Looking back from 2025

America’s media tend to look on the bright side. "Terrorism will be less relevant in 2025," Fox News headlined its account of the quadrennial "global trends" forecast of the National Intelligence Council. "Al Qaeda’s appeal to falter," the New York Times assured its readers.

But perhaps the British Broadcasting Corporation was more on the mark in distilling the Global Trends 2025 report into a headline. It ran the story as: "US global dominance ‘set to wane’."

In one of the most sobering assessments ever to emerge from this periodic forecast, America’s intelligence seers warn that a variety of factors "increasingly will constrain US freedom of action" over the next quarter-century. Terrorism is almost incidental. The rapid shift of wealth and economic power already under way from West to East is, they say, "without precedent in modern history."

"Although the United States is likely to remain the single most powerful actor," the report concludes, "the United States’ relative strength — even in the military realm — will decline and U.S. leverage will become more constrained." Just four years ago it reassuringly projected "continued US dominance" through 2020.

So this is what the would-be architects of a new American century in the Bush-Cheney administration have to show for their efforts to lock in U.S. global dominance for the 21^st century. Their policies of aggressive unilateralism, rash gambles on military force, and neglect of malignant social and economic viruses--all crowned by two trillion dollars in new debt--have discredited American leadership and accelerated what the new report foresees as the virtual certainty of a multipolar future.

In cheerier past reports, intelligence analysts carefully noted caveats. "America's success," the forecasters predicted after the 1996 election, would substantially hinge on "the degree to which it builds and sustains multilateral cooperation and institutions." Well, we've shot through that. In their forecast in late 2000, they warned that "any potential US military domination" would trigger responses through asymmetric warfare. We're living through that nightmare now.

Past forecasts in the global trends series repeatedly warned, as does today's look to 2025, of the risks of swelling populations--1.2 billion people in the next two decades--on sustainability of foodstocks, water, energy, environment, and health. And this year's abrupt spikes in energy and food prices are harbingers of future instability consequent on our paralysis on population.

Washington's blinkered conservatives have dealt with the danger by denial. They halted all U.S. funding for U.N. family planning programs and offered abstinence education as a palliative. They fume when a fraction of those soaring populations surges across the Rio Grande or the Mediterranean in desperate search for some crumbs of Western prosperity. No matter how urgently the intelligence community has warned them of this threat, Washington plays deaf and dumb.

Fixing misguided family planning policy will be an easy change for the incoming Obama administration. What will be far harder, and require far more imagination, is re-tooling the international institutions that will become ever more critical in the new multipolar century envisioned by the report.

The United States already needs to reaffirm allegiance to international law if it hopes to restore its shattered global leadership. Equally urgently, it should use its lingering power advantage now to buttress international law and reform global institutions so that the emerging new power centers--the report names China, India, and Russia--remain as committed to pursuing their agendas peacefully within the rules of the global system as do the European Union and a sobered United States.

Barack Obama will be uniquely positioned to lead the effort. He can harness the extraordinary hope and confidence that the rest of the world invests in him to press for institutional restructuring that anticipates the realities of 2025 that the National Intelligence Council foresees. Those reforms need to keep the rising power centers engaged and assure the rest of the world's nations that those rules apply fairly and equally to all.

Certainly this speaks to the need for restructuring of the United Nations Security Council, to incorporate a flexible reapportionment of representation as relative power shifts in the international community. The system for security decision-making needs to include most urgently those making the largest tangible contributions to peace and security.

Obama will also need to lead Washington in re-learning how to work effectively in the General Assembly and parallel universal bodies in global specialized agencies. Whether the issue is climate change or human rights or arms controls, buy-in is required of many states, and cannot be mandated by a few. For mega-states like the United States, China, or India, however, consistent buy-in may also require recalibration of their voice.

The Bretton Woods institutions have been spectacularly on the sidelines during precisely the kind of global crisis they were created to prevent. Obama will need to press the squabbling Europeans and Asians to fairer apportionment of contributions and voting at the same time as he seeks agreement on new international oversight of financial flows.

None of this will be easy, but after years of perverse policies that have pitted the United States against the world, Obama may be able to change not only how the world sees America, but how the world sees itself. That change may be crucial for a peaceful transition to the world of 2025.