Last Updated: Mar 5, 11:45 am
Category: From the Web
The National Intelligence Council has published four widely different pictures of the world in 2020: Davos World, in which economic globalisation continues but with a more Asian face; Pax Americana, where the US continues to shape the global order; New Caliphate, where Islamic religious identity challenges the dominance of western norms; and Cycle of Fear, in which non-state forces create shocks to security that produce an Orwellian society.
See Joseph Nye in the Financial Times 15 February 2007 for a summary of the arguments or visit http://www.ft.com/cms/s/00863494-bd3e-11db-b5bd-0000779e2340.html.
In addition to technology, three factors will shape the outcome: Chinese power and how its internal development, political and economic, bears upon its external relations; political Islam, where the struggle against extreme Islamist terrorism is less a “clash of civilisations” and more a civil war within Islam; American power and how it is used. If these three forces move in a favourable direction, Nye predicts, then the most likely world will be a relatively optimistic combination of globalisation with a more Asian face plus Pax Americana.
Risks to this benign central prediction include: political instability in China that creates a prolonged slump, violence and a more aggressive foreign policy; a conflict or revolutions in the Gulf; a pandemic that produces widespread deaths, economic dislocation and closure of borders; acts of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction that lead not only to millions of deaths,; climate change that occurs more quickly than expected or a catastrophic event such as the collapse of the Antarctic ice shelf.
Joseph Nye teaches at Harvard in the Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and is the author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
