshare in the Middle Eastern market for arms and technology.
For Saudi Arabia, this state of affairs is a disappointment; Riyadh spent several years after the departure of American forces in 2005 courting the Chinese and hoping to establish a new (and less controversial) partnership with the emerging superpower, one that would be more accommodating to local norms and help the al-Saud regime in Riyadh maintain normal foreign relations while dealing in its own fashion with internal threats. Saudi officials are also concerned that Chinese evenhandedness masks a strong preference for Iran, now a nuclear power, and this adds to Saudi uncertainty, pressing some in high councils to argue for an overt alliance with Pakistan. Despite the lack of a clear strategic commitment or security guarantee from China, China and Saudi Arabia negotiate sales of medium-range missiles, which have political as much as military importance for the Saudis, and help to diminish the Saudis’ sense of vulnerability vis-à- vis larger Gulf neighbors, even though the Chinese avoid being associated with any one state at the expense of the others.  In American foreign policy circles, many are alarmed by Chinese inroads into  the Middle East and bemoan the decline of US influence and presence in the region compared to the 1990s. Others are pleased that US industry appears genuinely committed to investments in new energy technologies, with the prospect of near-term reductions in dependence on imported oil. But the image of China jockeying with the United States as the major external actor in ME is the most frequently cited – and disturbing - example of China achieving peer status with US, and its success in attaining global power status.”

 

Alternative Futures to 2025: Global Governance.  Walter C. Clements, Jr., professor of political science at Boston University. OECD Observer No 221-222.

The OECD Observer recounts three basic international trends in world affairs.  1) The interdependence of states. Mutual vulnerability in many domains;  2) Globalization. The many forces that transcend state borders – from epidemics to electronic banking;  3) The pyramid of power.  Military, economic, political, cultural.  In th early part of the 21st century the world is unipolar.  It combines a single superpower with successive levels of great, medium, regional, and rising powers. Walter Clements   The following scenarios to 2025 discuss potential balances of power, potential henemonies, and a scenario of global governance without world government.
Scenario 1) Unipolar Stability.  “US hegemony is rooted in tangible and intangible assets that show no sign of weakening. The unipolar world continues for decades. It proves to be the most peaceful and prosperous era in human history. It is a world in which most states deal with global interdependence so as to generate mutual gain. International actors focus more on creating values for mutual gain than on aggressive exploitation or parasitism. The model the Canadian-Mexican-US relationship than, say, to the triangle of India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. Unipolarity proves to be more conducive to peace than multilateral balancing or bipolarity. It does not, however, prevent disorder among lesser states and “failing” states. Outside powers, usually with UN blessing, intervene in some but not all trouble spots. The United States is a new kind of hegemon on the world stage. A deal takes shape: Washington does not abuse its power and other countries do not gang up against it. The sole superpower seldom acts alone. Washington seeks and usually gets the support of other actors for its key goals, as it did in forging a policy to contain Iraq and North Korea in the 1990s. Economic prospects for most of the world are positive. The world is sufficiently rich and well informed to find paths to sustainable development. The World Bank formulates guidelines by which countries can enlarge their GDP and improve their Human Development Index ratings. Infant mortality continues to decline in most countries. Russia begins to realise its economic potential. New giants arise – China, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Kazakstan. But none of these countries has the wish or the means to challenge the global hegemon. Europe and Japan remain powerful trading states. Europe, however, is at most a confederation. Real union is unfeasible due to language, cultural, and economic differences. Alliance with America remains the linchpin of Japan’s security. The country faces severe limits. Its archipelago remains crowded. The population becomes greyer with fewer workers to support retirees. Japan’s foreign markets shrink as Korea and other neighbours fill the same demands at lower prices. Authoritarian rule curtails the once vibrant growth of Singapore and Hong Kong. Most Pacific rim economies slow their torrid pace as fresh inputs of labour, capital, and energy become more costly.”
Scenario 2) Fragmented Chaos.  “Extrapolations from the relative calm and prosperity of the late 20th century may miss the mark. How could chaos replace stability? A serious change in any part of the system can ripple throughout the whole. First, the biosphere fails to support human life in some places where it flourished in the 1990s. The affluent Pacific rim sits on a ring of fire – volcanoes and fault lines – that devour life and property. Storms and droughts increase due to climate change and deforestation. Both environmental and economic barriers impede growth. It is easier to call for “sustainable development” than to practice it. Epidemics such as H.I.V. infection undermine both physical and financial health. Second, the rational calm inspired by expanding prosperity is not shared by actors whose deep demands go unmet. Unemployed youth in many countries resent the gap between haves and havenots. Religious and ethnic zealots incite violence. Some states fail. Third, weapons of mass destruction become more accessible. A single nuclear explosion near a city – set off by mechanical accident, human error, or design – makes Chernobyl and Oklahoma City look like child’s play. Reports that Iraq is ready to launch anthrax-filled warheads create panic in Iran and Israel. When the awakening giant China trembles, there are global repercussions. Millions are unemployed as the economy slows. Malthus strikes: China has sacrificed too much farm land to industry. Border peoples become more restive. Authoritarian rule is challenged by democratic reformers and regional potentates. Transitions from dictatorship can endanger world peace. The United States fails to lead or throws its weight too aggressively. It antagonizes followers or loses them. Washington oscillates between do-nothing complacency and hubristic arrogance of power. The US home front deteriorates as racial and class cleavages multiply; as Hispanic and other groups reject the long dominant culture; as guns rule some streets and many schools; and as Congress and the public refuse to invest in science, public health, or infrastructure. As many countries follow the US lead, their democracy suffers from brain washing by mass media technology. Couch potato fast-food obesity and drug dependency impede brain power and physical health. Parasitism also takes its toll. Many actors try to free-load. While more and more individuals “bowl alone” – some of them lost in cyberspace – a global time of troubles engulfs humanity.”
Scenario 3) Challenge to the Hegemon. “Nothing lasts. When Uncle Sam appears weak or overbearing, rising powers challenge the hegemon. Most Chinese remain poor, but the country’s enormous GDP permits Beijing to build formidable armed forces. China’s engineers move the country to the leading edge of technology. China’s oil requirements deepen its motives to hold onto Central Asia and to dominate the South China Sea. Problems multiply when China cracks down harder on its Uygurs, Kazakhs, and Tibetans; insists that Japan stop building antimissile defences; and demands that Taiwan join in a Beijing-dominated federation. Washington again sends aircraft carriers to the Taiwan Straits. The danger to peace is far greater than when an Austrian archduke died in Sarajevo. Here the road forks. One direction sees China back down before the US show of force. Like Russia’s rulers in 1911 and 1962, however, Beijing swears never again to retreat before rival power. China steps up military investments and prepares for a confrontation one or two decades hence. The other fork also leads to trouble: Washington pulls back while Beijing incorporates Taiwan into China. The PRC then bullies other neighbours – Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Russia, India. Washington wants to contain China, but blows hot and cold. Emboldened, China marches toward a collision with the enfeebled hegemon, believing it will win the next round.” 
Scenario 4) Bipolar Co-operation.   “China and the United States have equivalent GDPs by 2025. Their economies are more complementary than competitive. Beijing and Washington have no territorial claims on each other. Co-operative projects convince their peoples that mutual gain is possible in all fields. The Taiwan issue no longer troubles PRC-US relations. China adapts the Taiwan model as technocrats supplant ideologists in Beijing. Mainland China and Taiwan are linked economically but distinct politically. They agree to disagree on politics. China keeps to its late 20th century borders and focuses on internal problems. China suffers many severe economic and environmental challenges but other countries give or sell food and other goods to fill deficits. China is not active at the United Nations but rarely objects to peacemaking by others.”
Scenario 5) Multipolar Co-operation.   “The poles of power are diverse but complementary. Democracy and peace reinforce each other. Most governments are representative democracies, linked by trade and other collaborative ventures. Cyberspace joins scientists, cultural figures, business people, relatives, and e-mail pals across the world. Even before 2025 Moscow and Washington cut their nuclear arsenals to 600 strategic warheads. Other nuclear powers keep their arsenals well below this number. The military requirements set out in Articles 43-47 of the UN Charter are fulfilled. The UN Security Council has a Military Staff Committee; and most UN members have earmarked forces for use by the Security Council. Collective security is becoming a reality. The tough action taken by the UN against Saddam Hussein in the 1990s encourages confidence in collective security and discourages rogue attacks on the evolving world order. Israel and most of its neighbours are learning how to co-exist and trade. North-South differences narrow. More Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries enter the path of rapid and sustainable development. New strains of wheat, rice, maize, and other crops permit nearly every region to feed itself without heavy irrigation or chemicals. Few countries still depend on a single commodity. Both developing and industrialised countries shift resources from defence to development needs. Biodiversity in the Amazon and other tropical regions is protected and becomes profitable.” 
Scenario 6) Global Governance Without World Government.   “The transnational civil society develops across many countries and regions. Common values – political choice, trust in free markets, respect for human rights – are shared by more than three-quarters of humanity. Territoriality weakens as a principle of organisation. There is no world government by a supranational authority. National governments remain, but they share power with a medley of non-governmental agencies – business and labour groups as well as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). Together they form expanding networks of institutions designed to meet a wide range of human needs. National governments confer among themselves and with responsible specialists from international and transnational agencies. This is functionalism writ large – decisionmaking informed and managed by experts, mediated and supervised by representatives of elected governments. To cope with epidemics, for example, government experts form a committee drawn from national medical boards, the World Health Organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the recently formed International Academy of Health Sciences. To deal with economic problems – from currency fluctuations to commodity prices – government experts form a committee drawn from the OECD, World Bank, the IMF, leading commercial banks, and the recently formed International Academy of Economic and Social Scientists. To deal with threats to peace and security, governments depend heavily on the UN Security Council and the UN Secretary-General. Some governments retain nuclear arsenals, but the Security Council has its own rapid reaction force, backed by designated units from most UN members. The UN Secretary-General has a panel of mediators whom she/he can propose to disputants. A committee of elders drawn from Nobel Peace Prize laureates advises the Security Council and the Secretary-General. By 2005 the University of the Middle East, founded by Arabs and Israelis who met in US graduate schools, has received help from some governments and foundations. By 2025 it has trained a generation of men and women more concerned with peaceful development than with sectarian passions. By 2025 they have launched several projects that knit Israel and its neighbours in mutual gain. World governance is global public policy responding to the dangers and opportunities inherent in globalisation.”

 

The Future of Oil: Four Scenarios. S & P Ratings News by David Wyss.  Standard & Poor’s examines four possible outcomes and how they would affect economic growth, consumer spending, inflation, unemployment, and other indicators. August 8, 2006.

The future of oil is uncertain. Having survived higher energy prices without a major impact, the U.S. economy is more sensitive to oil prices than a year ago.  Inflation has accelerated. Consumers are already spending more than they earn.  This paper reveals how geopolitical forces may play out over the relative short-term in the next five years to 2012.  Questions such as how long the Iraq conflict will continue, or the extent to which Iran, the 2nd largest oil producer will get involved in war or nuclear weaponry over the next five years are considered.  Will matters exacerbate into a broader war in the Middle East?  How will it effect the supply of oil to countries most in need, such as the US?  According to the author, “The falloff in U.S. growth means it takes a smaller shock to cause a recession than it did a year ago. Continued strong world oil demand, with usage in both China and Europe accelerating, will continue to put rising pressure on oil supplies despite a U.S. slowdown, thus raising the odds of an oil price surge causing a U.S. recession.”   The following are excerpts of scenarios of geopolitical and economic forces from Standard & Poor’s report.
Scenario 1. Conflict contained. In the base case scenario, it assumes that the fighting is limited to Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon. There is no impact on oil supplies, and prices drop slowly from current levels, which have a risk premium built into them. Oil falls below $70 per barrel by yearend and to $60 per barrel by the end of 2008. The world economy continues to expand, with the U.S. slowing to 2.5% growth in 2007 from 3.5% in 2005 and 2006 but with Europe speeding up this year and Asia remaining solid. Headline inflation rates drop because of the decline in oil prices.
Scenario 2) Iran shuts its taps.  In the second scenario, Iran stops exporting oil. This could be in response to a strike on its nuclear facilities, a retaliation against the West for supporting Israel, or internal disruption in Iran. In any case, Iran takes its 2.7 million barrels of oil exports off the market. World oil prices soar, probably to above $100 per barrel temporarily but settling near $95 per barrel. Near the end of next year, oil prices begin to decline, presumably as Iran returns to world markets, and fall back to $66 per barrel by the end of 2008. This scenario's impact on the U.S. is substantial, with a near-recession starting in the fourth quarter and continuing through mid-2007. Higher oil prices take 1.8% off the level of real GDP by the third quarter of next year and add 3.3% to the level of the consumer price index a year later. The impact on the euro zone economies is smaller than in U.S., with real GDP cut by a maximum of 1.0% and the CPI up 2.0%. The Japanese price effect is similar to Europe's, but GDP is cut 1.2% because of the greater reliance on oil and on imports.
Scenario 3) The Gulf Goes Dry.  In this scenario, Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers. Oil prices spike sharply. World oil supplies would be cut by about 20%. World strategic petroleum reserves are tapped extensively, but even so, oil prices rise to $250 per barrel. The world economy moves into recession, on the order of the 1980-1982 downturn. The U.S. is the hardest hit of the major economies, with real GDP dropping 5.2% below the baseline in late 2007, implying a major recession, and the unemployment rate reaching 7%. Consumer price inflation hits 10% next year as oil prices soar. The impact on Europe is smaller, but because the Continent started with weaker growth, the recession is just as big. Japan has a recession of similar size. Both in terms of the price effect and the supply impact, the models are being pushed well outside their historical range, and the dislocations could be even more painful than this projection implies. This is by no means a worst-case scenario but closer to a best case given the closure of the Strait. We think (and certainly hope) this is an unlikely scenario.
Scenario 4) The U.S. Gets Cut Off.   The fourth scenario involves an oil embargo against the U.S. begun by Iran but then accepted by the other Arab nations, perhaps because the threat of closing Hormuz brings them into line. Without cooperation from other oil-exporting nations, the impact would be minor because the U.S. gets only about 17% of its oil from the Middle East. We assume, however, that Venezuela goes along, thus increasing pressure on the U.S. The embargo will prove leaky because once oil flows onto the ocean, it will go wherever the money is. Also, we would expect most of the embargoing countries to be reluctant to enforce the ban strictly. Still, as in 1973, such an embargo could create significant short-term problems for the economy and the U.S. oil market. Prices would probably peak above $90 per barrel for a short while, but we would expect them to come back fairly quickly to the world level, which is essentially unchanged from the baseline. Only a small price differential would exist in the longer run. The other economies would be slightly hurt because of the weaker U.S. economy and consequent loss of exports.  However, the impact would be attenuated because the U.S. slips only slightly from the baseline projection.  Again, worse cases than any of these are entirely possible, with resulting impacts on the U.S. and world economy that are nearly impossible to model. The best hope is for a diplomatic breakthrough-and a little luck - to help limit the outcome to Scenario One.”

 

The Next War of the World   Niall Ferguson. Foreign Affairs  85.5 (Sept-Oct 2006): p61. Copyright 2006 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

In this article, Niall Ferguson argues the same ingredients that made the 20th century the bloodiest in history  is poised to make the 21st century just as deadly.  The “three Es” as he calls them – ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline – when combined, create an environment that can lead to devastation and war. Where do we see the “three Es?” most prominently today?  The Middle East.  Ethnic disintegration is accelerating, most obvious with the sectarian wars in Iraq.  Since the UN sanctions and US invasion in 2003, Iraq experienced severe economic volatility: real GDP declined by more than 40 percent to bounce back somewhat last year, but growth was under 4 percent. Also, oil production is running only 16 percent of its prewar level because of war-related sabotage and other problems.  The Middle East is also the zone of potential imperial conflict.  According to the author, “The Islamic Republic of Iran is heir to an imperial tradition dating back to the time of the Safavid dynasty, which ruled Persia from 1501, and beyond. Although Iran's leaders prefer the rhetoric of religious revolution and national liberation, the historian cannot fail to detect in their long-held ambition to acquire nuclear weapons -- and thereby dominate the Middle East -- a legacy of Persia's imperial past. The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is not only a devotee of the Hidden, or Twelfth, Imam (who devout Shiites believe will return to the world as the Mahdi, or messiah, for a final confrontation with the forces of evil); he is also a war veteran at the head of a youthful nation. It is not wholly fanciful to see in him a potential Caesar or Bonaparte.” Niall Ferguson  Scenario The Rocky Road Ahead – The War of the World?  “ If the combination of ethnic disintegration, economic volatility, and empires in decline is the basic formula for twentieth-century conflict, then what are the implications for the twenty-first century?  In this scenario,  the escalating civil war in Iraq is so disturbing it spills over into neighboring countries. The Iranian government takes an intense interest in  Iraq. Iran, with its Sunni and Kurdish minorities. Iran is no more homogeneous than Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. These countries cannot be expected to look on insouciantly if the Sunni minority in central Iraq begins to lose out to what may seem to be an Iranian- backed tyranny of the majority.  The recent history of Lebanon offers a reminder that in the Middle East there is no such thing as a contained civil war. Neighbors are always likely to take an unhealthy interest in any country with fissiparous tendencies.  The obvious conclusion is that a new "war of the world" may already be brewing in a region that, incredible though it may seem, has yet to sate its appetite for violence. And the ramifications of such a Middle Eastern conflagration would be truly global. Economically, the world would have to contend with oil at above $100 a barrel. Politically, those countries in western Europe with substantial Muslim populations might also find themselves affected as sectarian tensions radiated outward. Meanwhile, the ethnic war between Jews and Arabs in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank shows no sign of abating. Is it credible that the United States will remain unscathed if the Middle East erupts?  Although such an outcome may seem to be a low-probability, nightmare scenario, it is already more likely than the scenario of enduring peace in the region. If the history of the twentieth century is any guide, only economic stabilization and a credible reassertion of U.S. authority are likely to halt the drift toward chaos. Neither is a likely prospect. On the contrary, the speed with which responsibility for security in Iraq is being handed over to the predominantly Shiite and Kurdish security forces may accelerate the descent into internecine strife. Significantly, the audio statement released by Osama bin Laden in June excoriated not only the American-led "occupiers" of Iraq but also "certain sectors of the Iraqi people -- those who refused [neutrality] and stood to fight on the side of the crusaders." His allusions to "rejectionists," "traitors," and "agents of the Americans" were clearly intended to justify al Qaeda's policy of targeting Iraq's Shiites.  The war of the worlds that H. G. Wells imagined never came to pass. But a war of the world did. The sobering possibility we urgently need to confront is that another global conflict is brewing today -- centered not on Poland or Manchuria, but more likely on Palestine and Mesopotamia.”

 

Four Futures for China Inc. What’s Next Business 3.0. Scenarios by Doug Randall and Jesse Goldhapper, consultants at Global Business Network, a Monitor Group company where Randall is a partner. 2006.

Business, especially global business is looking at China, the world’s largest emerging economy as a stakeholder in future global strategies albeit markets, suppliers, producers.  China’s GDP has more than doubled within the last six years alone and it’s worth a CEO to invest in China for great gains in ROI.  But will China fare successfully in the future if it continues to pollute the local and global environment? What about corruption and the potential for social turmoil? Utilizing the scenario planning technique, Global Business Network presents four scenarios of the future of China.   Overview of scenarios. Scenario 1) Emperor of Business.  “ China grows peacefully and plays by the rules.  In this dream scenario, China becomes global business’s best friend. After a wave of political and economic reform, Beijing is willing to play by Western trade rules and navigates through all internal woes, economic and environmental.  The nation provides a credible, consistent infrastructure and cracks down on piracy. Beijing’s streets are full of stores selling legitimate software and DVDs.  As predicted by a Goldman Sachs study in 2003, China’s GDP surpasses that of the United States by 2041.  More European are learning Mandarin than English as a second language. Chinese workers become so prosperous that industry starts turning to Africa for cheap outsourced labor.  What it means for business: Investment in China is duly rewarded. Through the United States relative cultural influence wanes, a massively affluent Chinese middle class is spending more than ever.” 
Scenario 2) Emperor’s New Clothes.  “China’s growth rate is short-lived; it becomes a bigger Brazil.  As the adage goes, “Brazil has a bright future, and always will.”  In this scenario, China heads in the same direction – driven by boundless potential but never quite achieving First World status.  The country flounders in the face of environmental crisis, political unrest, poverty, and government corruption. (Indeed, businesses in China already perceive a steadily increasing level of corruption, according to nonprofit group Transparency international’s corruption index.) Growth first sputters, then grinds to a halt.  Some provinces demand autonomy, and Beijing’s tax collectors are rebuked.  Infrastructure crumbles.  What it means for business: As had happened with Brazil, China could still pay off nicely for foreign investors, regardless of its internal strife. But it will take a lot of local knowledge to get the payout. Long-term investments may sour, especially if the Communist Party cedes economic and political control.” 
Scenario 3) Emperor of Asia.  “China grows, but only as fast as its neighbors.  In this scenario, China enters an era of neo-regionalism.  Think pre-World War I Europe, except in Asia.  China grows at the same rate as its neighbors and finds itself jockeying for resources with India, Japan, and Russia. A web of Asian Economic interdependence evolves.  Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan sign trade treaties and mutual defense pacts.  Nationalist protests among ordinary Chinese, which have increased from 10,000 in 1990 to 74,000 in 2005, continue to grow – and even start to target Western corporations. Beijing’s streets are dominated by Chinese companies.  Regional saber rattling puts a brake on globalization. Service-sector outsourcing leaves China and moves to Africa and South America – now perceived as safer.  What it means for your business: You’ll need to hedge your bets on supply chains and watch events closely, as one Asian trade partner may not look kindly upon another. U.S. companies will find themselves aligning more with Latin America and Canada as the globe becomes ever more factional and regional.”
Scenario 4) Emperor of the World. “China’s speedy growth tips all the scales in its favor.  In this scenario, China Acquires economic power so quickly that it retains the ability to play by its own rules.  Through sheer scale, it forces trade partners to play by those rules too.  Beijing stops buying U.S. Treasury bills, and the Fed is forced to hike interest rates.  The yuan replaces the dollar as the global currency standard.  Piracy is rampant, and intellectual property rules are all but forgotten.  China’s military spending continues to rise, the nation fosters alliances with India and Russia, and the United States loses leadership in world affairs.  What it means for your business:  Companies that play by China’s rules may find themselves conflicted in their interests globally.  Growing hostility toward China in the United States could have a deleterious effect on investments.  Large businesses may start moving their headquarters to Beijing.”

 

An Inclusive World – In Which the West, Islam, and the Rest Have a Stake in An Inclusive World.   Sundeep Waslekar, Strategic Foresight Group. Copyright 2007, ISBN: 81-88262-09-9.

The Strategic Foresight Group received the support of The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Friedrich Naumann Stiftung for research and publication of this essay.  It explores what the scenario of an inclusive world among nations would look like and argues that religion, ideology, and other belief systems are generally used to justify the use of force.   The essay distinguishes between terrorism and extremism.    “Terrorism is violence causing bodily harm, with political or ideological motives, while extremism may not involve violent acts but can mobilize entire societies.  While terrorism is seen mostly in the developing world, signs of extremism are rising in Europe as well as North America.” Sundeep Waslekar  The analysis reveals there are common factors that drive terrorism and  extremism alike – comprehensive political and socioeconomic deprivation, which, according to the author,  must be distinguished from absolute poverty.  Such a phenomenon exists around the world.  The essay identifies steps for leaders and citizens to shift from force to a collaborative problem solving approach in the conduct of international relations.  In a normative scenario of an inclusive world, the authors propose three ideas for restructuring relations between Western and Islamic countries.
Scenario of an Inclusive World: “An inclusive world begins with the installation of an inclusive semi-permanent conference on the Middle East to resolve the Palestinian conflict and other regional security issues.  In the 1990s, policymakers recalled the Madrid Conference and proposed that it was necessary to instill innovation in the peace process.  But in an inclusive world, it would have a semi-permanent multiple stakeholder conference table. A Western-Islamic Dialogue and Engagement (WIDE) Initiative for a group of inspired and effective leaders would come together to develop proposals for conceptual clarity and to build political cooperation between Western and Islamic countries. The group would be comprised of credible leaders from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It devises ways to engage with the United States at various levels through informal channels. It also interacts with key political actors in the Middle East that have communication problems with the United States. The objective of the interaction would be to pursue the idea of the inclusive semi-permanent conference on the Middle East and to seek conceptual agreement on difficult issues such as the rule of law, difference between terrorism and resistance, and core human values. In an inclusive world, the establishment of an International Historical Study Group on our common is gathered to examine human civilization and the experience of mutual learning between civilizations and the evolution of mankind through joint efforts.  The Arab Islamic Renaissance (AIR) Initiative would take effect.  This is based on the premise that the failure of present governance models and the rejection of foreign ideas provide scope for preachers of absolutist visions to attempt young people with their own vision of society. Thus, it  is necessary to develop an alternative vision of Arab society that is based on successful periods in Islamic history. There are already many institutions that are committed to promote education, science, technology and rationality. But in this world, the existing capacity in a few countries would be harnessed and expanded for the benefit of the entire Arab region.  An inclusive plan of action would  include  spreading the message of Renaissance, strategies to make Arab unity operational, establishing houses of wisdom in the 21st century, ensuring freedom for critical inquiry and seeking influence through global engagement. An inclusive world would offer a compact of the 3Ds – democracy, dialogue and development - to deal with the problems of alienation in the world at large. It is necessary for each society to tackle relative deprivation with specific models of democracy, development and dialogue that are appropriate to its own circumstance.”

 

US Geopolitical Trends and Scenarios. Wikipedia, a participatory encyclopedia that is internet based, examines key trends and political scenarios of the United States. 

“America deals with turbulent times playing a pivitol leadership role, though not unchallenged.” The following set of four scenarios were built around two key uncertainties - One relates to the approach the United States takes to international engagement (passive or aggressive), and the second relates to the level of regional tensions that develop in the world (high or low).   Scenario 1. Get Under the Umbrella.  “World wide tensions are high and the United States is actively engaged in world events. In the America's, the war on drug cartels has almost taken on a narco-state dimension. While the drug cartels have not yet taken over any state, they have taken control over vast territories and defend them with well equipped paramilitary forces. In Africa, there remains large scale tribal conflicts and internal wars at the intersection of Islamic and Christian regions. In Asia there is instability in Indonesia and South East Asia. The Taiwan-China conflict remains unresolved. North Korea hangs on, and continues to devote disproportionate resources to its military. It continues to be propped up with humanitarian aid from an increasingly nervous Japan and South Korea. Internal civil wars have broken out in several of the "stans" and defending energy sources is now more complicated. Russia, given the instability in its southern regions feels compelled to rearm, and China devotes up to 6% of its Gross Domestic Product to its armed forces. A Palestinian state has been created, but their remains cross border tensions and skirmishes with Israel. Iraq is internally stable, Saudi Arabia is on the verge of internal collapse, and Iran is seen as a growing regional hegemon. Syria remains a military state with increased spending to support its internal forces. Europe is stable (with the exception of Turkey and Cyprus), but tensions and military expansion in North Africa have created serious concerns for the states touching the Mediterranean. The United States has been politically active around the world both in the United Nations and through both regional alliances and bi-lateral relationships. The United States is still actively pursuing the war on terrorism and seeks and deploys its own military forces in troubled spots around the world. It is both a source of stabilization and a magnet for counter balancing forces.  Countries must balance their defense procurement between meeting their needs for opposing regional adversaries and supporting (if an ally) or countering (if an adversary) US military capabilities. US adversaries will focus most of their militaries on regional opponents and invest in niche capabilities that they perceive will dissuade US military intervention. Adversaries with robust economies will invest in advance conventional weapons that offer standoff defense, offensive capabilities to support anti-access strategies, and asymmetric weapons that provide advantages against US military capabilities. In some cases these weapons systems may be provided by traditional US “allies. Adversaries with limited budgets will more likely dependent on WMD and unconventional warfare for defense against US intervention. US allies with robust economies will buy systems that have interoperability with the United States so they can be part of US military operations and thus have influence. Other allies with limited defense budgets will purchase niche capabilities to help play a supportive role to the United States but will mostly rely on the US policy of being engaged for their security.” Scenario 2) Watch Your Neighbor.  High tension/US is passive. “World wide tensions are high but the United States is not actively engaged in world events. In the America's, the war on drug cartels has almost taken on a narco-state dimension. While the drug cartels have not yet taken over any state, they have taken control over vast territories and defend them with well equipped paramilitary forces. In Africa, their remains large scale tribal conflicts and internal wars at the intersection of Islamic and Christian regions. In Asia there is instability in Indonesia and South East Asia. The Taiwan-China conflict remains unresolved. North Korea hangs on, and continues to devote disproportionate resources to its military. It continues to be propped up with humanitarian aid from an increasingly nervous Japan and South Korea. Internal civil wars have broken out in several of the "stans" and defending energy sources is now more complicated. Russia, given the instability in its southern regions feels compelled to rearm, and China devotes up to 6% of its Gross Domestic Product to its armed forces. A Palestinian state has been created, but their remains cross border tensions and skirmishes with Israel. Iraq is internally stable, Saudi Arabia is on the verge of internal collapse, and Iran is seen as a growing regional hegemon. Syria remains a military state with increased spending to support its internal forces. Europe is stable (with the exception of Turkey and Cyprus), but tensions and military expansion in North Africa have created serious concerns for the states touching the Mediterranean. Despite the evidence of world wide regional tensions the United States has lowered the profile of its military forces, but it remains politically and economically active around the world. The emphasis is on achieving stability through economic progress and regional political forums. To some, the absence of the US military is a growing concern given the increase in regional threats. The United States appears to be "missing in action" on the world stage. Adversaries and allies focus their defense procurements toward dealing with their own local needs and regional issues. In a robust economy, adversaries and allies will seek to purchase major new weapon systems in support of developing modern armies, navies, and air forces. Resources will also be invested in indigenous military R&D. If plagued by limited economic growth, countries will be more likely to focus on upgrading existing military systems with modern electronics and weapons systems, and asymmetric weapons, to include terrorism, vice making large new purchases. Military R&D would be limited.”  Scenario 3) Where is the Gorilla?  “World wide tensions are low but the United States is actively engaged in world events. In the America's, the war on drug cartels has rescinded and while drug traffic remains, it is more characterized by corrupt governments than large regions defended with paramilitary forces. In Africa, large scale tribal disagreements remain, but states and regions are more focused on economic development than confrontation. In Asia, Indonesia has been fractured, but appears stable. Taiwan has been integrated into China with a "Hong Kong Plus" type of arrangement. Without a major regional peer competitor, China has stabilized with less than 4% of its Gross Domestic Product devoted to its armed forces. North Korea has collapsed, and the painful process of reintegration with the South has begun. South Korea is consumed by the economic burden of its sick northern component. The "stans" are still struggling with internal stability issues, but so far they are limited to small scale skirmishes. They are still an increased source of energy for the developing world. Russia, having begun to see a turnaround in its demographic crisis, has become reengage on the world stage as a major regional power. Given the instability in its southern regions, Russia feels compelled to rearm. A Palestinian state has been created, however their remains cross border tensions. Israel and Palestine -- in partnership -- are trying to contain the terrorism. Iraq is internally stable; Saudi Arabia and Iran are both muddling along with containable internal tensions. Syria remains a military state with increased spending to support its internal forces. Europe is stable and all is quiet on the Turkey-Cyprus front. North African states are struggling with their long term direction -- theological or secular, but the anxiety has not spilled north into Europe. Despite the apparent absence of regional tensions, the United States has been politically active around the world both in the United Nations and through regional alliances and bi-lateral relationships. The United States, while not seeking an overt empire, still seeks to aggressively shape various regions to assure the present stability remains. To some, the dominant presence of the US military is growing concern. It is both a source of stabilization and a magnet for counter balancing forces.  Foreign defense planning is primarily focused on the United States. In a robust economy, adversaries will attempt to develop advance conventional forces that are more like those of United States. There will be much interest in where the US is heading in military transformation and looking to develop counter-transformation capabilities and networked forces. Adversaries with poor economies will be dependent on WMD, including nuclear weapons, and terrorist acts, as the key deterrent against US military intervention. Allies with robust economies will attempt to develop systems that can continued to operate with US transformation capabilities and will use part of their defense budget to cosponsor R&D efforts with the United States. Others with poor economies, will use the opportunity of low regional tensions to devote funding to other non-defense priorities.”  Scenario 4)   What Threat?  “World wide tensions are low and the United States is not actively engaged in world events. In the America's, the war on drug cartels has rescinded and while drug traffic remains, it is more characterized by corrupt governments than large regions defended with paramilitary forces. In Africa, large scale tribal disagreements remain, but states and regions are more focused on economic development than confrontation. In Asia, Indonesia has been fractured, but appears stable. Taiwan has been integrated into China with a "Hong Kong Plus" type of arrangement. Without a major regional peer competitor, China has stabilized with less than 4% of its Gross Domestic Product devoted to its armed forces. North Korea has collapsed, and the painful process of reintegration with the South has begun. South Korea is consumed by the economic burden of its sick northern component. The "stans" are still struggling with internal stability issues, but so far they are limited to small scale skirmishes. They are still an increased source of energy for the developing world. Russia, having begun to see a turnaround in its demographic crisis, has become reengage on the world stage as a major regional power. Given the instability in its southern regions, Russia feels compelled to rearm. A Palestinian state has been created, however their remains cross border tensions. Israel and Palestine -- in partnership -- are trying to contain the terrorism. Iraq is internally stable; Saudi Arabia and Iran are both muddling along with containable internal tensions. Syria remains a military state with increased spending to support its internal forces. Europe is stable and all is quiet on the Turkey-Cyprus front. North African states are struggling with their long term direction -- theological or secular, but the anxiety has not spilled north into Europe. Given the apparent absence of regional tensions the United States has been politically and economically active around the world but has lowered the profile of its military forces. The emphasis is on achieving stability through economic progress and regional political forums. To some, the absence of the US military is a growing concern, but there seems to be no immediate threats. The United States missing in action on the world stage. Adversaries and allies focus their defense needs on internal security issues and hedging strategies. With limited economic growth, foreign defense spending is focused on small arms to support security and policing functions. In a more robust economy, foreign countries may also pursue military systems that increase their "prestige" including space-launch vehicles, modern aircraft, etc. Some indigenous development is performed mainly as a "jobs program" effort.”

 

World Scenarios for the 21st Century.  World Scenarios Forum.  This year the World Scenarios Forum imagined a world in crisis.  The following are three scenarios for an international crisis with Iran. For more detail see www.world-scenarios.com.

Scenario 1) No Consensus on the IAEA.   “No consensus on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) due to the obstruction of Russia, China or members of the "non-aligned" group, such as Venezuela. The matter is referred to the Security Council by an individual Western state, by the terms of Articles 34 and 35 of the UN Charter. This individual referral would be on the basis of a "dispute between states" or an element that "endangers" "the maintenance of international peace and security." This delicate option could therefore allow Washington, without waiting any longer, to decide to launch targeted air strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, possible with the aid of the Israeli Air Force. Israel, which is within range of Iran's Shahab 3 missiles, fears that it would be the first victim of the Iranian regime... the field would be open to a local war.” Scenario 2) Referral to the UN Security Council.  “The IAEA obtains a majority and this brings referral to the UN Security Council. In New York, the five permanent Security Council members agree to impose sanctions on Iran, punishing its many violations of the nuclear non-proliferation regime and its unforgivable comments calling for Israel "to be wiped off the map." Economic embargo measures would then come into force, contributing to a pronounced isolation of the Tehran regime. The United States would therefore be joined in imposing this type of measure by a large section of the international community. Tehran would find itself outlawed by the community of nations…This hypothesis, that is also unlikely due to the reluctance of the Chinese and Russians to adopt such a scenario, avoids one major unknown: What will be the reaction of the mullahs? The very nature of the Iranian regime, in the grip of the guardians of the revolution, the famous Pasdarans from which Mahmud Ahmadinezhad himself originates, would suggest some sombre developments. Iran could decide to shut off its oil exports, causing share prices to plummet and barrel prices to soar. It could also do harm by reassuming control of the actions of the pro-Shi'i Hezbollah movement and intensifying the anti-US guerrilla in Iraq.”  Scenario 3)  The IAEA Board Obtains a Majority.  “The IAEA Board obtains a majority, the matter is referred to the Security Council, but once in New York, Russia and China decide to veto any international sanctions, despite the efforts of the Europeans and the Americans to dissuade them. That leaves just the United States, supported by Israel and no doubt Great Britain, to reconsider the military option. It would be up to them to provide a case for this dangerous manoeuvre by assembling the widest possible majority to support their action in the framework of the United Nations. This latter hypothesis is close to that of the theory of the "coalition of the willing" as formulated by George W. Bush in connection with the war on terror... the field would be open to a global war.”

 

South Asia 2020: Future Strategic Balance and Alliances.  Compiled by Lieutenant Colonel Debra R. Little. U.S. Army War College.   The U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute and Stanford University's Asia/Pacific Research Center and Center for International Security and Cooperation cosponsored a conference in Palo Alto, California, on January 4-5, 2002.  The purpose of this paper is to examine the current situation in South Asia.  What will be the future strategic environment of the region? What about China? The focus of this paper also included extensive essays on India and Pakistan.  A The U.S> Army War College involved approximately 75 participants, including former policymakers, uniformed and civilian members of the DoD, the intelligence and diplomatic communities, business world, and academia.  The scenarios discuss economic development, political dynamics, and demographic trends that will have a significant impact on the future of South Asia in 2020.  Scenario 1) Least Desirable.   “In the first and least- desirable scenario, the region reverts to pre-September 11 conditions. Pakistan is preoccupied with India, but India is not nearly as concerned with Pakistan because it believes that time is on its side. According to this speaker, Pakistan concludes that brinksmanship is the most effective way to bring attention to its high priority issues, so it will tend to play the "crisis" card. Most agree that any clash could escalate to the nuclear level.  A nuclear exchange in South Asia would cause a major jolt in great power relations and exacerbate problems between the West and the Muslim world. This scenario portends the most dangerous outcome, but it may be difficult to prevent reversion to pre-September 11 assumptions and the old status quo as the furor of the War on Terrorism diminishes.”  Scenario 2) Intense US involvement in Asia.  “United States would involve itself in Asia intensely but intermittently. Taiwan would remain the key flashpoint between the United States and China. Japan will want to avoid involvement but would be forced to from time to time. The United States would try to have positive relations with Russia and India, while China and Pakistan would remain allied. Economic aid would help bind Pakistan and Indian policy to patrons, and the patrons would push Pakistan and India to resolve Kashmir. This scenario would be less dangerous than the first.   Scenario 3)  The Configuration.  “The most benevolent but least probable scenario would be a configuration of the United States "plus eight." A U.S.-led coalition of Russia, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom would assume a mandate independent of the U.N. Security Council, especially regarding terrorism. One focus of this coalition could be the reduction of tensions in the Muslim world.”

 

Europe’s Present Futures Thinking: A Societal Science View on Future Geopolitics.  Peter H. Mettler , professor, Wiesbaden University of Applied Science.  Futures Research Quarterly, Fall 2004.

Relations between the U.S. and Europe is increasingly becoming more complex.  There are similarities and differences between the US and Europe, but as the complexity increases, so do transatlantic tensions.   Mettler writes five scenarios of the future of European – US relationships. (See article for the complete scenarios.)   Scenario 1) Triumphant Markets.  “US economic, as well as social, ideas finally win over the widely cherished European welfare state and the rest of the world.  But, through science, technology and business are blossoming more than ever before, six out of several billion inhabitants of our globe stayed poor, and US as well as EU cities went down; criminality soured and life in “gated communities” spread amongst the well-offs”.  Scenario 2)  The Hundred Flowers.  “In this scenario, the administrations of almost all European states lost all reputation and legitimacy and the polls found no voters. People withdrew into the underground (30 to 50% of the economy) and created new families and local underground communities, which issued their own local currencies.  Almost nobody paid taxes anymore, a “poor leisure class” enjoyed life, local economies replaced the consumer society, barter trade spread and products could only be sold if they were robust and easy to repair.”   Scenario 3) Shared Responsibilities.  “This is a scenario which could only be desired.  In this alternative future, the EU comprises 40 member countries with a total of 680 million citizens.  Negotiations and détente are the predominant slogans and lead to sustained social and environmental systems as well as to very secure European foreign relations.  “Regional” systems have high priority (including “employment pacts”); administrations have “business managers”  (which have to undergo regular scrutinies – benchmarking). And technologists try to adapt technological developments to potential future needs of people instead of adapting them to technological.  The European economy is highly competitive.  Transnational conglomerates recognize the virtues of the “European way” (more intense involvement of states and unions, dialogue and compromises, etc.), which lead to results unmatched anywhere.  But this way requires the constant consciousness on all sides of the Scylla of over-bureaucratization and the Charybdis of self-paralyzation.   Despite occasional set-backs, the civil society cannot be stopped. Values like solidarity, responsibility and calculability, but also quality of life, family, the role of women as well as the acceptance of different ethnic groups, religions and ethnics, are highly appreciated.  The enlargement of the EU was mainly successful because of the role of the European Supreme Court as the only possibility of appeal in matters of subsidiarity. Neighbor relations improved because the collective effort of all member states resulted in a political vision of security.  For the southern rim, OCOMED (Organization for Cooperation in the Mediterranean area) was developed, Turkey got a precise date for the start of the final membership negotiations, and the Ukraine got the assurance that she could join as soon as her economy is competitive enough to stand international competition.  Finally, the EU gained high reputation for her policy of support of multilateral institutions as well as because of her example of cooperation, e.g., her trade preference agreement with Russia . Even China and Japan are negotiating a common currency these days.”  Scenario 4)  Creative Societies.  “Evolved out of many crisis or even almost revolutions. Because of them, a broad social movement came up with thousands of innovative social, scientific/technological and environmental proposals.  A new national system of performance indicators was introduced instead of GDP (social and green). No more states were admitted to the EU and globalization was reduced.  Disillusions created a big number of dangerous situations; the US had rough times in Latin America and China as well as Japan are both in crises. Worldwide, many ordinary people recognize the importance of Europe’s “spiritual renaissance” (social and environmental consensus on the basis of longevity, coupled with creativity, in particular), but elites everywhere are anxious about losing their privileges.”  Scenario 5) Turbulent Neighborhoods.  “Is the most negative scenario. Growth is constantly negative and Europe falls back as well in technical innovations. The perceived future creates anxieties and people turn reactionary and racist. The big EU countries turn to law-and-order and right-wing polices and the media was seconding this motion 100% (Fortress Europe). The states are providing less and less public services and archanum politics resurge strongly.  At the European level, some lukewarm reforms failed and led to military-oriented security policies, thus accelerating the breakdown of the Union.  The US turns completely isolationist, Russia is in full chaos, China and Japan battle for Asian supremacy.  Only India and Iran stay relatively calm, though they as well follow the general military build-up.  The southern Mediterranean is following the Russian chaos.  Should the leaders of the world not rediscover the virtues of international cooperation, the danger is extremely high that the world will repeat its history of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

 

Identity in Digital Government.  A research report of the Digital Government Civic Scenario Workshop.  Convened by L. Jean Camp and sponsored by the National Science Foundation & the Kennedy School of Government. 

This report is based on the 2003 Civic Scenario Workshop. The Digital Government Civic Scenario Workshop convened to address issues surrounding digital identity and to better understand the concept of digital identity through further research.  For this set of scenarios, each technology description task group had several experts in the particular technology.  Advance scenario development, in this case,  improved the probability of remarkable success in the workshop. It gave the groups a chance to focus on the scenarios and frame more detailed and plausible futures. The resulting five scenarios were as follows: “In order for government to fulfill its critical functions, it must be able to authenticate its citizens’ claims about their own identities and characteristics. As digital government becomes a reality, the need for reliable digital identifiers becomes increasingly urgent. At the same time, digital government identifiers create unique threats to privacy as current practices of using personal information break down. The wide availability of information through electronic networks has the potential to erode privacy at an unprecedented rate, as well as making authentication based on personal “secret but shared” information increasingly untenable.”  Scenario 1)  Single national identifier. The idea of a national identifier gained popularity in the wake of 9/11. The national identifier program is moving forward through the coordination of the fifty state drivers’ licenses' authorities. A similar implementation can be seen in some identity management systems, which concentrate all data in a single account. Currently the Social Security Number is widely used as an identifier but it cannot be said to be ubiquitous and universal. This proposal will draw heavily on the secure hardware technology group.
Scenario 2) Sets of identifiers.The national identifier scenario offers a single credential. In thisproposal each person has a set of identifiers stored in secure hardware or in a series of devices. If the single credential is analogous to a signature, then the set of attributes is analogous to the key ring. In this case the multiple PKIs and devices will have some limited interoperability and potentially complex risk cascading issues. This scenario will draw heavily on the reputation technologies work. Scenario 3)  Business as Usual. In this scenario there will be a continuing growth of ad-hoc identifiers in the business world. The identifiers and practices in the business world are adopted unaltered for e-government. Such adoption is most likely in the form of closed code.  Scenario 4) Ubiquitous anonymity. Under this scenario the tools of crypto-anarchy serve the ends of egovernment. The most effective tools for ensuring anonymity are linked with particular assertions, for example, the assertion of Veteran status. Yet financial transactions and information requests can be made entirely anonymously. Scenario 5. Ubiquitous identity theft. The motivation for the ubiquitous identity theft scenario was difficult, until the Recording Industry Association of America began releasing waves of subpoenas. The file-swapping model became the intellectual basis for the identity-swapping model. Identities became so fluid and the personal information so badly protected that no reasonable person would want to expose their own personally identifiable information. Thus a single shopper might have a set of Social Security Numbers he or she uses, just as today we have multiple passwords

 

National Intelligence Council NIC 2020 Project.  The National Intelligence Council NIC 2020 Project was launched November 2003, as a yearlong strategic review to the year 2020. 

This involved hundreds of experts from around the world. After an analysis of trends, the National Intelligence Council predicts that the following trends will continue to be strong through the next 20 years: Radical Islamic beliefs will remain powerful through 2020 and will continue to spawn anti-American movements;  Populism may emerge as a potent social force especially as globalization increases the gap between winners and losers—and societies become more aware of economic inequality;  Countries run by predatory elites, who legitimize crime and corruption as tools of self-aggrandizement and social control; Poor nations with rapidly expanding youth populations and have a history of seeking revenge to redress grievances; States with limited economic and political links to the outside world; Countries transitioning to democracy, who are unable to balance the growing disparity between “haves” and “havenots.”  Scenario: The Use of Force in 2020.  “The nature of war will be significantly different in 2020. The United States will remain the only true superpower, without a military peer, making war between the great powers unlikely. Future wars that engage the United States will be conducted at a distance—on the frontier of US power. They probably will be spawned because of differences in identity—more specifically, ideology—rather than desire for territorial conquest. Still, these wars will be low intensity conflicts that are difficult to wage because of the distance from US shore, and likely to engage the US almost continuously for the next 17 years. For the US, these conflicts increasingly will require: a substantial commitment to postwar peacekeeping and humanitarian relief, which will have important budgetary consequences for the US economy, an understanding that there will be substantial civilian casualties—as enemies seek to weaken US resolve through increased use of civilian populations to cover military activities; preparation for a scenario in which a state or terrorist group successfully detonates a nuclear device against a civilian population located in a “frontier” country; an understanding that mainline protestant denominations will have pacifist tendencies—though they advocate humanitarian operations—and will be less inclined to support traditional national security interventions. Moreover, US religious activists are showing increasing concern for their co-religionists in other countries; g reater consideration about which weapons to develop, as US weapons technology is a driver of the military capabilities of other countries.”  

 

Around the World – Uncertainties in the Future of the European Union.  Magdolna Csath.  Futures Research Quarterly. Summer 2005 p. 66.  The author is a professor of Strategic Management and International Business at Saint Stephan’s University in Godollo.  May 2005 marked the first anniversary of Europe's largest ever enlargement. The European Union set an objective to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy by 2010. That is the famous "Lisbon objective."  The 10 new member countries would offer  new markets, cheap labor and real estate, weak labor laws and unions, and  great business opportunities  However, the EU is bureaucratic, over-centralized and top-down managed. There are huge, centrally planned projects dreamed up by bureaucrats and supported by money taken away from the individual countries, which could much better utilize those moneys for efficient local development.  For these reasons, the Commission launched a new initiative to make Europe more attractive to the “best researchers”.  The challenge of Europe’s future is how to become a dynamic and knowledge based economy by 2010. In the Global Competitiveness Report by Michael Porter, “competitiveness” should not be seen as a zero-sum game.    The author’s scenarios are based on speculation, and on thinking and discussions with colleagues and students. Therefore, they may suggest some ideas for future consideration and debate. Scenario 1) Europe, the Crisis-Fighter.  “In this scenario, Europe will be unable to solve its many problems. It keeps planning nice futures but fails to deliver results. It will be unable to move from words to actions. Countries keep fighting for additional resources, considering the EU to be a "cash cow." Moneys will not be spent effectively, so fewer and fewer resources will be available for building a successful, competitive and knowledgebased Europe. The citizens of Europe will be more and more skeptical and critical, and they will find political forces to voice their opinion. Consequently, some countries may leave the EU, others may stay and build an even closer relationship. Europe will be less stable in the case of this scenario. Countries inside and outside will continue fighting with each other. Europe will have no chance to close the technology, knowledge, and competitiveness gap with the USA and with the new, emerging economic powers of Asia.”  Scenario 2) Europe, the Centralized New Dictatorship.  “In this scenario, the EU will strive to become a strong power comparable with the USA. The leading nations will use the resources, especially those of Eastern Europe, to build up their economic strength. They will create new knowledge, new products and processes and make the weaker countries buy them. The governance of the EU will be even more centralized and top-down. The new constitution will serve the interest of the "core countries" and weaken the voice of the rest. Overregulation and the ruling of the "core countries" and the large organizations will create a quasidictatorship similar to the previous Soviet empire. The strong powers continue treating the weaker ones, especially those from the poorer regions, as inferiors. But by that time, the EU will have at least 28 member countries with different interests, cultures and attitudes, which will be very difficult to rule from the Center. It will cost more and more to manage and control the system, so less and less resources can be allocated to important investments. Therefore, the EU cannot sustain economic growth nor the living standards required by the populations. The smaller countries, including the new member states, will revolt against the new form of dictatorship and being exploited by the larger powers. There will be demonstrations, strong civil movements, and fightings against the established order. People want to be more free and independent. If this movement reaches a critical mass it may tear the EU apart.”  Scenario 3: A Harmonious, Synergistic Europe.  “Europe manages to solve its present democratic deficit, stops discriminating against the new members by offering equal treatments to the peasants, the businesses and the citizens of the new member countries, including the equal rights to free movement of people and services. Europe will also make sure that the new members shall not pay more to the EU budget than what they receive, in order to avoid the further deterioration of their economic competitiveness. The leaders of the EU will be accessible by the population, decision- making will be transparent and professional, with strong emphasis on the effectiveness with which the resources are used. The leadership styles applied and the methods used by the institutions will encourage participation, creativity and entrepreneurship. Diversity will be hailed and used to build synergies. Macroeconomic policies will concentrate on the long run, with the objective to build truly sustainable prosperity for all member states. Success will be based on merit; corruption will be fought efficiently. In this scenario, Europe will develop organically and consistently in harmony with its people. It may not develop into a great world power, but it will have a competitive economy along with a strong social capital and excellent quality of life. If you ask me to attach probabilities to these scenarios, I would say that the core countries are pushing for the second scenario. I believe that they will not succeed. I am not very optimistic about the chances of the third scenario. Therefore, I would attach the highest probability to the first one.”

 

Year 2025: Army’s Futuristic Uniform. Sgt. Lorie Jewell.  Army News Service, Orlando, FL. 

According to the 24th Army Science Conference 2004, solders of the future will be wearing hi-tech uniforms.  What will the uniform of the future look like? What will new technologies bring to protect our armed forces on the ground?   2025 Scenario: Vision of the Year 2025.   “In 2025 nanotechnology much improves an army fighter’s suit. He wears a form-fitting suit  made through the wonder of nanotechnology, which involves manipulating atoms and molecules to create things at the nanometer scale. With nanotechnology, that is about 50,000 times smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair.  Soldiers wearing the suit have the ability to blend into any environment, like a chameleon.  The 2025 helmet is the main hub of the uniform, where a tiny video camera provides a 360-degree situational awareness. A series of sensors inside give the Soldier three-dimensional audiological hearing and the ability to amplify specific sounds, while lowering the volume of others.  Complete voice translation is also provided, for what the Soldier hears and what he or she says. Night vision sensors by 2025 are minimized to the size of pencil erasers and are also contained in the helmet.  Maps and other situational awareness information are projected on the inside of the visor, while everything the Soldier sees and hears is sent in real time up to higher headquarters. Virtual reality technology also plays a part in helping the Soldier navigate an environment by projecting maps on the ground surrounding him or her…Thermal sensors woven into the fabric of the uniform control its temperature, based on the Soldier's environment. An on-board respirator, tethered to the Soldier's back, provides a continuous supply of fresh air – eliminating the need for a protective mask. Should the Soldier have the visor up, or the helmet off, and breath in some kind of harmful agent, the uniform sensor will immediately detect it, release tiny embedded capsules to counter it and inject treatment into the Soldier's body.  From the waist down, a skeletal system allows the Soldier to carry two or three times his or her body weight, feeling only the weight of their own body through the technology of an XO muscle, which augments a Soldier's strength to the Schwartzenegger degree.”

 

Mapping the Global Future  Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Report.  Based on consultations of nongovernmental experts around the world.  National Intelligence Council, Washington, DC.  December, 2004. To obtain a copy, contact the Government Planning Office (GPO) 202-512-1800.

“At no time since the formation of the Western alliance system in 1949 have the shape and nature of international alignments been in such a state of flux.”  At the same time, the likely emergence of China and India, as well as others, pose as new major global players that will transform the geopolitical  landscape,  Barring an abrupt reversal of the process of globalization or any major upheavals in  these countries, the rise of these new powers is a virtual certainty.  In Europe, Europe’s strength could be in providing a model of global and regional governance to the rising powers. But aging populations and shrinking work forces in most countries will have an important impact on the continent.  Other countries and regions discussed in this report include Russia, Japan, Middle East, and South America among others.  According to the National Intelligence Council’s report,  globalization trends are seen as a growing interconnectedness reflected in the expanded flows of information, technology, capital, goods, services, and people throughout the world.  In fact, this is an overarching “mega-trend,” a force so ubiquitous that it will substantially shape all the other major trends in the world of 2020.  On the world economy front, most countries around the world, both developed and developing, will benefit from gains in the world economy.  Yet, the benefits of globalization won’t be global. Rising powers will see exploiting the opportunities afforded by the emerging global marketplace as the best way to assert their great power status on the world stage.  The greatest benefits of globalization will accrue to countries and groups that can  access and adopt new technologies. Unfortunately, the gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” will widen unless the “have-not” countries pursue policies that support application of new technologies— such as good governance, universal education, and market reforms.  These are just some of the critical issues discussed in this extraordinary report.  The following is an abstract of four scenarios derived from various chapters.  For a complete version of the scenarios, please refer to the original report.

Scenario 1) Davos World (From the Chapter, “The Contradictions of Globalization”):  Fictional Scenario: Davos World  This scenario provides an illustration  of how robust economic growth over  the next 15 years could reshape the  globalization process—giving it a  more non-Western face. It is depicted  in the form of a hypothetical letter from the head of theWorld Economic  Forum to a former US Federal  Reserve chairman on the eve of the  annual Davos meeting in 2020. Under this scenario, the Asian giants as well as other developing states continue to outpace most “Western”  economies, and their huge, consumerdriven  domestic markets become a  major focus for global business and technology. Many boats are lifted, but some founder. Africa does better than one might think, while some mediumsized emerging countries are squeezed. Western powers, including the United States, have to contend with job insecurity despite the many benefits to be derived from an expanding global economy. Although benefiting from energy price increases, the Middle East lags behind and threatens the future of globalization. In addition, growing tensions over Taiwan may be on the verge of triggering an economic meltdown. At the end of the scenario, we identify some lessons to be drawn from our fictional account, including the need for more management by leaders lest globalization slip off the rails.

Scenario 2) Pax Americana. (From the Chapter, “The Changing Geopolitical Landscape”) “The scenario portrayed below looks at how US predominance may survive radical changes to the global political landscape, with Washington remaining the central pivot for international politics. It is depicted as the diary entry by a fictitious UN Secretary-General in 2020. Under this scenario, key alliances and relationships with Europe and Asia undergo change. US-European cooperation is renewed, including on the Middle East. There are new security arrangements in Asia, but the United States still does the heavy lifting. The scenario also suggests that Washington has to struggle to assert leadership in an increasingly diverse, complex, and fast-paced world. At the end of the scenario, we identify lessons learned from how the scenario played out.”

Scenario 3) A New Caliphate ( From the Chapter, “The New Challenge to Governance”)   “The fictional scenario portrayed below provides an example of how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity could emerge. Under this  scenario, a new Caliphate is proclaimed  and manages to advance a powerful counter ideology that has widespread appeal. It is depicted in the form of a hypothetical letter from a fictional grandson of Bin Ladin to a family relative in 2020. He recounts the struggles of the Caliph in trying to wrest control from traditional regimes and the conflict and confusion which ensue both within the Muslim world and outside between Muslims and the United States, Europe, Russia and China. While the Caliph’s success in mobilizing support varies, places far outside the Muslim core in the Middle East—in Africa and Asia—are convulsed as a result of his appeals. The scenario ends before the Caliph is able to establish both spiritual and temporal authority over a territory— which historically has been the case for previous Caliphates. At the end of the scenario, we identify lessons to be drawn.”

Scenario 4) Cycle of Fear:  “This scenario explores what might  happen if proliferation concerns increased to the point that largescale intrusive security measures were taken. In such a world, proliferators—such as illegal arms merchants—might find it increasingly hard to operate, but at the same time, with the spread of WMD, more countries might want to arm themselves for their own protection. This scenario is depicted in a series of text-message exchanges between two arms dealers. One is ideologically committed to leveling the playing field and ensuring the Muslim world has its share of WMD, while the other is strictly for hire. Neither knows for sure who is at the end of his chain—a government client or terrorist front. As the scenario progresses, the cycle of fear originating with WMD-laden terrorist attacks has gotten out of hand—to the benefit of the arms dealers, who appear to be engaged in lucrative deals. However, fear begets fear. The draconian measures increasingly implemented by governments to stem proliferation and guard against terrorism also have the arms dealers beginning to run scared. In all of this, globalization may be the real victim.”

 

Scenarios for the Future of Aboland. The government of Aboland, Sweden. Delphi study Final Report. Framtidsscenarier for Aboland.  In Swedish, abstract in English, "Final Report on the Future of Aboland" p 6-7.

The primary goal of the project is to create four different scenarios of the future for Åboland. In order to set up the scenarios, the field group analysed the cultural perspectives and settlements of the Swedish-speaking population, as well as the environmental protection, economic life and employment in the archipelago. The scenarios support the plans for an ecologically, economic, and socially sustainable development of the archipelago, up to the level of concrete actions. The project also provides help for the strategic planning of municipalities in Åboland. The secondary goal of the project is to develop a scenario process that can be generally applied to areas of such a scattered settlement. As a result all the four scenarios created different values and central ideas. Scenarios for the Future of Aboland

They are as follows:  Scenario 1)Ecological and vital archipelago culture: focuses on the cultural heritage, the social and cultural balance, the ecological sustainability and the clean see, the sustainable economy as well as on the region’s influence on its future and growth.  Scenario 2 ) Closeness to neighbourhood and environment: the traditional way of life, small communities and the respect of the community values are appreciated. But then the confidence in influencing the region’s future and conditions of environment and see are week. The scenario thus have positive influence on the region’s administration and environment matters.  Scenario 3) Technology and life in agricultureindicates that technology, administration and economic growth prevail and thus have positive influence on the region’s administration and environment matters. - Scenario 4)  New ideas and global impacts is growth, globalization and development of the new ways of life. According to this scenario neither technology nor administration are able to control region’s internal circumstances or external influences such as environmental questions on national or international level.

 

After Saddam - Assessing the Reconstruction of Iraq  Kenneth M Pollack  Analysis Paper  Number 1, January, 2004. The Saban Center for Middle East Policy, Washington, DC.

The situation in Iraq is extremely complex. In some areas, American and Coalition efforts have helped Iraqis to make real progress toward transforming their economy, polity, and society. What’s more, many basic factors in the country want real progress if the pace of reconstruction is maintained. By the same token, there are also numerous negative developments in the country, many the result of mistaken American policies.  Kenneth M Pollack

The Good News Scenario:  “Iraq follows the path of four "positives" , so by 2010 the rebuilding of this country takes a peaceful and coherent course even in the face of numerous and crippling American errors.  By 2010, Iraqi public opinion remained largely favorable to reconstruction.  The vast bulk of the Kurdish and Shiite populations were pro-reconstruction, but most Iraquis in general don't like to have so many foreigners in their county. Yet, the fear remained that if the United States were to leave Iraq, the country would slide quickly into chaos and civil war.  The United States does a better job rebuilding their country.  Most of Iraq's leaders have shown great patience and urged their followers to cooperate with the U.S. led reconstruction.  The general attitude among Iraquis recognizes that the United States is ultimately striving to build the stable, prosperous, and pluralist nation they hope for.  All the alternatives are recognized to be much worse.  Although several insurgencies occurred by 2010, the insurgency did not undermine the reconstruction itself, and the greatest threat was simply that the slow trickle of American dead will cause the American people to loose heart. Support for the insurgency was limited mostly to the Sunni tribesman who inhabit western Iraq (the Sunni triangle) and other fringe elements of Iraqu society.   Few of the insurgents were able to demonstrate an ardent commitment to their cause, and as a result the had caused comparatively few casualties to Coalition personnel given the daily number of attacks they conduct.  By 2010, American and other Coalition personnel had enjoyed considerable success working with Iraqis in their villages and neighborhoods to restore basic services, rebuild schools, restart the local economy, and create new political institutions.  In particular, the military's civil affairs personnel are making real headway in rebuilding the country from the ground up-- the only way that it can be done--wherever they are present.”  The Bad News Scenario:  “Iraqi reconstruction becomes challenged and causes the Bush Administration, then Clinton Administration, to shift or even reverse course on a range of issues it has so far resisted.  By 2010, the United States had to fundamentally reorient its security strategy.  The U.S. forces had concentrated on chasing insurgents and protecting themselves, but these efforts paled in comparison with the need to provide basic security for the Iraqi people.  The fear of common crime and attacks committed by those who seek to undermine the course of the reconstruction becomes the single greatest impediment to Iraq's economic and political reconstruction.  This will likely require the commitment of more American Forces, or a significant shift in U.S. policy to secure additional foreign forces, because Iraq's indigenous security forces were never ready for the job.  The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) reaches out to the Sunni tribal community, to eliminate its sense of grievance against the United States and so quell its support for the insurgency. In doing so, however, Washington and the CPA alienate the larger Shiite and Kurdish communities whose support so far had been key to progress.  The November 15th agreement, over the years eroded into a weak plan as it was extremely complicated and had a number of key hurdles to overcome, derived largely from the inherent complexities of Iraq and past American mistakes.  Consequently, the economic revival of Iraq was stunted by these failures such as providing security for the Iraqi people, which makes the ordinary flow of goods and personnel across the country difficult, raises production costs, and cripples investment. The second was the failure to provide basic services; it had still not corrected the shortages of electricity, clean water, and gasoline, to name only the most pressing. Along with problems of short-staff, the United States had major communications problems in two respects: 1)  Coalition personnel did not coordinate with one another enough.  Baghdad and the field were often cut off from each other and misdirected. 2) Because of shortcomings in both capabilities and intentions, the CPA provides the Iraqi people with too little information about developments in their own country, leaving them anxious, frustrated, and resentful. The Bottom Line: If the United States is unwilling to change its policies to address these challenges, but is willing to continue to maintain the current commitment of resources to Iraq ($18 billion per year in economic and political assistance, 150,000 troops, and a strong political role in the country’s governance), there is enough good there that, even with its failings, the current course of the U.S.-led occupation is unlikely to result in disaster. It probably will not produce a functional state and society, but it is unlikely that Iraq will simply descend into chaos—although such a worst-case scenario cannot be ruled out.”

 

Four Scenarios of Southern California in 2010 Bruce Sterling-Weblog, WIred News and Pasadena Art Center College embarked  on an exploration of scenarios for the 2010 future of Southern California.

The Pasadena Arts Center College students went on an adventure - they sorted through magazines, magazine covers, newspaper headlines, and product designs - in the "environmental scanning" sense - to come up with ideas for scenarios of the future to 2010. They asked questions like, "what would something as simple as a bottle of apple juice look like in the future?"   Using "personas" (or, as they have been called elsewhere "microscenarios")--stories of individuals, their lives, needs and desires, the students came up with ideas for design, futurism, and innovation.  In fact,  " ...this is a standard technique in the world of design, but is increasingly becoming a useful tool for business and organizational strategists." Bruce Sterling 

The Futures Lab at Art Center College of Design: Scenario Thinking.  “According to the group, the most intriguing scenario was "Scout World" in which the threats described on the axis (see reference for original scenario set in which all four scenarios were divided into axes of global threats and responses),  are "hysterically extreme"  - global warming, environmental crisis, international financial crisis - but people are "hysterically inventive".  "They're out beating the boundaries of the possible, looking for anything that works or even doesn't work!  The Scout World society ...will probably make quick (wrong?) decisions when the conflict between science and ethings rears its head.  The growing population and aging demographics will continue to post threats taht cannot completely be answered with technology.  Scout World denizens may put off long-term solutions...people also want to fee secure and install any gadget that they feel might enable them to cope with any catastrophe."... "Yeah, sure, we make mistakes here, -- but we can make a MILLION brand-new mistakes super fast!"  The other scenarios included: Scenario 1) Business as Usual: Threats are mild and low, and nobody is feeling very responsible or inventive.  So it's a sleepy, prosperous time.  No need to rock the boat.  Scenario 2) "Deer in the Headlights" :   Threats are grave, but society is paralyzed with fear and instinctive conservatism.  These people will be mown down in hecatombs.  There will be hell to pay.  Scenario 3) "Never Again":  In this world, everybody is grimly aware of the threat and everyone is resolved to meet in one single, resolute, uninventive way.  This is a world war, basically.  It's like a Bush II that never ends.”

 

Four Japanese Scenarios for the Future by Takashi Ino~chi. This article first appeared in  Internnlionaldfli (London), Vol 65, No I, Winter 19X8-89. Reprinted by permission.

Japan is a country of transition and insecurity.  The Japanese government is  no longer sure how to guide it's society, or with what goals. The society itself displays a loss of faith  as opposed to the faith it once had in the belief-system that was so dominant in the 1960s.  Although Japan is a country of global economic power, it is lacking a sense of direction and a time honored way of doing things, Japan now contemplates its role in the global scheme of things.   Takashi Ino-chi

The following four scenarios of the world in the next 25-50 years are seen by the Japanese as "visions of the future."  Scenario 1)  Pax Americana, Phase II: "This image of the future was first articulated by the Americans. It is the image of an America retaining its leading position in the world and making full use of its advantage in having created the institutions of post-Second World War order and security This scenario depicts an America experienced in forging the "balanced" or globalist view of the Western Alliance and deftly prodding and cajoling its allies into enlightened joint action, The outline of this scenario was first made during the latter half of the I97Os, when the post-Vietnam trauma was still strong and when Soviet global influence was somewhat exaggeratedly felt in the United States. In the parlance of American political scientists, the key word was "regimes’‘-rules and practices in international interest adjustment-whereby the United States would retain its enlightened hegemony and control the direction of world development.  This image has been intermittently  put forward in different forms.  This image has been a favourite one, not least because it encourages the basic retention of Japan’s traditional concentration on an economic role with no drastic ills crease in its security role, which is largely delegated to the United States. Scenario 2) Bigemony:  "This second scenario for the future has been propagated by economists and businessmen, fascinated by the rapid development and integration of the [Japan-US] economy. That is to say, the economies of Japan and the United States have become one integrated economy of a sort. This image of the future has been enhanced by the steady rise in the yen’s  value compared to the US dollar, and the concomitant rise in Japanese GNP, now registering 20 per cent of world GNP. Japan’s roles in the "bigemony" scenario may appear to some to be very similar to those envisaged in Pax Americana Phase II. However, economic power becomes military power almost inevitably, and Japan does not constitute the historic exception to this rule.  But the form in which Japan’s economic power will be translated into military power needs close attention. Under "bigemony" the technical, economic and strategic co-operation/integration between the United States and Japan will become formidable, and of the largest scale in history. It is therefore not difficult to foresee, for instance, advanced fighter aircraft being developed jointly and manufactured primarily for Japanese use, with Japanese finance, though with American know-how, and also sold to third countries under the label, Made in the United States. The large-scale strategic integration between these two countries as developed in the Pacific in the 1980s will come to be seen as a good testimony of the bigemonic roles Japan can play in security areas."  Scenario 3) Pax Consortis: "Japan’s third scenario portrays a world of many consortia in which the rn+ actors proceed by busily forging coalitions to make policy adjustments and agreements among themselves in a world in which no single actor can dominate the rest. This scenario resembles Pax Americana Phase II in its crude skeleton with its "regimes" anti cooperation under anarchy.   However, the major difference is that the thrust of the third scenario rests on the pluralistic nature of policy adjustment among the m+ actors, whereas that of the first conveys the desirability or necessity (or even the inevitability) of administrative guidance or "moral leadership" by the state. This third image is favoured by many Japanese, not least because Japan is averse to shouldering large security burdens. It is also  because Japan is not completely happy about America ordering everyone around, especially when it only grudgingly admits its relative decline. Japan’s role in the Pax Consortis scenario is two-fold. First, with the superpow-strategic nuclear arsenals increasingly neutral, either by the de facto USS, viet detente process or by technological breakthroughs, Japan’s primary role is that quiet economic diplomacy in forging coalitions and shaping policy adjustments. Secondly, Japan’s role is that of help-mate to create a world free from military solutions.  Western Europe will loom larger in this scenario, in line with its role is such forums as the Western seven-power. Western Europe will continue to play an even larger role, having been traditionally been quite adept in those situations where multiple actors adjust conflicting interests.  The increasing economic tics between Western Europe and Pacific Asia will encourage thinking along the lines of this scenario." Scenario 4) Pax Nipponica: A fourth image of the future, Pax Nipponica,, has been propagated
by those Americans who are concerned about the visible contrast  between the United States’ relative loss of technological and manufacturing competitiveness and Japan’s concomitant gain. The steady rise of Japanese nationalism, in tandem with what the Japanese call the internationalisation of Japan, is contributing  to the strength of this scenario, because the intrusion of external economic and social forces into Japanese society stimulated nationalistic reactions against internationalism. Japan’s role in this scenario is best compared to that of Britain during the nine-teenth century, when it played the role of balancer among the continental powers, its global commercial interests presumably helping it to fulfill this role. "

 

Human Performance Enhancement in 2032: A Scenario for Military Plannersby John Smart.  The original version of this article was written for a transformative technology scenario project set in 2032, for the U.S. Army Logistics Transformation Agency in 2004.

This scenario looks at the way I think human performance enhancement is likely to be viewed by army planners thirty years hence, and explores some of the military implications of accelerating information technologies (infotech), specifically the linguistic user interface, personality capture, and the valuecosm. One of the main messages is that biotech and cognotech are likely to be a lot less disruptive than infotech over the next thirty years. If the data continue to validate this perspective, we should prioritize our development resources accordingly. John Smart

Jan 2, 2032. Lucas Hightower, Human Performance Analyst, Army Corps of Engineers.
“Hello. I'm a 22-year-old Harvard-educated Human Performance Analyst, or HPA. I work in an Army-Civilian development group called the Army Corps of Engineers. Have you heard of it? I like to read, and my friends would say I'm pretty reflective. I love my job, and spend a lot of time thinking about human performance. If you are interested in that subject, let me give you a window to my world, and you can tell me what you think.”

A. Human Performance Enhancement Today: Building Better Environments, Not Better Humans.“We'll start with an interesting question: What is the best definition of the phrase "human performance enhancement" in a world where technology accelerates so rapidly that human beings effectively stand still by comparison?  There is an old futurist saying: "Human nature doesn't change, but our houses (read: the computing and communications technologies all around us) get exponentially better every year."  Back at the turn of the century, there was a big debate about what human performance enhancement (HPE) actually was. Many thought it was about trying to reengineer the biological and psychological human. Others thought it was mostly about improving our built environment, so that our innate biological and mental abilities would be better used, and our many shortcomings better protected against. Since the 2020's, the latter view has definitely won the day.  For several generations people have tried all manner of ways to improve the human organism using various bio and cogno technologies. But it turns out that our incredible nonlinear complexity, delicacy, and biological, psychological, and social resistance to change all greatly limit the effectiveness these schemes. Even our best medical therapies today do little other than restore the performance of the unhealthy to that of the mean. How few futurists would have guessed this at the turn of the century! All those old twentieth-century bioenhancement ideas about genetic engineering of humans, super-drugs for mental performance, extreme life extension, and brain-machine interfaces (except for people with disabilities), turned out to be like the 1900s' ideas about flying houses and atomic-powered vacuum cleaners: possible in theory, perhaps achievable some day, in theory, but always outcompeted in practice by far more powerful, efficient and less controversial digital alternatives every step of the way. There's just no better bang for the buck, and the social and political repercussions are far less bothersome as well.  Sure, you can find exceptions, but they either make negligible changes, like the so-called "super vision" you can get from your local eye doctor, or they aren't things you'd give to large numbers of people on the planet, which makes them valuable to a few, but uninteresting as national priorities.   Some examples might help here. It's true that if you are a marathon runner you can find bioneers who will replace your leg bones with titanium implants, with some health risk and at great cost, and you will run at least five percent faster, but you will then be barred from all the major competitions, and biomodified races are considered a "freak show" subculture by the general populace. So what will you have really gained for yourself or the planet? It's a much more interesting challenge to design better wearable marathon coaching software (e.g., a more intelligent "house" for the human) that can be documented to give the average user a 2-4% performance boost annually (for most runners), and can be freely shared with everyone who wants it, worldwide. The performance yield for widely-adopted enhancements is so much better, in cost/benefit terms.   What about medications? It is true that you can stick drug delivery implants into your body for all manner of things, but except for curing disease, such systems have been shown to add only marginal benefit. As soon as you circulate any drug in your body, the first thing your cells do is downregulate their receptors to maintain independence (remember "homeostasis" in freshman biology class?), which makes them increasingly less effective in subsequent doses. That's why you can't give a human a temporary cognitive enhancing drug (memory, attention) without causing a "stupid period" afterward. The best we've ever been able to find are things like caffeine, which has as many people trying to get off it as are currently satisfied with its temporary alertness effect. In sum, these effects are now known to be mild by comparison to the measurable performance benefits of enduring natural mental states like flow.   So unless you have control systems that run from the DNA outward, which we have no idea how to build, and can't ethically try to figure out by experimentation either, implants are very crude biomodification systems, no matter what Big Pharma will tell you.  Using "cognitive enhancement" drugs in implant systems ("drugbots"), even caffeine, can easily burn you out or addict you, which is why you can only install them under medical supervision, and are recommended to use them only for short transitional periods, like almost all the psychiatric drugs. Unless you can prove medical need, trying to jack yourself up with drugbots is just a recipe for pushing you into a subculture, and making it harder for you to get government and professional clearances. So where's the benefit?    Meanwhile, our best computers double in complexity every eight to ten months, down from every 14 months back at the turn of the century. How could biology compete with that? To get in the zone today, most everyone uses old, proven rituals and their personal avatars ("digital twins", more on these later) to help them achieve peak performance. A top, nutrient-optimized and toxin-free diet, consistent and body-type-optimized exercise, and a great living environment will beat our best top-down interventions every time. So if you want to max out your performance, get a better BioBed and robokitchen, and some great virtual (or real) performance coaches in your avatar network, who will push you to enter well-chosen competitions. You'll achieve a personal best in no time.    In fact, the better our systems biology has become, the more we've come to understand that humans simply can't be improved much more in their biological abilities. This is kind of subtle, but because DNA has so much legacy code that is protecting older systems, we now know that we have just about "saturated" our ability to make genetic changes to the human organism. Our wetware is just too delicate, old, slow, and sloppy to improve it significantly, and we have no idea how to reengineer it to work better from the ground up, because unlike computer tech, we didn't build biotech in the first place. That's why those few bio modifications that might do even a little good are mostly considered too dangerous to be publicly allowed. Nowadays you need expensive licenses be a biohacker, thanks to homeland security.  That isn't to say that studying biology isn't important. The more we learn about systems biology, the more payoffs we gain when we transfer this knowledge to the realm of "digital biology," into our increasingly biologically-inspired computing systems. Folks like Peter Bentley (On Growth, Form, and Computers) were some of the first to figure this out at the beginning of the century.   Let me be a bit abstract here, because so few people understood this just 30 years ago. When you think of human beings as information processing (IP) systems, you can evaluate them in relation to functional categories in information processing (IP), like: Input, Storage, Processing, Output, and Networks.  It turns out that in individual human organisms, almost all of these categories (networks are the only exception) are already tuned, from the bottom up, to be operating at near-maximum capacity. In other words they have all been "developmentally optimized", over long evolutionary timespans. In a simple model, you might think you could significantly improve human performance by adding a new input, say, X-ray vision.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to see through walls?     Today, we know that there is always an individual cost to specializing humans in this way, one that is less and less worth paying the more empowered people become, and the better our machines become at doing the same task. Human nervous systems are deeply tuned for the kinds of sensing they do, and they don't adapt well to different inputs without losing generic functionality. Attempts to add input capacities to the brain, as in sensory substitution therapy for disabled individuals, are never as effective as the original systems they attempt to replace. It is actually the careful filtering, or throwing away, of sense data that creates intelligence, and our brains are already tuned for the maximum sensory input their slow-switching, delicate bioneurons can handle. That is why the human thalamus, the main way-station for sensory input to the hippocampus and later, the cerebral cortex, throws away over 95% of the sensory input that flows to it.    In a related example, it's also why plants throw away over 95% of the solar radiation that hits their chloroplasts in the process of photosynthesis (the making of sugars from sunlight). If they didn't radiate away almost all of that energy right at the outset, they would blow themselves apart, because they are built out of delicate peptide-bond biostructures. But if a solar panel is made out of metal instead, it no longer needs to throw away that energy, making it almost 50 times more efficient.    To make a long story short, you can't do much to improve any of those five functional IP categories in biological humans, but you can dramatically improve all of them in our technologies, and by extension in human society, in the emerging social computer that is being created by information and communications technologies.    You can see this most obviously in the better performance every month of our digital twins (DTs), the online avatars that act as interfaces for us on today's internet. (More on DTs a bit later). Besides infotech, this area is sometimes called sociotech (social technology, socially-aided HPE) and it is the prime growth area of this generation.     Once our HPE programs moved to building tools instead of trying to tinker the biological human, the next question became whether to work on intelligence amplification ("IA") (tools that increase human performance) or artificial intelligence ("AI") (tools that increase machine performance). But even here, as our machines become more integrated with us every day, we have learned that these two paths end up being the same.  Consider how a good tool for searching information on the net, like Google, makes both us and our machines smarter at the same time. Is there a meaningful difference today between smart humans and smart "prostheses" (technological appendages) that are designed to be seamless with humans? Could we survive, in any sense we would want to, without our technology today? It has become an organic component of ourselves.  Much more important than whether we use IA or AI technology strategies is the way that new technology impacts the human environment. Here are some of the questions we ask when we are planning our Army development projects, which I'll get to a bit later:
How can we hide most technological change "under the hood" of the engine of innovation, so it simplifies rather than complexifies people's daily lives?
How can we get the best new technologies to the widest number of underserved people in the most efficient way, so that they feel there is some "measurable exponential value" that comes to them every day from participating in society, vs. fighting or subverting it?
How can we introduce new tech in a way that allows people enough time and resources to adapt to at least its anticipated impact?   How can we give people a choice as to which values they want to maximize first, so that different cultures can take different paths toward an inevitably faster future?   These are all social factors, that can be quite difficult to address, but we do our best to deal with them because they are the keys to good development. After security and futuring, development is the most important thing the Army does these days.”

 

Alternative futures for the islamic ummah  Dr. Sohail Inayatullah.  Sohail Inayatullah is a political scientist at the Communication Centre Queensland University of Technology. Brisbane, Australia. This is greatly revised version of a paper presented to the Islamic Development Conference.

This paper examines the futures of the Islamic Ummah. It does this by reviewing approaches to thinking about the future as well as various global forecasting models. The paper includes three scenarios for the futures of the Islamic Ummah: (1) the Ummah as an Interpretive Community, (2) The Future Without a Name, and (3) Islam as the difference in creating the next century. Dr. Sohail Inayatullah

Alternative Islamic Futures   “But can we say anything about this unfamiliar world.  While there has been a great deal of thinking in the Western world, save for the work of Zia Sardar and others writing in journals of futures studies and similar places, there is very little in the Islamic world.  Based on the available literature, we examine three scenarios of the future. Scenario 1) Ummah as Interpretive Community This plausible future is derived from an outstanding essay by Anwar Ibrahimin a special issue of Futures on Islam and the Future. Ibrahim argues that we need to go beyond the three world thinking of first, second and third worlds and begin to think of the future in terms of an Islamic Ummah.  He spells out what this means. (1) The Ummah is a dynamic concept, reinterpreting the past, meeting new challenges and (2) the Ummah must meet global problems such as the environmental problem. "The Ummah as a community is required to acknowledge moral and practical responsibility for the Earth as a Trust and its members are trustees answerable for the condition of the Earth. This makes ecological concerns a vital element in our thinking and action, a prime arena where we must actively engage in changing things." (3) The Ummah should be seen a critical tool, as a process of reasoning itself and (4) Equity and justice are prerequisites and imperatives of the Ummah. This means a commitment to eradicating poverty. It means going beyond the development debate since that merely framed the issue in apolitical, amoral, acritical language. To begin this means rethinking trade, developing south-south trade  as well as "new instruments of financial accounting and transacting ...and the financing of new routes and transportation infrastructure. (6) But perhaps most significant is a commitment to literacy for all.  As Ibrahim writes: "Only with access to appropriate education can Ummah consciousness take room and make possible the Ummah of tomorrow as a personification of the pristine morality of Islam endowed with creative, constructive, critical thought." Thus what is called for is not modernism but a critical and open traditionalism that uses the historic past to create a bright future. But Ummah should not becomes an imperialistic concept rather it requires that Muslims work with other civilizations in dialogue to find agreed upon principles (and be ready to collectively defend those principles as did not occur in Bosnia). We need to recover that historically the Ummah meant models of multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-religious, and pluralist societies.  A true Ummah respects the rights of non-Muslims as with the original Medina state. Scenario 2) The Future Without a Name  In the same special issue, Gulzar Haider takes us to an Islamic future with no name In his effort to imagine such an Ummah, he cannot. He says after falling asleep and waking in 2020. "I have seen a landscape of Muslim Futures and it looks fragmented, bounded, a controlled city of discrete tends. There are some who are alive and awake but are cast out of the city. They continue their search for the Madinah, and till then they keep reading, writing and speaking without fear except of their God and His Prophet. But none of them has a name." Thus, given current geo-political trends, unfortunately, a possible future is the cannibalisation of Islam internally and externally. Internally largely due to external pressures but still nonetheless from sectarian infighting, from deep Sunni/Shia divisions and from irreconcilable models of what it means to be Muslim. Many of these battles are issues of revenge and history instead of the imagination of desired futures.  External forces are such that changes in technology, globalism, and world politics question whether Muslims can meet the challenges faced by a world undergoing dramatic transformation.  Islam, of course, will continue but will there be worthy Muslims?  Scenario 3) Islam as the Difference: Conversely, through human action, Islam could become the difference in world science and politics. In this scenario, Zia Sardar writes that while we are uncertain about the nature of the next century, we know that Islam cannot be ignored. "Wether it is seen as a force for liberation or as an authoritarian step back to the middle ages, Islam cannot be ignored."For Sardar Islam is the difference, the force of order and disorder, the attractors that will create the next century. Galtung, for example, has argued that Islam and the West are in a expansion/contraction relationship with each other, as one contracts, the other expands.As the West loses its ability to maintain hyper expansion, exploitation of nature and other, Islam will come in and either continue the project as the Japanese have done, or transform the project. As Sardar writes: "At the beginning the 20th century, Islam--colonized, defeated, stagnant--could have easily been written off from history and the future. At the dawn of the 21st century, Islam--resurgent, confident, 'militant', 'fundamentalist', is very much alive." But which Islam will it be? This then becomes the task of activists and intellectuals engaged in Islamic science, in Islamic futures, to imagine and create an Islam that creates the future; that is not burdened by advances in genetics, information technologies, and globalism. Such an Islam must engage in the global science and technology revolution but within the values and terms of Islamic science. In these times of civilization transformation when chaos is everpresent, there is one thing that leads to something else: a sense of direction, of inner purpose, of deep morality. If Islam can provide that, the Ummah of the future will be alive and vibrant.”

 

Images of Pakistan's Future by Sohail Inayatullah. Metafuture.org.  Dr. Sohail Inayatulla is a member of the executive council of the World Futures Studies Federation and is currently editing a book on the Futures of South Asia. 

Based on a literature review of Pakistani magazines, newspapers and journals as well as conversations with Pakistani scholars and interviews with members of the general public, five images or scenarios of the future of Pakistan were developed.  Sohail asserts that designing the future at local and community and broader levels (through local and international social movements, for example) might be a more promising task than waiting for a politician or some other central authority to solve the problems ahead. Dr. Sohail Inayatulla

Scenario Image of the Future 1) Disciplined Capitalistic Society:   “The first image of Pakistan's future has many anchors, the  most version recent uses S. Korea as a compelling image of the future.  Both countries were underdeveloped thirty years ago but now S. Korea has joined the ranks of the developed, it is become an integral part of the "Pacific Shift."  Through state managed industrialization with strong private spin-offs (and the economic activity caused by the Vietnam war) Korea has dramatically raised its standard of living. Along with a strong confucian ethic (respect for hierarchy, family, hard work, and an emphasis on education) Korea was a strong national ethic.  However, given Pakistan's social structure perhaps North Korea is a better example of  Pakistan's possible future as both have strong militaries.  However, while North Korea has a strong totalitarian ideology, Pakistan does not.  Islam is in many ways a legal/social doctrine and in that sense that it defies any particular  authoritative interpretation rather it is up for grabs by a variety of ideologies. While a theocratic military state is possible so far this mixture has not occurred nor has a one-man state managed to succeed. The best way of stating this model of the future is the "disciplined capitalistic society."   The military rules directly or indirectly under the guise of "law and  order."  Not only is civil society disciplined but so is labor.  Labor exists to aid capital in its national and  transnational accumulation.  The Islam that is used is one  that aids in societal discipline at the individual and social level. The head of the nation is then the strict father who knows what is best for the children.  The mother is in this image is apolitical, remaining at home to take care of the nation's children so they can work for the larger good of capitalist development.   However there is an important contradiction here.  Among the reasons of the rise of East Asia was women labor.  Females are thus essential for for export oriented strategies that lead to capital accumulation; at the same time the Islamic  dimension of this model demands their continued "home-ization."  They are to provide care to labor.  This is the semi-proletarian  existence which in the long run cheapens the cost of labor for capital since the informal sector helps support the formal "monied" capitalistic sector.  Females are integral to this semi-proleterian structure.   The other obvious contradiction is the role of the military.  Besides the role of women, confucianism, the historical particular juncture in the worldeconomy, East Asia developed because of low military expenditures and high social expenditures.  Is Pakistan ready to put health and education before military expansion, that is, to redefine security?  We have yet to see.  In the meantime, the hope is that through discipline and privatization Pakistan can join the ranks of the rich.”  Scenario Image of the Future 2) Islamic Socialism:  “This image is partially influenced by interpretations of Islam that give weight to the syncretic personal dimension of Islam; that is, an Islam that does not the become the facilitator of the mullah's rise--not rote discipline but revelation.  The rendering of Islam is populist as for example in the view that the land is perceived as belonging to the tillers not the landlords.  This image is also partially influenced by the third world movement which has attempted to follow an alternative development path not based on multinational West run capitalism or on soviet party/military run communism.  This view was  made famous by  Z.A. Bhutto in Pakistan.  But let us be clear:  this view is still industrial and growth oriented like the previous model, however, it has a strong emphasis on "roti, capra, makan," on basic needs and distributive justice.  Nehru attempted a similar model but without the Islamic overtones as have numerous other third world leaders.  In this model, the state softens the impact of local and transational capital on individuals.  At the macro level, import substitution and nationalization become key strategies.  However, the larger problem of the world economic system as essentially capitalistic and politics nation-state oriented with Pakistan near the bottom of the global division of labor remains. The meaning of this image, however, does not come only from the economic as central is the religious.  It is Islam that unites, it is Islam that gives direction, it is Islam that integrates individual, family and nation.  And although Islam is pervasive, it remains open and committed to distributive justice and individual spiritual growth--a soft Islam, if you will.  National allies in this image come from other third world countries with collective self-reliance the long run goal--south/south cooperation on economic, cultural and political levels.   Among other writers, Syed Abidi's writes that these two images take turns dominating Pakistan's politics.   Exaggeration of one leads to individual and social frustration and then the rise of the other and visa versa.  However, revisionist historians, such as Ayesha Jalal, argue that both are unsuccessful because of the nature of the Pakistani state, molded along authoriatarian lines due to the circumstances of partition.   A third image, based on individual and national identity attempts to transcend the earlier two, using the past as its gateway into the future.”  Scenario Image of the Future 3) The Return of the Ideal and the Search for Identity:  “The original image of Pakistan was that of a safe heaven and haven for muslims: safe from both the hindus of the east and  later on from the  jews of the west (in Israeli and  American forms).  It was derived--at least in its popular  myth--as the territory wherein muslims would not be  oppressed by the hindus of India.   While Jinnah's intent may have been political power (a share in the action when  India was to be divided) for the Muslim League and later the  creation of a secular state, it quickly became a state for  muslims of muslims.   Pakistan's self image was to a large degree defined by India.  India has been the enemy that gives unity.  Even after three  devastating wars, military strategists still believe that Pakistan can defeat India.   In this view, India has  many gods, is bent on destroying Pakistan (the empirical  evidence of the Bangladesh war), has nuclear weapons and is  allied with godless Russia.  But would Pakistan retain any sense of its identity without India since Pakistan knows itself through the other of India? Indeed, is Pakistan but not-India. India has survived thousands of years  with and without muslim domination, but Pakistan is still struggling  to complete a half-century, to imagine itself as a nation, to find a coherent self.  This image exists in many ways outside our earlier  dimensions in that internal identity is more important than external reality.  The image is that we reside in the land of the Pure, the  place where there is no threat from the outside, wherein the  purity of Islam can flourish.  Other variables such as the type  of political-economy, culture and geo-politics are less important.  The moral dimension of Islam is central.   Questions that arise from this view is: has Pakistan achieved this  level of purity?  Some muslim scholars argue that each Islamic nation attempts to recover the polity of the initial Islamic state, the ideal of the  original promise of the time of the Prophet--the revolution  had occurred, prophecy had been delivered, the rightly guided  caliphs ruled, and there was social justice and economic  growth in Arabia.  This ideal is then the image of the  future for Pakistan; this is the time of partition when there was  promise in the air, a great deal had been achieved through  sacrifice, the British and the hindus had been thrown back, and the Quaid lived.    The image of the future then is a return to a time of hope  and dreams; of victory over struggles and of purity, before the politicians in the form of the military and the  landlords coopted the future.  In this sense this image of the future is a search for an ideal past, a mythic past.  But while this image may be glorious, revisionist historians point out that the birth of Pakistan was already steeped in power politics, in feudal domination: there was never any purity to speak of, to begin with.  If this is true then perhaps what is needed is a reimagination of Pakistan.  A  search for a new vision, a new purpose that makes sense of the last forty years of frustration and creates real visions of the future not dreams based on a past that is but a lie.  This reimagination task could occur through a democratic process of collective future envisioning or it could come from the words or images of great artists or others marginal to the present established power structure.  But while we await this reimagination of the future, in the meantime the present disintegrates.” Scenario Image of the Future 4) The End of Sovereignty:  “This images is the most pervasive and has many variants and levels.  The first is conquest by India leading to a greater India.   This is possible through military conquest or through  economic imperialism if the doors of trade are left wide open.   The second is more sophisticated and deals not with military  or economic imperialism but with cultural domination.  The  main villain is  the West, especially the United  States.  Irrespective of US AID and other ties to Pakistan, religion and their distant locations in the world economy make Pakistan and the USA naturally antagonistic.   Recent desires of the US to inspect Pakistan's nuclear development exacerbate this tension.  But cultural domination comes in  many forms: technology transfer from the green revolution to  the microcomputer revolution--technology is not neutral but  has many cultural codes and messages embedded in its  hardware (the actual physical technology) and software (the  rules that make it sensible).  For example, certain  technologies might promote individualism and the expense of  family.  Others might promote mobility.  Education transfer  also leads to cultural penetration, the widespread  emigration to the USA for education and then for work is the  obvious example.  Electronic technology even in the  ostensibly neutral form of CNN can but spread foreign views  of what is significant and what is unimportant; that  Pakistan is rarely covered is not inconsequential to  cultural self-images.  Travel to the West for tourism,  conferences, and medical reasons is another example.   While  certainly there is a bit of cultural transfer mostly it is but one-way communication.  Sovereignty then is clearly  violated; the idea that a nation can exist given this level  of cultural penetration is highly problematic.  For instance, just as  there is a world division of labor there is a world division  of culture and news with some supplying modern culture others  providing exotic or traditional culture.  We provide the data for their theories of the traditional.  The responses to this form of penetration are obvious:  fundamentalism in its strongest forms--a return to the historic text, a denial of physical and mental mobility, and a critique of all things foreign even those which increase the freedom and life chances of individual and family.   This is the famous  call by the ruling elite for a local form of "democracy" in  which basic "universal" freedoms are denied so as to save traditional local culture.  Liberals, thus, argue that the defense of cultural sovereignty of the  nation is but the denial of the sovereignty of the  individual and the reaffirmation of the  power of the State.  In the name of tradition, all sorts of injustices can be committed and rationalized.  Other responses to Western penetration could be further  Islamic penetration, for example, by Iran.  This could lead  to a Pakistan-Iran partnership with an increased Shia influence in Pakistan.  It would increase the power of ulema  in that they would have the power to define and narrate  legitimate cultural and political activities. Conversely the end of sovereignty could become a positive image in that Pakistan could be forced to become an international blend of many cultures and technologies: a place where the future resides, a place where sovereignty finds itself renewed at a higher plantery or spiritual or cultural levels not at a myopic national or local level.  This is then a reaffirmation of the idea of the ummah but extended to the entire world in the form of a global community.  Pakistan could then become a compelling image for other places to emulate. A receiver and sender of social technology and a creator of postmodern culture. But this direction would take a great deal of daring and courage as there are no models to follow only vague possibilities to explore.  As problematic as cultural sovereignty is the loss of the sovereignty of the self.  The self was previously constructed around familiar lines: heaven was above, hell below, and God all around.  One knew what one was to do with one's life: class and caste were clear.  But with the world continuously being recreated by the science and technology revolution and with the problem of West continuously staring at the Pakistani "self," there no longer exists any clear cut self.  Am I Sindhi first?  A woman first? A Pakistani first? A wife first?  A muslim first?  A feudal first?  Where do my loyalties lie?  Can I integrate these often contradictory fragments of identity?  And where do these categories stand in the larger scheme of things?  Moreover, the problem of the self can but become increasingly problematic with the feminist movement, increased exposure to the outside world through travel and the development of an overseas Pakistani community.  Instead of one mutually agreed upon authoritative construction of self we may see many Pakistani selves all vying for individual and national dominance. The next layer of sovereignty that is made problematic is internal territorial sovereignty, that is, the provinces increasingly  wanting more autonomy and in some cases secession.  The  calls for an independent Sindh is the latest case in point.   The image of this future is of all the provinces going their separate ways with Pakistan finally only being Punjab. The north-west might join with Afghanistan or the Phaktoons might form  their own country.  In addition, Baluchistan might join Iran, become its  own nation, or join a loose confederation with Sindh.  And in this image, Azad Kashmir would either join Punjab or unite  with the rest of Kashmir to form its own nation.  While  this might lead to conquest by India most likely the same forces that would lead to end of national integration in Pakistan would also lead to the disintegration of India, from one India to many Indias. Also possible after a period of disintegration is reintegration into a united states of south asia with Punjab as the most likely center of this loose regional federation.” Scenario Image of the Future 5) No Chance: the Continuation of the Grand Disillusionment:  “The last and we would argue most pervasive image of the  future is that of the present continued or "no change."   This is a general malaise, a grand disillusionment with the  ideal of Pakistan, with the promises of the rulers, with the  intentions of politicians.  In this view, the power structure--so obviously unjust--appears unchangeable to individuals and groups.  Given this malaise, there are then a range of strategies available. The first is individual  spiritual development, an escape from the social and material worlds.  The second is to flee the  country to brighter horizons outside: "Dubai Chalo" or the  fabled green card.  The poor and middle class go to the Middle East and the rich and the upper middle class leave for the United States.  Within the country the strategy is to  find a job and then use one's personal influence to help  others find work thus allowing the family as a whole to  move up the economic ladder.  Of course this is more  difficult in times of contraction.  During economic expansion, movement is easier.  Another tactic is politicization in the  form of joining political parties for the purpose of social transformation.  However, this strategy is often quickly abandoned  once the enormous weight of the  historical structures at hand are made obvious (the military, the landlords, and the interpretive power  of the ulema, mentioned earlier).  What remains is politics as patronage.   This regression from politics as social transformation to politics as patronage has a devastating influence on the national psyche.  Individuals  are forced into corruption and dishonesty (within their definitions of these two terms) and must live with their own moral  failures in a land where morality is central to personal and social valuation.   Violence--individual, institutional and state--becomes routine and acceptable.  Cities disaggregate; the rich secure themselves and the rest either form separate communities or create their own armies.  What emerges is cynicism and pessimism, a breakdown in the immune system of the political and social body--a world ending with a whimper not a bang.  For those in the position of leadership or responsibility  the contradictions are even stronger and inasmuch as the local, national and international structures are too difficult to transform others are blamed: the  foreign elements, the bad local elements, or the undisciplined youth, to name a few enemies. The oppression of the present bares down on leader and follower alike; both lose their humanity, both lose hope in any collective image of the future.  Worse, there is no savior ahead: all models have failed; leaders have failed; religion has failed; capitalism has failed; socialism has failed; political parties have failed.”

 

Scenarios on Terrorism. Free Agent Ecosystem site.  Community Zero.com.

A consortium of government officials and NGOS -  nominated an environmental and globalization study to research the future of globalization and had developed four globalization scenarios. For further information on this study, see reference.

Scenario 1) “High terrorism & Corporate altruism:  In 2008 corporations are taking care of employees like they never have before. Terrorism is still very common. While living in the shadow of terrorism is difficult, we can take refuge in our organizations. Corporations aren't greedy so they are willing to pay a high percentage of taxes for security to Tom Ridge's Homeland Security Dept. In spite of the increased funding for security, terrorism continues to increase.    There is a lot of work for people who do training but much of the strategic work for creating the organization of 2008 has already been done. All corporations have their own universities and create curriculums for the needs of their employees. Employee retention is important so everyone involved in hiring has been trained in effective interviewing skills. Courses in creativity are a part of every curriculum.    Since terrorism happens every organization has a cadre of volunteers who do outreach for organizations that that been the victim of terrorism. All organizations have internal child care centers too. This greatly reduces the anxiety working parents feel when there is an attack. They know where their children are. In addition to childcare, family time and family rooms are available as well. Disaster Preparedness is offered to all family members of employees.”  Scenario 2) “High terrorism & Corporate greed : We consultants have a full plate in 2008, a time when both terror and greed are rampant.  Virtual Terror.  Big Brother is watching. There is a Fast Tracker on every car. Identity theft is common. There is essentially no privacy and few regulations. We buy everything we canOur on-line because we are afraid to go out. As consultants we are called on to evaluate ways to prevent ID theft and to help people who have lost their identity.   Corporations feel that environmentalism is a waste of time. There are oil rigs in Balboa Park and Mission Bay.  Wireless Communications.  Phones, bike messengers, and carrier pigeons are popular forms of wireless communications. Also, UPS and knock-offs are extremely successful. In addition to delivering packages, they also deliver take-out food. This was an FAE consultant's idea.  Anti-Terror.  Anti-Terror is a big market for us consultants. The likelihood of terrorism happening anywhere at anytime has caused businesses to distribute employees across many parts of the world to avoid a vulnerable concentration. Having people/info in multiple sites decreases the chance of a business being struck down from single terrorist strikes. We teach Anti-Apathy courses for people who must work in virtual offices because of terrorism. Additionally, we offer survivalist training for employees who are caught in terrorist attacks. The most nurturing work we do is helping people set up safety gardens to protect our food sources.  Unsafe schools and travel. We are called on to do a great deal of distance learning since people no longer meet in person or travel to conferences. Included in this process is trust and team building. We also do a ton of psychological assessment. In a nutshell. We have unstable markets. We must constantly react to what is going on. An entire market could be wiped out by a series of attacks of greed or terror.  Since employees aren't valued, there is a disposable workforce that is in constant need of training. We only do 100% up-front pre-billing since clients are so unreliable.  Scenario 3) Low terrorism & Corporate altruism: “The Homeland Security Dept. has been able to greatly reduce terrorism, thanks to the financial resources provided by organizations. While terrorism is low, there is some discomfort with the price we have had to pay for the feeling of security. We have had to give up some of the freedoms we enjoyed in 2003. We may be videotaped any time we are outside our home. Our e-mail may be monitored. We have decided that the price is worth it.  Business is good for us! Organizations have plenty of money and have invested heavily in long-term strategic projects to keep terrorism low. We are called on to help with scenario planning and strategic planning. There is also a great deal being spent on leadership development and team development. Scenario 4)Low terrorism & Corporate greed:Money talks in 2015. If you want low terrorism, just pay for it! This is the way of life and it works.  Corporate greed and failures because of that greed seemed to top out in 2003. High profile cases such as WorldCom and Enron forced the government to pay attention to big business. Business failures greatly impacted two things:  1.Government oversight was put in place to keep companies in line so that the economy could improve. There was pressure to get well.  2.Shareholder pressure led to the formation of a "crooks coalition" doing business overseas where oversight wasn't as tight. Terrorism became an issue for global businesses. The crooks coalition responded by cutting deals with terrorists to keep them under control. Win-win! Everyone has money!    Where do we come in as consultants? Back in 2003 we helped corporations comply with oversight requirements but things have changed since most businesses have moved offshore. Now the most asked for services are "Negotiating with Terrorists", and "Understanding Third-World Thinking". We are essentially in cahoots with big business and the terrorists because we like things being safe at home and abroad. We want this system to continue.”  Scenario 5) Our clients and the Consulting World in 2015:  “In 2015:  What will businesses (your clients) look like? How will they do business?  What will be the role of consultants? The work place:  Architecture has evolved significantly since 2003.  Instead of 80% private work spaces and 20% collaboration spaces, the percentage will flip. Most work spaces will be for collaboration, most private work spaces will be in homes or they will be highly fluid "hoteling" offices. In hoteling situations workers will use a generic work site/desk for the duration of a project then move as the work reconfigures.  Work places will be completely wireless. Ubiquitous wireless broadband access to the internet and to company networks will allow workers to access any information anywhere anytime. "Walk and be" is the worker bee equivalent to "plug and play". Fluidity of work groups. Group works will form and reconfigure quite fluidly and that will be the expectation of workers rather than a disruptive occurrence.   Green environment. Worker wellness has been clearly shown to have an influence on profitability and innovation. Work environments that foster wellness give companies competitive advantage. Elimination of any questionable substances in the work place is well underway. Companies are introducing more plants, special lighting, and other improvements to work conditions to gain every possible improvement in productivity.The Psycho/Demographics of Decision Makers: Trust and Security. The cultural trauma among young people of the terrorism and wars of 2001-2005 is manifesting a high need for trust and security in the business people now in their 30's and early 40's and taking positions of authority.  Loyalties. More companies are behaving like movie studios. They form around an idea, produce a product or service or innovation, sell it to a large firm that can grow it to a mass scale, and then disband. Because this lifecycle of a firm has shortened, loyalties to self-interest increase and loyalties to a particular company have diminished. Networks of free agents have matured and within these loyalties are fierce. Though these networks are not technically unions, they have achieved a great deal of power.   Diversity The decision makers of 2015 are very diverse with Hispanic and Asian backgrounds being as prevalent as whites. Additionally, there are now five generations in the work force as lifespans increase and senior citizens continue to work (some for their own enrichment and some for financial survival). Health issues and costs are more important than ever as the Baby Boom generation and their children enter old age.  Comfort with Complexity & Ambiguity. Work and the world in general have become so fluid that comfort with complexity and ambiguity, beyond anything seen before, are now basic requirements for managers. The accelerating rate of change has been a significant driver of this requirement.  More and more Decision Makers are Visual Learners. The managers and decision makers of 2015 grew up on Nintendo, Gameboy and PC/video gaming. They expect incredible speed, richness and ease from computer interfaces. The virtual world of gaming and scenarios is as relevant and real as the physical world. They are accepting of new technologies as tools and intermediaries in the activities of daily living.   San Diego - Sunshine Pay. Many managers, who could have senior positions in large companies headquartered in the other parts of the country, choose to run small businesses in San Diego because of the pleasant climate. What Is The Plot? Much of what we did in 2003 is available as online tutoring and a crude artificial intelligence. Decision makers will look to us for more than technical knowledge. How do we as consultants act? What do we do?    We bridge the digital divide. Our generation is the last for whom ubiquitous computing and connectivity was novel. By 2010 we will have assisted the last of the old industries and managers to make the transition to computers and a connected world. By 2015 we will be still helping some managers fill in gaps that the wisdom of pre-computing days had worked out. Those skills that could not be codified still trouble new managers.   We model and teach. Systems thinking, scenario planning, cross-functional teaming, and leadership are all still areas where our support is needed.   We cultivate intangibles. The core of our work will be those things that cannot (yet) be automated. We will be in the business of automating knowledge and skill as well as providing support to leaders in things that are increasingly more intangible.   We provide a network of trust. Trust among our network is built through working together on Pro bono and for pay projects. We practice our skills together, stimulate and learn together, and rehearse deals and deal-making together. We "build trust at the rate of change" within our network and with our clients.   We are a strange attractor. In the chaotic modern world of 2015, we create moments of order and leverage. We provide what our clients cannot. Our product/service offers include:  Modeling language - to help clients describe their experiences and make sense  Deliverables - artifacts that engage and encourage reflection, dialogue, decisions, and action   Labor orbits sources of capital. Labor in 2015 will be largely comprised of free agents orbiting capital sources. The larger the source the stronger the "gravity" that will keep them in close and regular orbits. Like the rings of Saturn. If stronger attractors come into proximity, the free agent may change to orbit a different capital source. In some cases groups of free agents will coalesce to form their own capital sources and attract other free agents. They will, collectively, orbit a large capital source like a moon orbits a planet.”

 

Counterterrorism--Scenarios, Actions, and Policies.  Jerry Glenn and Theodore Gordon.  American Council for the United Nations University--Millennium Project.  Study was conducted in 2001-2002. See the "2004 State of the Future" CD ROM for more detail.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, a study was initiated to collect judgments about policies and actions that might be effective in counter terrorism. The study involved two rounds of scenario construction and a follow-up questionnaire on the effectiveness, plausibility and risks of the actions and policies suggested in the scenarios.

The study began with a request for anti-terrorist scenarios distributed to listserves of the Millennium Project of the American Council for the United Nations University and the World Futures Studies Federation. The scenarios submitted in response to this request were analyzed to identify and rate policies and actions that might be useful in counterterrorism strategies. This work was posted on-line with a further request for comments, modifications to existing scenarios and added scenarios.

The submitted scenarios and others from outside of this effort were reviewed to identify actions and policies that might be useful in counterterrorism strategies. The fifty-nine actions/policies identified were then submitted to an international panel for judgments about their effectiveness, plausibility, and potential unexpected downside risks. The questionnaire and the full results are included in Appendix C.  Jerry Glenn and Ted Gordon

Scenario 1) Escalation:  “In the wake of September 11, 2001 there were calls for retribution and vengeance. US military forces were deployed and massive attacks seemed imminent. Public opinion polls in the US and elsewhere supported this anticipated retaliation. But the absolute proof of the responsibility for the attacks on US civilians which would have been required for the whole hearted military and political support of non Western nations was not in hand. Therefore other avenues were initially sought by the US. It was easy to freeze the more obvious financial assets of suspected terrorist groups. This was moderately but only temporarily effective.  Terrorism continued as a serious global problem.  The terrorists, mistaking the surgical response of the US and its allies as weakness, used biological weapons. The immigrant Afghanis carried the seeds of a worldwide epidemic of Ebola- like Crimean Congo. Lethal anthrax, probably of a non-natural variety, was reported in a newspaper office in Boca Raton, Florida.   At the Super Bowl in New Orleans, Mardi Gras time, in February, 2002, nobody paid the slightest attention to a truck that stopped briefly outside the Super Dome. Even if anyone had seen it, they couldn't have known that during its brief stop the truck released an aerosolized cloud of anthrax spores that were now wafting through the Dome’s air circulating system.  The Internet became the medium that the terrorists chose to make the announcement of their nuclear threat.  When a terrorist warning appeared on the Internet, authorities asked: is the threat credible? Everybody had an opinion, but if anybody had facts, they couldn’t be distinguished from those that were just guessing.  The Office of Homeland Security would study the threat and would prepare to meet it with defensive strategies, but they soon recognized that the threat they studied was the last one, not the next one. So the Office formed a “futurist skunk works” which had the job of postulating the next threat- that is inventing terrorist strategies. Of course this work was very secret since the Office didn’t want to give the enemy any good ideas. But looking ahead gave the Office needed lead-time. In this world, the  war against terrorism merged with the war against drugs.  Unfortunately, ten years later, the “good guys” are still searching for criminals.”  (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM. ) Scenario 2) Counter Mindset: The Intellectual arms race to 2005:  “As more people believed like the Political Islamists that the tide of history had to be turned or else Islam would perish from the earth due to the overwhelming momentum of Western cultural hegemony, the stage was increasingly prepared for large-scale terrorist acts. Earlier "terrorist international" training bases gave birth to the growing networks of terrorism and together the growing Islamic extremists and their sympathizers formed the al Qaeda and other networks sworn to destroy the defilers of the sacred. The leaders of the "International Community" realized that the real enemy was NOT simply small groups of fanatics, but a mindset held by both the direct supporters of the Political Islamists and the millions of sympathizers from Mauritania to Indonesia.   Nevertheless, other Political Islamists and their supporters continue their struggle.  Information warfare may have prevented a world war, but was not conducted intelligently enough to fully counter the terrorists' mindset.  Innovators in Silicon Valley began to talk about the "Big-e" or the "enlightenment application."  Since there were too many potential terrorist tactics to destroy a human quality of life, an intellectual arms race would have to be waged, but this one to make the opponent more enlightened, less crazy, and increasingly curious about alternative views of life. In this scenario, a number of other policies were proposed by participants in the Millennium Project, American Council for the United Nations University were considered and implemented, including:  1) An early warning system at the UN Secretariat that was transparent to the media and NGOs and could deploy rapid media systems to make emerging situations known to the world in order to build public pressure for early or preventative responses; 2) Shared intelligence among security organizations;  3) State-of-the-art intelligence technology was made available to the public in areas of potential problems, so that they can show the world what is happening  4) More effective sanctions that target just the criminals and not citizens; 5) New counter money laundering strategies were established that included information traps that prioritized individuals by the amount of money they laundered, froze assets, identified where the criminal is and assessed local authorities' ability to make the arrest, identified the best country in which to prosecute a particular terrorist, and determined the readiness of local courts to move immediately.  When everything was ready, an intergovernmental money laundering authority executed all the orders at the same time that apprehended the criminal, froze the assets and access, and opened the court case. This also became an effective anti-corruption and anti-organized crime strategy;  6) Global dialogues that have been maintained over years since 11Sept01 on issues that inflamed terrorists and the results have been liked to school curriculum changes; 7) A "Global Partnership for Development" that gave reason for people not to be sympathetic with terrorists.  (One example in Egypt was Sharouk that connected rural village participatory processes for development priorities and strategies to financial allocations from government ministries in Cairo.)  Some funds from the new counter money laundering strategy were used to help support these development efforts. The intellectual arms race to counter the terrorist's mind set and all the systems that support them is fully engaged today and may well be having an additional impact on both government corruption and organized crime. As a result then the deaths 11 September 2001 will not have been in vain.”  (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM. )  Scenario 3) Root Causes:  “After the WTC, the Pentagon, and the State Department attacks, the USA –adhering to conventional strategic criteria- leads an ill-fated world war against terrorism. The final result is a chain of strong regional and local reactions. This leads the USA to re-formulate its security and defense strategy as a first step and, at a later stage and upon realizing that this strategy is not widely accepted, the USA proposes a global strategy previously agreed upon with other main actors.  NGOs with a global, inter-institutional and interdisciplinary vision begin to systematically study the terrorist threat and to propose policies agreed upon by different parties and with different perspectives.    International financial institutions start developing a strong self-criticism regarding their own general policies towards countries with very different present and potential development.   After a short period of expansion and association with other social radical movements terrorism starts to lose ground. Among other things, a strong emphasis is placed on education in order to reduce inequality  Some features acquire importance in the world of 2025 such as a more suitable international coordination scheme for intelligence and security organizations in their struggle against terrorism, together with the establishment of international courts and a common legislation aimed at overcoming national weaknesses and eliminating sanctuaries.  In major Islamic countries participative democratic forms become the instrument of secularization of political power which leads to a more effective solutions on the problems of insurgency and terrorism.”  (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to “Chapter 4. Global Scenarios” on this CD.)

 

Abstracts of other scenarios from the Millennium Project:

Socratic Justice  The US used all of the powers that the UN could offer. The US ratified the International Criminal Court and encouraged other nations to do so. The US brought captured terrorists and criminals to the Court and then focused on new modes of international cooperation. (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

The Wild WestUS and Allied military strikes led to endless escalation in a war that apparently was won, but over time sped up the process of decline, with terror meeting terror. The CIA got back into business on a big scale. Nations already poor became poorer. (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

The Peaceful Cowboy  The US sought means to cooperate with other nations to deal with terrorism in a more contained, targeted way, although a great deal of wild west posturing continued. There were three parts to its strategy: improved internal security; enhanced intelligence; and economic action. Eventually, protection against terrorism has become almost a habit. (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

The Next Year  An invasion of the Taliban areas results in the execution of the Taliban-held UN aid workers. This provides additional moral support for more military strikes. The US considered withdrawing support for Israel unless they reduced their military severity. Casualties mounted.  Bin Laden was apparently assassinated by one of his men but more likely by Alliance Special Forces. (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

Fortress USA/OECD Borders were closed, locked down.  This led to general impoverishment and the loss of innovation that accompanies immigration.  In the short run, it provided the appearance of security, but in the longer run, poverty resulted.(To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

Establishing A Global Civic Ethic  Key international NGO’s formed a global council that believed that the major impediment to lasting peace and global security was the lack of a global civic ethic. A World Public Service was formed in which volunteers took on global ethical management tasks in international conflict resolution. Their strategy: potential combatants have to agree to mediation and to implement the outcomes thereof.  Failing this, sustained ongoing sanctions would follow. Comprehensive military action overseen by a global peace force would be a last resort. (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

Colonialism Reborn  After the US destroys the Taliban regime, internal conflicts in Afghanistan cause local rioting and escalating conflicts. bin Laden’s death (or capture) creates enthusiasm in the US and unrest in the Muslim countries. Massive deliveries of assistance for Afghanistan are provided to the country in the form of food, quick rebuilding of hospitals, others services, and infrastructure. In the Middle East, the US is forced either to put pressure on both parties to find a compromise, or to accept complete failure of the peace process and thus the West becomes further involved in the unstable region from Pakistan to the Middle East. An unexpected terrorist event dramatically changes the situation, which then becomes similar to the colonial wars of the 19th and 20th centuries. A long period of reshuffling of the political and security system follow. (To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

Call on the UN. The investigation that "followed the money" to map the criminal network and catch the criminals proved to be extremely complex and the speed of international financial markets made this task more difficult than anticipated. It became clear that the US experience in Afghanistan would become similar to the USSR’s, but complicated by continued terrorism at home. This situation lasted for more than one year and induced some serious political changes both in different Islamic countries where extremists obtained greater influence and in the US too, where the war (and Bush) became unpopular. The "anti-global" movement gained influence, and new leaders with new policies appeared. The UN was seen as potentially more useful in settling international disputes than direct interventionism had proven to be. The Bin Laden case, still unsolved, was taken over by the International Criminal Court.(To read the full version of this scenario, please refer to the 2004 State of the Future Report CD ROM.)

Middle East Peace Scenarios  Jerry Glenn and Theodore Gordon.  American Council for the United Nations University-- Millennium Project.  Written in 2004 based on studies conducted in 2002-04.  See the "2004 State of the Future" CD ROM for more detail.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has to be one of the most studied and contested issues in world affairs today.  The normative peace scenarios presented in this chapter were created through a unique process. A series of literature reviews and interviews identified seven conditions that seemed required by all sides prior to the emergence of peace. The review also found a set of actions to help establish each precondition. An international panel of several hundred participants was asked to rate the importance of each action for achieving the precondition, the likelihood that the action could occur, and the possibility that it might backfire or make things worse.  Additional actions were also collected and rated subsequently in a second-round questionnaire. The results were used to write draft alternative peace scenarios and submitted in a third round to the panel for critical review. The drafts were then edited based on the results and are presented here. Details of the process and results are available in “Chapter 4: Middle East Peace Scenarios.” Jerry Glenn and Theodore Gordon

Scenario 1. Water Works:  Water crisis led to water negotiations that built trust that peace was possible and boosted political negotiations.  Momentum increased with new youth political movements, the "Salaam-Shalom" TV series complemented by Internet peace phone swarms, tele-education in refugee campts, the Generva Accords complemented by parallel hardliner negotiations, joint development with Arab oil money and Israeli technology, participatory development processes, new oil pipelines from the Gulf to the Mediterranean, and a unique "calendar-location matrix"for time-sharing of the holy sites.  UN troops enforced agreements with non-lethal weapons, and new forms of international collaboration cemented the peace.

Scenario 2) The Open City:   The new Pope challenged Jewish and Muslim religious leaders to solve the question of governance in Jerusalem. Politics, power, and media all played a role in reaching a proposed solution that was ultimately codified in a resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly. The threat of a fatwa ended the suicide bombings; when the bombings stopped, so did the Israeli retaliatory missions. Education of young Muslims gradually changed; schools that once taught hatred moderated. On the question of refugees, the Israelis were concerned about being overwhelmed and outvoted by Palestinian immigrants in their democratic society. The issue promised to be inimical but a compromise restricted the right to vote to people who had lived in Israel for more than seven years. Finally, a historic proposal came to the UN from Israel—it traded guarantees of Israeli security for establishment of a permanent Palestinian state.

Scenario 3) Dove - —“Dove” was a secret, contested Israeli plan to de-escalate and unilaterally renounce retaliation in order to demonstrate that Palestinians were aggressors. At the same time, a secret debate was taking place among extremist Palestinians on whether to escalate to more lethal weapons. Those against escalation said “If we desist, Israel will be seen as the aggressor.”
So each side had reasons for wanting to stop but seemed frozen by circumstances. The tide changed when 27 Israeli pilots said they would not participate in future air raids, initiating the “Refusnik” movement. What happened next was like a chess game. The Israelis got a guarantee that the bombing would stop; the Palestinians got an agreement that the Israelis would withdraw to the pre-1967 borders. A series of non-aggression treaties and agreements stated that Israel had a right to exist. Jerusalem became an open city, with its own democratic government. Immigration quotas were established. Foreign capital flowed into the area. New businesses were established, and unemployment among the Palestinians dropped sharply. It was a self-fulfilling cycle: the move toward peace sparked the environment for peace.

While writing these scenarios, it became increasingly clear that the speed of building better conditions must be so fast that the voices of those who would have us understand the past before we move forward are less audible than before. It is a race. It is easy to say there are many alternative scenarios for the Middle East that show variations on the current violence, but without plausible stories of how peace could evolve with cause-and-effect relations woven into peace scenarios, it is difficult to motivate people to move toward more cooperative pursuits to build a new story for the region.

 

The Future of American Politics   Richard A. Segal Jr., Executive Web Developor for Steve Forbes, founder and pioneer of Forbes Magazine.  Richard S. Dunham, senior writer for Business Week.

Technology trends greatly impact the way citizens organize, communicate, and vote.  In the future, the behavior of citizens is likely to resemble the past, as it was in the 1830s.    In 1830, Alexis de Tocqueville, struck  by both the interest and influence of the average citizen in the electoral process once said, “The American people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe.”  Scenario of the 21st Century: A Return to ‘Democracy in America’, by Alexis de Tocqueville”:  “It is the year 2015 but in many ways, it is similar to1830. Back then, candidates canvassed voters in their homes and citizens questioned politicians in public forums.  The big difference today is, that it is all taking place on the internet.   Back in 2004, voters felt less potent as the game was to raise enormous amounts of money from special interests and then spend it on gobs of TV advertising--in which candidates were packaged like beer. Victory went to the best mass marketer.  In 2015, politics changed.  The politics of 2015 resembles what Alexis de Tocqueville saw in 1830.  The Information Revolution democratized politics by weakening the elites' grip on information. American voters, instead of being passive recipients of news and advertising from a few TV networks and national publications, today receive information from hundreds of competing sources, such as E-mail lists and Web sites. What's more, interactive media lets the voter talk back. It’s personal again.  Today in 2015, the masses attend campaign events in cyberspace and exchange ideas in online chat rooms. What went away by 2015 were the tight links between moneyed interests and the traditional apparatus of party politics. What ascended between 2004 – 2015  were single-issue groups that mobilized their troops with a computer keystroke, and coalitions around causes or candidates. ``It ended up weakening institutional structures,'' says White House Chief of Staff John D. Podesta. ``That's bad news for party discipline and good news for creativity.'' The risk of 2020 – 2050 is this:  For nearly two and one-half centuries past, two major parties have moderated the public's passions because neither has dared stray too far from the center. If the parties splinter, the U.S. could wind up with a fractured, stalemated Congress and a President preferred by only a small portion of the electorate. To avoid obsolescence, the Democrats and Republicans themselves will have to harness technology to build cohesive blocs of voters from splinter groups. ``In essence,'' says Democratic consultant Dane Strother, ``it's back to the future.'' 

 

Scenario 2025: Broken Edge. Oliver Sparrow is the Director of the Challenge!Forum. He is the author of many publications, including five books which were written for the Forum, as well as an interactive CD-ROM and this web site. He is also known for his groundbreaking computer-based presentations, which are given to audiences totalling well over ten thousand people in the course of a year.

This scenario examines plausible trends in global security, global economy, corporate governance, and global geo-political infrastructure.  Sparrow writes about a highly fractured world, stretched under the envelop of a broken environment where resources are becoming scarce.  Scenario in the 21st Century: 2025: Broken Edge:  “The century began with a series of bad frights, but the enforced rebalancing of the stock markets in the industrial world was, essentially, completed by 2005. Issues of terrorism had faded into the background after the resolution of at least some of tensions in the Middle East, a firm global hand from the US and its partners, and an effective international clampdown on suspect sources of finance. Agricultural commodity prices improved as subsidised food exports from the wealthy world were reduced, and a gradual pattern of lowered tariffs present good prospects for the economies of the middle income nations.  Japan, too, was seen to be taking strategic steps to reform. The effective insolvency of its banks had been taken in hand, and lending to business had begun once more to flow. Japanese interest rates returned to meaningful rates of return, the Yen strengthened and huge volumes of Japanese savings were repatriated.  European interests, alarmed by the halving of German asset values and by the weakness of and evident rigidities around the Euro, by the implications of enlargement and the facts of demographics, had begun an equally painful process of public re-evaluation of the overall project. Important sources of misdirection and sclerosis had, therefore, begun to be taken out of the world system. In addition, however, these processes had four important outcomes. The first was an abandonment of hitherto sacrosanct rigidities - of agricultural protection and subsidy, of formal and de facto protection of labour and of the blanket reduction in monetary degrees of freedom that came with the Euro.  Second, increasingly genuine regionalisation in decision-taking and in monetary policy led to prospects of specialisation. Local economic engines and flexible trimming of money supply to meet local needs. Overall discipline was confined to a longer term, rolling model to which each had to accede. A new cadre of local political talent, linking the European to the local in a meaningful manner, began to make itself felt, setting limits on what national-level political traditionalists could maintain.   Third, the unimpeded flow of low-cost labour from the recent accession to the EU together produced a dramatic sense of dynamics.   Fourth, management teams that had hitherto been protected from international capital disciplines by state assistance, legal and regulatory protection were increasing subject to enforced change.   Confidence - in the future, in governance, in global security - had been somewhat restored. The United States and its NAFTA partners found themselves in a fine environment. The enormous investment in information technology of the previous century was open to exploitation at low cost. Upward pressure on the dollar remained a powerful force, but improved conditions in the rest of the industrial world somewhat relieved this, as did a booming home market. The ocean of technical capability that decades of investment in science and technology had already created was supplemented by an endless flow of astounding breakthroughs.  US dominance in the security environment was essentially assured by its successes in what was once called the war on terrorism. With exceptional instances of dissent, the other industrial powers fell into line with procedures which they saw to be in their best interests. A consensus was developed around the management of areas of strategic importance, such as the resource-rich regions.  There was broad agreement around the techniques, legal basis, agency and funding of interventions both here and in the chaotic regions of the world. A set of criteria were developed, covering the priority of such an intervention and the ability of the industrial powers to deliver a timely improvement in the situation. Interventions were increasingly planned, based on such criteria, rather than undertaken in response to crisis and media pressure. In particular, international companies were increasingly required to act as arms of the state in this respect, reporting intelligence and making (often subsidised) dispositions that assisted in stabilisation plans. Thus the choice of location for a plant might be expected to take into account the need to stabilise - provide income and employment - in a region. Not all firms accepted these strictures, but pressure on US-domiciled companies was intense, and many found themselves carrying both a burden and walking with a powerful friend. Non-US companies found themselves at a loss in access to intelligence - to name but one area - and so had to balance independence of action against the advantages of compliance.   The effective hegemony that developed over the first ten years of the century had the ability to damp virtually any sources of conflict that threatened the world's equanimity. A series of international agreements were developed under the auspices of the WTO that greatly reduced impediments to trade. Each of these were based on the view that economic growth was ultimately good for all, and that impediments to this - to trade, to the free flow of capital, to information flows and to access to knowledge - were all matters to be set aside. Gestures were made in this legislation to environmental issues, to impact management in poor nations and to workers' rights, but the speed of events made these issues hard to implement fully, and the entangled nature of state and commerce led to many special cases being developed where extralegal issues were paramount. The upshot of this was, however, that industries which were open to international integration - such as everything from vehicle manufacture to broadcast entertainment - therefore underwent swift consolidation, often doing so around US corporate frameworks.   The situation in the 2008-2010 period, during the second business cycle into the new millennium was, therefore, a strikingly positive one. Economic growth was reaching levels seen only in the post W.W.II glory days. True, there were more or less acute issues of demographics in some nations, but technology was enabling people to work from their homes, and markets were supporting the assets needed for old age. Extremely tight IT-based systems of guest-worker management permitted the flow of many low-wage earners to come into the industrial world from elsewhere in the world. Economic growth was providing the taxes needed for a vast range of public works, including care of the elderly. Health technologies promised to at least manage the leading ailments of old age.   This period of "fast forward" had, however, concealed some profound problems which the pragmatic, fragmented world of 2010 was poorly suited to handle. National statistics for important regions were, in effect, as poor in 2010 as they were in 1998, when the Asian collapse showed nations to owe up to ten times as much as had been thought.   In the rich world, political institutions had changed little in several generation, and the sheer complexity and the modern environment made effective decision-taking a matter of compromise and opportunistic horse-trading, usually amongst the articulate. Capital markets continued to pursue their zero-sum game with the same avidity as before, but with sharper tools and shinier teeth. Business managers were pressed ever-harder for results, and having to perform in a world where life cycles were shorter, and where the difference between the best and the inadequate was next to marginal.   Corporate governance was typically weak in the international environment, despite sweeping US-based regulation after the scandals of the millennium's end. Much multinational business activity was anyway effectively conducted "offshore" to the highly regulated regions. The mix of interests forced on the international companies by the war on terror provided further instances where misdirection, hidden income flows and false accounting developed unchecked.   These objective problems were, however, as nothing to the social issues which had been building up, partly in the industrial world but chiefly beyond it. Periods of prosperity may provide the platform from which discontent finds a voice. Stringency, by contrast, focuses minds on essentials. Education and the media provide the means to articulate discontent. In the wealthy world, and elderly traditionalist group find fast change and technological wizardry increasingly alienating. All low-skill jobs that can be taken by low-wage immigrants or exported to low-wage areas are now inaccessible to the poorly educated, and a further cadre feel aliens in their own societies. "World" cities had achieved populations which were now of predominantly foreign extraction - as opposed to having a third to a half of their population made up of foreigners, as was the case at the turn of the millennium. Some citizens who relished pluralism and a cosmopolitan environment enjoyed this, but a significant voting majority felt that their country has been stolen from them. A potent thread of rejectionist politics developed in Western societies, taking erratic and unexpected action against paradigms of modernity. Commerce, and leaders who embrace the cutting edge, were frequent targets for more or less orderly interventions.     These issues were minor, however, when compared to what was happening in the world at large. An elite had been doing well, a middle class had been straining every sinew to keep up, but a significant fraction of those living even in countries which are doing well - and virtually everyone in the countries which had not accepted the world order - had been seeing their world becoming less understandable, less orderly and above all, less a place in which they felt at home.     Traditional institution rely on tacit rules, on trust and on reputation. These were being diluted or eroded by a fluid, urbanised society. Traditional sources of authority derive their power from consent, trust, unquestioned tacit rules, undisturbed continuity and from their ability to deliver. Don-client networks are a common form or traditional authority in almost all developing countries. These consist of nested pyramids, where one "cell" consists of a powerful figure - the don - and a layer of clients. Clients owe the don respect and obedience, and the don provides them with opportunities, a source of power in the event of conflict and a means of dispute resolution. Each person of power is a client in their own right in a higher pyramid, and they appeal up the structure in order to access the power that they need in order to help a client. Dons who are unable to do this are deserted, so they must never be seen to be weak or to back down. Such structures maintain many societies where national civil mechanisms cannot reach. They can be weakened when, for example, clients can see opportunities elsewhere, due to their improved education and general levels of wealth. Equally, they can fail when economic circumstances or new, more virile networks make the system unable to deliver advantage and retaliation to offence. In such circumstances, civil systems must take over or all order is lost. Old informal structures are mitigated by long-term relationships, a certain noblesse oblige and by a mutual interest. The new raw systems that replace during rapid economic and political shifts are short-term, invariably exploitative and unilateral. As with Russia after the fall of communism, Mafia and corrupt elites crush the middle classes and exploit the society in ways which are identified less with the lack of institutions and good public governance than with the external forces of 'modernisation'. Rural systems of order are destroyed and replaced by urban exploiters, whose relationships with the unskilled, inarticulate people whom they control is merciless. The result is distress, bewilderment, the destruction of well-understood order and its replacement with mutual predation. Around four billion people lived in such societies in 2000. Around 750 million lived in the industrial nations, with their impersonal and transparent institutions. Something over one billion lived in an equivalent environment. They did so either in nations which were in fact undergoing industrialisation, or else by living on conditions where they were were able to transcend local limitations through their elite status. The numbers in the former industrial nations remain static or declining, with many moving into a post-industrial "gradualist" state that has already been discussed, in which change is resented. By 2010, however, the rise of the global consuming classes was everywhere apparent. This group greatly outnumbered the wealthy people in the rich world. They may have lacked the national consolidation of the former elite - and they certainly lacked it individual purchasing power - but they nevertheless became a formidable force in the world.    By 2010, therefore, seven billion people lived in a very different world from that of 2000. The old, rich world remained extremely powerful but was becoming a degree arthritic. Its writ, its paradigm and its insights continued to set the agenda for much of the world. This said, its institutions were stretched by the ad hoc and pragmatic way in which complexity had been managed: entwined systems had been ignored and compromises stitched together to meet urgent needs. International agreements had been as much imposed as they had been negotiated. The interests of the new consuming class had begun to shift away from the generic acquisition of possessions to issues of individual identity and individuation. In addition, the pursuit of local identity, of "roots" and ethnic identity had become strong, driven as much by brand differentiation amongst marketers as by the yearning for stability. States that were host to large numbers of these consumers found that issues of external and consumer debt, inflation and economic instability grew and, as a consequence, the 2010 period was marked by increasing numbers of bank collapses and currency crises in these emergent economies. As already indicated, state reporting of statistics remained dismal and few knew the scale of the problems that were building up. Behind this was, however, a growing political movement that resented the hegemonic dominance of the old industrial powers, and which was more than a little fearful of the forces - technical, social, industrial - which they had so casually unleashed. Two billion people continued to live in absolute poverty, but half of them were now urbanised and consequently accessing more education and insight. Around three billion were seeing their traditional world turned upside down, and not usually to their advantage. They resented this bitterly and, as the European underclass turned more or less sequentially to religion, Luddism, socialism and totalitarianism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for an explanation of the world and a relief from it, so deep currents of explanatory bitterness ran everywhere through the world during the 'teens of the century. Where the pace of change was seen to be excessive, so challenges were mounted to local governance, and many states fell to populist-rejectionist movements. As such separatism spread, so it found common cause and so, too, it discouraged the talent, capital and predictability which were necessary to cope with the alarming external world. Rising oil prices both permitted Arab separatism and created crises for the poor and indebted nations.
The scene was set for the reactive phase that has so marked subsequent history. The downturn in the business cycle in the industrial world served to trip many of the over-extended middle income states, each affected by high commodity and energy prices, internal demand and over-borrowing. Sprawling systems of outsourcing found themselves affected by this, such that industrial world companies experienced sharp problems. A stock market readjustment - overdue after the boom of the late 2000s - exposed significant corporate irregularities, and an estimated 15% of gross book value evaporated off world bourses in the course of two months. Confidence was heavily undermined and two years of drifting and economic misery affected the lives of billions of people. This proved the catalyst that had been needed to bring the many rejectionist movements into practical alignment.       The "war on terror" had been coupled with ten years of military and economic-diplomatic pressure on states that encouraged illegal trade or violence. This had made the phenomenon of terrorism chiefly a local phenomenon, in which only small organisations or those with little to lose tended to engage. Its orchestrated return came as a considerable surprise to most, and a confirmation of what they had always believed to many. The world was an unsafe place, the foreign was dangerous, it was best to bolt the door and be safe at home. Coupled to the now-apparent economic instability of the industrialising nations, the political prescription seemed inevitable: to pull supply chains back to 'safe' environments and, wherever possible, to rationalise global manufacturing activities. This, of course, worsened conditions in the industrialising countries. It confirmed many in the poor nations in the views that they might already have formed as to the capricious and selfish nature of the old, wealthy countries. The poor nations were, of course, hurt even more, yet oddly heartened by the palpable failure of the wealthy nations.    In the rich nations, many systems that had relied on continued economic expansion and buoyant markets - such as, in particular, the support of the elderly population - were now seen as unsustainable. A concerted howl arose from the dependent population, aimed at much the same targets as the criticism from abroad: at over-fast change, at modernism, to demonise individual fast-buck merchants and the like. As turbulence and violence became a feature of the poor and industrialising world, so the isolationist tendency - to slow down, to slow 'them' down, to keep them out - became a strong political voice. As this seemed a pragmatic move, and one which fitted with the commercial motives of the time, at least some major states moved in this direction. Trade weakened, agreements were not honoured, institutions were challenged and ignored.        A growing tide of lawlessness developed in the poorer, chaotic states. This has its impacts in the wealthy world in strangely indirect ways. Public health was allowed to slip in the poor nations and so disease control and disease reporting lapsed. Epidemics of novel viral diseases swept through crowded and poorly sanitised cities, and thence to the susceptible wealthy world.    Dangerous and forbidden technologies - such as manipulation of human foetuses during pregnancy in order to alter the child's capabilities, or the use of xenotransplantation - quickly found homes in these nations, serving foreigners. Kits that allowed the choice of a child's gender during conception became cheaply available, having formerly been banned. The reason for this ban now became apparent, as four out of five births in wide regions of central Asia were male. More pertinently, perhaps, intellectual property rules were flouted and many knowledge products on which western companies relied for their existence were sold globally on networks. Environmental and human rights accords, laboriously enforced during the boom years, were swiftly dumped.    In effect, the world had gone at integration too fast and with too little concern for the systems, institutions and social habits which this needed. Angry groups now huddled behind their respective barriers, shouting insults and tossing rocks. Wiser voices began to council a new approach.    It has not been easy to deliver this, and it is far from clear how we are to progress from 2025. Technological potential is unsurpassed, and a huge cadre of capable people now exist. It is issues such as trust, continuity and reciprocity that are at a premium. The period of aggressive entry into other people's domestic problems is past us, yet we are at a loss how to tackle the managerial and institutional issues which harm billions in the aggressive, violent and rejectionist countries with which the world is peppered. Africa appears irredeemable, even after the abating of the HIV epidemic. Central Asia is a complex network of warlord-dominated enclaves, and the areas between the Mediterranean and India seem intractably withdrawn. China and India are holding together as political entities with the gravest difficulty. Coastal China, southern east Asia and Latin America are, in their very different ways, relatively bright spots nut none are of themselves the engine of growth that is needed to return vibrancy to the rather gray scene.”

 

Back to the Future: Final Report on Planning and Designing Legislatures of the Future.  Max K. Arinder, executive director, Mississippi Joint Legislative Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review (PEER). Journal of the American Society of Legislative Cerks and Secretaries. Volume 6, Number 2 Fall 2000.

This Mississippi task force, working on alternative futures of the legislature, decided to structure its first attempt at scenario building around three critical dimensions or axes. “First is the status of direct democracy. The public's desire for direct versus representative democracy cuts to the most fundamental issues facing future legislatures: Will the press for direct democracy made possible by technology and the ascendance of the desire for the ultimate in democratic expression continue to prevail?  A second axis of uncertainty is the increasing complexity of the legislative environment and the continually shifting balance between political self-interest and respect for the legislative institution.  A third axis that the task force factored into our thinking is potential changes in the demand for services. Will the trend of getting government out of the lives of its citizens prevail or will demand for government services increase as needs emerge? These three axes of uncertainty provided a promising framework for exploring how changes in social, technological, economic, environmental, and political environments will affect the legislature of the future.”   Scenarios in the 21st Century: Alternative Political Futures for the Legislature in 2025:  Scenario 1) The Harassed Legislature:  “Technology has made it possible for direct democracy to be a highly viable alternative to the more traditional representative democracy; the fabric of the institution is beginning to show the strain.”  Scenario 2) The Circumvented Legislature:   “This legislature has passed that invisible point where direct initiatives have eclipsed the more deliberative representative processes and traditional legislatures are weakened and on the decline as the public’s choice for problem solving.”  Scenario 3) The Traditional Legislature:  “This is the task force’s nod to the possibility that the contemporary legislature has evolved sufficiently to allow it to be competitive in vying for public confidence. Able to rise to the challenges of the future as it has arisen to the challenges of the last twenty-five years, the traditional legislature is alive and well.” Scenario 4) The Diminished Legislature:  “This is the result of a loss of interest and/or confidence in the democratic process itself. Under this scenario there is an abdication of responsibility to strong political personalities that have been allowed to assume relatively unchallenged leadership positions. The diminished legislature is a move away from democracy as we now know it.”

 

The Government of Australia 2020 Project. Ian Fergusen. Officials and thinkers in the country of Australia came together for a trends discussion of Australia to 2020.  These global scenarios, with Australia in context, follow.  The Government of Australia 2020 Project, Working Paper, 2003.

Scenarios of the 21st Century.  The Government of Australia 2020 Project.  Scenario 1) A Trip to the Precipice: “The global situation deteriorated from 2005 onwards.  Following the Middle East turmoil, the world was polarised into two camps: those for and those against the US. The international system was paralysed by a succession of religious and civil wars and by conflicts over resources.    In the face of unbearable uncertainty and anxiety, there has been a rise in authoritarian (ideological, theocratic or militaristic) regimes that are tolerated by people tired of chaos. This group of states includes 9 of the 18 nuclear capable states.    Global institutions to manage international politics, the ecosystem and economic systems have failed to eventuate. Issues that need global cooperation are politicized in win-lose scenarios. The individual nation-state has lost any effective voice in the global turmoil.    The international situation is mirrored in Australia. The system of governance is fragmented, disjointed and indecisive. There is no coherent approach to complex problems across levels of government.     Federal government is seen as remote, elitist and unaccountable. Buffeted by international trends and forces over which it has no control, it lacks direction and vision, and is responsive only to vested interests. The situation is exacerbated by a hostile Senate that refutes government programs. Partisanship has entirely replaced any sense of open dialogue and debate.    Civil liberties considered sacrosanct at the turn of the millennium have been eroded in the face of the on-going terrorist threat. The internal identity card contains pictorial and electronically stored information and a location chip. Under the guise of security, the administration has the power to track and control every individual if it chooses to do so.    The press is failing the citizens, inundating them with specious information, creating exaggerated awareness of issues but no understanding. The level of sensationalism necessary to attract attention fuels extremism.   State regimes are weak and failing. They claim to serve, but fail to acknowledge dissent, difference or diversity. Lacking a values framework and unable to finance the demands of their electorates, they jump from one issue to another, grasping at ideological straws and transferring blame to other levels of government. Massive cuts to the public sector bureaucracies have placed inordinate pressure on those remaining to deliver services.    The level of corruption in local authorities is at an all-time high. Across the board public figures appear to lack the courage to stand up to business interests or minority pressure groups.    At community level there are sharp divisions on generational and socio-economic lines. Older folk bemoan the emergence of hedonistic, consumerist and individualistic youth with few civic virtues. Segments of the population such as marginalized rural groups and long term unemployed feel disenfranchised and are easy targets for radical cults and neo-fascist groups.    The clear inability to cope is polarizing political parties and fostering extreme positions. People vote for authoritarian figures hoping for decisive leadership but fearing a lurch towards a self-serving dictatorship.  We never really appreciated how fragile democracy was until we looked over the edge…”   Scenario 2) Our Preferred Future?  “It is 2020. I am immensely proud to be an Australian citizen.   It’s amazing how far our country progressed in the first two decades of the century. A much improved international situation provided a suitable context for growth and prosperity. Domestically, we found that once "our preferred future" was articulated, it was not really that difficult to start shaping it.   Internationally, the emergence of China and India has tended to balance US hegemony and European domination. The expansion of the world economy created strong demand for Australian resources. The restructure of the United Nations to reflect the new realities has given it added credibility. Institutions to monitor international governance, economics and trade are more effective. Other institutions to address human rights and the ecology are progressing, albeit slowly.   In Australia, the constitutional changes of 2010 were nowhere near as traumatic as some predicted. With minimal changes the transfer to a Republic was accomplished and a Bill of Rights adopted. The structure of government is nominally the same as last century but there are some marked differences in the way it operates. Alterations to the system have been widely debated and systematically introduced.    Governments at all levels are working against a backdrop of a longer term vision. It facilitates the setting of international and domestic goals and priorities for service delivery. Governments are generally smaller, more concerned with governance, setting guidelines, boundaries, standards and policy, rather than with running businesses or enterprises. The one exception is public utilities which have been reclaimed following the collapses of the first decade.   Problems of accountability and responsibility were addressed by putting the authority with the knowledge and the ability to implement. This resulted in the heterarchies we have today which operate in a matrix pattern across government.    Political parties are less strident. The party organisation is more an administrative support structure than an ideological platform. Parliaments more closely reflect the demographics of the wider community. For example, in the Queensland State parliament, 40% of politicians are female and the average age is 37.   The accountability and responsiveness of elected representatives is independently monitored and published. Now that ethical leadership is acknowledged and rewarded, a wider range of candidates are stepping forward to make a contribution. Politicians are now more likely to consult and listen rather than talk and tell.    Communities expect that Government will exploit technology to work in partnership on major issues and optional solutions. The latter have to be cost-effective, sustainable and consistent with the long term vision. People have the opportunity to provide input on public spending for health, education and infrastructure development. At regional level there are integrated plans covering transport congestion, urban planning, environment renewal, and safe and supportive communities.    Seamless services are delivered from government centres "badged" with federal, state and local government logos. Citizens can make direct contact with their local, state and federal representatives from these locations.   The exploitation of the South Australian 'hot-spot' energy resources has been a boon for the economy, assuring a cheap stable supply of renewable energy for the next 200 years. The development of high temperature super-conducting technology facilitates energy distribution to the East coast. Excess energy is being used to create on demand hydrogen fuel production. Wind and solar energy industries, water farming, tree farming (rather than clearing), native animal farming (less need for the European herds of the past) abound.   This is a time where justice: social, environmental, moral and legal prevails over economic rationalism and trade. Australia is again an optimistic and prosperous society, globally acknowledged as a bell-weather democracy.”  Scenario 3) Something Different?   “It is 2020 and "Government" is nothing like it was last century!Commentators identify four discernable levels of government: supra-national, national, state/provincial and local/municipal; but the categorization is outmoded. It is no longer appropriate to focus on the levels and machinery of government, rather the focus should be on issues, the community and the function of governance.Authority and power has shifted. International governance structures are now more powerful than most nation-states. National and state governments still have a role, but it is significantly reduced. Our own Federal government, like most others, has ceded authority in many fields to international bodies and has significantly reduced in size. It still deals with issues of national security, the economy and sets domestic policy priorities; but the vast majority of service provision is decentralised and outsourced. The pattern is repeated at State level. Legislatures there are losing ground to virtual regional and issues-based governance structures. Citizen initiated referenda have been introduced and there is a plan to hold simultaneous referendums in all states in 2022 to seek to abolish state governments and to formalize the introduction of regional governments. (It is unlikely this move will be successful, but it indicates how far we have moved!) At local and regional levels, it’s all about communities. Best practice governance models have applied technology to open government, to align it closer to the grassroots, to allow citizens access to decision-making and to decentralise service delivery. Physical and virtual communities form around issues to guide elected representatives on practical, sustainable solutions that conform to the long term vision.Politicians can serve for only three terms, but they are better paid than twenty years ago. Their oath of office attests they are independent of any political party and that they will abide by the published code of conduct. Our democracy has demonstrated a remarkable ability to adapt…”  Scenario 4) More of the Same?  “Dear Khim,We are very much looking forward to your return to Australia. Those last 17 years have really sped by! When you come back, you won’t have too much difficulty adapting – Australia has not changed much!Despite the PM’s talk at the UN last week, we are really a bit player on the international stage. Once upon a time we "punched well above our weight", but a couple of poor decisions last decade fixed our international reputation for a long time to come! Economically things are not flash. Even though Australia is firmly established in a trading bloc – it’s in an increasingly hostile trading environment. You will have seen that the multi-lateral trade talks ramble on. There’s little hope that they will lead anywhere soon given the entrenched international positions on world trade. Just looking at the newspaper this morning, the Federal government scene is still the same. There are too many "professional pollies" - many have never been employed outside politics! Policy and political fortunes are still developed in secret. Question time is a joke. The adversarial two party system (which consistently degenerates into personality politics) is increasingly tiresome and irrelevant – but still it persists! Every government since the turn of the century has faced a hostile Senate – this becomes the excuse for inactivity on the big issues.Here at State level they blame the Feds for a lack of resources – but there is no doubt the bureaucracy is pretty inefficient. "Big ticket" items like education and health are no better administered than at the turn of the century. They persist with "quick fix" solutions rather than confronting powerful lobby groups and addressing the fundamental problems. Dealing with anything that crosses departmental boundaries or levels of government seems to be beyond them. It is so frustrating! There doesn’t seem to be any mid to long term planning in the public sector. The bureaucracy bungles along reacting to the latest political issues and newspaper headlines.Structures have been established for community consultation and to encourage grass roots democracy. There have been some successes, but there’s a lot of tokenism and the mechanisms are usually exploited by organized lobby groups who are not always representative of community concerns. The average standard of living is still pretty high, but the group of "have-nots" is getting bigger. Older folk like our parents’ generation are getting nervous. Increasing numbers rely on Government support funded from a dwindling tax base – but you probably picked that up from your dad’s letters.That said, there seems to an abiding faith in the system of government (in parliament and elections), in individual rights and tolerance, a 'fair go', and in social justice for all citizens. A more multicultural Australia continually tests these values, but invariably they come out on top. Also on the plus side, support for environmentally friendly energy and transportation systems is finally beginning to bite, but it will be a long time before we recover from the excesses of the past.I suppose the one saving grace is that politicians have to face the electorate every couple of years, but there is little difference between the two major parties, and the minor parties and independents tend to be single-issue based. The best we can hope for is an occasional change of government to at least prevent corruption becoming endemic.Well Khim, must close now. Tell Danny to write if you see her again and let us know your arrival details and we shall be there to meet you…”  Scenario 5) Some Thoughts – Worth A Thought? These Snippets do not Form a Coherent Story, but may be Worth a Thought:   “The world has moved beyond governments. In 2020 people have formed communities which barter goods and services amongst each other and across the globe. People have no need to go to workplaces as they have skills to produce something that makes life sustainable in their own backyards, and this is what they exchange for other goods and services. Life is indeed different.Every species in the Australian environment gets a vote before every person gets a vote. People have access to the landscape and can walk from one side of the country to the other without encountering a "private property - keep out sign". Deep rooted (salt busting), drought tolerant genetically engineered Australian species such as Acacias are our principal source of carbohydrate. There are no roads as personal transport has become airborne. Health care is delivered free over the internet. Every rooftop has a bioreactor producing oil for cars photo-synthetically.The Australian Republic's federal government is responsible only for strategic and nationwide policy and service delivery in Defence, Foreign Affairs, Security (internal and external), the Environment, Trade, and Strategic Economic Planning. Policy dominates the federal agenda. The 2015 watershed election and establishment of a Republic also saw the federal government's right to collect taxation, move back to the States.Government has redefined its role and begins to implement social systems based on the laws of natural systems. The old economic rationalist model is abandoned. Success is no longer gauged by GNP and economic criteria. The new models are based on an understanding of cells, genetics, Chaos and Complexity theory. The Government sees itself as part of an adaptive system, giving form and structure to the variety of social systems which self-organize around it. Governments mediate, facilitate and act as catalyst for social systems operating on a human scale - small intimate systems creating bigger systems and so on. The government agencies are akin to Messenger RNA providing feedback to governing bodies, so they can adapt and respond (like genes) providing what is required to keep the systems operating. Government agents become the catalysts, enabling social "reactions" and helping to build the capacity of communities to become self-organizing, functional and sustainable, both socially and ecologically. All systems operate in accordance with natural laws, with care for the environment, relationship building and adaptability as primary drivers. Governments elected by popular vote are no longer partisan. They become self-organized bodies the members of which are chosen for their intelligence, humanity and capacity for visionary leadership.…and every form of government acknowledges the cultural industries. In fact culture is now a major concern of government given that bureaucrats are now largely redundant due to our wonderful trans-national fuzzy logic networks developed to perfectly administer taxes, education and welfare grants. Government has realised that the loyalty of citizens depends on their appreciation of culture and every individual has the right to artistic development and education. Everyone expects to have musical skills and performance or craft skills. Political performance is judged by the delivery of these services. Artists are a respected elite - except for actors who have been replaced by computer generated holo heroes on the daily 'real life' holo virtual reality shows....Since the extension of the Presidential Emergency five years ago, things are already improving. In the last weekly address on both channels, armed forces chief General Saltas, said the President has been happy to extend his appointment for life and the armed forces can now concentrate on further improving the happiness of the people since the criminal gangs have now been permanently defeated in the Western and Northern Territories. On the question of government, he repeated that there is no reason to return to the "bad times" when criminal gangs told lies to the people and stacked the old parliament with the non-progressives and atheists. There have been no complaints about any aspect of government for several years – proof, he said, that the Progress Australia programme has the full backing of the people. Then the screen went blank. A few people got together and created a new criteria for voting for political posts. The criteria was long, but the idea was that if a person had several of the qualities they would be better suited to hold office than their predecessors. This idea went out over the internet and eventually started catching on - mostly in small villages or towns. Some of the criteria were: personal insight, ability to laugh at ones self, background and experience with crisis handling, an understanding of systems behavior, ability to admit mistakes and learn from them and articulate the learning to constituents, personal value system etc. This idea was not taken up in the US, but was implemented in other countries, particularly those which were developing, moving into more democratic forms and away from negative dictatorships. They still wanted a dictator, but they wanted a mature, father/mother or grandmother/grandfather figure for whom they could vote...Though the local / regional government sector was rationalised into regional local authorities which increased their service delivery impact, they lost the power to tax or rate their constituents to the States. People-centric services such as education and health are now wholly controlled at the local (regional) level and funded from both state and federal levels.”

 

Futureland: Nine Stories of an Imminent World

Autor: Walter Mosley, 2001, Warner Books
From story entitled Little Brother, page 205.

In this work, author Walter Mosley describes a future in which society predominately employs an automated justice system.
The “court” consists of a screen; the judge, juries and lawyers appear on screen only and are compressed personalities – that is composed of dozens of dead and living judges, juries and lawyers. They believe they are superior to “real” living beings because they are composed of many bodies, have a superior retrieval system and a greater overall mind.
Witnesses appear only on screen as well, and are subject to neural links for “fact finding” and lie detector tests, both used to insure that only the factual truth is presented to the court.  Meanwhile, defendants are restrained via automated chains and are subject to neural cameras planted in their brains.
Using the automated justice system, trials take only 10-20 minutes and there is never a backlog of cases in this society’s legal system.
Only the rich can afford “real life” judges, juries and lawyers who might understand and consider non-factual variables such as circumstances and motivation.

 

Possible Scenarios for Columbia’s Future.
Author: James L. Zackrison, National Defense University, Institute for Strategic Studies; Last update 9/30/2002 Taken from website: http://www.ndu.edu/inss/books/books%20-%201999/Crisis%20What%20Crisis%20Eng%20Oct%2099/cris2.html 
In this document, Mr. Zackrison describes four possible scenarios for the future of Columbia: Idealistic, Inertia, Guerrilla Victory, and Dirty War.

The Idealistic Scenario: describes a time when the leftists, paramilitaries, drug mafias and the civilian government have reached a balance of power. Efforts to eradicate corruption, the lack of justice, and the drug businesses succeed. Lack of drug profits means insurgents cannot fund wars and within ten years of the agreement, peace and stability are achieved. The government is now free to focus on the job of governing.

The Inertia Scenario (the muddle through scenario): “ ‘Muddle through’ implies reaching a livable consensus among all the participants, in this case one that keeps the state together….muddling through may be …. recognition of the currently de facto partitioning of Colombia.” According to the author, in this scenario, the symptoms of the country’s instability, such as drugs, human rights violations, and corruption, are not addressed and status remains the same in the future as it is today.

The Guerrilla Victory Scenario: In this scenario, Columbia emerges as an authoritarian Marxist state with an economy based upon the legal cultivation, production, and export of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and hash oil. An economic decline results; violence increases, and intense governance and social instability occur. Citizens with the means, flee the country in droves. Columbia’s instability bleeds across boarders causing problems with Venezuela, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, and Panama. Relations with the U.S. are terminated, and U.S. assets are seized and nationalized.

The Dirty War Scenario: Ruling non-governmental elites align with military and police forces to enter into a “war of extermination against the FARC and ELN” and eventually the drug mafias. There is “a dramatic period of loss of life” and civil liberties. After a period of military rule, “the military would then cede the reigns of government to the civilian elites, who would form a new government to capitalize on the new stability.”

North Korea.
Author: Christopher Salter, 2003, Chelsea House Publishing
Chapter 8, Images of North Korea in the Future (page 95). 

In this scenario, author Christopher Salter discusses a possible future for North Korea. He sees changes in the future in North Korea’s economic activities due to North Korea’s Special Administrative Zone of Sinuiju and the people’s exposure to the benefits of free enterprise. He envisions cities showing greater foreign influence from Japan, China and other nations, on the streets, in shop windows, and on billboards. And he sees an increase in agricultural activity, more intense farming, in the areas surrounding the cities

Salter also believes friction will continue between Japan and North Korea because of the deep history between the two; and between North and South Korea “as long as interactions … remain erratic.”

 

Not A Drop To Drink? A History Of Water: 2000 – 2020.
Author: Oliver Moor http://www.hackwriters.com/notadroptodrink.htm 
(note: no information on author or date of document)

Oliver Moor sets forth four scenarios in this article, all of which describe future conflicts over water.

2005: Turkey diverts water from the Euphrates to irrigate farmland, thereby reducing the water available to Iraq by 50%. Iraqi response is firepower. After a three week period, the water supply to Iraq is restored but it is too late to save the country’s crops and famine and rioting occur.

2009: Zimbabwe refuses to release water from the Kriba dam to Mozambique, which is suffering from a drought. War is averted thanks to intervention by the South African government and its promises to supply Zimbabwe with irrigation technology and Mozambique with desalination plants.

2013: Sea levels rise to such a degree that thousands of miles of coastline in Pakistan are flooded. By 2016 the water has not receded and the lands are now considered permanently lost to the sea.

2015: Water from the Indus is not usable for irrigation. Pakistan is suffering from a water shortage and is disputing with India and China; neither will assist Pakistan by sending water from their Himalayan ice fields. Russia is assisting, shipping water to Pakistan from its “newly accessible deep-crust aquifers” but that assistance is not enough to adequately meet Pakistani needs.

 

Post 9/11 Scenarios: The Future of Global Security.
Innovative Technology Partnerships, LLC.INMM Southwest Regional Chapter, Annual Meeting, Taos, NM, USA, May 16, 2002 

Post 9/11 Scenarios: The Future of Global Security was developed to promote discussion among global leaders about the post 9/11/2001 world. The four scenarios summarized from this document are: Struggling Through; A Chance for Hope; World War III; and Return of the Dark Ages.

Struggling Through: In this scenario, the world is in shock after a nuclear “incident” has happened in the US. The act, perpetrated by terrorists, has left the country devastated morally and economically, over the loss of over a million lives and the “indefinite evacuation of a hundred-plus mile stretch of the East Coast.” Terrorist activities in the US and around the world are propelling extraordinary global cooperation; in particular, an international UN nuclear force. Education is considered the key to fighting the terrorists: “the world must commit to take an entire younger generation and provide enlightenment and education to bring the children away from the influences of the 20 th century hatred.” While a difficult process, the continuing global terror threats are proving to be sufficient motivation. It is hoped “the Malta Global Strategy Toward Peace would begin to see results before a cell obtained sufficient weapons to create the feared Global Discontinuity.”

A Chance for Hope: This scenario depicts a time in which Palestine has become a state, with official status from the UN and defendable borders. “It had made a much more significant change than even the proponents had imagined” and surprisingly, resulted in the dissolution of the terrorist networks it had originated. Anti-Americanism has subsided. The US has launched Operation Freedom - the overthrow of the Iraqi government - and the U.S. was viewed with renewed admiration. “The completion of Bush-Putin I, and the signing of the Huen-Wilson-Sakarov dismantlement treaty gave hope to the world that it had stepped back from the brink of destruction. The New United Nations quickly gathered all of the necessary resources to serve as the Overseer, and many believed that there indeed was a renewed Chance for Hope.”
.
World War III: The war on terrorism has been won. But as many had feared, resentment over US presence in the countries of Middle Eastern allies has grown and “the linkage, real or implied, to Israel began to take its toll.” The first exchange of the Millennium War, or World War III as it is known to some, has occurred. The use of nuclear weapons has resulted in million deaths but there has not been a full exchange of stockpiles. “Some magic threshold in the social conscience of warring nations could not be crossed, and each exchange was tempered.” However, in the second decade of the millennium, the Musharraf government is overthrown and the Pakistani nuclear stockpile is now in the hands of a fundamentalist faction. The world is preparing itself for how World War III might ultimately play out. 

Return of the Dark Ages: The date of the nuclear attack on the US, 3/29, is now be another number etched into America's history. Following “the event” a different lifestyle emerged: what were once "gated communities" had become "armed encampments.” The US government is focused on the security of the country’s industrial abilities and resources and is not exercising its influence in global conflicts. Global conflicts “festered, and now were on the brink of disaster - the Koreas, India-Pakistan, Israel-Arab, China-Taiwan, not to mention local civil wars too numerous to count where factions had secured weapons of mass destruction with impunity. Some estimated 100 million had died since 3/29, and the nuclear winter theory was being tested in a real life experiment.” There are, however, discussions of hope, indicating that most, if not all of the fundamentalist enclaves had been distinguished.

 

The Conflict Environment of 2016: A Scenario Based Approach. Author: Andrew F. Krepinevich Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, www.csbaonline.org

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments is a non-profit policy research center than specializes in promoting innovative thinking about defense planning and investment strategies.  The following illustrative scenario considers the future security environment of Easy Asia in 2016: “The last 20 years have seen a gradual, yet significant change in East Asia’s security environment and in the military balance of power.  China is now the region’s dominant great power, with the largest economy and biggest military.  Economically, however, considerable autonomy is vested in the provinces.  The Chinese people seem satisfied to defer political freedom as long as the nation’s strong economic growth offers the prospect of continuing the marked improvement in their living standard.  Twenty years of declining defense budgets has seen the U.S. military presence in the region diminish over time, to the point where the leadership of long-time allies like Korea (reunified in 2002) and Japan publicly debate whether
they need to take a more active course in providing for their own defense.”  According to the scenario, tensions in the conflict environment escalate in the summer of 2016, when Chinese leaders receive intelligence regarding Taiwan’s political and military initiatives towards the U.S., Korea and Japan. “On September 20, 2016, Beijing declares a maritime and air exclusion zone extending 1,000 kilometers out from Taiwan and the Spratly Islands.  Any ship or aircraft found within the zone will be liable to destruction.  Chinese forces begin laying mines near Taiwan’s major ports, and Beijing announces that Chinese ballistic and cruise missile batteries have pre-targeted all of Taiwan’s major ports and airfields.  Faced with this challenge, the [U.S.] president asks the Pentagon for options on how to break the Chinese blockade if negotiations with Beijing fail to produce a diplomatic solution.”

 

Sunset at Dawn.
mbowman@globalforesightinc.com www.hackwriters.com/anewpeace.htm 
Author: Aisha Said 

Grounded in the events of September 11, 2001 author Aisha Said creates a scenario that demonstrates how in 20 years, new anti-terrorism laws and strategies in America have tackled the problem of domestic security while simultaneously generating a barrage of new challenges. “While most people around the world will remember the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001 as the darkest day of the year, for me I could still feel the heat of the smoke that clouded my life.  Not only did I lose my husband but also my daughter was born premature and stateless.  For the next 20 years I tried to return to my life in America but new laws kept pouring out to deny my baby and me our right of abode.  Twenty years after the creation of the [Office of Homeland Security], resulting in billions of dollars of over-budgeting, America still lives with the fear that there are many trained killer waiting to strike.   New security strategy based on the principle of Low Tech and High Concept titled Freedom of Non-Association adopted i
n 2019 has only succeeded in creating a society of uneasy calm.  In this new program, people are encouraged to stay off the streets ad transact businesses and schooling via electronic media instead of physical travel.  TV and radio jingles are used to “advise” people that they are safer at home than on the streets.  The idea is to monitor the dew on the move via satellite and arrest any suspicious persons.”

 

Seven War Scenarios Every Investor Should Consider. mbowman@globalforesightinc.com Author: Michael Brush, November 21, 2001

Written shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this article considers seven scenarios regarding the U.S. war on terrorism and its impacts for investors.  The list of potential scenarios include: 1) Osama bin Laden is captured; 2) the war escalates; 3) Afghanistan turns into a quagmire; 4) there are more terrorist strikes; 5) dissent arises in the U.S.; 6) the war on terrorism destabilizes the Middle East; 7) U.S. attacks spread to Iraq or elsewhere.  Although the scenarios are limited to short descriptions, each is followed by advice regarding the business ramifications from experts in terrorism, international politics and financial markets.

 

The Future of Crime
www.predicitionscience.org
Author: Chris Lang 

In this engaging scenario author Chris Lang weaves together an array of trends and emerging issues including privacy rights, law enforcement, potentially ubiquitous technology and social interaction to produce a detailed look at the future of crime.  Scenario excerpt: “It’s 2010. Jeff was just returning from a two-hour sailing excursion. As he walked up the dock he faced a large white sign with red letters. “You are Entering a Secure Zone,” it read, “An Identity Scanner is Available for Your Convenience.” In his case, the scanner wasn’t merely a convenience-it was an outright necessity. Chizuru would freak-out if he ever left the zone without subordinating his accesses to a scan. She worried enough about him as it was. Thus, every time he returned from sailing, he had to have them scan him. Sometimes, he even had to pay them for it. He had to make sure they recognized him. They probably recognized him already, but he had to make sure. “They” were the security companies’ microprocessors. They watched him thr
ough cameras hung from buildings, cameras hung from vehicles, cameras worn by people, etc. Most of these sensors were necessary anyway just to make sure robots didn’t bump into people, pets, debris, and so forth, so a naïve observer might not have suspected that any single entity was behind all of them. But there was. He, like everyone else, was being followed. They saw him at home; they saw him in his car; they saw him get on his boat; and, for all he knew, they might even have watched him by satellite while he was on the water. He hoped they did. He hoped they watched everything, especially each other. Checks and balances…checks and balances…gotta make sure Big Brother doesn’t break the law, right?”

 

Public Governance in 2020.
The Economist, April, 2001. 

This article examines governance and OECD country relevance to public confidence in current forms of government, then extrapolates to a scenario in 2020.  It offers three sets of thoughts.   In the first section, there is an assessment of attitudes towards public governance and an exploration of the social roots from which these grow. The second section assesses one specific issue, the route to policy formation, doing so in the light of what is known about the knowledge economy. The paper closes with a view of where this may take us. In 2020, it becomes a world of high complexity in which coordination and active citizenship will be demanded if issues of true inclusiveness and representation were to work. 

Scenario: Governance in 2020.  “The next decades create immense complexity in the tasks of government, in the machinery of representation and option generation. People will become more complex in their expectations and in their connections. Economic integration will demand excellent, differentiated policy choices. The consequence is a vast and untidy task of co-ordination, and a considerable intensification of the drift to subsidiary government. Smaller and more inclusive nations in 2020 seem further down the track than are the larger nations, or, those which have relied on a combination of centralisation and market decision-taking as a solution to complexity. In 2020 it is realized that humanity needs to to create the future, or live with what evolveed from contemporary muddle.  In 2020, thought is seriously given as to how to engage all in society without simultaneously creating the very logjams that these institutions developed to circumvent in the early 21st Century.”

 

Security and Power in 2020.
Author: Richard Worsley Tomorrow Project  

The Tomorrow Project gathered primary information, surveys, and interviews about security, key issues, international institutions, self-determination, and armed conflict in the world of 2020. After conducting these extensive surveys, the Tomorrow Project developed a set of very profound scenarios. The following is one that is of special interest. 

Scenario: Industrial World in 2020:  “In 2020, we live in the industrial world, which has around one billion increasingly elderly inhabitants. New entrants will perhaps swell this to 1.2 bn by 2020, and this by-then frankly old population will be embedded in a world of around 8 billion by 2020. It will still create about 85% of the wealth, as compared to the poorest 2 bn, who generate less than 1%, down from nearly 3% in 1960. Technology will be widely disseminated, and the communications of 2020 can only be guessed at.  In essence, anyone who wants to connect to any information source, group or people or person will be able to do so at minimal cost.  Self-evidently, this is a fast-paced, hectic world. When I was in India recently, CNN Asia commented on how "a billion people now lived on amphetamines, staying awake for 20 hours a day whilst striving to become rich." Billions in 2020,  connected as never before, begin to stand on each others' toes, requiring trans-national regulation, policing, politics and power projection. Agreements on everything from human rights to the environment, from intellectual property to public health requires us to manage our commons. Some states will object, some will lose control. The potential for harm is large, the potential for muddle even higher.”

 

September 11th: Chapter One of Which Scenario?  
Author: Jay Ogilvy, Global Business Network.

  In this article, Jay Ogilvy sets out to challenge our forsight in the aftermath of September 11th.  He notes that alternative scenarios “can help to frame these acts so we can make sense of these events and act accordingly.” In this age of terrorism, using the scenario planning technique for short-term insight can be just as useful as scenario outlooks to the medium and long-term.   

Scenario One: Jihad:  “A dark world indeed. “Paris, July 12, 2003:  Today’s attack on the Eiffel Tower continues the string of international incidents. If only the Americans had listened when Chirac insisted that it wasn’t a "war".  Like many a commander in chief who lost a conflict by confusing it with the last war, the Americans thought they could mobilize their military might to defeat the terrorists. They sent their ships and planes toward Afghanistan. They did their best to smoke out Osama bin Laden to catch him on the run. They tried desperately to find a battle they could win . . . but there was none. The enemy was elusive, invisible, dispersed. America wanted action, retribution, and the punishment of the perpetrators. Surely the massed might of America would be sufficient to find and eliminate the enemy. So America went to war.  Trouble was, Chirac was right: It wasn’t really a war. At first it looked like Bush "got it." There was talk of "a different kind of war." The first strikes were "surgical," very little "collateral damage." But just when the Americans were celebrating their "victory," the second one hit, the atrocity at the World Series. Enraged by that diabolical choice of targets, America lashed out with less discrimination. You want terror? We’ll show you terror! And a terrible attack rained down from the heavens over Afghanistan. And that was just what Osama bin Laden wanted—an escalation from crime to war. Pictures of maimed women and children helped to unite the Islamic world against America. What had begun as an exchange of carefully focused rapier thrusts now turned into a brawl between the military might of America and every Muslim, every anti-globalist, every disenfranchised child of poverty, both within and outside the borders of the U.S.  Throughout 2002, massive air strikes by the U.S. were followed by terrorist attacks in the least likely places—a shopping mall in Toledo, a high school graduation in Austin, a rock concert in London, the assassination of a governor, the kidnapping of a group of business executives.   By the end of 2002 the terror had created massive paranoia. People stayed home. Restaurants and theaters remained empty. Businesses shut down. The Dow dipped to triple digits. Like the "war on poverty," like the "war on drugs," this "war on terrorism" looks like it will drag on and on. How can it end now that the war has escalated while one side remains invisible?”

Scenario Two: One World:  “A future worth working for. “New York, July 12, 2003:  Today ground was broken for the new World Trade Center. It won’t be as tall as the old one, but its reach will be even broader. In the weeks and months following the attack in 2001, the community of great nations got bigger. United by the common cause of uprooting terrorism all over the world, countries like Russia and China acquired an increased respect for the rule of law. Pakistan and Syria came in from the cold. The stick of American power loomed large, but the carrot of peace and prosperity loomed larger. Focusing on global "crime," America refrained from indiscriminate attacks and relied instead on special forces, covert operations, and some very good investigative police work. As a result, America managed to walk the fine line between appeasement on the one hand, and on the other a show of force that would have united the Islamic world in a jihad against the U.S. Walking that fine line wasn’t easy. People were impatient. The pain was deep. But this crime against humanity led to humane responses: Not only heroic rescue efforts and an outpouring of generosity, but also a soul-searching quest for what is most important in life. No sympathy for the criminals. After seven long months of searching, they were found and punished. But the patient precision of their defeat saved the world from decades of descent into senseless bloodshed.” 

Scenario Three: Uprising:  “Offers an interpretation based on economic rather than political interests.  “London, July 12, 2003 As if the pattern were not already clear, today’s attack on the London International Stock Exchange drove home the lesson: The terrorists are targeting the infrastructure of international capitalism. Their enemy seems to be corporatism everywhere, not just in the U.S.  Back in 2001 the signals weren’t yet clear. September 11 was an American tragedy, and the response came mainly from the U.S. The attack on the Pentagon drew the U.S. military into the conflict, but in hindsight it appears that the terrorists were provoking a military response more in order to unite the Islamic world than to hurt the U.S. Further attacks—the series of package bombs sent to many corporate headquarters, the frying of the computers at the Hong Kong exchange—made it increasingly obvious that it was not so much the U.S. that was under attack, but big business. Sovereign states were not set up to defend multi-national corporations. Nor is the United Nations equipped to fight for companies rather than nations. For lack of any appropriate "ministry of capital defense," global corporations are now calling for some form of global governance that can mobilize against terrorism. It is odd to see executives who had been eager to "get the government off their backs" now calling for global of governance. What lessons can we draw from these three very different scenarios? First, the real meaning of current events may take time to emerge. Second, know your enemy, and your enemy’s real enemy. Third, for citizens and politicians, it is important that we not unite the Islamic world by mistaking a crime against humanity for an act of war.  For corporate interests, it is important to realize that there is no escaping politics. Getting national governments off corporate backs won’t eliminate the problems that the public sector is there to solve. Ignorance and poverty will haunt the global stage even as we combat them locally, and new institutions may be necessary to create a truly global public sector.”

 

The Return of the State.
Author: Peter Schwartz, Red Herring Magazine, March 2002.  

Mr. Schwartz discusses the victory of the market over the last two decades. But now we are entering a period of unsurety with the collapse of Enron, the creation of a new government agency – the office of Homeland Security, and the turnaround in helping California deal with the energy crisis due to the failure of deregulaton.  Similarly, in Britain, there are growing doubts about the effectiveness of the market.  Evidence can be seen in many OECD and developing nations that the public role in providing infrastructure is seriously being reconsidered.  Mr. Schwartz makes the case that, “what may (actually) be emerging is a new era of governance--not a neat hierarchy of national and global institutions, but rather, a more complex, tangled network of political and economic entities that enable and constrain one another.  

Scenario One: Victory of the Markets:  “In this world, we are seeing just a blip in the inevitable victory of the market. We may live in an era in which increasing complexity will continue to overwhelm the ability of public systems to manage and adapt.”  

Scenario Two: A New Synthesis:  “We might be witnessing a new synthesis of the public and the private, neither unfettered capitalism nor a return to Stalinist bureaucracies. Rather, it may be about new modes of governance made possible by informing and bringing together the governing and governed in new ways. In such a scenario, overlapping and densely connected political and economic institutions at national and global levels compete and co–perate at the same time to create a constrained but powerful system of global governance.To date, the best global example of this trend is the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which developed from the actions of a single person using the Internet. The result: a coalition of nongovernmental organizations successfully pushed a global treaty signed by nearly all the major governments of the world (except the United States) to end the scourge of land mines. We may see an era of emerging global governance and a more balanced power relationship between public and private interests.”

 

Transnational Threats to NATO in 2010.
United Nations Development Program (UNDP)  1998 European Symposium, National Defense University.  Winston Wiley, Associate Deputy Director for Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency.

This paper focuses on the most likely transnational threats in 2010. In lieu of the events of 2001, we have the responsibility, as futurists, to re-examine some of the best foresight reporting over the past decade   This paper is one of them.  Toward the conclusion of this report, the UNDP described a set of "wild card" scenarios.  One of the key results of this Symposium, was the agreement that the most direct threats will likely come from terrorism, threats to NATO countries' information systems, the build-up and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and international drug trafficking and organized crime. Key wild cards that could have significant implications for the NATO threat environment include the emergence of new radical ideologies and the potential for conflicts on NATO's periphery.  “Transnational threats will probably loom large for NATO in 2010.  …The threats will vary depending on a number of factors, many will be inter-related, and most will be hard to grapple with and will require cooperation with other nations and international institutions.”

Terrorist and Information Systems Threats.“The international terrorist threat to the NATO area will likely remain high, if below past record levels. It will originate largely from outside NATO member-states and will be increasingly global as groups expand their transnational infrastructures. The United States and to a lesser extent other parts of the Alliance probably will remain prime targets.    Terrorism in 2010 probably will be committed more by groups than by states--which are more susceptible to diplomatic and military pressure. These groups will be diffuse and to a large degree undeterrable because they will be "true believers." They will represent diverse ideologies and causes, and many will originate in the Middle East. The extent of terrorist activity is likely to vary depending on several factors:   The Middle East Peace Process. A just, equitable peace would decrease the terrorist threat, while a deterioration in the peace process would likely spark greater terrorist violence.”

Other Regional Conflicts and Instability.  “The Algerian crisis already has spurred terrorist attacks in France. Instability in the Balkans, former Soviet Union, and North Africa could spawn similar violence in the NATO area.   Information Warfare by States. The information warfare threat to NATO from hostile states will also have matured by 2010. Like terrorist groups, countries will have a more thorough understanding of the potential payoffs--as well as challenges--afforded by attacking or otherwise manipulating an adversary's information systems. Many potential adversaries recognize the growing dependence of NATO countries on information systems for both civil and military activities. The governments of several countries have information warfare efforts already under way. Some of these efforts almost certainly are targeted against NATO information systems.”

The Threat From Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)  “In 2010, NATO allies will face the prospect that a hostile state, terrorist group, fanatic religious cult, or any other extremist group will use, or threaten to use, nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons against coalition forces or civilians. Potential challenges come from:   Russia. Russian WMD and WMD programs will remain of concern to NATO, especially given Russia's continuing economic and political turmoil.   Other States. Several states in the Middle East, for example, will have the potential to threaten NATO with WMD by 2010.   Iraq. Although Iraq's development and production of WMD has been interrupted as a result of UN resolutions and sanctions, Iraq retains documentation and expertise in the nuclear, chemical, and biological realm, and has probably retained some chemical and biological warheads and SCUD missiles. Also, it has retained or is rebuilding elements of its WMD infrastructure. For instance, Baghdad could use experience in maintaining its 150-km Ababil missile program to support a longer range missile effort.   Libya. Libya's chemical weapons capabilities (it employed CW against Chadian troops in 1987) are far more advanced than its research and development efforts in nuclear or biological weapons. Progress has been stunted in these areas by the lack of foreign assistance. Libya has a small SCUD B force which has a 300-km range and, in 1987, fired a conventionally-armed SCUD at an Italian island. Libya hopes to acquire or develop a longer-range missile capable of reaching Southern Europe.    Iran. Iran's current delivery systems (SCUD B/Cs and CSS-8s) have a range of up to 500-km, and Tehran is seeking to produce or purchase longer range missiles. Additionally, Iran is attempting to acquire fissile material for nuclear weapons development, produces and has used chemical agents, and possesses the expertise and infrastructure to support a biological weapons program (it may have small quantities of agent available).   Syria. Syria may be producing chemical weapons, and possesses the required infrastructure to support a biological weapons program. It may also be trying to develop advanced nerve agents and pursue research and development of biological weapons. It maintains SS-21, SCUD B, and SCUD C missiles with up to a 500-km range.”

Terrorism.  “One of the most dangerous threats to NATO will in 2010 be terrorists' use of chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear materials to inflict casualties or cause fear or massive disruption. Terrorists are more likely to use chemical and biological weapons than other unconventional weapons because they can be relatively easy to make and deploy. Moreover, a major psychological barrier to using them was crossed in 1995 when Aum Shinrikyo released a chemical agent in the Tokyo subway. To obtain a nuclear weapon, terrorists would have to steal, buy, or build one, and in each option terrorists face formidable obstacles. The high damage potential, however, makes nuclear terrorism a constant, albeit remote, threat.   Two factors would increase the likelihood that the NATO states, military forces, or citizens would be threatened by WMD:   New NATO Roles. New peacekeeping or other nontraditional roles assumed by NATO--either within Europe or beyond its periphery--may place coalition forces at risk from intentional or inadvertent exposure to WMD. NATO military superiority may have actually increased the threat of WMD use, since less developed countries or extremist groups may feel driven to develop and use WMD to achieve the desired impact, deter conflict, or prevent retaliation.”    

Nuclear Smuggling.  “Nuclear smuggling from the former Soviet Union can result in accelerated nuclear weapons development in hostile states. It could also expose the coalition to hazards such as radiological weapons, or exposure of the civilian population to smuggled materials such as cesium-137, strontium-90, and cobalt-60. These items could be used to contaminate business centers, government facilities, or transportation networks. Russia and other former Soviet republics are the most likely, but not only, potential source of such materials. South Africa and Brazil also experienced thefts or accidents involving nuclear material.”  

The Narcotics and Organized Crime Threat    “The interrelated threats of narcotics trafficking and international organized crime will also seriously challenge the NATO area in 2010.    Narcotics. The extent of narcotics trafficking and consumption in NATO countries in 2010 will depend largely on demographics and the effectiveness of counterdrug efforts. Heroin and cocaine will remain drugs of choice, but the expanding production, distribution, and consumption of potent and affordable synthetic drugs in Europe will compound the problem. The alliance may face friction over changes in attitudes toward drug use and treatment, variations in criminal penalties, and scarcer and less effective law enforcement and judicial resources from newer East European members. The international financial system, particularly in NATO countries, will continue to be the destination for billions of narcodollars annually.   Heroin trafficking routes into Europe will shift further from Turkey and the Balkans to Russia, the Baltic states, and Eastern Europe. The alliance will be challenged to ensure that new NATO members by 2010 have sufficient resources to effectively counter the flow of narcotics and to prevent the further corruption of state institutions by narcotics organizations.   Spain and Italy will be less prominent entry points for Latin American cocaine, as Spain in particular continues it exemplary interdiction efforts, and the trend toward shipments directly to Eastern Europe becomes the primary route of choice.    Despite an aging population among traditional NATO members, drug consumption is unlikely to have diminished, and may even increase markedly if large numbers of younger immigrants enter the region.    The infusion of dirty money from the sale of drugs into the financial institutions, businesses, and property markets of NATO countries could damage both the national and international economic climates.”  

Organized Crime.  “The proliferation of links among international criminal organizations, coupled with the globalization of business, will provide expanded opportunities for the movement of illicit drugs, weapons, and money, and illegal immigrants. National law enforcement officials will face greater obstacles in targeting transnational criminal networks unless the alliance bolsters avenues of cooperation.    Latin American cocaine traffickers, the Italian Mafia, Russian organized crime, and Nigerian criminal syndicates will have established greater cooperation in drug trafficking, arms smuggling, counterfeiting, and money laundering into and across Europe. They will gain efficiencies by specializing in their most experienced and profitable areas of operation and by exploiting the more vulnerable borders and less-regulated financial systems in the region.  The entrenched presence of Eurasian organized crime in Eastern Europe and its international reach will continue to hinder the development of market-based economies and democratic political institutions unless significant headway is made in fighting corruption and enacting and enforcing legislation to counter these crimes.   The sheer volume--trillions of dollars annually--of illicit proceeds from these global criminal organizations could present a threat to national economies from price and stock manipulation to banking fraud. These groups also may use their massive wealth to gain controlling interests in strategic economic sectors and buy high-level political influence.   Unless NATO nations ensure that international standards exist for emerging financial technologies-cybercurrency, smart cards, electronic wallets, Internet banking-criminal organizations likely will attempt to exploit their anonymity to launder proceeds from illegal activities, break encryption codes, and counterfeit these instruments for financial gain.”  

Other Transnational Threats  International Economic Challenges.  “Notwithstanding the current financial turmoil in East Asia, the world economy will be much larger in 2010 than it is today, primarily because of faster growth in China, Latin America, and Central Europe. The spread of information technology, increases in international trade and investment, and demographic shifts within countries will bolster global integration and disperse the balance of economic power. Most of these changes will demand greater cooperation among NATO countries, while some will test the alliance's cohesion:  Chinese Power.  The NATO countries probably will face new challenges as China's commitment to economic and institutional reform enables it to grow faster than many of its regional neighbors and, as a result, to emerge as a much stronger and more influential world economic and military power.   Oil Disruptions.  NATO countries also are likely to face a heightened threat of major oil supply disruptions if, as we expect, a larger percentage of the world's oil supplies come from the volatile Persian Gulf region. Barring an unexpected surge in non-OPEC oil production, the share of the world's oil supplies coming from the Persian Gulf probably will rise about 10 percent between now and 2010, in part because of increased demand from faster growing economies in Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and China.   Tight Military Budgets.  Rapid economic growth outside of the North Atlantic community and budget shortfalls in many NATO countries will increase the likelihood of a large shift in the global allocation of military expenditures, potentially boosting the relative military and political influence of countries such as Russia, Taiwan, India, and China. Many Western European countries will have a harder time financing military expenditures as large aging populations, shrinking labor pools, and declining birth rates pressure already cash-strapped governments to boost social welfare outlays on dependent populations. If NATO defense outlays decline, and if non-NATO countries maintain the ratio of military spending to GDP at 1995 levels, the NATO share of global defense outlays will fall over ten percent by 2010.   Central European Tensions. The NATO countries may confront increased strains in Central Europe if growing income disparities within the region boost tensions between the haves and have nots. We expect economic disparities between nations in Europe to be significantly skewed in 2010 as reforming countries like the Czech Republic and Poland boost economic growth and attain significantly higher living standards while others--such as Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, and countries in Central Asia--fall behind.
Financial Strains. Tensions over international financial rules could strain the alliance. International financial linkages will have grown in size, importance, and sophistication. By 2010, if not sooner, the North Atlantic countries along with other economic powers are likely to face the task of shaping a new international monetary system that will reduce the potential disruptions of financial flows on the global economy. As with previous attempts at multilateral monetary reform, forming new rules governing international financial flows and currency adjustments is likely to generate potentially serious tensions among NATO members.”

Illicit Migration Threat.  “Illicit migration will continue to plague NATO in 2010 as migrants fleeing overpopulation, poverty, natural disasters, and conflict in developing countries seek better standards of living in wealthier NATO states.”

"Wild Cards" That Could Alter Threat Scenario   “Given the dramatic changes of the past decade, a number of lower probability but high impact scenarios are also conceivable in the years ahead. Among them are:   Russia. A Russia that steps away from its current direction of reform would probably overshadow the above transnational threats.  Intra-NATO Strains. Strains among current or future NATO members that erupted, or threatened to erupt, into conflict could disrupt the Alliance.   Other Conflicts. The outbreak of a chemical, biological, or nuclear confrontation in the Middle East, South Asia, or former Soviet Union would have far-reaching political, military, economic, and environmental ramifications.    Radical Ideologies. The taking hold in one or more NATO countries of extreme ideologies--anti-materialism, Islamic extremism, militarism, or some new unforeseen "ism"--could weaken NATO from within, just as the onset of anti-Western ideologies outside NATO could threaten the Alliance.   Economic Crisis. A spillover of financial instability from any source over the next 12 years could slow world growth and plunge NATO countries into recession.   Terrorist Sponsors. The terrorist threat picture could change by a radical new regime outside the NATO area or, conversely, a shift in policy by a country such as Iran now supporting terrorism.   Information Warfare Risk. The risk would grow markedly and sooner if a country set as a priority developing a significant offensive information warfare capability or if protective technologies failed to keep up with offensive ones.   Illicit Migration. The threat would rise rapidly with a surge in one or more factors that drive it, such as a major economic downturn, natural disaster, or regional conflict on Europe's periphery.   Climate Change. A sudden and extreme climate change--such as global warming by 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit--would affect agriculture and energy use and have other potentially wide-ranging effects on NATO countries.”   

Implications of Transnational Threats for NATO   “Short of these more radical scenarios, as NATO moves toward 2010, its overriding challenge probably will be to strike a balance between maintaining an adequate conventional and nuclear military capability to counter aggression against any Alliance member and strengthening its ability to meet the above more likely range of transnational threats.”  

Conclusion   “In sum, many of the threats to NATO that have become more pronounced since the end of the Cold War are likely to grow further in the years ahead. While the exact threat scenario is difficult to project, such threats as terrorism, threats to information systems, WMD proliferation, and international narcotics trafficking and organized crime will probably be prominent, and a number of other challenges could appear on the screen with little notice. Moreover, the combination of transnational threats is likely to be more complex and challenging for NATO to manage.”

 

A Revisit of Vision 2020 for Malaysia. Author: Chellis Glendinning, published in 1999 by Random House, Canada. A revisit of a world reknown scenario from the book, “Off the Map – An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy, and Other Earthy Whereabouts”. 

In the book, “Off the Map - An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy, and Other Earthly Wherabouts", the author questions the nature of imperialism - the dominant political force on the planet for centuries.  Chellis Glendinning “charts the course of empire across countries and continents and on into individual minds, hearts, and bodies.”  The author reveals imperialism's legacy, questioning how the map was altered, empire as map, and what is "off the map".  A huge section of the book is devoted to "What is Globalization?"    Globalization: In the future, "…the map is altered. The gold-etched designs and tall ships and roaring lions disappear from sight.  Even the opaque maps of the classroom fade into obsolescence.  New maps are made, state-of-the-art, lines and numbers, computer simulation, digital coordinates. A trillionth of a meter, 3 million light years away.  Cyberspace curved space 750 Kilobits per second--- measuring, modeling, predicting, printout the world, the Earth, the universe.  In the 21st Century, the making of maps, it is something different; map making, it is something the same." The author traces many countries and future visions of those that have gained and are gaining independence from imperialism.

 

The author reviews the world-renown Malaysia  2020 Vision (see annotation in this bibliography); acknowledging Malaysia as a success story after independence from Great Britain after World War II: “Malaysia, an "undeveloped" country, stepped into thorny terrain.  "It had been mowed over in everyway, from the psychological to the economic, and it was now attempting to unfurl its flag into a world busily restructuring into a subtler form of the same old bag. .... "But take Vision 2020: Now here's a plan.....A plan to transform Malaysia, with its paradisiacal rain forests, and rice paddies and rubber trees, into the planet's most seductive techno-business park.  The Multimedia Super Corridor would link the immense new Kuala Lumpur International Airport with two newly constructed cities -- a digital friendly capital called Putrajaya and an InfoTech center named Cyberjaya -- all  knit together by fiber optics and managed by a GATT_ ready code of cyber-laws. Good-bye rubber tappers, basket weavers, and thatched villages. Hello CEOs, Banana Republic-clad info workers and one-bedroom apartments.  The land would be coated in concrete. Super freeways would glide into the horizon like boulevards at Versailles.  There would be corporate headquarters galore, computer-smart campuses, borderless marketing plexus, and national cyber-cards to access everything from IA to overdue video-rental fines. What cattle are lift would inhabit patches of pasture like one-bedroom condos and graze on plastic shopping bags.  Vision 2020: its being thrust down the throat of reality by Malaysia's prime minister, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohammed, who has already distinguished himself by supplanting the rubber-trees of the north to build a modern multiversity, erecting the world's two tallest spires, building superhighways where only footpaths existed before, jamming them with the indigenous-build Proton, and jacking up the gross national product from $34 billion in 1980 to $123 billion in 1995.
It's happening. "

 

Pentagon See China’s Forces as no Foreseeable Threat to US.  
Pentagon Report Commissioned by Congress – “Implementation of Taiwan Relations Act”. Public Law 106-113.

China is modernizing its armed forces to counter military threats from technologically superior enemies, but ''significant shortcomings'' in its weapons and training will leave it unable to challenge the United States for ''an indefinite period of time,'' according to the Pentagon report.  China's military modernization efforts are increasing its ability to threaten Taiwan,  especially with long-range missiles.  But the study concluded that the People’s Liberation Army, is limited in fighter aircraft and amphibious ships, would not fare well if ordered to invade Taiwan in the near future. The study analyzed the Chinese military, Chinese planning, strategy, potential “electromagnetic warfare” – attacks on computer and communications networks, and, intelligence findings of China studies of the 1991 Persian Gulf War and NATO’s war against Yugoslavia.   The report describes scenarios in phased timeframes as an estimate of Taiwan’s ability to sustain air, sea, and ground operations in the face of a China attack.   

Short term  (2000-2005)    “The PLA will have only a limited capability to conduct integrated operations against Taiwan. The PLA conducts interservice exercises at the tactical level, but the services are not fully integrated into a cohesive combat force. This weakness would contribute to Taiwan’s ability to  sustain air, sea and ground operations in the face of a PLA attack in the short term. Maintaining air superiority over the Taiwan Strait would be an essential part of any Chinese effort to mount a military operation against Taiwan. China currently has an overwhelming quantitative advantage over Taiwan in military aircraft and is expected to retain that advantage beyond 2005. On the other hand, Taiwan's  more modern aircraft will provide it with a qualitative advantage that should be retained at least through that period. PLA EW operations against air defense radars,  disruption of command and control networks, and/or large scale conventional SRBM and LACM strikes against airfields and SAM sites could reduce the effectiveness of Taiwan’s air defenses. The overall capability of the TAF would depend on the implementation of sound pilot training, sufficient logistic and maintenance support, and the ability of the TAF to integrate satisfactorily several disparate airframes into a cohesive, operational fighting force.  A PLA amphibious invasion of Taiwan probably would be preceded by a naval blockade, air assaults and missile attacks on Taiwan. Airborne, airmobile, and  special operations forces likely would conduct simultaneous attacks to the rear of Taiwan's coastal defenses to seize a port, preferably in close proximity to an airfield.  Seizing a beachhead likely would constitute a supporting attack. An airborne envelopment would facilitate amphibious operations by cutting off Taiwan's coastal defenders  from supply lines and forcing them to fight in two directions. China likely would seek to suppress Taiwan’s air defenses and establish air superiority over an invasion corridor in the Taiwan Strait. The PLA’s success in establishing and maintaining a foothold on the island would rest on a variety of intangibles to include personnel and equipment  attrition rates on both sides of the Strait; the interoperability of PLA forces; and, the ability of China’s logistic system to support adequately optempo operations.  China’s numerical superiority in submarines constitutes a threat to the Taiwan Navy, but Taiwan is acquiring advanced ASW technology that likely will improve  its ability to counter PLA submarines operating off the coast of Taiwan. Nonetheless, the Taiwan Navy probably would have an extremely difficult time opposing  a naval blockade with its existing resources, which include many obsolescent World War II-era ships. Barring third-party intervention, the China’s quantitative advantage over Taiwan’s Navy in surface and sub-surface assets would probably prove overwhelming over time.

Maintaining air superiority over the Taiwan Strait would be an essential part of any Chinese effort to mount a military operation against Taiwan. China currently  has an overwhelming quantitative advantage over Taiwan in military aircraft and is expected to retain that advantage beyond 2005. 

In the mid-term (2005-2010): The PLA is expected to field a force that is more capable of conducting integrated operations against Taiwan, but probably  would still have significant shortcomings in this area. Regardless of the timing, a successful invasion would exact tremendous losses and require a massive commitment of military and civilian assets. Additionally, China would have to be willing to accept the almost certain political, economic, diplomatic, and military costs that  such a course of action would produce. If current shipbuilding trends continue into the mid-term, the PLA navy will not possess significantly greater amphibious lift capacity for troop transport. This trend will continue to act as a constraint on a full-scale amphibious invasion., but would not preclude the use of other assets, such as ballistic missiles and submarines, in an attempt to reunify the island by force. China is aware of its weaknesses in lift capacity and is giving greater attention to the role of civilian assets in an amphibious invasion. Recent PLA military exercises that probably incorporated a Taiwan scenario have featured fishing boats and merchant ships in a strong supporting role. The creation of such a reserve, if realized, would improve China’s ability to conduct an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. Beijing reportedly also is stepping up efforts to refit merchant ships to make up for the shortage in naval landing vessels. Weather constraints would affect  the timing of any invasion attempt. In addition, mud flats along the western shore of Taiwan would restrict the number of available landing beaches.

In the long term (2010-2020):   China’s qualitative edge over Taiwan’s military forces could continue to increase. By 2010 and after, China could gain greater operational experience with many new systems. These systems include advanced air superiority fighters, air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, and naval combatants.  The PLA also could improve its ability to conduct combined arms operations, integrating air, land, naval and missile forces to a higher degree than currently observed. Other capabilities, such as aerial refueling, AWACS and AEW operations are expected to be more fully developed during this time frame.  The change in the dynamic equilibrium of forces over the long term will depend largely on whether Taiwan is able to meet or exceed developments on the mainland with programs of its own. Its success in deterring potential Chinese aggression will be dependent on its continued acquisition of modern arms,  technology and equipment, and its ability to integrate and operate these systems effectively, and its ability to deal with a number of other systemic problems- -primarily the recruitment and retention of technically-qualified personnel and the maintenance of an effective logistics system--lest Taipei once again risk losing its qualitative edge.

 

Department of Defense Report on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Report to Congress Volume I, Domestic Preparedness Program in the Defense Against Weapons of Mass Destruction. http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/domestic/5.html

The following is an excerpt from a  prepared statement before the Senate Armed Services Committee On “ Global Threats and Challenges: The Decades Ahead”   Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, U.S. Army, Director, Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., 2000.

“Though less certain, I am increasingly concerned that adversaries -- notably North Korea and Iran -- will develop and field nuclear-armed missiles with intercontinental range. This more diverse and complex strategic nuclear threat environment affects Cold War thinking about nuclear deterrence, policy, force posture, and strategic targeting. The threat posed by regional weapons of mass destruction (WMD) -- already the greatest threat to deployed U.S. forces -- will increase. Several rogue states will likely join the nuclear club, chemical and biological weapons will be widely proliferated, and the numbers of longer-range theater ballistic and cruise missiles will increase significantly, particularly in the Middle East. This dynamic has the potential to fundamentally alter theater force balances, the nature of regional war and conflict, and U.S. contingency planning and execution. Large regional forces remain a substantial concern. A number of key regional powers -- China and possibly Russia at the high end, but also an unimpeded Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, and, at least through the near term, North Korea -- will field conventional military forces that are large and well equipped by today’s standards. The degree to which these ‘industrial age’ forces can adopt and apply selected ‘high-end capabilities’ -- WMD, missiles, satellite reconnaissance, global positioning, precision strike, advanced radar, and so forth -- remains to be seen. In the right regional context, they could pose a significant threat to U.S. mission success, particularly in the period beyond 2010. The emergence of a new threat paradigm, and changes in the nature of warfare itself, underpin all of the trends outlined above and are having a profound impact on U.S. military missions, strategy, organizations, planning, operations, and force development. It is difficult to predict precisely how these trends will play out over the next two decades. That uncertainty creates an extremely challenging planning environment for U.S. policy makers and force planners.”

Under Title XIV, Congress directed a program to enhance the capability of the Federal Government to prevent and respond to terrorist incidents involving weapons of mass destruction. This report covers in detail, program scope,  the elements of preparedness,  statistical elements of response,  program implementation; and a training support for 120 US cities, - for all weapons of mass destruction - chemical, nuclear, and biological.   The Department of Justice and FBI have developed, with interagency concurrence, three distinct scenarios that help guide the coordination of agencies:  

Scenario 1:  No Notice: “The no-notice scenario assumes that an agent has been released. FEMA, acting in support of the DoJ/FBI, will request DoD assistance to manage the consequences of the incident in accordance with established interagency guidelines and DoD Directive 3025.15. DoD will utilize a quick response team to deploy and assess the incident site and coordinate for additional augmentation. Within this scenario, the CBQRF will be deployed upon notification and at the direction of the SECDEF to support the LFA. The number of individuals deployed may vary and the capabilities may change based on the location of the incident, existing assets available to first responders, and proximity of Federal assets.” 

Scenario 2: Credible Threat: “The credible threat scenario assumes that intelligence sources have indicated a high probability of a known threat and that deployment of a response force is warranted prior to the actual use of a WMD. Within this scenario, the FBI will request WMD EOD and technical assistance from DoD special mission units as defined under DoD plans and interagency guidelines. Those elements will be called upon by the FBI to detect, render safe, and turn over for disposition any rendered safe WMD devices with EOD potential. Upon request from FEMA, acting in support of the FBI, DoD will deploy the CBQRF, whose focus will be the consequence management aspects of the incident. This response will include a command and control element, appropriate forces from TEU, and the US Marine Corps’ CBIRF, reinforced as necessary with additional specialized teams for both crisis and consequence management. The task organization for this scenario is directed by the SECDEF, after coordination with the LFA, who will coordinate with local and  state official.” 

Scenario 3: The Planned Event.  The planned event scenario assumes that predetermined WMD response elements will be prepositioned based upon coordination with the LFAs. This scenario is usually associated with special events such as political conventions, inaugurations or large public gatherings of personnel that would be vulnerable to a terrorist incident. The planned event scenario response may include a larger command and control element and will include an additional response team reinforced, if necessary, by trained medical, decontamination, and monitoring teams. The task organization for this response will also be directed by the SECDEF, after coordination with the LFA, who will coordinate with local and state official.  Based on the threat scenario, a three-tiered consequence management organization and response capability will be deployed to augment existing first responder’s capabilities.

 

Scenarios on the Future of South Florida. 
Report commissioned by Miami-Dade , Broward, and Palm Beach Counties. 

Florida citizens were at the center of the elections storm in November. As a consequence, they are now demanding reform of their election system and fresh perspectives of their future.   This report a launching pad of dialogue among citizen groups in three counties – Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties.  The process involved three stages: scenario learning, extensive interviews  with county officials and experts, and a two-day scenario workshop.  Each scenario in this set of four scenarios, builds on timeline visions from the years 2000 - 2003; 2004 - 2007; and 2007 - 2010, based on a matrix of two spectrums - level of social cohesion (declining, more conflicts, separation verses improving, cooperative, integrative) and growing internationalization of the economy  (slowing, contracting, adjusting versus fater, vibrant, complementary).   Following a comprehensive set of key implications, matrices, and factors that lead to positive futures,  such as, for example, “Many South Florida residents  are open to working with people who are different and are willing to cross the barriers that  exist between diverse groups. All residents, regardless of economic status, race or county of  residence, should be fully supported so that they can grow."; plus key performance  indicators to track each scenario.  

Scenario 1) “Rio in South Florida" “ This is a world where over the next decade South Florida continues to take on characteristics commonly found in so-called “Banana Republics” of Latin America. In such a scenario, vast discrepancies exist between the levels of wealth and overall type of lifestyle associated with very rich and very poor. Yet such differences are often tolerated and overlooked.  Economic and political power exists at the top and is generally controlled by tight clans. To a large extent, South Florida’s governing style, not to mention its extremely culturally diverse population, varies dramatically to what is found in the rest of the United States. The economy of the region remains strong and increasingly international with strong ties to expanding Latin American economies. Decisions regarding the infrastructure and environment of the region generally support continued growth. However, all of this sits upon a precarious, violent and oppressive social environment fraught with conflict and mistrust.” 

Scenario 2) Epicenter of the West Is South Florida part of the Southeastern U.S or is it the northwestern capital of Latin America?  In this scenario the answer is definitely the latter.  In this world, the region becomes a global success story and successfully anchors the U.S. as an emerging economic center for Latin America.  Other areas of the U.S. may play a role, but the big plays and big decisions are made in South Florida. The region solidifies its position by showing effective leadership, genuinely innovative approaches to social problems and responsible action on the environmental front. Smart investments are made in infrastructure and a vivid, cultural diversity emerges that makes the region vibrant and attractive on a global scale.

Scenario 3) Falling Off the Edge:  Probably the worst part of a slow death is that, for short periods of time, there may be evidence that things are improving. This is a world in which South Florida never heals from its social wounds, and instead, such problems eat away at its economic vitality. By the end of the decade the region becomes a place that is clearly not on the leading edge of any dynamic trend; instead new wealth is created in other places. The region becomes a third choice in the race to be one of nodes of the global networked economy. Opportunities for growth go elsewhere because the region never effectively addresses its problems or makes the kind of long-term investments in human or physical capital that generates deep and lasting competitive advantages. 

Scenario 4)  The Happy Siesta:  Sometimes the best way to put an end to an argument is for one person to leave the room.  This is a world where some people leave South Florida, resulting in a poorer place, but one that is quieter and more peaceful. In many ways richer for the people who stick around and make things work. The race for economic growth finds other places in Florida, the U.S. and the international region.  A larger Latin presence emerges in South Florida and puts its cultural stamp on everything.  This works well for those in that diverse culture, and for those who are comfortable adjusting to it, but the drain of the people leaving takes it toll.  Once this stabilizes, people find room for renewal and find solutions to problems that now exist on a smaller scale.

 

The African Time Machine.
WIRED November 2000.  Institute for the Future.

Discussion of the trends derived from the African continent that, "like a vast time machine" seem to be "slowly retreating' back to the 19th century.”   Description of the AIDS epidemic, geological disadvantage,  poverty; comparisons of certain pockets of Africa as worst case; others as best case but not as good as say, the UNDP numbers of the life expectancy, education, and GDP numbers of a say, Canada, or US, or  Norway.  According to the author, the vision for the 21st Century is startling: "The worst tragedy in human history is brewing in the heart of the continent. "  The author concludes with three long term scenarios of Africa:  
Scenario 1: Best Case:   “So where is Africa headed? There is no good scenario for Africa in the next several decades. Perhaps the best case is a slow decline and gradua lrecovery -- somewhat like Latin America in the '70s and '80s. But even that would take massive foreign investment, successful peace-keeping efforts, sustained engagement by the wealthy nations, a new African policy that emphasizes an end to corruption and violence, and the rise of democracy and markets. But there is no sign that even such a dismal scenario is plausible. 
Scenario 2: Massive Mobility:  “Far more likely is a massive catastrophe and the response to it. Devastation on a scale difficult to imagine is gradually unfolding, driven in part by the AIDS epidemic. At least 25 million Africans are already infected, including more than a third of the adults in Botswana. Life expectancy is plummeting: in Zimbabwe and Namibia it will soon be 33 years. War and the disruption of the agricultural economy compound the suffering with starvation and violence. Unless something almost unimaginable happens, as many as 100 million Africans may die over the next decade. The response to this immense tragedy is likely to be mainly nothing. There will be many international conferences held and even some promises made.
But there will be little action and even less fulfillment of promises. In such a scenario, over the next few decades the downward momentum will burn itself out as little remains and the decreasing population becomes less prone to disease. For the rest of us it will be another Holocaust, leaving us wondering how we could have let it happen. Why did we turn our backs even as CNN shoved it in our faces? Racism and an apparent lack of national interests will surely be among the reasons.  
Scenario 3: Rescue Effort We could be surprised, if the drama gets bad enough. Maybe an increasingly wealthy world will launch a serious international rescue effort. The only problem is that no one really knows what that means and the result would almost certainly be some form of neocolonialism. This time, of course, the benign colonial administrators would likely come from the United Nations.

 

Scenarios for Russia: From Short-term Greed to Long-term Need? 
Author: Heinrick Vogel

The author, Heinrich Vogel, is a political economist specializing in Russia and Eastern Europe.  In this article, he re-visits the scenarios of the original book, " Russia 2010 and What it Means for the World"  by  authors Dan Yergin and Thane Gusatafson (please refer to this scenario bibliography for an annotation of the complete set of scenarios).  Yergin & Gustafdon are confident that by 2010, the time of troubles and intermittent chaos will be over.  "They call this economic outcome by the Russian word chudo (miracle), but they are careful not to identify it with the performance of postwar Germany or Japan. The underlying assumptions are clear: to reemerge from chaotic drift Russia needs strong leadership, stable money, property rights, external support, lots of investment in the right places, and a minimal consensus between winners and losers not to rock the boat"

Where are we today, seven years after Yergin and Gustafdon published the book in 1993?  Vogel examines in detail, Russia in the present:  “ The political spin-off from the recent economic rebound, the "Putin-factor" (a near religious trust in the new leadership's potential), remains relevant although it has already been put to harsh tests. Continued fighting in Chechnya keeps Russian troop casualties at non-negligible levels. In addition, prestigious symbols of Russia's technological capacities and global standing have suffered painful blows: the orbital station Mir was saved from collapse only by international sponsors; the flagship of maritime great power status, the submarine Kursk, was sunk by a technical failure or even friendly missiles; and Ostankino, Moscow's key transmitter station, fell mute after a devastating fire. And yet, high ratings in recent Russian opinion polls signal unabating trust in Putin. The balance sheet for the human dimension of stuck reforms and decayed infrastructure is much sadder. The World Health Organization ranks Russia at 131 in an international list of per capita expenditures on health—just ahead of Sudan. Life expectancy and birth rates are falling: the population shrunk from 148.3 million in 1992 to 145 million presently and is expected to continue declining by 750,000 annually until 2010. Demographers predict that in 2020 the world's largest country will end up with a population of only 125 million. The Russian government promised to spend $125 million during the next two years on a program aimed at increasing the birth rate. But the fight over priorities for the revitalization and modernization of social welfare programs has only begun and resources are limited: social welfare is only receiving 9 percent of the total budget, compared to Western nations which average 33 percent at much higher levels of revenue.

Vogel's Vision of the Future of Russia:  This is not the place to elaborate new sets of scenarios; Yergin's and Gustafson's reasoning of 1993 comes surprisingly close to the historical course of events. But we are still ten years from 2010, and the odds are by no means comforting. Russia may well be the object of yet another strange experiment in social engineering when it comes to bridging the gap between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, between preindustrial ways of life and the new economy. And this experiment will be different from cases like India because it implies continued social decline and reverse urbanization for major parts of a society which, one generation ago, had been educated in a belief system of inevitable growth and prosperity for all. … Whatever political visions of mobilization by maximum growth, strong statehood, and primacy of the military sector make Putin and his buddies tick, their hands are tied by the painful constraints of capital gap and physical and social decay. It is very unlikely that the trajectory of average long-term growth will exceed 4 percent annually while hopes for a more democratic state will be jeopardized by the temptations of authoritarianism. Whatever the political response, Russian dreams of restoring the country's great power and status will remain dreams. And Western politicians, with their hopes for a predictable partnership with Russia, are heading for interesting and uncertain times.

 

Wired Scenarios of BioWar.

Author: Ed Regis,  WIRED Magazine.

According to this article, some of the most leading-edge biotech thinking is now being done not by scientists and academics, but by the military.  The conference, titled Biotechnology Workshop 2020, hosted by the Army War Collage, Carlisle, Pennsylvania – home for the Army’s Center for Strategic Leadership – focuses on battles to be fought in the future. These battles would not be limited to the hand grenades, assault rifles, and land mines of the 20th century - they would feature entirely new categories of weapons, munitions based on the biotech advances that would occur in the interim.

Defense Planning Scenario 1.    “July 2020, and Turkey is at war with Iran and Syria. The latter two countries, sick of their constant water shortages, have invaded Turkey and taken control of a major dam and reservoir. Turkey, after mobilizing its troops, calls upon the United States for assistance.  The US sends a total of 300,000 troops, plus navy and air force backup units, into the area. Together, the combined US forces are supposed to (1) throw the invaders out of Turkey, (2) advance into Iran and Syria to incapacitate the main forces of those countries, and (3) "locate and neutralize Iranian and Syrian nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, their means of delivery, and their production facilities." 

Defense Planning Scenario 2.  This scenario is not much different than the defense-planning scenario, except for the fact that Iran and Syria were now threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on a major Turkish population center. “The US, in response, sends in eight army assault units plus special operations forces, to (1) attack enemy headquarters, (2) destroy their command, control, and logistics sites, and (3) wipe out their weapons facilities.  In July 2020, however, this is no problem. First of all, our foot soldiers are protected by biocamouflage, clothing that changes color automatically, allowing the troops to visually merge with the background. Their outer garments sense the ambient temperature and harmonize with it, rendering the wearer imperceptible to temperature-sensing devices, heat-seeking weapons, or infrared detectors. The troops become as invisible as chameleons, for the same reasons, and by essentially the same biological mechanisms.  The enemy, however, is not invisible - not to the army's newly developed artificial smart noses. The Americans ferret out their adversaries by means of biosensors, biologically based olfactory sensing units that discover the presence, location, and strength of opposing troop concentrations by detecting - believe it or not - their odors, the characteristic airborne molecules or "downstream effluents" they discharge.  Having pinpointed the enemy battalions, the US troops now advance toward them and deploy a full range of nonlethal, nonhuman bioweapons - antimaterial microbes, for example.  These genetically engineered organisms have been programmed to eat the rubber from enemy vehicles, decimating their tires, engine gaskets, coolant hoses, and fuel lines. Other antimaterial microorganisms infiltrate fuel tanks and turn their stores of gas and diesel oil to masses of incombustible jelly.” For continuation of this detailed scenario, see original article. 

Defense Planning Scenario 3:  “July, 2020: Brazil invades Venezuela seeking to acquire its newly discovered oil reserves. Venezuela appeals to the United States for help, and we respond by sending in the biotroops.  This time, according to the scenario, we've got technology to burn: biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics - all of it has been developed and has succeeded beyond the wildest expectations. Wars, therefore, are now conducted long-range and by remote control. Robotic combat and remote telepresence have replaced traditional ground warfare. On this battlefield of the future, intelligent robots outnumber humans.”  For continuation of this detailed scenario, see original article.

Enemies Go Nuclear.  Author: Waller Douglas, Time South Pacific  06/08/98 Issue 23, p40, 3p, 1 chart, 3c,2bw.

This article discusses whether the rivalry between India and Pakistan could start the world's first nuclear war. The Clinton administration's secret research of scenarios depicting how the two nations might stumble into an atomic exchange; example of a scenario. It depicts the fear of the United States government that both sides will move into the next stage, threatening each other directly by placing nuclear warheads atop missiles. 

Scenario: Enemies Go Nuclear:   “It's no longer just a theoretical possibility now that Pakistan has exploded its nuclear devices. It could go like this: Muslim militants in Kashmir, covertly backed by Islamabad, step up their insurgency in the disputed Himalayan territory, where several Indian and Pakistani soldiers already die each week in cross-border skirmishes. India lashes back, sending its troops across the Pakistani border to chase militants. Islamabad retaliates with heavy artillery shelling. Conventional war breaks out and quickly escalates to the point where both sides resort to their nukes, and 15-kiloton, Hiroshima-size bombs are dropped by warplanes or lofted by missiles on densely populated cities like Bombay and Karachi. Many thousands of civilians die, and deadly fallout spreads throughout the subcontinent.  Officials all over the globe hope that such a frightening specter will sober both countries into backing off their nuclear one-upmanship. But for the moment, each seems determined to match the other, bomb for bomb.” See original article for more on strategy, thoughts on nuclear war worldwide, theoretical possibilities; and state of mutual assured destruction (MAD).

 

Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century. 

Author: Garfinkle Simpson Byte, 03/13/2000.

The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century is a compelling account of how invasive technologies will affect  lives in the coming years. 

The Death of Privacy:  In the 21st century, continuing advances in technology endanger privacy in ways never before imagined. “It is common for direct marketers and retailers to track every purchase; surveillance cameras observe movements; mobile phones report locations to those who want to track; government eavesdroppers listen in on private communications; misused medical records turn our bodies and our histories against us; and linked databases assemble detailed consumer profiles used to predict and influence our behavior.  Computers have built-in bar code readers and a signature pad. When a delivery is made, a UPS driver scans the bar code on each package and then has the person receiving the delivery sign for the package. The bar code number and the handwritten signature are recorded inside the DIAD, and ultimately uploaded to the company's databanks.” 

In 2010:  society shifts toward a different track - Instead of relying on technology to track people, business and government considers social solutions such as using relatively weak identification systems and very strong penalties for institutions engaging in violations of privacy and individuals in identity fraud. “Statutory damages are created not just for the bank or business that was defrauded, but also for the person who had their identity appropriated.  Biometrics becomes an omnipresent part of the future. But because of their recognized limitations, and because of the legitimate civil-liberties concerns that these systems create, society will probably not experience the full realization of a totally biometrically tracked future. Instead of tracking people, institutions will increasingly turn to the much simpler project of tracking things.”

 

Anti-Nuclear Physicians Publish Doomsday Scenario. 

Associated Press, April 30, 1998, Section: National, Edition: first, page B9.

Doctors paint a picture of Russia’s spitefully launching missiles, killing 6.8 million Americans.  A doomsday scenario, written by an anti-nuclear physicians group and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, “reads more like a Hollywood script than a scientific paper.”  The Physicians for Social Responsibility argue that nuclear accidents can happen because Russia and the United States maintain several thousand strategic warheads each, many on high alert. The weapons' targets were only symbolically removed in 1994.

Doomsday Scenario: “The first nuclear missiles would come from a rogue Russian submarine making an unauthorized launch. After the first missile broke the surface of the Barents Sea, 6.8 million Americans would have just 30 minutes before a ``giant fire storm'' turned them to dust. Then all-out nuclear war could break out, erasing billions from Earth. ``There's an assumption of a crew-wide collusion and cooperation,'' Bruce Blair, one of the paper's authors, acknowledged. ``It would require a conspiracy of some magnitude to pull this off.''  The crew would not only have to breach command-and-control protocol, but also gain access to top secret launching codes. According to the scenario, a Delta-IV sub patrolling the Barents Sea north of Russia launches 16 missiles, each armed with four 100-kiloton nuclear warheads -- each warhead eight times the strength of Hiroshima. Assuming a 25 percent failure rate, a dozen missiles would hit eight U.S. cities at night -- Washington, New York, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Seattle – killing nearly everyone at ground zero, or 6.8 million people. ``There may be a rare survivor, but essentially everyone dies,'' said Dr. Ira Helfand, a co-author who estimated another 6 million to 12 million would die of radiation sickness in the following month. ``This could lead to all-out nuclear war,'' he added. The report said billions could die worldwide. The bombing would create ``a giant fire storm with hurricane-force winds'' and boiling air temperatures, later followed by deadly epidemics of illness and infectious diseases among refugees, the report said. Most experts believe a more plausible scenario for an accidental post-Cold War nuclear confrontation would involve defending against a false warning indicating Russian or U.S. missiles were in the air.

 

Nuclear Scenario Alarming to Think Tank.

Author: David L. Marcus, Boston Globe, March 21, 1998 Section: National/Foreign Edition: Third Page:A3.

For two days at the National Defense University in Washington, several of America's veteran intelligence specialists enacted this ``loose nukes'' scenario. The lessons they learned were chilling, according to a report issued. The exercise was designed to test how US intelligence specialists and scientists would work together, how international laws would hold up, and whether US agencies monitoring the borders would detect the entrance of illegal nuclear materials. The simulation is part of a long-term study in global organized crime supervised by William H. Webster, former director of the CIA and FBI. 

Wild Atom Scenario: “It's the winter of 2001 and President Clinton's successor knows that criminals have stolen highly-enriched uranium and plutonium from a Russian nuclear weapons complex. Then comes worse news: Terrorists are planning an attack on the United States. The new president and his advisers have to decide how much to tell the American public and whether to close ports and airports. And they don't even know the worst part: A freighter is steaming across the Atlantic with a nuclear device that a radical Islamic group plans to detonate in the Baltimore harbor.  The action starts with a ``Mafia boss'' selling stolen Russian plutonium to Iran. The plutonium is then filched by the ``Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group,'' which plans to target US troops in Saudi Arabia and a US harbor city.”

 

Bracing for California’s Changing Landscape – Scenarios of California in 2020
Author: Richard Thau, The San Francisco Chronicle, 11/21/99.

 

IN 2020 Anglo Boomers and Young Latinos will be in the majority, with both groups maneuvering for resources and political power. To avoid a power struggle, both groups must take steps now to close the age and cultural gap.

California’s Changing Landscape:  “In 2020 and beyond, the biggest contingents of elderly Americans and of Latinos will both live in California. As their respective growing populations increasingly crowd out the remaining non-elderly and non-Hispanic citizenry, both groups will be jockeying for resources and power. In one ominous scenario, the tensions will split the state in two: A Southern California and a Northern California, a Hispanic/Asian California and a California for the rest, particularly if today's residents don't recognize that two seismic demographic forces are at work, ones with real geographic and political consequences. While Strauss' scenario thankfully remains only that, there are reasons to fear that California may be in for a bumpy ride. A driving issue is the lingering resentment over Proposition 187, which attempted to deny certain government benefits to illegal immigrants -- mostly of Hispanic heritage. And Proposition 227, which effectively ends bilingual education, remains a sore point for some Latinos who view it as an Anglo-driven attempt to deny their children a quality education. These tensions are likely to be further exacerbated by increased demands from the elderly for retirement income. In order to provide full Social Security benefits to a growing elderly population, payroll taxes will have to rise by as much as 25 percent to 30 percent. Projected Medicare costs will push those increases even higher. These increased taxes inevitably will be paid by a growing number of younger Hispanic workers, some of whom may begin wondering why, when they're having trouble making ends meet, their tax dollars continue to flow to Anglo elders who never showed much fondness for them -- and who may be economically better off than they are.”  

An Alternative Scenario:   “One way to lessen the likelihood that there will be elderly vs. Latino fights over future resources in 2020 is to ensure that every Californian, and, indeed, every American, is prepared to live for several decades in old age on more than just Social Security.  Is there anything that can be done to help avoid a young vs. old conflict, when a disproportionate number of the old are Anglo and the young are Hispanic? Yes.  In this scenario, the study shows Latinos and the elderly recognizing each other: leaders in both the elderly and Hispanic communities must take the initiative now to recognize each other's growing strength. Regular contact may help prepare certain Hispanic Boomer leaders to take on a mediating role to quell future tensions.   The solution is to know each other: people reject what they don't understand. Boomers become more familiar with Hispanic culture, tradition and mores, and more sensitive to them as the  "Hispanicizing" of the popular culture continues in 2020.  Ken Dychtwald, president of Emeryville-based Age Wave, was one of the first to suggest solutions that turned out successful in this world:  build a national elder corps.  That is, recruiting elders to volunteer in communities with young adults so they "not only can help fix America but can connect with its youth."  More and more, there is learning from Latinos' family-oriented culture: Hispanics have much to teach Anglos about how to deal with the elderly. Hispanics always recognized that caring for the elderly is about more than money. Perhaps adopting the Hispanic ethic toward the elderly would help mitigate America's looming Social Security problems -- and even strengthen intergenerational bonds at a time when they would otherwise be weakening.”

 

The Shape of the Future.

Author: Ramo Joshua Cooper, Time, 04/13/98, Vol. 151 Issue 14, p197, 1p.

Introduces four articles on conflicts continuing into the 21st century. The topics of environmentalism, globalization, tribalism, and fundamentalism create global challenges.  In a new century, come new conflicts. Environmentalism presses against Globalization and the world will have to confront the power of Tribalism and the challenge of Fundamentalism.  The author believes that though we are living in peaceful times, history shows that short, temporary bursts of tranquillity have followed all the major wars of this century—“think of the Roaring Twenties and the boom years of the 1950s.” Society’s challenge now is to ensure that the current era of peace and prosperity continues long after the close of the cold war. It will demand as activist an agenda as that long fight did. The next 100 years will bubble with questions that are as difficult as the ones we have faced in this century. Perhaps, because of their incredible subtlety, these questions are even more difficult.”  Environmentalism:  Once dominated by fringe activists, environmentalism, worldwide, becomes an essential element of political reform -- especially in the developing world, where the destruction of nature threatens to widen the gap between rich and poor nations. Tribalism:  The ideological divisions that plagued the 20th century may have disappeared, but new fault lines are drawn in the 21st century in their place. The most explosive one: ethnic conflict. The dissolution of nations invites politicians to exploit resentments to amass power. But this kind of tribalism isn't intractable....ethnic hostility can be prevented--with education and vigilance. Globalization:    What will define life most in the next century? The global economy. The machinery of globalization continues to integrate financial systems, dismantling  territorial frontiers--and bringing people closer together. It has also created a high-flying, high-stakes business class, filled with go-getters. To them, the chances for prosperity are limitless. And national boundaries mean nothing.  Fundamentalism:  Fundamentalism offers its adherents a moral refuge from the vulgarities of the secular, modern world. To critics, it represents a dangerous rejection of the liberal, Western tenets of the Enlightenment. Can the two views be reconciled in the next century...."  .To what extent should we trade off our environment for our economy? How should the advancement of a secular global mentality make room for God? As the world becomes increasingly integrated by technology and communications, these questions become more relevant in the 21st century.”

 

The World of 2020 and Alternative Futures.
Air War College, Air Command and Staff College, and School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1998. <http:www.awc.gov>

One of the initial tasks accomplished by the SPACECAST 2020 participants in the Air War College, Air Command and Staff College, and School of Advanced Airpower Studies was arriving at a consensus on the key features of the far future: the world system as affected by five fundamental forces. These forces include: the number and distribution of people on the planet; the world's geopolitical organizations and interactions; the world's economic processes; the effects of new technologies; and the constraints imposed by the natural environment. Each of these functions will affect US space capabilities in the future.  The study describes these forces in depth then outlines key issues. The participants identified a creative and fertile  “rogue set” of scenarios. 

Scenario 1. Spacefaring World:   “ (This) is a world in which there are many actors with a strong desire to be involved in space and with high technomic vitality representing the capability to be involved in space. Prior to 2020, there will be advances in communication and information interconnectivity and success of the Global Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), leading to a highly interdependent global village. The few remaining rogue states that may have inhibited development and spread of space and technological activity will have been swept away by dual waves of glasnost and economic activities. The competitive atmosphere among states and transnationals had leading to the early development of advanced space-launched methods, and cheap, reliable spacelift have become available from a variety of sources, which might include states and corporate barons. This fierce competition extends into the economic realm and into space, but it has developed in a fairly friendly and non-conflictual manner. As these events unfold, the military increasingly assumes the role of policeman and space-traffic controller. The entertainment and education industries respond to these developments by increasingly using space as a setting for both entertainment and education, continually sparking the imaginations of populations worldwide…” 

Scenario 2. Rogue’s World:   “(This) is a world in which there were few actors with a desire to be in space and limited technological and economic capability, but the will of some actors to be involved in space will be very high. The history leading up to this world might be a failure of GATT, spawning an era of neoprotectionism and a world economic downturn. Advances in communication and information interconnectivity failing to overcome deep-seated prejudice and traditional cultural barriers. Fundamentalist and extremist Islamic states becoming closed, highly controlled societies in a quest for cultural purity. More than one Rogue state developing reliable indigenous spacelift, a demonstrated antisatellite capability, and a willingness to violate space law. This perceived threat brings renewed US emphasis on space defense and an increased military role in space…” 

Scenario 3. Mad Max Incorporated World:   “(This) is a world characterized by many actors with a strong desire to be in space, but actors who are limited by very low technomic vitality. This world is very conflictual. The Mad Max Incorporated world history is characterized by a small nuclear exchange (not involving the US) and a resultant environmental nightmare occurring in South Asia. A devastating earthquake in California decimates the US economy and leads to mass internal migration. Postindustrial states increasingly shift to social programs, environmental cleanup, disaster relief, and a complex internal regulatory environment. Multinational corporations, are quicker to recover than states, fill the void by privatizing many other former public sector tasks. Corporate and individual economic concerns lead to decreased clout for states and a further rise of multinational corporations. Many military forces, including space assets, were increasingly made available to the highest bidder in order to sustain their activities...” 

Scenario 4. Space Baron’s World:   “Space Barons are individual entrepreneurs involved in space. According to the plausible history leading to the Space Baron's world a single nuclear incident occurs prior to 2020, but states avoided World War III. States continually shift from military to economic competition. Increasingly, wealthy northern countries form several pragmatic alliances and consortia widening the gulf between "have" and "have-nots." High-tech alternate terrestrial options such as fiber optics slow the drive to develop advanced space systems. The lack of political will to be in space opens the window to Space Barons such as Motorola, Microsoft, and CNN (Cable News Network)…”

 

The Future of Crime.
Author: Daniel Erasmus, facilitator, Rotterdam School of Management, 1998. <http:www.rsmcourse.dtn.net>

Crime is an interesting topic for drama on television, but it is as old as humanity. It hasn’t changed that much over the last 3 trillion years or so. There is no clear-cut definition of crime except for how the legislation in various cultures defines it. A more difficult aspect is to portray people’s perception of crime. Daniel Erasmus   Some driving forces include: the weakening of nation states; privatization /receding government; polarization of wealth and distribution of wealth; information based economy ; deterioration of family and community values and norms; increasing capacity/power of microprocessors; development of New Technology.   The set of scenarios rests on two dimensions: crime based on ideological differences and emotions; crime based on material greed. 

Scenario 1. A Big Brother Scenario:  Materially driven crime: “In the year 2015, the situation of crime is basically a power game fighting between the government and the criminals. The winning key is - technology. If government won, the society would be in high control and vise versa. However, the war continues to go on since the technologies are more accessible by both parties…”  Ideologically driven crime: “Afraid of the threats of the end of the century, immigration and inequality driven crime, the citizens of the developed world were willing not only to accept, but even reclaim, higher government presence, and the use of all available means to regain safety. In consequence, traditional power elites have succeeded to gain control of the technology and use it to protect their interests. The networks that once promised a paradise of freedom are now the means for them to maintain the order, providing means that go far beyond the perfect totalitarian dream. Traditional crime has not disappeared but has been confined to the backward regions of the world and the low class ghettos of the big cities, which had not stopped their growth. In the difficult transition to the full digital economy many have been the victims, even relatively educated and expensive workers have been dismissed from succumbing service industries, suddenly replaced by intelligent agents…” 

Scenario 2. Laissez-faire Scenario:   Materially driven crime: “In 2015 governments will no longer play a significant role in managing a country’s legislature. Law enforcement has been decentralized and is in many cases carried out by private crime fighters who are hired by individuals and corporations alike. The concept of the social welfare state is a distant memory, - In 2015 individualism and materialistic gains are the main driving forces in the economy. The demise of social and political justice has increased the polarization of wealth resulting in strong divides in society…”  Ideologically driven crime:  “Far behind from technological development, social and political mechanism have definitely failed to cope with technological change. Politics, Government, Law, Justice systems are harder to update because they are highly based in strong cultural paradigms. Paradoxically, the globalization has contributed by making national legal systems irrelevant and global legal systems impractical because is almost impossible to reach agreements due to the same cultural diversity…”

 

War Scenarios.
World Press Review, Vol. 44, No. 6, 1997.

The cold war was declared over in 1991, with the West triumphant and America the world’s only superpower.  But there are new tensions and jockeying for power.  Some see China looming as the next adversary; some see Russia reemerging; some see a possible Moscow-Beijing axis confronting the West. A lot of literature has nominated China the chief villain. World Press Review, June 1997.    A new book announces “The Coming Conflict with China”; THE CHINA THREAT booms a recent cover of Foreign Affairs, an influential journal. A question to consider is, does the press influence these matters?  Would more benign, normative scenarios about China influence policy making in a positive way?  Or, would “war scenarios” and “China the villain” prophetically influence policy making so as to avoid such scenarios? (Another positive outcome.)  An article in Hindustan Times, New Delhi March 24, 1997, titled, “War Scenarios,” announces that think-tanks and academic communities have been “abuzz” with informed speculation about an eventual clash between America and China. According to a March 6 issue of the authoritative Inside the Pentagon newsletter, it discusses a new scenario: 

Asian Regional Conflict:  “China provides military support to North Korea in a war with South Korea, and the United States responds with attacks on the Chinese mainland.”  The Naval War College conducted computer simulations in 1997 and 1998 of battles in Asia between China and the United States in 2010. To everyone’s surprise, China defeated the U.S. in both (a spokesman would neither confirm nor deny this). It is said that the CIA recently conducted its own simulations of such a battle in 2005, and China won that, too.”

 

Beyond Yugoslavia.
The Boston Globe .  March 30, 1999 A9.

Ethnic tensions run long and deep in the Balkans. The conflicts over language and identity in a region with no natural national boundaries could spread into Macedonia, Bulgaria, and Greece if left unchecked.  The area is inherently unstable with ethnic Albanians living in Greece and ethnic Albanians and Turks living in Macedonia.   Part of the logistics of NATO intervention is to put a check on expanded war and on broader conflict in the region.  Potential scenarios of regional spread:  

Scenario 1. Albania’s Fear:  “Albania might suffer as ethnic Albanian refugees flood over the border from Kosovo.  As a miserably poor country, Albania might not be able to supply food and other resources to everyone within its borders, leading to riots and other problems.  Moreover, those Albanian refugees might include armed members of the Kosovar separatist movement, which is trying to break away from Yugoslavia, led by President Slobodan Milosevic.  The Albanian government, already weak, might have to contend with Kosovar rebels waging war from within its borders, or with Milosevic's forces chasing its enemy onto Albanian soil.  The result: Albania might enter the Kosovo conflict to protect its own borders. And that is only one  strand in the knot of tangled political interests in the region.” 

Scenario 2. Macedonian Fear:  “Macedonia could face problems similar to Albania's. About one- third of its people are ethnic Albanians, and Albanian refugees have been streaming in from Kosovo.  Milosevic's forces could use that as an excuse to move into Macedonia, or they could lay claim to Macedonian territory under the excuse that Macedonia was once a republic within Yugoslavia. It broke away in the early 1990s and is an independent parliamentary democracy.  Political instability in Macedonia could prompt Bulgaria or Greece to send troops into Macedonia.” 

Scenario 3. Grecian Fear:  “The Greeks fear that Macedonia has designs on a northern Greek province that is also called Macedonia. Greeks say the name Macedonia, as well as the country's flag and a provision of its constitution, reveal its ambitions in Greece. Because of Greek sensitivities, the young country has been known officially as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Greece attacks a destabilized Macedonia.  Turkey could enter the conflict under the guise of assisting Macedonia's Turkish and Albanian minorities. Like the Turks, the Albanians are Muslim. A fight between Greece and Turkey, two heavily armed NATO members, would be the most destabilizing outcome of the war in Kosovo.”

 

Science Fiction to Futuristic Scenarios.
The Orange County Register December 13, 1999.

As research for her latest science fiction novel, award-winning African-American author Octavia E. Butler looked not to just technical journals or NASA blueprints, but in a different research mode, she looked at "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."  Butler uses characters of history to reflect on the 21st Century in very human terms.  In her novel, “The Parable of the Talents,”  Butler outlines a plausible, cautionary scenario about  the United States in the 2030s as riddled with gangs, slavery, environmental decay and religious crusaders in political control. The U.S. turns to fascism. Disease and warfare drive this world. Portrayals of multiculturalism, social unrest and adversity and racial issues among Blacks, Hispanics,  Asians (and even aliens of three sexes - male, female, and neuter) , constitute major characters.

 

Four Scenarios of Corporations and Governance.
Wolfson College, Oxford (see http://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk)

Wolfson College is a large graduate college of the University of Oxford situated in North Oxford beside the River Cherwell. At present it consists of some sixty Governing Body Fellows, thirty Research Fellows, forty Junior Research Fellows and about three hundred and eighty Graduate Students. The total membership of Common Room is nearly 1200.  Wolfson offers scenarios of governance.  

Scenario 1. Turf Wars: “Corporations and governments that had reaped the greatest benefits of prosperity clung to outmoded and dysfunctional value systems throughout the late 1990's and early twenty-first century. People accustomed to being in command adjusted poorly to collaborative decision-making: the necessity to share participation in both the power and the profit across class and national boundaries. Ever in the minority, the old profit mongers were the target of the pent-up frustration and anger of millions of workers across the globe. Resentment built, at times unfocussed and wild. The murder of Alan Greenspan in 1999 by a disgruntled manager who had been the victim of corporate downsizing triggered a number of violent outbursts as people turned against not only the wealthy elite, but also against "others:" communities, religions and other racial groups. Trouble and violence seeped into virtually every major city and disrupted the flow of high technology goods, goods that were necessary to sustain not only economic growth and development but also the little conveniences of life to which people had grown accustomed. Jobs began to disappear. People began to disappear. The high tech luxuries that seemed poised to dominate life in the twenty-first century became unattainable. People have banded together in small, ethnically based groups to gain access to the food and natural resources they still need to survive. Though some industry remains viable, much of its output is controlled by loosely organized paramilitary groups. Bill Gates is General of the largest one.” 

Scenario 2. Around the World in Eighty Seconds  “From the Komatsu factory in Sioux City, Iowa, to the Deutsche Bank branch in Kuala Lumpur, to crisp, golden McDonald's french fries in Shanghai, the global economy has co-mingled and integrated until consumers see the same thing wherever they go. International markets led companies to tap into the developing world's growing labor force, helping to equalize wages and standards of living across national boundaries. As food and natural resources seem abundant in the short-term, international relief organizations now focus on issues of "relative poverty," addressing those disadvantaged segments of less-developed countries that are still technologically illiterate. The Internet Relief Fund provides individuals and companies the opportunity to help a technologically disadvantaged person by pledging five dollars a month towards Internet access fees. The roots of transnational corporations have increasingly intertwined, making it difficult to sort out corporate citizenship from national identity. And as the net worth of the transnationals now exceeds the GDP of most countries, and the amenities offered transnational employees continue to expand, people acknowledge their corporate ID is more valuable than their passport. Even those in small, independent businesses now rely heavily upon outsourcing from, and alliances with, global organizations. Employee ideologies reflect industry-based perspectives more than geographically organized political systems. The rice growers in Alabama and Vietnam collaborate to promote their products, sensing virtually no affinity at all for the steel producers in Mobile or Hanoi a few scant miles away. Electronically-shared research and development coupled with a continuously operating global transportation system generates a never ending stream of technological innovations, which are manufactured simultaneously at the site of the needed materials. Whatever consumption of the planet takes place is balanced by the occasional environmental technology breakthrough in the endless need to force-feed the global economy.”

Scenario 3.  L'art pour L'art: “Developing countries discovered new economic leverage in the sense of "enviropreneurship" at the end of the twentieth century. As more lands and resources were depleted in the industrial countries, their populations finally understood the real cost of their rush for economic supremacy. Consequently, developing countries found new sources of income as a ecotourists and ecology trusts poured money southward. Ever eager to follow shifts in social values, multinational corporations now implement true cost pricing for their goods and demand that production footprints be made as small as possible. The practice of reverse manufacturing is commonplace as corporate planners design their products with the view that they are merely borrowing the earth's resources and are obligated to return those resources in the most efficient manner possible. More and more new materials are biochemically engineered from renewable resources and designed to degrade into "greenfill" for farms and gardens. Landfills are being reclaimed with nano-fullerene "micro miners", which recover strategic resources efficiently with no disruption to the land. Information technologies enable employees and work cooperatives to disperse jobs throughout habitable territories. This shift has encouraged many people to become self-sufficient in many of their small produce needs. Emptying high rises have been converted into vertical farms, using solar power to permit year-round food production. With the dispersal of the population, people lost their sense of hyper-urgency and now focus on the more natural rhythms of life. Closing ten deals over lunch became a lost art, while art once again became found. Even Al Gore learned to finger-paint.”

Scenario 4.  Designer Kids R Us: “As services to genetically design your children became cheaper and more accessible, the global population started to drop. Initially a service marketed only to the wealthy, global elite, "designer kids" have made future generations smaller in numbers, but vastly more valued - and valuable in their skills and potential. Many adults have also discovered the joys of re-engineering their bodies for different activities and environments. With the help of DNA-altering "cosmetic viruses" the "four hands, no feet" micro-gravity environments of orbital production facilities and pleasure parks are now accessible to all. People have embraced technology and now enjoy unprecedented freedom from mundane tasks and planning. Political and economic decision-making is handled by specialized "knowbots," cousins of the "intelligent agents" originally designed to filter information from the Internet.  Companies, governments and even personal relationships now form and reform in fluid, virtual structures as "cybership" has become more important than citizenship. The development of "Just In Time Corporations" allows workers from different companies to collaborate on projects on an as-needed basis: technical specialists spin out of their work teams at Nikon, DuPont and John Deere to create a Mars rover with which school kids can run remote experiments on Olympus Mons, and then spin off again separately to other work groups. Hawaii, the Commonwealth of the Marianas and Japan work together on an agreement of North American plankton farming. Parents create a different set of "extended family relations" as a unique "village" in which to raise each child they have. The hottest vacation spot around is your own living room lounger, as more and more people take vacations as well as work in virtual reality.”

 

RAND: Turkey and Greece May go to War in 2003.
04/28/98  Turkish Daily News . Source: World Reporter (TM)  

Scenario developed for US Air Force, Turkey.  The escalating tensions between Turkey and Greece over a host of related disputes have long captured the attention and imagination of Washington's think tank community.  According to "Sources of Conflict in the 21st Century," a recent study released by RAND Corporation, there is a chance that Turkey and Greece may actually go to war over the rights of the Turkish minority living in Western Thrace. According to one of the nine  "selected scenarios, " Turkey and Greece can clash in an environment where "the revival of regional competition in the Balkans has provided new flash points in the relationship between Athens and Ankara.” 

According to the RAND scenario, a clash between the two NATO neighbors may develop in the following manner: RAND Scenario:  "In 2003, a crisis arises over the alleged mistreatment of Turks in Greek Thrace. As friction -- including several minor border skirmishes that flare when small groups of refugees attempt to flee from Greece to Turkey increases, the two countries conduct simultaneous and overlapping exercises in the Aegean and begin reinforcing the border regions. Several incidents in and over the Aegean -- surface-to-air and surface-to-surface targeting radars locking on to aircraft and ships; a Greek and Turkish frigate suffering a minor collision while playing "chicken" -- further increase anxieties and animosities. Finally, a major demonstration by ethnic Turks in Greek Thrace turns into a riot, and Greek paramilitary troops intervene, firing into crowds and killing several Turks." "Denouncing the "genocidal policies of the Greek government," Turkey responds by launching a sudden but limited thrust across the border into Thrace aimed at seizing key centers in which the Turkish population resides --in essence establishing a protected safe haven. Greek forces try to hold this invasion at the border, and Athens declares a 12-mile territorial-waters zone in the Aegean, effectively closing Turkish access to the Aegean. The Greek air force attacks Izmir and other Turkish cities, and the two countries also clash in and over the Aegean."  RAND recommends that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff conduct operations "as soon as possible" to protect U.S. forces and citizens in the region from attack by either combatant.

 

A European Confederation 2015: Power and Progress. 
Edited by Patrick M. Cronin.  National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996.  

By 2015, the European Union is likely to develop into a European Confederation, but may be weak.  After a history of strengthening, there is a small chance that the Union would break in the next 20 years.  The Institute for National Strategic Studies conducted extensive research into trends and driving forces, then provided detailed scenarios illustrating conflict possibilities in the region. The following are scenario summaries. 

Scenario 1. ) A European Confederation. “Apart from unpredictable internally-generated decisions by the West  Europeans themselves to decrease or increase the pace of their political integration, possible pressures on Europe from Russia or from across the Mediterranean may hasten the formation of a confederation, in response to one or another such threats.” 

Scenario 2. ) The Disintegration of the European Union.   “Since the end of the Cold War, both nationalism and regionalism have revived noticeably in a number of the member of the European Union. Among the major members, these tendencies have shown special vigor in Britain, France, Spain, and Italy.   Nonetheless, France remains rather firmly linked to Germany, forming the essential core of the EU.  While the Franco-German relationship may become strained over the coming decade, it seems likely to endure, eventually to grow stronger yet.  But there are some signs that nationalism or regionalism might grow stronger in Britain, Spain, and Italy.  Either or both might disrupt or even end the cohesion of the EU.” 

Scenario 3.) A Renationalized Germany.   “Germany is the major EU member most committed to the movement of Europe toward true federation.  But even if the EU remains intact, it is conceivable that the combination of revived nationalism in Britain, France, and Italy might end progress toward deeper union and even reverse recent developments in that direction.  Under such circumstances, the Ironic redult might be to cause a revival of nationalism in Germany.”

 

History Moving North. 
Author: Robert Kaplan/  The Atlantic Monthly, Feb. 1997.

Kaplan provides an understanding of how the map of Mexico is being transmuted so it is possible to see more clearly where the US may be headed.   “Mexico is an example of failing capacity in a state that is supremely subtle and middle-of-the-road—not extreme, like many sub-Saharan African states, or even Pakistan, and not quite so wretchedly vast, intractable, and bureaucratic as India or China.”  Antonio Alonso Concheiro, of Analitica Consultants,  one of Mexico’s leading planners and futurists, briefly describes two plausible scenarios of the future of Mexico. 

Scenario 1.) The Good Scenario.  “The good scenario is that we will soon face a challenge much more severe than the peso crisis; something like a trade war between Japan and the United States that leads to a world recession [and undermines Mexico], or a complete freeze in Mexican immigration by the U.S. Authorities.  That would lead to intensive destruction of current Mexican political institutions over the next decade, and the rise of local bosses and free-enterprise networks to replace them.” 

Scenario 2.) The Bad Scenario.  “Alonso’s bad scenario is that “no true crisis will emerge.”  Indeed, the Mexican government and American editorial writers have already proclaimed Mexico’s recovery from the peso crisis; over the long term, according to the bad scenario, the low-level erosion of the state will continue—in a sufficiently gradual way as to be always deniable, but leading to quasi-anarchy.”

 

Russia. 2015: Power and Progress
Edited by Patrick M. Cronin.  National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996.

According to the Institute for National Strategic Studies, the choices open to Russia are revolutionary. In the future, Russia must decide whether to expand into territories as they had done historically.  What is the future of Russia’s national identity?  “Are they Europeans, Eurasians or uniquely Russians?”  The various possible answers to these questions are closely linked in their potential influence on the country. This book contains extensive research into trends and driving forces, then provides detailed scenarios illustrating conflict possibilities in the region. The following are scenario summaries. 

Scenario 1. ) Declining Russia.  “The Russian Federation may decay, because of failure of economic reform, strong regional tendencies, the strength of organized crime, and the success of local cliques to ignore instructions from the central government.  The military might remain relatively powerful politically as an autonomous force but decline technologically because of a lack of funding.  Some areas, such as St. Petersburg, the Black Sea coast, and Vladivostok might enjoy prosperity; others, including Central Russia and the Urals might decline into penury. These regions would still be tied to Moscow by vague nationalist sentiments, however, Areas like Tatarstan, Yakutia and the Far East might attain a highly-autonomous status because of local ethnicity, wealth or the lure of powerful neighbors on the other side of Russia’s borders.  Moscow would possess little power in a country with a weal overall economy, high unemployment, wretched social welfare programs, low levels of public health, powerful criminal gangs, and loyalties tied to communal and local authorities.” 

Scenario 2.) The United States of Eurasia.  “Russia might begin to decline as described above but be saved from such degradation along the way.  Moscow might be able to reassert some of its authority under a charismatic leader or movement, especially if Russians felt threatened by China.  Nonetheless, many of the problems previously mentioned would limit the central government’s options.  Moscow would be less able to force the regions into submission than to negotiate a new political arrangement.  Russian officials might propose the creation of a Eurasian counterpart to the European Confederation.” 

Scenario 3.) A Russian Nation-State.  “Russia may develop into a democratic and liberal capitalist state, but to do so would require Russia to abandon the legacies of its Tzarist and Soviet past.  Such a Russia would probably be organized along federal lines, much like contemporary Germany.  This would almost certainly mean a contraction of Russian territory, giving freedom to those who do not feel a sense of Russian nationalism.  To include such non-Russians in a new “free Russia” would require forms of coercion incompatible with democracy.  Realistically, such a democratic Russia could probably be born only out of a major disaster like a lost war with the Chinese or an unsuccessful intervention into Ukraine. These kinds of serious reversals, such as those suffered by the Axis Powers in World War II, can lead to revisions of identity and national rebirth.” 

Scenario 4.) Imperial Russia. “The pull of the past may prove too strong for the Russians to escape over the next 20 years.  They may abandon their experiment with democracy, rally to an authoritarian government, and renew their ancient attempts to impose their hegemony over Eurasia.  The regions and the non-Russians within the revived empire would be subjugated to harsh central rule.  Russia would remain capitalist but with large state participation in the economy.  This Russia would be, or would approximate, a neo-Fascist state.  Nonetheless, it is not inconceivable that such a Russia would restore the monarchy as a powerful symbol of Russian imperialism and divine right to rule over vast territories inhabited by non-Russians.” 

 

The Coming Anarchy. 
Author:Robert Kaplan.  The Atlantic Monthly,  February, 1994.

Kaplan excellently portrays how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet.  This comprehensive article covers most parts of the world, particularly the developing and least developed countries in relation to the industrial world.  Kaplan details a rich image of the future, and in many parts, Kaplan adds a scenario-like quality that cannot be overlooked.  Since 1994, The Coming Anarchy has influenced policy makers and major think tanks around the world. The first paragraph begins, “ The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse--the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."

 

India.  2015: Power and Progress. 
Edited by Patrick M. Cronin.  National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996.

This book contains extensive research into trends and driving forces in the Sub-Continent, then provides detailed scenarios illustrating conflict possibilities in the region.   “Economics and demographics will govern India’s success or failure at becoming a great power by 2015. At present, India resembles two countries superimposed on the same territory: a modernizing and rapidly developing middle-class India of some 200 to 300 million and a traditional, impoverished India of some 600 to 700 million.  In some ways, the gap between these two groups is widening.” The following are scenario summaries. 

Scenario 1. Divided India.  India may fail to develop its economic potential sufficiently and fall victim to overpopulation.  Certain Indian regions, primarily those between Bombay and Bangalore, might become prosperous and secede to enjoy their wealth in isolation.  Overwhelmed by massive national poverty, the central government might collapse and the country fragment into several states based on local language and religion. For example, the Pubjab might emerge as an independent Khalistan closely aligned with Pakistan; Kashmir might unite with Pakistan; Hindu Bengal might merge with Bangladesh; and the Tamils might declare independence and seize the Tamil-inhabited region of Sri Lanka. However, the Indian Army might manage to keep the country united within a weak confederated structure.  Foreign enemies might be kept at bay by a nuclear-armed Indian Air force still loyal to the center.” 

Scenario 2. Hindu India.  “Hindu-speaking Hindus number only about 30 percent of the population.  So long as India remains a democracy, such a group cannot gain control of the government.  But if Hindu nationalism swept the Marathis, Bengalis, Tamils, Gujaratis, Sindhis, and other language groups of Hindu religion, Indians could elect an intolerant authoritarian government ruled by Hindu extremists.  Under such circumstances, large numbers of the cosmopolitan upper classes might flea and the Western-oriented diaspora cease returning to India.  The fate of the Moslems would be truly miserable, judged by recent attacks by Hindu mobs on mosques and Moslem neighborhoods in Indian cities.  Some would be massacred, some would flee to Pakistan, and the rest would be reduced to servitude.  However, lsuch an India could still emerge as a great power, if it pursued economic policies that encouraged high rates of growth.”  

Scenario 3. Democratic India.  “An economically successful India that rejected Hindu extremism might nonetheless adopt many of the policies described for a Hindu India, but such an India would stress its democratic ideals as one of the bases for an anti-Chinese understanding with the United States and Japan, should a powerful China disturb the tranquility of Asia.  However, even if China were to develop into a peaceful democracy, Chinese-Indian rivalry would continue, even if pursued  primarily along economic and political lines.”

 

Air Force 2025. 
Department of Defense. United States Air Force, 1997.

Air Force 2025 is a study designed to comply with a directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force to examine the concepts, capabilities, and technologies the United States will require to remain the dominant air and space force in the future. Presented in June 1996, this report was produced in the Department of Defense school environment of academic freedom. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the United States government.  Six separate worlds were created.  

Scenario 1.) Gulliver's Travails.  “This is a world of rampant nationalism, state and nonstate sponsored terrorism, and fluid coalitions. Territorialism, national sentiments, the proliferation of refugees, and authoritarian means flourish.  The US is overwhelmed and preoccupied with such worldwide commitments as counterterrorism and counterproliferation efforts, humanitarian assistance, and peacekeeping operations. The US is attempting to be the world's policeman, fireman, physician, social worker, financier, and mailman.  The US military, based in the continental United States, is not really welcomed overseas. This world forces the US military to devise systems and concepts of operation for meeting expanding requirements while maintaining a high operations tempo during a period of constrained budgets. The US world view is global, DTK is constrained--evolutionary, not revolutionary--and the global power grid is dispersed.”

Scenario 2.) Zaibatsu.   “In Zaibatsu, multinational corporations dominate international affairs and loosely cooperate in a syndicate to create a superficially benign world. Economic growth and profits are the dominant concerns. While conflict occurs, it is usually through proxies and is short lived. Military forces serve more as "security guards" for multinational interests and property rights Technology has grown exponentially and proliferated widely. Global power is concentrated in a few coalitions of multinational corporations. The main challenge to the US military in this world, which is becoming unstable due to rising income disparities, is to maintain relevance and competence in a relatively benign world where the United States is no longer dominant. The US world view is limited as domestic concerns take precedence.”

Scenario 3.) Digital Cacophony.   “This is the most technologically advanced world resulting in increased individual power but decreasing order and authority in a world characterized by fear and anxiety. Advances in computing power and sophistication, global databases, biotechnology and artificial organs, and virtual reality entertainment all exist.  Electronic referenda have created pseudo-democracies, but nations and political allegiances have given way to a scramble for wealth amid explosive economic growth. Rapid proliferation of high technology and weapons of mass destruction provide individual independence but social isolation. The US military must cope with a multitude of high technology threats, particularly in cyberspace. The US world view is global, technological change exponential, and the world power grid dispersed.” 

Scenario 4.)  King Khan.   “This world contains a strategic surprise in the form of the creation of a Sino-colossus incorporating China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. US dominance in this world has waned as it has been surpassed economically by this entity and suffered an economic depression. This has led to a rapidly falling defense budget and hard choices about which core competencies to maintain in a period of severe austerity.  The American Century has given way to the Asian Millennium and the power, prestige, and capability that were once American now reside on the other side of the Pacific Rim. The US world view is decidedly domestic as it copes with problems at home, the growth in technology is constrained and world power is concentrated in a Chinese monolith whose economy, military, and political influence dwarf those of the US. The US has come to resemble the United Kingdom after World War II--a superpower has-been.” 

Scenario 5.) Halves and Half Naughts.  “This is a world in which there are both changing social structures and changing security conditions. The main challenge to the military is to prepare for a multitude of threats in a world dominated by conflict between haves and have nots. The world has split into two unequal camps: a small, wealthy, technologically advanced, politically stable minority of the states and peoples of the world (roughly 15%) and the poor, backward, sick, angry, unstable vast majority of the world's states and people who have little, and therefore have little to lose, in seeking redress of their grievances. The US world view is global but only because of the threats to its security represented by these masses. Technology and power are bifurcated exhibiting trends in both directions in the divided world.”  

Scenario 6.) Crossroads 2015.  “In Kurdish areas of Eurasia, the US uses programmed forces from 1996-2001 to fight a major conflict. The choices and outcomes made at this juncture have much to do with determining which of the worlds of 2025 will emerge a decade later.  The American World View is global, DTK is constrained, and the World Power Grid is seen as concentrated but beginning to become dispersed. Potential future conflicts center on events involving disputes between the Ukraine and a resurgent Russia and the reaction of the rest of the world to such a conflict. The US in 2015 still has global commitments and concerns, but a constrained rate of economic and technological growth.  Whether the US chooses a more isolationist path because of these pressures or chooses a more activist role with the sacrifices that would require is the major question to answer in shaping the world of 2025.”

 

China.  2015: Power and Progress. 
Edited by Patrick M. Cronin.  National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996.

By 2015 China could emerge as a highly aggressive great power or fall in decline.  According to the Institute for Strategic Studies, China will be an important world event in the next two decades.  Capitalism had unleashed revolutionary forces in China and the country is undergoing vast political change. This book contains extensive research into trends and driving forces in China, then provides detailed scenarios illustrating conflict possibilities in the region.    

Scenario 1.) Weak China.  “China has enjoyed spectacular economic success over the past 15 years, but the growth of the Chinese economy has been heavily concentrated in the industrial sector; the agricultural sector has grown hardly at all.  This imbalance has created tensions between the cities and the countryside that might lead to serious social unrest.  If China lacks an effective central leadership.  It could fail to address these social problems.  As a result, industrial growth could falter or cease.  Foreign investment, so vital to Chinese development, might slacken or even cease.  In that case, China could fall into serious, prolonged economic depression.  Popular loyalty to the government could be undermined.” 

Scenario 2.  Provincial China.  “China might suffer from ineffective or misguided leaders after Deng’s death.  Nonetheless, parts of China might continue to enjoy significant prosperity.  The richer provinces could gain effective autonomy from Beijing before 2015, but national sentiment, fear of foreign powers, desire to avoid civil war  and a recognition of the advantages of maintaining some form of central government could result in the formal unity of China being preserved.  No formal arraignment for such a system might be developed; instead, Beijing would be involved in a separate, less authoritative, relationship with the richer provinces than with the poorer ones.  The richer provinces might pay significant taxes to Beijing but be effectively independent of many forms of central authority.  The poorer provinces would be under tighter central control, while struggling to grow wealthy enough to gain more autonomy. The non-Han Chinese areas might remain under firm PLA control, paid for by the richer provinces.  Alternately, Tibet might enjoy no more than a confederal link to Beijing.”  

Scenario 3. Liberal China.  “By 2015, China could be in the process of moving toward the establishment of a multiparty elected system of government, something like that of Western European states in the mid-19th century.  Beijing’s leaders would be concerned  about achieving popular support, recognizing the enhanced power gained from having a willing national consensus to carry out policies.  A Liberal Chinese political system would undoubtedly be imposed from above, unlike the process in the United States in 1787-88.  China would remain into a broadly liberal and, eventually, into a democratic state.   In 2015, however, China would hardly be democratic, although power would be shared between the central and provincial governments, basic human and civil rights would be protected, and all Chinese would live under the firm rule of law.”  

Scenario 4. Authoritarian China.  “Nationalism may replace Communism as a burning political faith  for the Chinese. A post-Deng government might produce one or more charismatic, authoritarian leaders who  could mobilize the loyalty of the Chinese people, direct continued vigorous economic growth and resolve distribution of power questions very much in favor of Beijing.  Such a China could be very dangerous.  It might be motivated by the type of aggressive need to assert itself that afflicted Italy, Germany and Japan before World War II.  Or it might simply view attempts to bring China into a cooperative relationship with the other great powers as an infringement on its sovereignty.  Beijing might be involved in a continuous series of confrontations, one of which might spark an armed conflict.  Such a China could take advantage of a vigorous economy to pour large amounts of amounts of money into the armed forces and then embark on an offensive foreign policy, seeking undisputed predominance in Asia. By 2015, such a China could be seeking to become a truly global power.”

 

Japan.  2015: Power and Progress. 
Edited by Patrick M. Cronin.  National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies, 1996.

It seems certain that Japan would enjoy security and strength in 2015.  But there are uncertainties over trade imbalances that raise concerns about the duration of the American-Japanese security relationship.  Also, it is possible that China will be a major economic and military power in fewer than 20 years and thus be a threat to Japan.  Japan has an aging population that might cause the decline of Japan in the face of a youthful China. This book contains extensive research into trends and driving forces in the Japan, then provides detailed scenarios illustrating conflict possibilities in the region.  Scenario summaries follow.   

Scenario 1.  Japan, an American Ally.  “Japan might remain allied to the United States, but the partnership would probably be a far more equal one -- although still probably not more symmetrical in 2015.  In cooperation with its ally, Japan might have acquired a theater anti-missile defense system and could maintain a reconnaissance satellite system.  The American naval presence in the Western Pacific could have relatively diminished capability nest to that of the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force. Japan may not have any other formal military alliances, but it probably would have close ties to the ASEAN states and would cooperate militarily with several of them, especially Thailand and Indonesia.  Japanese-Australian security cooperation could also be close.  And, depending on the challenge posed by either Russia or China, Japan could even have a cooperative military relationship with Seoul.”  

Scenario 2. A Renationalized Japan.  “For a variety of reasons, the US-Japan security relationship might not survive until 2015.  Under such circumstances, Japan would have to see to its own defense.  So long as the American-Japanese relationship was not a hostile one and Japan did not feel particularly threatened by Russia or China, Japanese rearmament might be held within moderate limits, at least at first.  But the very fact that Japan had decoupled from the United States might create great fear in East Asia and prompt a regional arms buildup.  In turn, particularly if Korean and Chinese armament levels upset Japanese public opinion, a full-scale arms race might break out in East Asia.  Japan and China might seek allies against each other and all Asia might be divided into two mutually hostile coalitions.”   

Scenario 3. Japan, A Great Power.  “Japan might retain its alliance with the United States but still pursue far more autonomous foreign and security policies than it has over the past 50 years.  Suspicions about anti-Japanese feelings in the United States, anti-American feelings in Japan, trade friction, fear that the United States might come to see China as a more valuable partner than Japan, increased Japanese national pride, and a sense that American society was slowly decaying might all combine to lessen Japanese respect for the United States and raise doubts about its reliability.  But the Japanese are prudent--they might consider the continuation of the American-Japanese security relationship useful for the moment and dangerous to end abruptly.  At the same time, the Japanese might take steps to allow them to break with the United States and provide for their own defense, if necessary.”

 

An Address to the Council. 
Author: Ben Bova. Chapter from The World of 2044 -  Technological Development and the Future of Society  edited by Charles Sheffield, Marceto Alonso, and Morton A. Kaplan.  Paragon House St. Paul, Minnesota.  A global governance scenario to 2044.

The context of this scenario is an address to the World Council in the mid-21st Century.  The environment has suffered degradation on a wide scale, and the world just recovered from the “70 year Petroleum Wars” in which politics and military combat was driven by the desperation of poor people struggling for a scant slice of the world’s resources.  The war ended , thanks largely to the dedication of the United Nation’s   International Peacekeeping Force and to the scientists who made nuclear fusion power more efficient.  An international tax is proposed to the World Council based on the ratio of each individual nation’s gross national product (GNP) in comparison to the mean GNP of all the nations.  Thus, the very richest nations would pay the largest tax, while the very poorest nations would have a negative tax, which means  receiving income from the tax fund.  The purpose of the tax is to establish long-term programs to improve economies.  “Thus, the rich nations would pay to make the poor nations richer.”

 

The United Nations: Policy and Financing Alternatives: Innovative Proposals by Visionary Leaders.
Edited by Harland Cleveland, Hazel Henderson, and Inge Kaul.  Futures  May, 1995. U.S. Edition 1996, The Global Commission to Fund the UN, Washington, D.C. Useful to scenario work.

“Capital markets and world trade become more democratic, orderly, truly efficient, and socially and environmentally responsible.  Reveals how prices can reflect true costs through fees on use of global common resources, taxes on arms shipments, speculation, waste and pollution, and how such new international agreements can provide new revenue streams for a restructured United Nations and finance equitable, sustainable, human development.”

Contributors include: Keith Bezanson, Emilio Cardenas, Robert Cassani, Erskine Childers, Oliver Giscard d’Estaing, Jo Marie Griesgraber, Alan F. Kay, John Langmore MP, Ruben Mendez, Morris Miller, and Maurice Strong. 

This book is as indispensable to policy-makers, academics and NGOs as it is to finance ministers. 

 

The World 2010: A Decline of Superpower Influence.
Author: Charles W. Taylor. Carlisle Barracks PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, July 1986/51p. A world power scenario to 2010.

The superpowers that once dominated the world in the 20th Century have lost substantial power and influence.  New alliances of nations are forming and increasing, contributing to more intense competitive pressures and the possibility of armed conflict is ever present.   This scenario plausibly describes linkages of events to show that there has been no World War since World War II., and no major depression since the early part of the 20th Century.  By 2010, global population has increased to 7 billion people and the global financial integration trend continues to thrive strongly, creating more interdependence among nations, as well as new economic arrangements.  The US was once the only leader and superpower of the world in 1997, but by 2010, the US lost its economic, political, and military influence substantially.  In spite of this, the U.S. remains the most powerful nation in the world.  This scenario misses the demise of the USSR, one of the countries described as less competitive on the world scene.  The author goes on to describe that the world  in 2010 as a progressive realignment to a new order of nations within five very distinct groups:  postindustrial (US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand), advanced industrial (Israel, South Arica, Taiwan), transitioning industrial (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico), industrial (China, Cuba, Philippines, South Korea, USSR), pre-industrial (all others, including the once-wealthy oil and resource-rich countries).  

 

Fraternity Reigns. 
Author: Richard Rorty.  New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1996.  A conflict scenario to the year 2044.

A scenario that tells the story of a world where the breakdown of democratic institutions during the Dark Years of 2014-2044 led to a painful recovery  that forever changed  the political vocabulary, sense of moral order, and economic order.  In 2044, the atrocities of the have have-not gap that were taken for granted in the late 20th to early 21st century,  have virtually disappeared since the violent revolutions arose to  teach the stern lesson that we cannot be dominated simply by “rights.”  It goes beyond rights – it goes into the realm of fraternity.   “During the first part of the 21st century, the pressures of a globalized world economy, the gap between most Americans incomes and those of the lucky one-third at the top widened.  Looking back, we think how easy it would have been for our great grandfathers to have forestalled the social collapse that resulted from these economic pressures. They could have insisted that all classes had to confront the new global economy together.”  The scenario illustrates America rebuilding herself slowly; Europe is ahead of the world, mainly because this region had a substantial welfare system in place.

 

SDI: What Could Happen: 8 Possible Star Wars Scenarios.
Author: John Rhea.  Harrisburg PA: Stackpole Books, July 1988/136.  Eight star wars scenarios to 21st century.

The author writes about the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) and portrays eight scenarios on the future of SDI.  These scenarios are portrayed as imaginary news articles from various newspapers and journals.   Scenarios range from the story of a  fatal flaw resulting in full-scale nuclear war to the complete cancellation of SDI.   Of interest is a scenario of a December 1999  article in IEEE Spectrum titled,  National Academy of Sciences Warns of Perils from Continuing ‘Star Wars’ Research,  in which the molecular engineering research that was originally launched under the SDI initiative (canceled five years ago), has created little nano-computers, originally designated to be “bio-chips” for new seventh generation computers, but they went out of control, and are capable of self-replication and wiping out all life on the planet.  “The problem, according to the Academy, is there is no assurance that the growth process of self-replication can be stopped once it begins.”  According to the article, the National Academy of Sciences report was “quietly being circulated among high level government officials.” 

 

A Nightmare.
Author: Morton A. Kaplan. Article from The World of 2044 - Technological Development and the Future of Society  edited by Charles Sheffield, Marceto Alonso, and Morton A. Kaplan.  Paragon House St. Paul, Minnesota.  World scenario to 2044.

Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984  wrote about anti-utopias in which ever present social controls would change the nature of man and of society.  A Nightmare  scenario by Kaplan proposes that in the mid-21st Century, it is technologically feasible to increase vast social controls to control the vulnerabilities of modern complex society. “Although modern complex society has both greater instantaneous and long-range flexibility than simpler societies, it also has less redundancy and more bottlenecks that could affect the whole society.  Thus, major interruptions that overwhelm its instantaneous or short-run flexibility to get a chance to work, might cause great damage to the society.”  In this scenario, Kaplan describes a disrupted complex society susceptible to deliberate terrorist attacks accompanied by blackmail, organized crime, nuclear weapons in the hands of criminals, and conspiracies capable of bringing civil government to a halt.   Vast social control becomes necessary to overcome terrorism.   This scenario balances the choice between two nightmares: terrorism or vast social control in the “big brother” sense.

 

Alternative Futures for the State Courts of 2020. 
Authors: Jim Dator and Sharon J. Rodgers   Chicago, IL: American Judicature Society, July 1991/206p.  Seven scenarios of U.S. state courts to 2020.

Seven Scenarios sketched on what may happen to state courts in 2020. 

Scenario 1.) Judicial Leadership: State courts fill a leadership vacuum. Improvements in education and recruitment of judges and innovative adoption of technology by the courts lead people to put more faith in the judicial system. 

Scenario 2.) Generic Justice: all government sectors shrink except the military. Scarce resources retard adoption of technology and lower quality of judicial administration; nonetheless, an abundance of lawyers spurs proliferation of tort and product liability cases. 

Scenario 3.) Road Warrior: characterized by apocalyptic environmental collapse and global depression. Frontier justice prevails a la the Road Warrior and Mad Max movies. 

Scenario 4.) Multi‑Door Courthouse: centers on the rise of alternative dispute resolution, which saves a court system choking on a backlog of cases, and alternative corrective techniques, which includes substantial decriminalization and a move to education‑based approaches.

Scenario 5.) Global High‑Tech: involves the heavy adoption of technology, including electronic direct democracy and a flourishing of artificial intelligence. Robots are added to a United Beings Declaration of Rights. 

Scenario 6.) Super Surveillance: characterized by technology being used for surveillance, control, and the denial of human rights.  Biological technologies, including cloning, are also used as tools of power and control, leading to the “Gene Wars.” 

Scenario 7.) Green and Feminist: steps in following the collapse of capitalism. Communities flourish as the nation‑state declines. Society emphasizes removing root causes of crime and the judiciary emphasizes rehabilitation.

Scenarios of State Government in the Year 2010.
Authors: Thomas Bonnett & Robert L. Olson Council of Governors’ Policy Advisors, 1993.  Three scenarios of state government in the year 2010.

The Institute for Alternative Futures conducted a study of state governments for the Council of Governor’s Policy Advisors.  After surveying trends and driving forces, the following scenarios were constructed.  The original paper is rich in detail. 

Scenario 1.) The Entrepreneurial State: “State governments have become lean and efficient. Most agencies and programs have clear missions and priorities.  Accountability measures have been developed that focus on both social benefits (effectiveness) and program costs (efficiency).  State governments use of various strategies to improve their performance and the quality of services; privatization, decentralized management, market-based incentives and user fees,, and broadly dispersed technology.” 

Scenario 2.) The Withering State: “State governments have become much smaller than they were during the 1980s.  They retain direct responsibility for the criminal justice system, transportation, and public health; but they provide relatively few direct services and often not of high quality.  State governments resemble holding companies; formula grants to localities constitute most of their budgets; they also contact with providers, communities, and nonprofit organizations to provide services.” 

Scenario 3.) The Restructured State: “State governments in the year 2010 have primary responsibility for education, health services, housing, community and economic development, employment and training, social services, airports, and roads. Moreover, they are excelling at assuming these broad responsibilities, demonstrating high levels of planning, coordination, and management. Additional public resources combined with the elimination of federal regulations for hundreds of categorical programs have given state officials and managers tremendous flexibility and autonomy in shaping domestic policy and in designing programs creatively.”

 

European Security Beyond the Cold War: Four Scenarios for the Year 2010.
Author: Adrian Hyde-Price of the University of South Hampton, Sage Publications, June 1991/272p. Four European security scenarios to 2010.

A study of the underlying structural dynamics of European interrelationships.  The implications are examined in a set of scenarios. 

Scenario 1.) NATO and an ‘Atlanticist’ Europe:  NATO has adapted to the demands of the post-Cold War world and had developed into one of the central institutions of the new Europe;  its view of European security is mostly Anglo-American and politically conservative. 

Scenario 2.)  A West European Defense Community :  the European security system has changed much more radically than scenario 1, with the emergence of a “West European Defense Community” as an alternative to an ‘Atlanticist’ Europe based on NATO, which is declining.  

Scenario 3.)  The CSCE and a Pan-European Collective Security System:  a pan-European system of collective security is established, based on an institutional CSCE, with an institutional ensemble—a CSCE Parliamentary Assembly; regular meetings of heads of state and government, and of foreign and other ministers; many specialist agencies; and its core, a European Security Council. 

Scenario 4.) : L’Europe des Etats : describes a Europe without cohesive blocs, military alliances or multilateral security structures and thus is different from the other three scenarios, which characterize an ‘architectural’ structure - solidity, stability, firmness and order.  In this case, the ‘European idea’ does not assume institutional form, and the value of supranational forms of integration is low.  Thus, a new European security system will be established on the continued centrality and vitality of the nation-state, without superpower hegemony and bipolar bloc structures. 

 

Pentagon Imagines New Enemies To Fight in Post-Cold-War Era.
Author: Patrick E. Tyler, The New York Times, Monday, 17 Feb 1992, p1.  Seven war scenarios to the 21st century.

This article was based on some 70 pages of a classified Pentagon document.  There was concern that the Pentagon was inventing a menu of alarming war scenarios to prevent further cancellation of forces or reductions of weapons.  The article outlines seven scenarios.  

Scenario 1.) Panama: Right wing elements allied with Colombian drug traffickers mount a coup against Panama’s civilian leaders, threatening th