Every five years we pause to assess the larger trends shaping the world system, and from this, we develop a 10-year forecast for the future. The purpose is not to predict specific events, but to understand and anticipate the general contours of international relations, social dynamics, economic patterns, and competition and conflict. We do this with an eye on the impact on internationally engaged businesses and organizations; a lens that shapes what forces we prioritize, what implications we highlight. Looking at the world through the lens of a military commander, a political leader, a humanitarian, may yield a very different set of focal areas. As such, our recently published 2025-2035 decade forecast does not attempt to assert what the future should be, but rather what we see as the likely patterns and pathways forward, to allow those who use the forecast to assess the impacts and implications for their own operations, and from that identify opportunities and mitigate future risks.
We start our forecast with the following quote, “We are living through a period in which change is rapid and far-reaching and in which the political implications of change are probably more revolutionary than is generally appreciated.” While this could easily be said about today, it was written in 1960 by Princeton scholars Harold and Margaret Sprout in ‘Geography and International Politics in an Era of Revolutionary Change.’ Each era, each generation, each decade, we appear to be at a moment of revolutionary change, managing the rapid pace of technological developments, rapid swings in international power balances, upheavals of social and political norms, rerouted trade relations and routes. Change is the one unifying factor in looking to the future, and in looking forward, we seek to determine what change is incremental, what is truly revolutionary, and what is just noise and volatility.
At the core of the 2025-2035 forecast, we assert that the basic framework for the decade remains a global multipolar system, one where no great power has the willingness or capacity to shape the world at will, and one where friction within traditional blocs will be as important to understand to maneuver through change as competition between blocs. The apparently inevitable drive to a unified global system of trade, whether through unofficial norms or formalized regulations, is reaching its limits, and a more fragmented globalization is taking its place. Middle Powers will take an increasingly active role in managing regional dynamics, as the traditional great powers are less engaged in what they see as secondary issues. Smaller, more fluid blocs, based on regional or interest affinities, will form and reform, seeking to thread a path between the big four (the United States, China, the European Union, and Russia), pursuing so-called multi-alignment to give themselves more room to maneuver.
For companies and organizations that operate across borders, which given the complexity of supply chains encompass most, this means that long term expectations of general stability need to be exchanged for shorter-term assessments of change. We have already seen an erosion of organizations and frameworks like the World Trade Organization, we are seeing trade agreements taking on shorter-term dynamics with more frequent changes and updates, all amid renewed assertions of economic nationalism. The pendulum is swinging, and social and political forces are pushing back against the universalist ideals of extreme globalization. It will be a volatile decade for those who rely on predictable trade patterns and regulatory environments. But over the decade, this volatility will lead to a realignment of the global balance - we see Europe gaining new momentum at unified action, though under national conservatism, we see the United States by the end of the decade begin re-embracing both its hemispheric trade relations and its sense of proactive internationalism. We see China struggling with its own internal economic and social dynamics but also drawn into taking an active security role in areas once the purview of the United States or Europe. We see opportunities emerge in East Africa, heightened international competition over South American resources, and countries like Turkey and Japan emerging as leading middle powers.
In addition to the broader framework, our 2025-35 forecast also highlights several factors shaping the global environment. Our look at Artificial Intelligence looks at the impact on jobs, and the attendant economic and political ramifications. Our coverage of climate change highlights both the physical impacts (including climate-driven migration) and the shifting pattern of government response from preventative mitigation to responsive adaptation. We look at the evolution of the energy transition, factors that may slow and others that drive a confined expansion of renewable sources, including nuclear power. We assess the growing national and private sector involvement and competition in space, the deepening dependencies on space technology for terrestrial activities, and the groundwork for space-based manufacturing and resource exploitation. And we look at the public and private sector use of cyberspace as an area of competition, competitive advantage, and conflict. Taken together with the focal areas we raised in our 2020-30 decade forecast, we see these as a set of significant, even if not all inclusive, list of key drivers of change with global ramifications.
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