(Graphic by Code and Dagger. Original crystal ball photo by Photo by Luriko Yamaguchi from Pexels. Coronavirus graphic via CDC.gov.)
Every few years the U.S. intelligence community gets together with outside experts to imagine what the world will look like about 20 years from the present.
As such, the National Intelligence Council recently released the Global Trends 2040 report, a 144-page tome that covers everything from the enduring U.S.-China rivalry, to major demographic shifts, to emerging technologies and fears of eroding democracy.
It also discusses the obvious current concern about worldwide pandemics, after defining COVID-19 as the “most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political and security implications that will ripple for years to come.”
The paper notes that previous editions of the trends report “forecasted the potential for new diseases and even imagined scenarios with a pandemic, but we lacked a full picture of the breadth and depth of its disruptive potential.”
Looking back at the intelligence community’s predictions for 2020, at least, shows relatively little interest in pandemics at the time. The document, written in December 2004, really only discusses it in one short section about globalization and the things that could derail it. Still, it seemed to assume that the world already had learned how to handle pandemics better.
“Some experts believe it is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears, such as the 1918-1919 influenza virus that killed an estimated 20 million worldwide,” the 2004 report says. “Such a pandemic in megacities of the developing world with poor health-care systems — in Sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, Bangladesh or Pakistan — would be devastating and could spread rapidly throughout the world.
"Globalization would be endangered if the death toll rose into the millions in several major countries and the spread of disease put a halt to global travel and trade during an extended period, prompting governments to expend enormous resources on overwhelmed health sectors.”
But, the report said, there was a bit of a silver lining: “On the positive side of the ledger, the response to SARS showed that international surveillance and control mechanisms are becoming more adept at containing disease, and new developments in biotechnologies hold the promise of continued improvement.”
As the global death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 3 million, including more than 500,000 in the U.S. alone, perhaps that optimism was misplaced.
It’s hard to judge the intelligence community prophets of 2004 for that. As this year’s report says, “We offer this analysis with humility, knowing that invariably the future will unfold in ways that we have not foreseen.”
[This report was updated April 29, 2021 with additional analysis from former senior CIA official John Sipher and an additional expulsion by Bulgaria. Do you have a tip or question for Code and Dagger? Send it along at CodeAndDagger@protonmail.com. Also, consider contributing to Code and Dagger on Patreon at Patreon.com/CodeAndDagger.]