The world in 20 years

Manoj Joshi
Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation

The US National Intelligence Council’s 20-year forecast, released last month, makes for disquieting reading. Issued once in four years, the seventh edition of the Global Trends Report is coming out at a time when the world, and especially, the US is reeling from the consequences of the Covid pandemic, as well as deep social and political divisions in its society, something not very different from what we are experiencing back home in India.

The challenge for India will be to ensure that the young are provided adequate nutrition, healthcare and education. Failure to do so would result in large-scale social breakdowns.

Global Trends 2040 talks of scenarios that will shape the global environment in the next two decades and their implications for US national security. The NIC supports the Director of US National Intelligence and its focus is on longer-term strategic analysis. It relies on expert opinion in the US and abroad and is aimed at alerting policy makers and the broad policy community of the emerging developments. The report is not a simple prediction of what will happen in 20 years, but an examination of past and future trends, working out of scenarios of evolving developments, their dynamics and the key uncertainties ahead.

The experience of 2020 tells us that even the best forecasts can be upended by the black swans and grey rhinos on the path ahead. The former refers to highly improbable and unexpected events like the Covid pandemic, which impact on the unfolding of social and political trends. The latter are obvious and foreseeable events which we sometimes willfully ignore till they hit us, such as the global financial crisis of 2008 or climate change.

The report has identified four structural forces that are likely to shape the world — demographics, environment, economics and technology. Demographic trends are the easiest to predict and we know that the populations of well-off countries will age and even shrink in size. But areas like Sub Saharan Africa and South Asia will continue to show younger population profiles and their numbers will continue to grow.

There is an obvious challenge for countries like India which need to ensure that these young are provided adequate nutrition, healthcare and education. A failure to do so would result in large-scale social breakdowns. As it is, the World Bank has estimated that as many as 75 million people have slipped back into extreme poverty in India because of the pandemic.

An equally easy prediction is the impact of climate change whose burdens will be unevenly distributed around the world and result in social and political unrest. This is a classic grey rhino standing on the middle of the road ahead of us, and yet, we don’t seem to care as we drive on. Just three months ago, we had a President in the US who did not believe that there was any such thing as climate change.

India’s population, likely to overtake that of China by 2027, its geography, nuclear weapons and economic prospects make it a potential global power, but, says the report, ‘it remains to be seen whether New Delhi will achieve domestic development goals to allow it to project influence beyond South Asia.’ It says that India faces ‘serious governance, societal, environmental and defense challenges’ that will constrain how much it can invest in developing military and diplomatic capabilities for playing a larger global role.

Incidentally, whatever the high-flying rhetoric about India and the US being the world’s largest democracies, as far as the report is concerned, there are no ‘liberal democracies’ in South Asia as of 2020. India is presumably one of four ‘electoral autocracies’ in the region which hold free and fair multiparty elections, and guarantee freedom of speech and expression, ‘but do not uphold the rule of law and/or do not have constraints on the executive.’

The biggest black swan ahead is technology. This is also the fuzziest area to forecast. The next two decades will see increased global competition for ‘core elements of technological supremacy’ such as talent, knowledge, markets which could lead to a new crop of tech leaders and hegemons. The US has long used it as a tool of national power, but the next two decades will see increasing competition for the core elements and the competitor here is China.

Technology can help us mitigate climate change and disease, but it can also aggravate societal disruption as it is doing today by manipulating information on a large scale or through job displacement. The report forecasts that some technologies that are already showing their hand such as AI, biotechnology, smart materials and manufacturing, and ‘hyper connectivity’ could, in the next 20 years, have a transformative effect on the world.

As for the international system, the report forecasts that it will be ‘more contested, uncertain, and conflict prone.’ The US and China will have the greatest influence on global dynamics and their rivalry ‘will affect most domains’, reshaping today’s alliances, international organisations and the norms and rules that we call the international order. This competitive environment makes the risk of conflict more likely and deterrence more difficult.

Looking at the future, the report rolls out five alternative scenarios — a renaissance of democracies with the US in the lead, a world which is adrift where China is a leading, but not the dominant state, competitive coexistence where China and the US compete for leadership, separate silos where globalisation and countries are divided into ‘aatmanirbhar’ security and economic blocs. And finally, the possibility of ‘tragedy and mobilisation’ where a devastating global environmental crises and collapse leads to a bottom-up change.