Check out the latest edition of the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report, published in March 2021. Published every four years since 1997, Global Trends assesses the key trends and uncertainties that will shape the strategic environment for the United States during the next two decades.

Global Trends is designed to provide an analytic framework for policymakers early in each administration as they craft national security strategy and navigate an uncertain future. The goal is not to offer a specific prediction of the world in 2040; instead, the intent is to help policymakers and citizens see what may lie beyond the horizon and prepare for an array of possible futures.

This edition of Global Trends constructs its analysis of the future in several stages. First, it examines structural forces in demographics, environment, economics, and technology that shape the contours of our future world. Second, it analyzes how these structural forces and other factors — combined with human responses — affect emerging dynamics in societies, states, and the international system. Third, it envisions five plausible scenarios for the distant future in 2040. The key themes discussed above appear across these sections.

Read the digital report on the NIC website or view/download the PDF file below.

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