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# Posted 7:33 AM by Patrick Belton

THINKING AHEAD: The National Intelligence Council's triennial Global Trends projects collectively represent some of the most wide-ranging, strategic, and neat thinking being done within the U.S. government. Robert Hutchings, the Council's chair, is fond of saying that with so much of the nation's intelligence community focused on the next car bomb, it's crucially necessary to have at least someone looking at the decennial trends that will shape the world in which the U.S. will be acting, to permit policy to take into account ways to prepare to anticipate and adapt to trends, and to look for lever-points at which it can attempt to shape them.

As an analytical exercise, future-forecasting requires looking both at trends (i.e., it is 2020, and America, Europe, and Japan are struggling to maintain a decent quality of life for masses of elderly people, China is facing a choice between belligerence and joining Western nations as an economic superpower, and India, Brazil, and Indonesia are becoming emerging powers) and at wild cards (a nuclear exchange, for example, or the emergence of new technologies, or worldwide pandemics), as well as points at which U.S. policy could attempt to influence these trends. Global Trends 2015 and Global Trends 2010 have already been released, and make for provocative (and recommended) reading.

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