The US National Intelligence Council's unclassified publication, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World', drew widespread attention in November 2008 for stating the obvious: that the United States would decline in relative power over the coming decades. The study noted that "risks will increase that the traditional Western alliances will weaken", but followed a linear pattern of projection in noting that "the unprecedented shift in relative wealth and economic power roughly from West to East now underway will continue". The transformation to a multi-polar strategic environment now apparently (and finally) evident to the National Intelligence Council (NIC) was discussed by this writer in Defense & Foreign Affairs publications, with the collapse of the bipolar system in 1991, and subsequently. However, the urge by many "linearists" to believe in the inevitability of the movement of political leadership, capital, and power from West to East - and particularly to the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India - was challenged by this writer in a range of articles and speeches. A growing alignment, or collision, of strategic trends, I said, augured badly for (particularly) the PRC and India, over the coming few years. In other words, a decline in relative power and wealth by the US and Western Europe in the coming decade would not necessarily lead to a relative rise in stability, wealth, and power by the PRC and India, although it may well lead to a relative improvement in the position of Russia.
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