International security

Is America Ready for a Multipolar World?

“By 2025, the international system will be a global multipolar one.” That is the forecast of the 2008 volume of the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends series—a forecast that still seems correct today.

Provocatively, that volume warned that “we cannot rule out a 19th century-like scenario of arms races, territorial expansion, and military rivalries.” At the time, many senior U.S. policymakers dismissed it and other, even earlier, warnings as just another worst-case “guesstimate,” the kind intelligence analysts love to produce. Where the intelligence community can be faulted is in thinking that multipolarity wouldn’t happen as quickly as it did.