Towards a More Contested World? The Latest NIC “Global Trends” Seen in the Light of Previous Reports

Every four years, when a new president enters the White House, the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), a body connected with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), publishes a vision report on broad geopolitical trends for the next 15-20 years. This report, entitled Global Trends, describes the concerns that the American intelligence community opts to make public and wishes to draw to the attention of political leaders to guide their strategic decisions. The 2021 edition, the seventh since the first appeared in 1997, came out this spring. Geoffrey Delcroix presents the gist of that report here and uses the occasion to take a retrospective look at previous ones. He stresses, in particular, the rather conventional character of these reports, which ultimately make little effort to anticipate the coming years’ strategic trend-breaks or surprises, as witness the treatment of pandemic risks over the 25 years.