2012
- May 27 – June 2: Dan Twining & Ash Jain – What is the impact of the rise of the rest on the liberal international order: End of the Western world?
- June 3 – 9: Bill Burke-White – What Will be the Shape of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in 2030? Will the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Exist in 2030?
- June 10 – 17: Thomas Mahnken – Will China’s economic growth stall out? What will be the impact on the global economy?
- June 17 – 23: Peter Feaver – What Will be the US Role in a Multipolar International System?
- June 24 – 30: Jackie Newmyer Deal – How will the security environment of 2030 be affected by the proliferation of advanced technologies – including conventional capabilities such as precision strike and, unfortunately/potentially nuclear capabilities – to a variety of smaller regional actors and even non-state actors?
- July 1 – 7: Steve Weber – How Will Employment Change with the Expansion of New Technologies—like Robotics—in Manufacturing? Will We See a New Unemployable Underclass?
- July 8 – 14: Robert Odell – Future trajectories of migration and issues policy makers will face.
- July 15 – 21: Drew Erdmann – Urbanization Dynamics and Challenges
- July 22 – 28: William Inboden – American Decline
- July 29 – August 4: Richard Cincotta – Will Aging Cripple the West? Will It Cripple China’s Development?
- August 5 – 11: Ralph Espach – Brazil’s future role in the international system
- August 12 – 18: Allan Dafoe – Will the Long Peace Persist?
- August 19 – 25: Howard Passell – Will Mega-Cities be a Cauldron for Revolution or Be an Engine for Technological Revolutions?
- August 26 – September 1: Cung Vu – Will Shale Gas (and Shale or Tight Oil) Give a Second Burst to US Manufacturing? To what degree will Shale Gas Give the US A Huge Advantage in the Future?
- September 2 – 8: Dr. Mathew Burrows – Draft author of GT2030 Report from National Intelligence Council
Global Trends 2030 
What’s happened to the 2030 blog posts? Things have gone quiet since August 27. I thought there was at least one due in Sept. Is this the end of the line?
Hi, I work for a French journal called “Diplomatie”. We specialize in international affairs and strategic issues. Our next publication will be on the US and we would love to have a short interview with Dr. Matthew Burrows to present GT2030 and some of its (provisional) findings. Would that be possible? You have my e-mail. Thanks.
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Urbanization and American National Security
It has long been the case that American foreign policy is most successful when it reaches beyond governments to societies (think Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin shaping French attitudes). The diversification of major power centers in other countries will require our government to shift its focus away from making policy in capitols, simply because capitols will no longer be the place where decisions get made in other countries. We are ourselves emblematic of this diversification, the separation of our seat of government from our financial capitol having been a conscious one to prevent centralization of power. Natural forces further diversified the geography of American society: entertainment centered in Hollywood; literature in Boston and New York; manufacturing in what is now, sadly, the rust belt; computers in silicon valley and Redmond, Washington.
But our foreign policies have not yet adapted to these changes. It will not be adequate to talk to government ministers, yet that remains predominantly how we conduct our foreign policy. There are over twenty cities of more than a million people in which our State Department has no representation; where there are Embassies, they are literal bastions of American power inhospitable (because of security precautions) to engagement with civic groups. The Foreign Service spends nearly all of its resources on language training, yet the overwhelming majority of our diplomats lack the facility to participate in live debates in the native languages of the countries in which they are posted. This is the result of a system that prizes generalists; the nature of change in the international order demands specialist skills that we neither recruit or develop in our diplomats.
While the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review acknowledges these shortcomings (even if it is somewhat breathless about the newness of developments that are not really new), State has not followed through with spending and managerial effort to redress them. Moreover, State still treats shaping attitudes in other countries as a special skill — “public diplomacy” — rather than the most important reason for posting diplomats abroad. As a society, we are predisposed to understand messy, small-ball mosaics of power and organization; as a government, we are typically too lazy or ignorant to operate that way. That must change. We must understand the complexity of other societies and navigate them effectively to build public support, not just engage the governments in power, if we want to remain successful in the international order Global Trends 2030 identifies.
A second major effect of urbanization for American national security will be in the area of immigration. We have long been the beneficiary of other countries’ deficiencies, drawing their talent. Richard Rosecrance identified in the mid-1990s the importance amidst globalization of winning the competition for talent. Rosecrance argued that the traditional elements of state power shifted with a country’s level of development, from controlling territory that produced commodities, to controlling trade that created wealth from manufactured goods, to enabling virtual corporations focused on product design, marketing, and financing (Rosecrance, The Rise of the Virtual State, Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996). States with the highest level of development would compete for intellectual capital, a factor of production that cannot be compelled by force but must be attracted by opportunity and incentive.
Marx famously said that religion is the opiate of the masses; suburban life as practiced by Americans may likewise be an opiate of the masses. That is, what most people in the world want is the boring pleasantness of their own house, spending their time taking kids to sports practice and discussing traffic or a local eyesore with their neighbors. It has a pacifying tendency on behavior, but it is predicated on a standard of living, societal and governmental infrastructure that has been beyond the reach of most countries. If people don’t need to leave other countries to enjoy the benefits we have, we will get less of the world’s intellectual and entrepreneurial talent coming to us.
And immigration has been the way America compensates for our incapacities. We import much of our scientific and technical expertise, overcoming the paucity of science education in our own children with the attractiveness of our higher education systems and job opportunities. As the Economist cautioned in its reporting on London, so here: we are making policy choices that disincline people to choose us, whether because of our homeland security policies or nativist “lump of labor” ideas that jobs are limited and must be preserved from export. As the rest of the world comes to have the urban and suburban advantages we enjoy, we need to end our complacency and get serious about competing for the world’s talent. And we need to strengthen our own domestic base, most especially in education.
The third effect of urbanization I would note for American national security results from is who is modernizing: it is the so-called developing world. As Amartya Sen has put it, the greatest beneficiaries of globalization are the world’s poor. Countries that are urbanizing are those that have been poor and are growing wealthy. This is to be applauded, not only as a moral good, but as an expansion of opportunity for countries that may take a greater interest in global issues and have the resources to participate in shaping them. The United States needs more countries to share the burden of sustaining the global order that has served and the world so well. In the 1940s and 1950s, America believed decolonization would produce a wave of new allies for our policies. On that basis, we refused Churchill’s pleas to sustain their empire, refused to support our closest allies in a war against Nasserite Egypt. If we welcome the arrival of countries that have pulled themselves out of poverty, remain a voice for the truths we hold to be self-evident, and emphasize accountable governance, the international order of 2030 has the potential to be even more beneficial to American interests than the one we now enjoy.
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