The National Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World” report considers likely scenarios for nearly all strategic global issues, including nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and climate change.  Climate change in particular is an issue that we will be faced with on a daily basis two decades from now.

The National Intelligence Council’s "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World," released on November 20, poses a fascinating variety of alternate futures. 

Speaking to the Atlantic Council last Thursday, CIA director Michael Hayden declared that, "although Al-Qaeda has suffered serious setbacks, it remains a determined and adaptive enemy" and vowed that, while the American people have grown naturally complacent about the threat, he and his colleagues remain vigilant every day, motivated by the fact that the country "never faced an enemy so committed to our destruction."

One of the more provocative projections in the NIC's "Global Trends 2025" report is a prediction of the end of U.S. dominance in world affairs.

Dr. Thomas Fingar, the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), discussed the new report "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World."  The report analyzes the global situation 15 to 20 years in the future, touching on international security, political and social trends, globalization, and other transnational issues. 

Thomas Fingar, the chair of the National Intelligence Council, spoke to the Atlantic Council tonight on the release of "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World."

The international system—as constructed following the Second World War—will be almost unrecognizable by 2025 owing to the rise of emerging powers, a globalizing economy, an historic transfer of relative wealth and economic power from West to East, and the growing influence of nonstate actors.  By 2025, the international system will be a global multipolar one with gaps in national power continuing to narrow between developed and developing countries.