Global Trends 2025

A recent article in The Guardian newspaper, headlined “2025: the end of US dominance,” outlines a review of global trends by the United States’ National Intelligence Council (NIC):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/20/…

The NIC report is titled “Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed” and is available as a PDF document which you can download from a link at the end of the article. Although the report is close to 40,000 words long, it contains a series of convenient textboxes which summarize the key predictions. For example, “Women as Agents of Geopolitical Change”:

Although data on women’s political involvement are less conclusive than those regarding economic participation, political empowerment of women appears to change governmental priorities. Examples as disparate as Sweden and Rwanda indicate that countries with relatively large numbers of politically active women place greater importance on societal issues such as healthcare, the environment, and economic development. If this trend continues over the next 15-20 years, as is likely, an increasing number of countries could favor social programs over military ones. Better governance also could be a spinoff benefit, as a high number of women in parliament or senior government positions correlates with lower corruption.

In the parliamentary election of 2003 Rwanda achieved the highest percentage of women parliamentarians in the world (source) and the only one with more than 50% women after the 2008 election. Sweden (No.2) was the first country to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and Rwanda was the 13th – long before the 1994 genocide.
Source: http://treaties.un.org/…IV-8.

By 2007, CEDAW had been ratified by all 186 signatories — except the United States of America. See a chart of the first 20 ratifications.

Armed conflict

Many theories have been put forward to explain why the Rwandan genocide occurred (it lasted about 100 days). Global Trends 2025 emphasizes that countries with ‘youth bulges’ in their population demographics are more likely to engage in armed conflict or support terrorist groups. A report from the International Studies Association cites evidence that during the period 1950-2000 countries which had extreme ‘youth bulges’ were 2·3 times more conflict-prone than countries without a significantly unbalanced population age distribution (source).

The shifting political power balance

The third chapter of the report begins by saying:

By 2025, the United States will find itself in the position of being one of a number of important actors on the world stage, albeit still the most powerful one. The relative political and economic clout of many countries will shift by 2025, according to an International Futures model measuring GDP, defense spending, population, and technology for individual states (see graphic).