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What did strategic foresight reveal about Russia’s future a decade ago?
Russia’s brazen invasion of the Ukraine has shaken the international order. The vicious attack is jarring, even if we have known for years that this day could come. In 2014, Vladimir Putin wrote that “Kiev is the mother of Russian cities.” Days before the attack he issued ominous statements like, “modern Ukraine was entirely and fully created by Russia.” He has now sent in the troops to bring it into the Russian empire.
Among the U.S. government agencies tracking Russia and security-related developments worldwide is the National Intelligence Council (NIC). The NIC serves as a bridge between the U.S. intelligence and policy communities, a source of substantive expertise on intelligence issues, and a facilitator of intelligence community collaboration and outreach.
Every four years, the NIC publishes the output of an extensive strategic foresight exercise. In December 2012, it released Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds to stimulate thinking about the future by identifying critical trends and potential discontinuities. The “sweet spot” for foresight studies is exploring plausible scenarios ten or more years into the future. It has now been about a decade since that NIC report was under preparation. What did it perceive in Russia’s future?
