The Future Behind Us
Commentary: Spying on the Future: The U.S. Intelligence Community as Seers Without Sizzle.
October 6, 2008
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The year is 2010 and, yes, Saddam Hussein is gone and there are no American troops in Iraq, but, as the report suggests, "the challenge will be to see whether a modern, secular successor government emerges that does not threaten its neighbors"—especially since those dogged Iraqis are back at work on their nuclear weapons program. Meanwhile, the national security agenda of American policymakers, who face no conventional military challenges, is dominated by five questions: "whether to intervene, when, with whom, with what tools, and to what end?"
Surveying the world in 2010, we find a Russia irredeemably in economic decline, a China beset by too many internal problems to hope for military dominance in Asia, and a North Korea so transformed that military tensions have vanished from the Korean peninsula (along, evidently, with the North Korean nuclear program). Oh, and those food riots that swept the globe recently, they never happened. After all, it's well known that food production has kept up with population pressures, and energy production has been more than a match for global energy needs. As for global warming? Never heard of it. On the bright side, the key to the future is "international cooperation," led, of course, by us truly.
An alternate universe from a missing Star Trek episode or that new sci-fi novel you haven't read yet? Not quite. Thanks to the best brains in the many agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community or IC, it's been possible for me to venture into the future, just as our own world is being shaken to its roots—into the years 2010 and 2015, to be exact.
There, surprisingly enough, life is relatively calm and the United States remains the preeminent Power of Powers. There, you aren't likely to hear the words "deep recession" or "depression" on anyone's lips.
In that far perkier future our intelligence analysts sent me to, you can exist forever and there will never be those four jets, box cutters, and 19 hijackers. The Bush administration will never barge into the world "unilaterally." The U.S. will not be renowned for torture techniques or an offshore secret prison system of injustice, and nothing will contravene then-Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers Ben Bernanke's 2005 assessment that soaring housing prices were due to "strong economic fundamentals."
In neither 2010 nor 2015 will anyone have heard of the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the giant insurance company A.I.G. In neither year will newspapers have headlines like "Worst Crisis Since '30s, With No End Yet in Sight." In neither will anyone know that the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, conducting two bankrupting wars that refused to end.
Think of it as the blandest, tidiest, least-likely-to-occur future around. And it was even paid for with your tax dollars.
Planting the Stars and Stripes in Future Soil
In a world where shock has repeatedly been the name of the game, where tall towers fall in clouds of toxic ash, investment houses disappear in the blink of an eye, and a black man is the Democratic Party's candidate for president of the United States, the American intelligence community has been straining to imagine a future without surprises or discontinuities. As its experts summed the matter up in 1997, "Genuine discontinuities—sharp nonevolutionary breaks with the past—are rare, and our focus is on evolutionary change."
Lucky is the country that didn't bet its foreign policy on that bit of intelligence wisdom. Of course, in the long decade of hubris, from the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991 (something American intelligence neither predicted nor expected) to the moment American troops entered Baghdad in April 2003, it seemed obvious enough in Washington that a generational Pax Americana was settling over the world.
As a result, the futures the IC's analysts produced back then were remarkable mainly for their inability to imagine what was stirring under the surface of the obvious. As a result, when you visit those futures, you're not likely to have the urge to throw away your Arthur Clark or Isaac Asimov or Philip Dick or William Gibson classics. But maybe you'll still be curious, as I was, to know what that "community's" top minds missed when they peered ahead. Think of it as a window into the limits of our intelligence services when they tried to grasp the real nature of U.S. power by forecasting the future.
What's strange is that the distant future was once the province of utopian or dystopian thinkers, pulp fiction writers, oddballs, visionaries, even outright nuts, but not government intelligence services. Peering into it was, at its best, a movingly strange individual adventure of the imagination, whether you were reading Edward Bellamy or Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin or H.G. Wells, George Orwell or Aldous Huxley. That was, of course, before the Pentagon and allied outfits began planning for the weaponry of 2020, 2035, and 2050; before war turned nuclear and so, with the exception of two cities in 1945, could only be "fought" in think tanks via futuristic scenario writing; before names like Complex 2030, Vision 2020, UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] Roadmap 2030 were regularly affixed to government programs. In fact, the U.S. government has been planting the Stars and Stripes deep in territory previous left to sci-fi dreamers for quite a while.
In the process, regularly analyzing the distant future has become almost as much the duty of the 18 agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community as doing National Intelligence Estimates on Iran. Ever since the 1990s, they have been hard at work preparing committee-made futures that simply won't happen. To judge by their work, they are a community of seers without sizzle, and yet the next of their fantasy futures, for the distant year 2025, is about to be made public.
