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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Intelligence says more
about now than future By Tom
Engelhardt
That was, of course, before the
Pentagon began planning for the weaponry of 2020,
2035, and 2050; before war turned nuclear and so,
with the exception of two cities in 1945, could
only be "fought" in think tanks via futuristic
scenario writing. It was before the leaders of the
sole superpower were so overcome by hubris that
they began to suspect the future, like the
present, might indeed be theirs.
And yet
the future is, and remains, everyone's, always.
Until it actually comes to pass, your guess is as
good as the CIA's or the NIC's. Probably better.
They may, in fact, be the worst
possible candidates to write
about the future. Even when they know the rap
against them - as laid out in Global Trends
2030, their inability to let go of
"continuities" for "discontinuities and crises" -
it doesn't matter.
They simply can't bring
themselves to think outside the box. They don't
dare surprise themselves, no less give the future
its surprising due, even though - my own guess -
ours is likely to be a world increasingly filled
with those discontinuities. The rise of China, the
collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Arab Spring, the
eruption of both the Tea Party and the Occupy
Movement, even the tiniest of unexpected trapdoors
in history - like Paula Broadwell taking down
America's "greatest" general - are conceptually
beyond them. Surprise is their poison. They would
prefer to palm a few cards and play from the
bottom of the deck rather than acknowledge that
the future just isn't theirs.
Apocalypse when? The early years
of the George W Bush era proved a visionary, if
quite mad, moment. That was when Washington blew a
hole in the oil heartlands of the planet and may
have launched the Arab Spring. More recently,
policymaking has been firmly restored to an
administration of managers and the American
imperial imagination, such as it was, began to
atrophy. Global Trends 2030 reflects that
all-American reality, which is why it's less like
entering the future than getting a guided tour of
the airless corridors of Washington's collective
mind as 2013 begins.
Of course, the future
is an impossibly tricky thing to guide anyone
through. Take China, for example. No one would
claim its rise isn't a fact of world historical
importance. Still, I think it would be fair to say
that, from the beginning of the 19th century to
the end of the 20th, an individual who accurately
predicted the next bizarre and spectacular twist
in China's path to the future would have been
laughed out of any roomful of experts: the
collapse of imperial China, the improbable rise of
Mao Zedong's communist movement out of the chaos
of invasion and civil war, or - most improbable of
all - the creation by China's Communist Party,
after a decade of startling radicalism and
extremism, of an unprecedented capitalist
powerhouse (slated, as Global Trends 2030
points out, to pass the US as the globe's leading
economy by 2030, if not earlier).
So why
should anyone imagine that, when it comes to
China, present trends can simply be extrapolated
into the future? And yet so it goes for the folks
of Global Trends 2030, who project a more
daring than usual series of scenarios for that
country, ranging from cooperation with the US in
hegemonic regional harmony to growing nationalism
and "adventurism" abroad to (an extreme
improbability, as they see it) an economic
"collapse" scenario that shocks the global
economy.
Still, let's take one prominent
fact of Chinese history, which the analysts of the
National Intelligence Council ignore (although
China's leaders are deeply aware of it or they
wouldn't have moved to suppress the Falun Gong
sect or, more recently, a Christian cult of the
Mayan apocalypse). Under stress, China has a
unique revolutionary tradition. For at least a
couple of thousand years, in bad times huge
peasant rebellions, often fed by syncretic
religious cults, have swept out of the Chinese
interior to threaten the country: the Yellow
Turbans, the White Lotus, the Taipings of the
mid-19th century, and most recently Mao's own
movement, among others.
Already today, in
economically upbeat times, China has tens of
thousands of "mass incidents" a year in which
citizens protest polluting factories, peasants
take over local villages, and so on. If the
Chinese economy takes a major hit between now and
2030, amid growing economic corruption and
increasing inequality, who knows what might
actually happen?
With the rarest of
exceptions, however, the authors of Global
Trends 2030 relegate the shock of the future
to outlier "black swans" like a pandemic that
could kill millions or solar geomagnetic storms
that knock out satellite systems and the global
electric grid (a scenario the writers of NBC's hit
show Revolution got to well ahead of the
NIC's experts). Otherwise, when it comes to a
truly disjunctive world, for better or worse,
forget it in Global Trends 2030.
I
don't think I'm atypical and yet I can imagine
worse than they seem capable of describing without
even blinking, starting with a full-scale,
gob-smack global depression. In fact, if you have
an apocalyptic turn of mind, all you need to do is
look at the information they supply - some of
which their analysts consider good news - and it's
easy enough to grasp what a truly extreme world we
may be entering.
They tell us, for
instance, that "the world has consumed more food
than it has produced in seven of the last eight
years" (a trend they hope will be reversed by the
genetic modification of food crops); that water is
running short ("by 2030 nearly half the world's
population will live in areas with severe water
stress"); that demand for energy will rise by
about 50% in the coming 15 to 20 years; and that
greenhouse gases, entering the atmosphere as if
there were no tomorrow, are expected to double by
mid-century.
By their estimate, in 2030
there will be 8.3 billion high-end omnivores
rattling around this planet and more than a
billion of them, possibly two billion, will have
entered some abysmally degraded version of "the
middle class". That is, there will be more car
drivers, more meat-eaters, more product buyers.
Throw in climate change - and the
"success" of fracking in keeping us on a fossil
fuels diet for decades to come - and tell me you
can't imagine the odd apocalyptic scenario or two,
and a few shocking surprises as well.
A
wishing well on the global mall Think of
Global Trends 2030 as a portrait of an
aging, overweight Intelligence Community (and the
academic hangers-on who work with them) incapable
of seeing the world as it is, let alone as it
might be. The National Intelligence Council
evidently never met an apocalypt or a dreamer it
didn't want to avoid. Its movers and shakers
seemingly never considered putting together a
panel of sci-fi writers, and in all their travels
they evidently never stopped in Uruguay and paid a
visit to the radical writer Eduardo Galeano, or
even consulted his 1998 book Upside Down: A
Primer for the Looking-Glass World.
At
one point, discussing global consumerism - and
remember this was the year after the first Global
Trends report came out - he wrote:
"Consumer society is a booby trap.
Those at the controls feign ignorance, but
anybody with eyes in his head can see that the
great majority of people necessarily must
consume not much, very little, or nothing at all
in order to save the bit of nature we have left.
Social injustice is not an error to be
corrected, nor is it a defect to be overcome; it
is an essential requirement of the system. No
natural world is capable of supporting a mall
the size of the planet ... [If] we all consumed
like those who are squeezing the earth dry, we'd
have no world left."
With the rising
powers of "the South" and "the East", we'll now
have a chance to see for ourselves, perhaps by
2030, just how accurate Galeano might have been
about the fate of this ever more crowded, ever
more resource-pressed, ever hotter and more
tumultuous planet of ours. We might learn up close
and personal just what it means to add a billion
or two extra "middle class" consumers at such a
moment. By then, perhaps we'll be able to take our
pick from extremities of all sorts, ranging from
old standbys like revolution or fascism to new
ones that we can't even imagine today.
But
don't read Global Trends 2030 to find out
about that. After all, the nightmare of every
bureaucracy is surprise. We're not spending $75
billion on "intelligence" and giving up what were
once classic American rights and liberties to
encounter a bunch of unsettling surprises. No
wonder the NIC folks can't bear to imagine a
fuller range of what might be coming. The
Washington bubble is too comfortable, the rest too
frightening. They may be living off our fear, but
don't kid yourself for a second, they're afraid
too, or they could never produce a document like
Global Trends 2030.
As a portrait
of American power gone remarkably blind, deaf, and
dumb in a world roaring toward 2030, it provides
the rest of us with the functional definition of
the group of people least likely to offer
long-term security to Americans.
Boil it
all down, in fact, and you have a single,
all-too-clear New Year's wish from the US
Intelligence Community: please, please, please
make 2013, 2014, 2015 ... and 2030 not so
different from 2012!
Tom
Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire
Project and author of The United States of
Fear as well as The End of Victory
Culture, his history of the Cold War, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest
book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is
Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone
Warfare, 2001-2050.
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