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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Intelligence says more
about now than future
By Tom
Engelhardt
Think of it as a simple
formula: if you've been hired (and paid
handsomely) to protect what is, you're going to be
congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might
be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours
of the future but to plant the Stars and Stripes
in that future has had the US Intelligence
Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s.
That was the moment when it first occurred
to some in Washington that US power might be
capable of controlling just about everything worth
the bother globally for, if not an eternity, then
long enough to make the future American property.
Ever since, every few years the National
Intelligence Council
(NIC), the IC's "center for
long-term strategic analysis", has been intent on
producing a document it calls serially "Global
Trends [fill in the future year]". The latest
edition, out just in time for Barack Obama's
second term, is Global Trends 2030.
Here's one utterly predictable thing about
it: it's bigger and more elaborate than Global
Trends 2025. And here's a prediction that,
hard as it is to get anything right about the
future, has a 99.9% chance of being accurate: when
Global Trends 2035 comes out, it'll be
bigger and more elaborate yet. It'll cost more and
still, like its predecessor, offer a hem for every
haw, a hedge for every faintly bold possibility, a
trap-door escape from any prediction that might
not stick.
None of this should be
surprising. In recent years, with a US$75 billion
collective budget, the IC, that historically
unprecedented labyrinth of 17 intelligence
agencies and outfits, has been one of Washington's
major growth industries. In return for almost
unfettered funding and a more-than-decade-long
expansion of its powers, it's promised one thing
to the American people: safety, especially from
"terrorism". As part of a national security
complex that has benefitted enormously from a
post-9/11 lockdown of the country and the creation
of a permanent war state, it also suffers from the
classic bureaucratic disease of bloat.
So
no one should be shocked to discover that its
forays into an anxiety-producing future, which
started relatively modestly in 1997, have turned
into ever more massive operations. In this fifth
iteration of the series, the authors have given
birth to a book-length paean to the future and its
dangers.
For this, they convened groups of
"experts" in too many American universities to
count, consulted too many individual academics to
name despite pages of acknowledgements, and held
"meetings on the initial draft in close to 20
countries". In other words, a monumental effort
was made to mount the future and reassure
Washington that, while a "relative economic
decline vis-a-vis the rising states is
inevitable", the coming decades might still prove
an American plaything (even if shared, to some
extent, with China and those rising powers).
Frack is the new crack Having
grown to immodest size, the "trends" in the
project's title were no longer faintly enough.
Instead, the language of Global Trends 2030
has bloated to match its mammoth pretensions.
These days to nail down the future for American
policymakers, you need Megatrends ("Individual
Empowerment", "Diffusion of Power"), Game-Changers
("Crisis-Prone Global Economy", "Governance Gap",
"Potential for Increased Violence"), Black Swans
("Severe Pandemic", "Much More Rapid Climate
Change", "A Reformed Iran"), and Tectonic Shifts
("Growth of the Global Middle Class",
"Unprecedented and Widespread Aging"), not to
speak of Potential Worlds or fictional futuristic
scenarios in which those Megatrends,
Game-Changers, Black Swans, and Tectonic Shifts
mix and match into possible futures.
Out
of this, what exactly have the mavens of American
intelligence, the representatives of the last
remaining global superpower, concluded?
Here would be my partial summary:
that we should expect the rise of nothing much
we don't already know about;
that various versions of the knowable present
can be accurately projected into the future;
that much depends on what happens to the
Earth's greatest state (with China nipping at its
heels) - whether, that is, with its "preponderance
across the board in most dimensions of power, both
'hard' and 'soft'", the US will remain a
benevolent "global security provider" or "global
policeman" of planetary stability or - disaster of
disasters - pull in on itself, creating a
declinist fortress America;
that the true American crisis might be a
decrease in military spending;
that odds are the global economy, with more
than a billion new "middle-class" consumers, could
do marginally better or worse;
that Iran might (or might not) build nuclear
weapons;
that global conflict could increase somewhat
(with an emphasis on resource wars) - or decline;
that the national state could hang in there
with something like its present power or lose some
of it to nongovernmental bodies and "smart
cities", and so on.
There are, however, a
few topics that seem to have gone MIA in the
National Intelligence Council's version of our
future world. You won't, for instance, find these
words emphasized in Global Trends
2030:
corporations - they seem to have no
role worth mentioning in the world of the future;
depression - yes, "recession," or even in
extremis "collapse," but not "global
depression," not even when the US is compared to
the planet's previous great imperial power, 19th
century Britain, and so to an era when depressions
were rife (a possible "great depression" gets a
single "low probability" mention);
imperial - since we're the only ...
ahem ... great you-know-what left, that's not an
appropriate word for the world of 2030;
revolution - oh, there was one of those
in 1848 and it can be mentioned, but despite the
fact that the globe has been convulsed by
unexpected uprisings and unforeseen movements in
recent years, in 2030, revolution is unimaginable;
capitalism - no need even to say it in
a world in which nothing else exists, and to use
it might imply that by 2030 another system of any
sort could arise to challenge it, which is, of
course, inconceivable;
Israeli nuclear weapons - why bring up
the Israeli nuclear arsenal, which actually exists
and will assumedly be there in 2030, when you can
focus on that fabulous black swan Iran and its (as
yet) nonexistent nuclear arsenal.
Finally, military base - undoubtedly a
perfectly acceptable term for the NIC in "Global
Trends 2040", once the Chinese establish a few of
them abroad. In the meantime, in a world in which
the US still has about 1,000 of them globally,
there's no point in bringing the subject up or
discussing the fate of Washington's historically
unprecedented garrisoning of the planet.
Nor in Global Trends 2030 will you
find a serious consideration of American military
power or Washington's penchant in recent years not
for guaranteeing stability but ensuring
instability, mayhem, and chaos in distant lands.
You'll find a section on drones, but not
on our drone wars and how they might play out in
2030. (Other verboten words now associated with
those wars are "assassination", "targeted killing,
"kill list". You'll find the Arab Spring discussed
in passing, but not the Indian Spring. (You know,
the one that occurred in 2023 in that youth-bulge
of a nation when rising expectations met economic
frustration.)
You'll read much about
resource problems and potential resource wars, but
not about the 800-pound gorilla in the global
room. The single looming crisis threatening the
well-being of the planet, climate change, while
certainly discussed in passing, is essentially
ducked on the grounds, it seems, that by 2030 it
won't really have hit yet. (Assumedly, none of the
group meetings the NIC called were held in the
parched US southwest, the drought-stricken
Midwest, or on the Jersey Coast since Hurricane
Sandy hit.)
You'll note that the thing
that makes our intelligence futurologists jump for
joy and gives them the equivalent of a drug high
is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to which
they return again and again. I kid you not. For
them, frack is the new crack, and if this document
(god save us) were ever made into a movie, it
might be called Frack to the Future. Yes,
in most of their future scenarios, fracking,
releasing all that "extreme energy", makes the US
energy independent, a natural gas exporter, and
practically ensures that 2030 will once again be
an American year! Yippee!
Time's
democracy Above all, the National
Intelligence Council's analysts have managed to
largely banish the single most essential,
unavoidable, and bracing aspect of the future:
surprise. That tells you far more about the
Washington world the authors inhabit than what may
happen in 2030. But before I get to that, give me
just a second to pat myself on the back.
After all, I've done you an enormous
favor. I've actually read Global Trends
2030 from its two-page "Dear reader" letter
from the chairman of the NIC and the report's
"executive summary" though its 136 two-columned
pages, and even its interminable acknowledgements.
And let me assure you, it's put together by
perfectly intelligent people and has some
interesting nuggets in it. The assembled crew has
even tried its hand at writing bits of futuristic
fiction and at least one of them, a "Marxist"
analysis "updated" for the 21st century, has some
passing entertainment value.
In the end,
though, the document, like the IC itself, is an
overblown artifact of Washington's own limitations
and fears. It's also mind-numbingly,
bone-blisteringly dull and repetitive, featuring
elaborate charts laying out what you've just read
as if you were simply too thick to take it in
paragraph by paragraph. It's exactly the sort of
thing that no bureaucratic collective should be
allowed to inflict on the great unknown, and that
no one raised on H G Wells, Arthur Clarke, Isaac
Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip Dick, Ursula Le Guin,
George Orwell, William Gibson, or for that matter,
Suzanne Collins should ever have to endure.
And yet, the strangeness of this project,
historically speaking, should get your attention.
Stop for a moment and think about time and the
state. States have traditionally had an urge to
control the past (sometimes working hard to gain a
monopoly on the writing of history). And - no
surprise here - most states have the urge to
control the present. But the future? The future is
time's democracy. No government can secure it. No
military can invade it. No intelligence agency can
embed its operatives in it.
This is why
the Global Trends series that originally
emerged from the increasingly self-confident world
of the "sole superpower" holds a certain
fascination. It represents a unique state foray
into the future, a singular attempt to corral and
possess it. Once upon a time, the distant future
was the province of utopian or dystopian thinkers,
pulp fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, even
cranks, but not government intelligence services.
Peering into it was, at its best, a movingly
strange individual adventure of the imagination,
whether you were reading Edward Bellamy or
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin or H G
Wells, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley.
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