D

Global Trends 2040

The National Intelligence Council’s report Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World,¹ which was “designed to provide an analytic framework for policymakers early in each administration,” was released in March 2021, when the committee was starting to prepare this document. The committee recognized that Global Trends 2040 reinforces the committee’s views about the Society and Governance driver most likely to impact the future of encryption. Accordingly, the committee thought it useful to summarize the most pertinent aspects of Global Trends 2040.

Global Trends 2040 focuses on five themes: increasing global challenges, including climate change, disease, financial crises, and technology disruptions; fragmentation of responses by the international community to such challenges, notwithstanding increasing connectivity in all sectors; disequilibrium from the mismatch at all levels between challenges and needs in an international system not suited to address compounding global change; contestation within the international community as tensions, division, and competition increase because of such change; and the existential need for adaptation to these changes. A review of the components of each theme lends support to this report’s discussion of the Society and Governance driver.

Global Trends 2040 examines four topics: structural forces, technology, emerging dynamics, and future scenarios, each predicted to impact U.S. national security strategies in the next two decades.

Beginning with structural forces, four factors are identified as interacting to alter or disrupt the existing global context:

• Demographics lead to a larger aging population in some nations, a general decline in education, health and poverty reduction, and increased migration pressures.
• Societal changes result from populations becoming pessimistic and distrustful because of economic, technological, and demographic trends; increasingly siloed information contributes to fault lines supporting civic nationalism, volatility, and a more informed population with the ability to express demands directly.
• Future scenarios for 2040 include resurgence of open democracies, rapid technological developments, and public–private partnerships that transform the global economy while improving the quality of life, in contrast to efforts by China and Russia to increase societal controls with monitoring techniques.

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¹ National Intelligence Council, 2021, Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, March, https://www.dni.gov/index.php/gt2040-home, accessed October 21, 2021.

• Environmental changes increase risks to human life and national security, with an unequal impact with a destabilizing economic impact nationally and internationally.

Meanwhile as the pace and reach of technology increases, global competition challenges local governments, facing a more engaged population. This mismatch between public demand and government capability extends to the international level: no one state controls, although the United States and China continue to have powerful, if apposite, levels of influence.

From the international perspective, without unitary control, the world is adrift and several outcome options compete:

• A directionless, chaotic, volatile world, with rules ignored;
• Competitive co-existence as the norm;
• Separate silos; or
• Tragedy, followed by a more cohesive mobilization and move to common standards.

Second, technology reveals increased technological developments that transform human experience and capabilities, but produce tensions and societal and economic disruption among states. Heightened competition for talent, knowledge, and markets results in a multitude of areas (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality) raising ethical, societal, and security questions about who we are as humans, our environmental impact, and the bounds of warfare. Such technologies also drive further transformation and disruption.

Third, emerging dynamics challenges, in the context of societal, state, and international relations, become increasingly interconnected globally in a technologically advanced and diverse world.

• Society becomes increasingly disillusioned, informed, yet divided, as large parts of the global population become insecure, uncertain, and distrustful of all institutions.
• Populations divide and gravitate to more comfortable units, leading to competition in visions, goals, and beliefs.
• Transnational identities, allegiances, and siloed information combine to enhance intra-state fault lines, undermine civic nationalism, and increase volatility.
• Populations gain ability and incentives to demand social and political change, demanding services and recognition; governments are challenged, the international order and traditional norms are contested, democratic governance declines, and the risk of interstate conflict grows.

Fourth, the scenarios for 2040 posed three questions:

• How severe are the looming global challenges?
• How do states and nonstate actors engage in the world, including focus and type of engagement?
• Last, what do states prioritize for the future?

In response, the report discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the five possible scenarios:

• A renaissance of democracies:
  • Fostering of scientific research and technological innovation catalyzes economies for domestic and international benefit.
  • Better services and anticorruption efforts restore public institutional trust.
  • U.S. leadership is central but requires alliances and international institutions.
  • Repression, stalled economic growth, and demographic pressure may undermine authoritarian regimes in China and Russia so that they become unpredictable, more aggressive neighbors.

• A world adrift:
  • A directionless world without international rules, with limited global cooperation, and with limited technological solutions.
  • An aggressive China increases armed conflict risk with regional powers, especially over critical resources; developing countries are compelled to co-operate.
  • Regional powers and nonstate actors (e.g., corporations) increase influence over cyber, space, and technologies, but without power to dominate.
  • Weakened rules and multilateral cooperation make a more vulnerable world for non-state actors.
  • “Global challenges” increase, as states lack incentives to act collectively and proceed in a “patchwork” approach.
• Competitive coexistence:
  • Global rivals (e.g., the United States and China) compete for markets, resources, and brand recognition under mutually accepted rules, with national corporations agreeing.
  • Economic interdependence reduces armed conflict risk, although influence operations, corporate espionage, and cyberattacks continue.
  • Security relies on managing competition to avoid harming their prosperity or that of the global economy.
  • Climate change remains a challenge for stability.
• Separate silos:
  • Separate economies risk financial loss as supply chains facture, markets are lost, and other sectors decline, even though supply chain disruptions are less problematic.
  • Some large countries and abundantly resourced countries (e.g., the United States and Canada) adapt; others are challenged by self-sufficiency.
  • For domestic stability, states adopt various political models, combining democracy, authoritarianism, surveillance, repression, and exclusionism.
  • Without immigration, innovation lags; more resources go to educating citizens.
  • Focus on climate change, healthcare disparity, and poverty falters; countries adapt and look for risky solutions.
  • Internal security leads to smaller resource conflicts but a focus on scared resources, which diverts attention from domestic problems to support against foreign enemies.
• Tragedy and mobilization:
  • Existential threats stimulate a social movement to transform multilateral cooperation, which disrupts economic incentives; enhances non-state actors’ role.
  • Sustainable development is promoted along with China’s new energy technologies, creating an unlikely partnership.
  • Global energy revolution creates a backlash by fossil fuel industry-based nations.
  • Nongovernmental organizations and multilateral organizations influence standards, resources, and so on and prod states to action.

The scenarios in the Global Trends report helped to inform the committee’s scenario development, but, consistent with the statement of task, the committee identified drivers and examined scenarios focused on encryption.