22 December 2025. Futures | Geopolitics
Making sense of futures // Making sense of the National Security Strategy
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The Three Horizons book manuscript is now on its way to the publisher, I’m pleased to say, so I’m hoping that more normal service will be resumed here on Just Two Things. I’ve really missed writing it while in the weeds of editing.
1: Making sense of futures
I was invited to talk about futures recently at the Royal College of Defence Studies In London. Most of the event was unattributable, but our initial remarks were recorded, so I can share a version of them here.
Futures, in its modern version, is a child of the Second World War. It has two foundational strands, one in the United States, funded by the Department of Defense, and associated with RAND and SRI; the other in Europe, which is less cohesive but associated with Fred Polak‘s The Image of the Future in the Netherlands and Gaston Berger and the prospective school in France. The first was about better forecasting, the second about rebuilding nations; the first positivist, the second more normative.
Since then, futures has gone through three phases, each lasting about 25 years. It took the first quarter of a century to reach some conceptual agreement about what futures work did. In 1970, in Future Shock, Alvin Toffler wrote that “Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures”.1 In a paper four years later, Roy Amara, who was running the Institute for the Future in California, used the same trio but substituted “preferred futures”.2 The first is about forecasting and trends analysis, the second about scenarios, the third about visioning. Conceptually, this trio has stuck.
(Giulio Paolini, ‘Dilemma’, 2005. madre, Naples. Photo: Andrew Curry, CC By-NC-SA 4.0)
Over the second quarter of a century, scenarios, and in particular a variant called “scenario planning”, became dominant. You can trace a thread here from the RAND alumnus Hermann Kahn, through his Hudson Institute to Royal Dutch Shell, to the consultancy Global Business Network set up by Shell alumnus Peter Schwarz. This strand runs out of intellectual energy in the late 1990s.
The third strand, which was more engaged with issues about complexity and agency, emerges at this time. This is futures’ “complexity turn”, and early markers of it are Richard Slaughter’s Integral Futures model and Sohail Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis. This drew on futures ideas that had been incubated since the 1960s by academic futurists associated with the World Futures Studies Federation, notable James Dator and Eleonora Masini. This work is more interested in values, meaning and power, and in preferred futures. But it is also an important philosophical moment, because it represents a different understanding of our relationship to the future, in which elements of the future exist as latent elements in our present, and respond to what we do or don’t do. This third phase is second-order futures, not first-order futures.
Toffler added a gloss to that Future Shock quote:
Determining the probable calls for a science of futurism. Delineating the possible calls for an art of futurism. Defining the preferable calls for a politics of futurism.
In this he was prescient. There certainly was more art in the construction of scenarios in the second phase, and more politics in the third.
Dancing around systems
Throughout this history, futures has danced around systems. The two are more like cousins that don’t know each other that well, but one coreidea in futures work is that change comes from the outside, which aligns it immediately with open systems theory (pdf), going back to the influential work of Emery and Trist in the 1960s. This suggests that change emerges from the “contextual environment”, then influences the “transactional environment” (also thought of as the “operating environment”, and then finally, the “organisational environment”. I usually describe this metaphorically as like frying an egg in a pan: the pan heats first, then the white cooks, and then, finally, the yolk.
Another systems idea that has direct relevance to futures and foresight work is Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (‘variety’ in this context meaning ‘complexity’, which hadn’t really become a commonplace term when Ashby formulated his law in the 1950s.) This is a cybernetic principle—provable mathematically, but not by me—that states that the internal variety of an organisation needs to match the external variety of its external environment. It can do this by amplifying its ability to understand external variety (which is where futures comes in), or by ”attenuating”—reducing—the amount of variety it chooses to absorb from the external environment.3
One of the features of futures methods is that many of them enable people to have systems conversations without having first to learn systems. Systems thinking is encoded into the methods. I’m thinking here of scenarios, when done well, of Three Horizons, or Futures Wheels, or Causal Layered Analysis, but there are many others.
Because change comes from the outside, this means that horizon scanning is a foundational tool in futures work. When you’re doing the analysis to build up a scanning picture, you tend to be looking for four things. There are drivers of change — big substantive changes, often with long tails stretching back into the contextual environment (population changes, the rise of feminism, and so on.) These are the province of both quantitative and qualitative analysis. There are trends, which are shaped by drivers, which tend to be quantitative (the proportion of a population over 65, say) and therefore—without going into a long aside about the social nature of the production of data—essentially backward looking.
There are weak signals, that are individual data points that signify new possible points of change. These are almost always qualitative. And then there are emerging issues, which can best be described as small clusters of weak signals that might point in due course to a new trend.
The scanning questions
Scanning, I was taught by the futurist Wendy Schultz, involves three questions:
Does this confirm something we already know?
Does this change something we already know?
Is this something new?
Wendy also suggested that the third question had a second part: is this new to most people, so genuinely new, or new to us (and therefore suggestive of a blind spot.)
Because the idea of the “black swan” has spread like a virus, people tend to be too interested in the third question, and not interested enough in the second question.4
Most things that are genuinely new take a long time to arrive, so if you do notice them you have time to prepare. Things that change something we know, on the other hand, are likely to be disrupting the mental models we draw on to understand what’s going on around us.
Pierre Wack, who led much of the work at Royal Dutch Shellthat shaped the way we think about scenarios, said that they were most useful when the external or contextual environment was changing in unexpected ways. He hoped to change the way that managers read the news.
This links to the work of Peter Drucker, whom Wack quoted (or possibly misquoted) as saying that
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.
This connects futures also to management, and to Drucker’s idea of ‘the theory of the business’—which is true of non-commercial organisations as well as businesses. He argued that when organisations were working well, it was because they had a coherent “theory of the business” that connected and aligned three different elements:
A view of the external environment—mostly meaning the “transactional environment”, as I understand him— that was correct in its essentials;
A mission statement (this might be the “organisational purpose” these days); and
The set of competences and capabilities needed to deliver the mission in this environment.
There’s a bit more: as well as maintaining alignment, the organisation needs to ensure that the theory is understood and that it is tested constantly. “Mission” or “purpose” doesn’t necessarily need to be “purposeful” in the modern sense. In the (1990s) paper, Drucker uses the example of Sears, whose purpose was to deliver the things an American household needed at competitive prices.
Signs that you might need to change your theory of the business might be that you attain your objectives (Toyota had this problem when it became the world’s #1 car maker, because, as Hardin Tibbs noted, it had confused goals and mission), if you have an unexpected failure, or an unexpected success.
Obviously the futures and foresight element comes in to ensuring that your view of your external environment is broadly correct. These three elements—environment, mission, competences and capabilities—also connect in interesting ways to Stafford Beer’s viable system model, but that’s probably a discussion for another post.
2: Making sense of America’s National Security Strategy
I have been trying to make sense of America’s 2025 National Security Strategy] [NSS] (pdf) since it was published without fanfare a few weeks ago. Russia liked it, and said so; Europe, well, not so much. I’ve read quite a lot of the content analyses by the geopolitics and security community, and I’ll discuss this as well, but there’s also something here about the medium as well as the message.
Conventionally, governments, including the American government, make something of the launch of National Security Strategies. News conferences are held. Senior politicians do interviews. Members of the security services who have been involved in the drafting do off the record briefings. You get the idea.
None of this happened with the 2025 NSS. It was pushed out without any announcement one Friday evening. That might reflect a sense that the White House didn’t think it was that important. Some reports say that drafts have been bouncing around between different bits of the Administration for a while, until Michael Anton, a conservative State Department official (now departed) was given the job of sorting it out. He cut it back ruthlessly, and inserted a lot of the familiar Trump messaging that now peppers the document. More of that in a moment.
It’s worth stepping back a bit to put some of this in context. Incoming American administrations typically publish a National Security Strategy during their first year, to convey their worldview. Henry Farrell, who used to teach a module on “grand strategy” and the National Security Strategy, explained on his blog that they are designed to do a few things simultaneously.
The first is internal coordination.
a National Security Strategy... sets the government’s national security priorities... The NSS doesn’t have any binding force, but it is meant to serve an important practical use. The United States policy making apparatus is enormously complex, with many different institutions, agencies and departments which have some greater or lesser role in national security, but regularly get in each other’s way. That poses enormous challenges of coordination.
The second is that it communicates both an internal message and an external message:
As I used to tell my students, a National Security Strategy speaks to three audiences: the U.S. government itself; allies and friends, and adversaries.
This immediately means that one document is doing a lot of work. This is one of the reasons that they are usually quite a bit longer than the 29 pages of the 2025 NSS. As Henry Farrell observes, any National Security Strategy “gets pulled into the awkward realities of complicated issues, different factions in US politics, ally politics etc.”
The end of ‘great power competition’
All the same, this is a very different document from the 2017 National Security Strategy that was published by the first Trump Administration. The British think tank Chatham House spelled out some of the differences:
The 2017 document identified great power competition with Russia and China as the animating US foreign policy challenge... It was a compromise text between cabinet moderators of Trump’s instincts (like Jim Mattis, HR McMaster, and Rex Tillerson) and the enablers (like Stephen Miller and William Barr)... [T]he bureaucracy was nominally involved in shaping the text: the author was a career State Department civil servant. Eight years later, the new strategy is driven by commercial deals and authoritarian accommodation. A cabinet composed only of loyalists has advanced Trump’s vision with few checks.
People at places like Chatham House, the Brookings Institution and the Council for Foreign Relations have spent more time than me reading the runes on the document, and are far more expert than I am at doing so, and so I’m just going to synthesise quickly their takes on the differences in the new NSS.
The idea of great power competition has gone. If there is competition with China, it is purely economic competition. The so-called “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, asserting American influence in Latin America, is directed at Chinese economic influence. Russia is not blamed for the Ukraine war.
At lot of space is devoted to internal enemies, not external enemies. The threats that America faces, according to the NSS, are mass migration, crime and drugs, and the undermining “of American spiritual and cultural health”.
Related to America’s spiritual and cultural health, the document contains an astonishing attack on America’s allies in Europe. Europe is in decline, it says, and needs to have its “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” restored. This doesn’t take too much decoding, but in case anyone in Europe isn’t paying attention, the NSS also explains that American policy will cultivate “civilizational self-confidence and Western identity” in Europe, effectively by working with what are described as “patriotic parties.”
Of course, this was all signalled by J.D. Vance in his notorious speechearlier this year at the Munich Conference, and as far as I can see you could have asked an AI to parse that speech in the style of a government document and you’d end up with chunks of the NSS. All the same, as Constanze Stelzenmüller says in the Brookings review,
To state a truth that should be self-evident: that is no way to speak to allies. An earlier age would have recognized it as the language of tyranny.
It’s also worth mentioning a couple of other elements in the NSS that are recurring Trump Administration themes. I quote:
We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.
American energy dominance will focus instead on “oil, gas, coal, and nuclear”.
And the document is not a fan of international institutions, “some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”
Selective evidence
When you have a worldview that is as selective as this, it’s not surprising that the evidence that underpins it is selective as well. On migration, for example, it says
[t]hroughout history, sovereign nations prohibited uncontrolled migration and granted citizenship only rarely to foreigners.
The whole notion of “sovereign nations” is largely a construct of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and of course this is also a rewriting of American history. On energy, it’s as if no-one has been monitoring China’s energy strategy or the reasons that sit behind it. There’s data on relative European GDP decline that ignores the growth in Asia—which has had the same effect on the United States.5 In fact I assembled the relevant chart for a recent presentation.
(Source: IMF data, chart constructed with AI support)
Looking through, in particular, the analysis from the Brookings Institution analysts, a couple of contributions jump out.
The first is by Caitlin Talmadge, who tugs at the gaps between the rhetoric and the Administration’s practice. As she summarises,
The strategy touts Trump as “The President of Peace,” even as he has ordered illegal and unnecessary military operations against civilian drug traffickers in the Caribbean. It warns against the dangers of “fruitless ‘nation-building’ wars,” even as the president toys with launching a regime change campaign in Venezuela. And the document repeatedly harps on the importance of sovereignty, even as the administration seems eager to reward Russia for brutally violating that principle in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
There’s more: “the document informs us that “all human beings possess God-given equal natural rights”, which she contrasts with the Administration’s disregard for law in its anti-migrant crackdowns. The economic ambitions of the document are hard to reconcile with the gutting of America’s scientific and technical institutions. And, as she puts it, “the cherry on the top” is
the anti-DEI lecture on the importance of “competence and merit” from the employer of Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel.
This shouldn’t be surprising. One of the curious features of the current Trump experiment, given his narcissistic personality, is the way that he has constructed a government with a narcissistic personality disorder. And we know that projection is a significant defence mechanism for narcissistic personalities—in which your own faults are projected onto others to prop up your fragile self-esteem and grandiose personality.
The conterfactual National Security Strategy
The other interesting piece is by Asli Aydintaşbaş, who constructs the counter-factual: what would this look like if it wasn’t being written by the ideologues in the White House? It would probably still signal a move away from geo-political competition, and be expecting allies to shoulder more of the cost of NATO, even if it might not also be threatening them with regime change:
A future NSS—perhaps even under a Democratic administration—would likely retain some Trump-era themes: burden-shifting, criticism of global institutions, a narrower definition of U.S. interests, and the centrality of economic interests... American power would undoubtedly remain consequential, but it would have to be exercised with greater caution, economic realism, and a clearer sense of limits.
I discussed some of this in a post here back in March.
https://justtwothings.substack.com/p/18-march-2025-geopolitics-systems
In particular that post mentioned an argument made by the Marxist geographer David Harvey more than 20 years ago, which America’s “grand strategy” seems finally to have caught up with. Influence, in future, would involve
more flexible forms of economic and geopolitical control, where coercion, financial leverage, and market mechanisms replace the need for physical occupation. The U.S. is increasingly relying on cost-effective instruments of influence, such as sanctions, trade policies, and financial restrictions, rather than direct military engagement.
Reading the NSS as a document, there’s a lecture early on about what strategy entails, which is a rehearsal of the idea of “ends, ways, and means” approach you learn in defence studies. Rhetorically, this reads like a “look over there” device designed to distract the reader from the incoherence of and contradictions within the document.
Because the strong impression that you get as you work through it is that this is a document about American weakness, not American strength.
Henry Farrell’s piece underlines this. As he writes, the Administration no longer has the expertise or the capacity to co-ordinate a National Security Strategy:
The NSC has been gutted in a series of ideological purges, egged on by those who interpret expertise and experience as codewords for Deep State sympathies... Matters are even worse in the State Department, and the strategic decision making bits of major national security institutions aren’t doing great either. People are still fleeing and being fired. So too for the bits of government that are actually supposed to implement the detail of policy... [T]he Trump administration lacks the institutional bandwidth to execute the sweeping changes that it proposes.
Whatever Ends it might prefer, whatever Ways it might imagine to achieve them, it no longer has the Means to deliver them.
And this might be why it was smuggled out in the middle of the night without fanfare. As Rebecca Lissner says at the Council on Foreign Relations website,
the unceremonious rollout... suggests the White House could see the NSS mostly as a box-checking exercise, rather than a binding statement of strategic intent. Its many audiences, from Capitol Hill to allied capitals, should discount it accordingly.
(Seen in London. Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
In addition: music
I have a seasonal tradition running back to to 2018 that at this time of year I compile an “off-centre” seasonal playlist, which I generally shorthand as seasonal music you probably won’t hear in the supermarket. There’s all sorts of genres in here, from straight up and down pop to jazz, folk, soul, reggae and a bit of choral music. Here’s the 2025 edition. It comes, of course, with seasonal greetings to all my readers.
j2t#654
If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.
I am grateful to my colleague Johann Schutte for reminding me of this quote, even though I am on the record as regarding Future Shock as being over-rated.
There’s a curiosity in the literature here. Conventionally Roy Amara’s 1974 paper always gets referenced in the futures literature in connection with probable, possible and preferred futures (sometimes as the 1981 book in which the paper was gathered). But Future Shock sold by the truckload, and Amara was the President of one of America’s leading futures researchers, the Institute for the Future. Theres no way he wouldn’t have read it. And when you look at the 1974 paper, the idea is thrown away, buried in a diagram. So my interpretation here is that Amara didn’t make a big deal of the notion of probable, possible, and preferred futures because it was already current in the discourse.
I was teaching this idea recently, and one of the people in the room asked if attenuating the information from the external environment might be a bit of a risk—you might be surprised by changes. Well, yes; you might be.
Leaving aside that people who tell you that something was a “black swan” event often turn out to be fundamentally blinkered about what is going on around them. As the futurist Alex Pang once said, “black swan” is not an excuse for bad scanning.
Whether Europe is in relative decline—relative to the USA—is actually a complex question that Adam Tooze happened to discuss at length in a post at his Chartbook newsletter yesterday.