Earlier this month the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the United States publicly released its report, “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”*. This is the fifth instalment of an exercise conducted every four years with the primary goal of providing the US intelligence and political community with a framework for thinking about the medium-range future. The report draws upon a wide range of consultations within and outside the US (including with think tanks in India) and is released in the brief period between the presidential election (in November) and the president’s inauguration the following January. While the NIC reports to the Director of National Intelligence, who is located in the White House, its goal is to provide policy makers with the best information for decision making irrespective of official US policy.
The structure of the Global Trends 2030 report is straightforward. It first describes four “megatrends”: drivers of global society and politics that are already evident and are likely to persist and to intensify. These are individual empowerment; diffusion of power; demographic patterns; and the stresses of the “food, water and energy nexus”.
Against these relatively certain megatrends, the report juxtaposes six “game-changers”: sources of uncertainty that will powerfully shape the global order. These six are: a crisis-prone global economy; a “governance gap” as governments and institutions, both domestic and international, struggle to cope with the pace of change; the potential for increased conflict as relative power shifts around the world; wider scope for regional instability, particularly in the Middle East and South Asia; the impact of new technologies; and the role of the United States itself, where the question is whether the US will be able to work with new partners to reinvent the international system.
The report blends the megatrends and the game-changers to sketch four potential worlds in 2030. The most plausible worst case, the report labels “Stalled Engines”. The US draws inward, globalisation stalls or retreats, and conflict increases. A reasonable analogy is with the world of the 1930s, when global leadership had not fully passed from Britain to the US, and the world retreated into destructive beggar-thy-neighbour policies in trade and finance. A more sinister example would be 1914 when the leading countries went to war despite deep financial and trading links and political linkages through their royal families.
The polar opposite, the most plausible best case it christens “Fusion”, where the US and China find ways to run the world together, the world of the much-feared (in India, at any rate) “G2”. The report also outlines two more radical possibilities. One describes a world where governments are increasingly eclipsed by non-state actors, not just for ill (eg terrorism) but also to deal with global challenges (such as the environment) where states are simply not able to deliver the goods. The second world is one where growing inequality within and between states destroys state legitimacy and also undermines any shared vision of common global purpose.
Scenario exercises such as Global Trends 2030 are best thought of as applications of structured imagination, and as such there are no established criteria to assess their quality. As someone engaged in the same trade (as a member of Shell’s scenario team), I personally am inclined to apply two tests. The first is to ask if the scenarios are too constrained by present reality; the second is whether they provide a sufficiently rich language to think about the future in one’s area of interest.
In applying the first of these criteria, it is useful to “backcast”, in order to see how the world has changed over an equivalent span in the recent past. 2030 is as close to 2013 as is 1996. While that doesn’t seem all that long ago, it has encompassed the end of the “unipolar” moment for the US, 9/11, withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China and the relative decline of Japan, and most spectacularly the loss of prestige, credibility and confidence provoked by the financial crisis in the advanced countries. On the social media and technology front, these past 17 years have seen the democratisation of telephonic mobility and the rise of giant global, largely unregulated mechanisms of communication such as Facebook and Twitter with at least a short-term impact on the exercise of political power.
As for the criterion of usefulness, the NIC exercise is avowedly designed with a US-centric focus, to illuminate both conventional and unconventional strategic threats that the US is likely to encounter. It is, however interesting to examine whether the framework, language and insights of the report are sufficiently rich and general to be applicable to the Indian context.
This brings me to events in Delhi as recent as the past week, when I have been back in India on holiday. Three separate and apparently unrelated events struck a resonance in my mind with the framework of the NIC report. The first was the public outcry and outrage at the official response to the awful case of rape on a Delhi bus. This exemplified the individual empowerment stressed in the report (in that the discontent seemed to spread primarily through social media, although the organised Delhi press also played an important role). It also illustrated the governance gap theme of the report, in that none of the organised political or bureaucratic structures seemed able to address the anger and frustration of those assembled at India Gate.
The second event was the celebration of Indo-Asean ties with the visit of virtually all heads of government, and the conclusion of the India-Asean negotiations on a services agreement to complement the goods agreement signed earlier. Critics might rightly argue that these agreements are diluted of content to the point that they are primarily symbolic. But symbolism does matter, and together with its partnership agreements with South Korea and Japan, India is on the way to creating a framework that would allow it, in time, to become a core player in Asian economic integration.
The third event was the reduction in the 12th Plan growth rate to eight per cent, announced at the meeting of the National Development Council on December 27. While perhaps inevitable, this does increase the difficulty of India’s closing the gap on China and becoming an equal player in the Asian space, to retain its own strategic autonomy for its own economic and political development. In brief, many if not most of the themes of the NIC report have relevance for India, and I, for one, feel it offers a useful framework for thinking about the formidable ecological, strategic and governance challenges that await us.
*http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/GlobalTrends_2030.pdf
The writer is chief economist, Shell International.
These views are his own
