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MEDIA CENTER Epic Changes in Global Leadership Over the Next 50 Years: NEW YORK (11 January 2006) — Speculating about global geopolitical change is mostly the province of media pundits and political operatives, as well as scenario-builders in the National Intelligence Council and other such agencies. The Canadian author and scholar Vaclav Smil lies entirely outside this mainstream but is nonetheless well qualified to engage in such speculation—and by his distinctive background to bring to it fresh insights. Smil has written widely on energy, the history of technology, global ecology, food supply, and population and is an authority on China's environmental problems. His take on the world's geopolitical future is contained in a new article, “The next 50 years: Unfolding trends,” published in the current issue of the Population Council’s Population and Development Review (PDR). Smil does not believe it is useful to construct scenarios, given the complexity of international systems and the inevitable role of unpredictable events. Instead, he looks at the long-term trends affecting six major protagonists on the world stage—trends that together will yield a new order in world power. The six are Europe, Japan, Russia, China, the Muslim world, and the United States. For none is there clear sailing. Europe, its economy underperforming, demographically imperiled from its low fertility yet facing intractable difficulties in integrating its immigrants, and unclear about its reach and mission in the world, is no candidate for global leadership. Japan's prospects are discouraging, also for largely demographic reasons. Smil argues that Japan’s financial collapse in December 1989 was not a temporary downswing, but rather the death knell of the country’s status as an economic titan, signaling a long-lasting retreat from its aspirations to become the world’s leading technical innovator and from its climb to the top of the global ladder. The rebirth of Russia as a power to reckon with is another possibility that Smil considers. Given the anemic economies of the former Soviet states, this suggestion may seem far-fetched. Russia’s current weaknesses may in fact keep it sidelined during the next half century. But Smil asserts that the nation’s great cadre of highly creative scientists, engineers, and doctors and unmatched energy resources may help restore its place as a great power. While acknowledging China's dramatic economic growth, Smil points to factors that may hinder its rise to superpower status: a “twisted demographic foundation" of rapid population aging and an unbalanced sex ratio, rising economic inequality, major environmental problems, and lack of "soft-power" appeal to the rest of the world (especially in comparison to the United States). Smil’s article notes that by 2050 populations of Muslim societies that historically have been most prone to various forms of fundamentalism and anti-Western sentiment (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen) will likely number 700 million—75 percent larger than Europe’s population. More importantly, by 2025 every seventh person in that region will be a male in his late teens or 20s. The relative abundance of young males appears to be associated with episodes of collective aggression: This fact alone will be a major source of internal tension, instability, and violence. These demographic trends take place against a backdrop that may compound this challenge. Smil points to the lack of secular sources of state legitimacy, leading to a default reliance on traditional religious sources—in some instances, on "archaic despotic authorities"—and the abysmal state of science in the Muslim world. But, Smil writes, "even a problem-ridden China, a self-absorbed Europe, a faltering Russia, and nonconfrontational Islam would be no guarantee of America's continued primacy." He sees America’s global leadership in its twilight phase. Along with imperial overstretch—a classic marker of an ebbing capacity to dominate—and the familiar concerns with large budget and trade deficits, he emphasizes an underperforming educational system and declining technical capabilities, yielding a retreat from global leadership in manufacturing and technical innovation. Smil, in an earlier companion-piece to this article (“The next 50 years: Fatal discontinuities,” PDR, June 2005), assessed the probabilities of global calamities with transformational potential. The chief dangers he arrived at were a 20 percent estimated probability of a megawar and—like many other forecasters—the virtual certainty of a major influenza pandemic. More elusive but no less serious is humanity’s role in environmental degradation that weakens the biophysical foundations of modern civilization. Putting this together, Smil ends, "you might conclude that, despite so many atrocities, failures, and fears, the past 50 years were an exceptionally stable and an unusually benign period in human history and that the probabilities of less benign events will greatly increase during the next 50 years."
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