Megatrends, Game-Changers, Black Swans, Tectonic Shifts, and a World Not That Different From 2012
Think of it as a simple formula: if you've been hired (and paid handsomely) to protect what is, you're going to be congenitally ill-equipped to imagine what might be. And yet the urge not just to know the contours of the future, but to plant the Stars and Stripes in that future has had the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in its grip since the mid-1990s. That was the moment when it first occurred to some in Washington that U.S. power might be capable of controlling just about everything worth the bother globally for, if not an eternity, then long enough to make the future American property.
Ever since, every few years the National Intelligence Council (NIC), the IC's "center for long-term strategic analysis," has been intent on producing a document it calls serially Global Trends [fill in the future year]. The latest edition, out just in time for Barack Obama's second term, is Global Trends 2030. Here's one utterly predictable thing about it: it's bigger and more elaborate than Global Trends 2025. And here's a prediction that, hard as it is to get anything right about the future, has a 99.9% chance of being accurate: when Global Trends 2035 comes out, it'll be bigger and more elaborate yet. It'll cost more and still, like its predecessor, offer a hem for every haw, a hedge for every faintly bold possibility, a trap-door escape from any prediction that might not stick.
Comment: One wonders just what kind of attacks are being planned by Israel which will then be blamed on neighboring countries like Syria. Remember, Israel knows better than anyone the usefulness of a false flag attack...