Member-only story
Intelligence Strategists Peered into the Future. This is what they Found.
Every four years, strategic thinkers at the National Intelligence Council (NIC) assess the key trends and uncertainties that will shape the strategic environment for the United States over the next two decades. Then they make their analysis publicly available. Their latest assessment is found in the report, Global Trends 2040 — a More Contested World.
The NIC has constructed its analysis of the future in several stages. First, it explores structural forces in four core areas: demographics, environment, economics, and technology. These areas were selected because they are foundational in shaping future dynamics and relatively universal in scope, and because the NIC can offer projections with a reasonable degree of confidence based on available data and evidence.
Next, the report examines how these structural forces interact and intersect with other factors to affect emerging dynamics at three levels of analysis: individuals and society, states, and the international system. The analysis in this section involves a higher degree of uncertainty because of the variability of human choices that will be made in the future. The NIC focuses on identifying and describing the key emerging dynamics at each level, including what is driving them and how they might evolve over time. Finally, the third section…
