“One who ventures to prophesy about a decade lying ahead must try to estimate whether it will be characterized by change or by relative continuity.” Ernest R. May, Lessons of the Past (1973)
By its very nature, the future is unknowable, yet our actions, and those of national leadership, are shaped by expectations of the future - in essence by an underlying belief that the future is foreseeable, that past patterns give us insight into future developments, and that actions can have anticipatable outcomes. Without a framework for the future, we flounder, bogged down in uncertainty and inaction. Yet despite the vital nature of understanding the future, expectations are often based on very flimsy ground, on simple analogy with past experience, and with little structured process to identify and assess probable futures.
In its most relevant application, geopolitical analysis is about anticipating the future, not merely about explaining the past. It seeks to distill the forces in play down to a few most relevant, and then determine how they interact to shape and reshape future patterns. In building out working frameworks for the future, we use similar tools as those employed by traditional intelligence analysts, applying structured analogies and plausible futures scenario processes, while moving between scales and scopes of time and space. We seek to identify patterns, and then to focus on how and why those patterns persist. Geopolitical forecasting abhors linearity - it expects change, whether due to changing context over time, to a build-up or fracturing of underlying dynamics during repeated cycles, or to areas where there is discontinuity in patterns in different regions. Barring the short term, linearity is usually the least likely future.
The inputs in a geopolitical forecast are often myriad, and frequently unquantifiable. As such, analysts must, in the process, oversimplify the world, region, or area under study, narrowing down the key forces that will shape or constrain future developments. As in ecology, there is a recognition that simplification is necessary to discern patterns, even as details are vital in discerning local impact and implications. As with many intelligence processes, geopolitical forecasting requires exploiting cognitive dissonance - simplifying and focusing on minute details, looking broad and looking narrow, identifying trends and seeking out ways they may break. Structured analytical processes help the analyst remain focused, force explicit statements of assumptions, and provide a way to effectively integrate alternative perspectives and challenge.
A strong geopolitical forecast will blend qualitative and quantitative inputs, will draw on understandings of the past, on societal dynamics, on economics, politics, security, and always keep in mind the physicality of the world. The past serves as the testing ground for geopolitical assertions, and a deep knowledge of a very wide array of history and historiography provides the analysts with a larger pool of potential analogies to draw on. As May pointed out in both Lessons of the Past and Thinking in Time, there is a tendency for analysts (and decision-makers) to grasp onto the first analogy that appears to fit the issue at hand, failing to pursue alternative comparisons that may provide alternative insights or at least force a reassessment of existing assumptions and launch a new line of research.
When we hear complaints that the generals always fight the last war, it is both a reflection on the tools available for the task and the cognitive bias to prefer personal or vivid experiences, whether from actual involvement or through study, education, and training.There is a predisposition to see things through the lens of the most obvious parallel - thus discussions of U.S.-China dynamics and the future of the world system quickly assert a Cold War parallel, as that represents the most recent example of large global powers competing against one another. Yet looking at longer patterns of history, the Cold War global bifurcation (itself never complete) is more an anomaly than a pattern, and it emerged from a period of violent chaos that broke underlying systems and reshaped the center of global economic and military gravity.
As we look forward to the next decade, we are faced with May’s challenge - do we look for continuity, or do we look for change? Do we see a steady pattern of U.S.-China competition leading to“decoupling” and thus paving the way for a return to a bipolar world, or does the context of this competition require us to look at likely changes rather than continuity? In looking at subsets of the international system, we could ask similar questions about the direction of European integration, or of the long-term strength or vulnerability of Russia. We should look at the way demography will begin to exert new pressures over the next several decades, and where it may be more acute or serve as a driver of change in the near term. We should look further back in history to see if there are other periods that may provide alternative frameworks to look at the future, to assess multipolarity and other frameworks for global systems. In short, we need to ensure that we are taking a holistic approach to historical analogy, and using clear and challengeable tools and processes to determine the new or renewed patterns emerging. As these patterns of the future become more discernible, we can focus deeper on the impacts and implications, and on the way societies adapt, resist, or drive additional change.
