No more them and us, with a farewell to American supremacy — China to be biggest beneficiary of change, with wealth moving from West to East and nations competing for scarce resources, writes Julian Borger
The view of the world presented by the United States’s leading intelligence organisation, the National Intelligence Council (NIC), lacks the black and white, us and them, good and evil clarity of the Bush years. It is a place of competing centres of power, scarce resources and countless potential shocks to the system.
Most importantly, in a conclusion likely to be contested by Washington’s remaining neo-conservatives, the NIC report declares the end of American supremacy.
‘A less dominant power’
“By 2025 the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power continuing to narrow between developed and developing countries,” says the NIC report, entitled A Transformed World.
That is a dramatic shift away from the “unipolar moment” the United States was said to enjoy after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. That moment has now passed, the NIC concludes. Barack Obama’s Democrats claim it was squandered by the hubris of the Bush administration. But whatever the cause, they are stuck with the consequences.
The US’s loss of clout relative to the rest of the world will be military as well as economic. The US may continue to field the world’s most formidable military force in 2025, but the NIC warns future commanders in chief that “advances by others in science and technology, expanded adoption of irregular warfare tactics by both state and non-state actors, proliferation of long-range precision weapons, and growing use of cyber warfare attacks increasingly will constrict US freedom of action”.
The rise of China
The biggest winner in the coming multipolar age will be China, according to the report. “China is poised to have more impact on the world over the next 20 years than any other country,” it predicts. On present trends China will have the world’s second largest economy by 2025 and could well be the largest importer of natural resources and the biggest polluter. It will be a leading military power, with a considerable navy to protect the sea lanes that deliver its raw materials, and at the same time wield hi-tech asymmetric tools.
A US congressional panel claimed last month that China was already practising its cyber warfare skills.
The triumph of the Western democratic model in doubt
The shift from a unipolar world to one contested by several global powers has taken the form of a transfer of wealth from West to East that is unprecedented in its scale and speed, the NIC says. That transfer has been driven by high oil prices which have enriched producers in the Gulf and Russia, and the relentless drift of manufacturing to the low-wage economies of China and the rest of Asia.
That eastward movement has also entailed a shift in the world economy’s centre of gravity from free-market capitalism to state-run structures. “For the most part, China, India and Russia are not following the Western liberal model for self-development but instead are using a different model, ‘state capitalism’,” the report says.
In a straight repudiation of the neo-conservative creed, it states there is nothing “pre-ordained” about the advance of Western democracy, at least in the medium term. In the long run, it suggests that once states such as China and Russia can no longer meet the expectations of their middle classes, the push for democracy might gather strength, but so might the drift towards nationalism and xenophobia.
State collapse and the failure of international institutions
The NIC report predicts that there will be more Somalias — failed and lawless states. As power flows between nations, there will be another shift in some parts of the world: from the state to “nonstate actors” such as corporations, tribes, religious groups and criminal gangs.
“Several countries could even be ‘taken over’ and run by criminal networks. In areas of Africa or south Asia, states as we know them might wither away, owing to the inability of governments to provide for basic needs, including security,” the report warns.
Pulled apart by conflicts over increasingly scarce water, food and fuel, states will begin to implode, and the international organisations such as the UN that are supposed to act as referees do not seem to be up to the job of dealing with this new world.
“Global institutions that could help the world deal with these transnational issues and, more generally, mitigate the risks of rapid change appear incapable of rising to the challenges without concerted efforts from their leaders,” the NIC says.
Obama wants to renew the push for UN reform to make it more relevant to the 21st century, but the experience of earlier would-be reformers suggests that the organisation’s institutional inertia is formidable.
New conflicts driven by climate change and scarcity
The report envisages the return of a type of conflict “we have not seen for a while”: the battle over resources. As energy supplies are perceived to be more endangered, states could go to war in an attempt to secure exclusive access. One possibility raised by the NIC is a conflict between China and India, two fast-growing economies competing for finite raw materials and energy. Lack of water and declining crops caused by global warming can also fuel conflicts within weakening states in Africa. In that sense Darfur, where nomads and farmers have clashed over resources, could be a sign of things to come.
A new arms race in the Middle East
The NIC does not believe Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons is inevitable, but the perception that the Islamic Republic is getting close to acquiring the bomb could lead other Middle East states to pursue their own nuclear ambitions, sparking a dangerous arms race.
The mostly stable mutual deterrent relationship that kept the Cold War cold may not work in the Middle East, the report warns.
“Episodes of low-intensity conflict taking place under a nuclear umbrella could lead to an unintended escalation and broader conflict if clear red lines between those states involved are not well established,” it says.
Demographics and the ageing of the West
Underlying the eastward shift of power is the ageing of the West. The world’s population is expected to grow from 6,8-billion to eight billion in 2025, and almost all that growth will take place in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with only 3% in the West.
The US, with its high rate of immigration, will be a partial exception, but the greying of Europe and Japan will increasingly hobble countries’ economies, as fewer and fewer working-age adults support the massed ranks of pensioners.
“By 2010 there will be about one senior for every four working-age people in the developed word. By 2025 this ratio will have climbed to one to three or possibly higher,” the report says.
By contrast, “youth bulges” in the nations of Africa’s Mahgreb region, Iran and Lebanon will mature into “worker bulges” before dissipating rapidly, giving those countries some added economic propulsion.
In troubled corners of the world such as the West Bank and Gaza, Iraq, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, the youth bulges are expected to persist, along with high unemployment, and more “volatility and violence”.
Blowing away certainties
What’s striking about the National Intelligence Council’s assessment of global trends is not just that it repudiates the fundamental tenets of George W Bush’s foreign policy — it does so in such a matter-of-fact way, write Alex Evans and David Steven.
Just four years ago the NIC declared globalisation irreversible and assumed ongoing American supremacy. Energy supplies were plentiful; climate change hardly mentioned. Terrorism was the main challenge the United States faced.
Now these certainties have been blown away. Instead of unipolarity, multipolarity is explicitly recognised. Shocks, whether natural or manmade, are taken for granted.
Above all, the NIC identifies scarcity — of land, water, oil and food and ‘airspace” for carbon emissions — as the hallmark of tomorrow’s world. Where the Bush administration regarded the American way of life as non-negotiable, this report concedes that a fundamental economic, social and cultural shift is now required.
But can we pull this off? Read the report and you’re left with persistent doubts that the world, and especially the US, is capable of changing fast enough. The NIC recognises that an energy transition away from oil and gas needs to be ‘completed” by 2025. But the US president elect, Barack Obama, expects US emissions to be barely below 1990 levels by then.
Ongoing turbulence will make it harder to focus on long-term changes. Recent weeks have seen much chatter about a second Bretton Woods, a gathering of states to rescue the world’s economy from its woes. But what if we have not yet reached 1944? What if we’re still in 1914, when the world’s first period of globalisation was about to end to be replaced by 30 years of upheaval, depression and conflict?
This then is the challenge facing Obama. Can he help lead a period of renewal, even as the world continues to face massive stress? The problem cannot be tackled incrementally. Multiple systems — financial, economic, energy, security and more — now need to be overhauled. Obama and other national leaders should use this report to challenge the fragmentation and incoherence at the heart of their governments. —