Study Looks at Dangers Shaping World of 2015

Communal tensions flaring among indigenous groups from Mexico to the Amazon. Dozens of Chinese nuclear warheads aimed at the United States. Russia’s power in serious decline, its population diminished by 16 million. A cold peace in the Mideast, but transcontinental terrorists attempting devastating attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

Welcome to the year 2015, as characterized in chilling detail by a sweeping new U.S. intelligence report to be released today.

As President-elect George W. Bush prepares to take office, the report offers the most specific insight ever provided an incoming administration about the forces shaping global change. It also underscores the enormous challenges facing Bush’s new national security team, to be headed by retired Gen. Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, if it hopes to avert many of the worst-case scenarios.

“Global Trends 2015,” the result of an intensive yearlong study involving all branches of the intelligence community as well as many of America’s top thinkers, offers sobering predictions about the “drivers,” or major forces, that will determine the world of 2015 and beyond.

The dangers are not just from traditional hot spots. Among the report’s other predictions: more than 3 billion people, roughly half the world’s population, living in “water-stressed” regions, from Southern California to northern China. And while new biotechnology will dramatically lengthen average life spans in rich countries, old diseases will shorten life spans in some African nations by as many as 40 years.

The report was prepared by the National Intelligence Council, the most influential analytic arm of the U.S. intelligence community. The council also produces classified “estimates” on dangers for all branches of the government.

“Global Trends 2015” is being released to launch a “strategic dialogue” within the government to deal with both the challenges and the opportunities ahead, said CIA Director George J. Tenet.

“Grappling with the future is necessarily a work in progress that, I believe, should constantly seek new insights while testing and revising old judgments,” he wrote in a letter introducing the report.

The most fundamental shift will be in the world’s balance of power, the report predicts.

China and India will be the world’s new military powers, based on sheer numbers, growing economic might and technological capabilities.

By 2015, China will have dozens of missiles with nuclear warheads targeting the U.S., along with hundreds of shorter-range ballistic and cruise missiles, some with nuclear warheads, for regional use. It will also have purchased technologies--from the U.S., Russia, Israel, Europe and Japan--to integrate sea and air capabilities against Taiwan and other regional rivals, the report says.

Yet a strong China may not be a serious threat. “China will seek to avoid conflict in the region to promote stable economic growth and to ensure internal stability,” the global survey predicts.

Indeed, a weakened China might be more dangerous, opening the way for greater arms proliferation, instability, crime and drug trafficking.

“New leaders will be even more firmly committed to developing the economy as the foundation of national power,” the report predicts. “Resources for military capabilities will take a secondary role.”

Domestic Challenges for 3 Major Powers

Three of the 20th century’s major powers will be increasingly diverted by domestic challenges in the early 21st century, the report says.

Russia’s expectations as a world leader will be “dramatically reduced,” because by 2015 it still won’t be able to fully integrate into the global trading system. Even the best-case scenario would leave it with an economy “less than one-fifth the size of the United States,” the report concludes.

Strapped financially, Moscow will have fewer nuclear weapons and missiles than allowed by treaties. It will instead invest in “selected and secretive” weapons of mass destruction.

Japan will have a hard time holding its position as the world’s second-largest economy. Tokyo may even need an “external shock” to jolt it into the painful reforms necessary to slow the steady erosion of its leadership role in Asia.

And Europe will be largely peaceful and prosperous but more “inward-looking,” the study finds. The region will be challenged by an aging population and low birthrates, which will undermine cohesion and economic health and create chronic shortages of skilled workers and professionals.

Despite the potential benefits of globalization, three blocs will face setbacks, according to the report.

In Latin America, the democratic tide that had spread across the continent by 1990 will suffer reversals because of rampant crime, corruption, narcotics trafficking, local insurgencies and failures by governments to address popular demands. Mexico and Brazil will be the strongest voices in the hemisphere, while the threat of instability will be greatest in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Paraguay.

Africa will be more marginalized than it is today. “Most African states will miss out on the economic growth engendered elsewhere by globalization and by scientific and technological advances,” the study says.

The negative trends will worsen as Europe severs ties and aid to former colonies. Often filling the void will be religious groups, narco-traffickers, mercenaries, crime syndicates and terrorists seeking refuge.

In the Middle East, increasingly important as a primary energy source, petrodollars will allow the region to resist the forces of reform. With populations due to expand over the next 15 years in most countries--by anywhere from 26% (Algeria) and 39% (Libya) to 56% (Saudi Arabia)--the region’s people will be poorer, heavily concentrated in cities that are unable to cope and more disillusioned with their governments. As inequities mount, Islamist movements may come to power.

Although the U.S. will remain the preeminent world power, it will face challenges from a growing array of countries, including China, India, Mexico and Brazil, as well as organizations, such as the European Union, trying to check its leadership.

The way conflicts play out will also change, the report says. Most wars will be within countries--and longer, more vicious, harder to end and more likely to recur. Because of globalization, they could threaten the very stability of the new international system.

Wars between states will be fewer but more deadly because of the lethality of arms, as in South Asia, where both India and Pakistan--the two nations in the world most likely to go to war--will amass larger nuclear and missile arsenals.

Internal problems will exacerbate regional instability. In India, more than half a billion people will live in dire poverty, as the gap between rich and poor widens and sparks domestic strife. In increasingly tumultuous Pakistan, government control will by 2015 be limited to the Punjabi heartland and the commercial capital, Karachi, the report predicts.

U.S. Firms May Be Terrorist Targets

State-sponsored terrorism is likely to decline. But it will be replaced by “freewheeling” terrorism by groups operating across continents with the help of information technology, the National Intelligence Council predicts.

American companies, rather than diplomatic or military facilities, will become targets.

The greatest danger, however, is the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Before 2015, the report warns, Iraq, for example, could test an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the U.S. with a nuclear-sized payload.

Worldwide, the potential for the use of a missile with chemical or biological weapons will be far greater than during the Cold War. New threats will come from nations with smaller arsenals of weapons that have “far less accuracy, yield, survivability, reliability and range-payload capability” than the Soviet arsenal did, the council says.

The report does contain some good news. Economically, the world will witness the kind of growth rates characteristic of the 1960s and early 1970s. And globalization will ultimately increase political stability--even though the survey predicts that its evolution will be “rocky, marked by chronic financial volatility and a widening economic divide.”