Salon.com has put up a selection of Worst-case Scenarios centered around the insane policies of our Emperor. Some, like the Middle East scenario, are plausible and well-written. Others, like the essay on the environment, repeat a lot of what already's been said many times. On the whole, though, we are sooooooooo screwed.
Or are we? I'm going to keep a copy of these essays and have a look at them a year later and compare them to what actually happened. That is, if we're still alive by then (my What If? scenarios usually feature the earth's annihilation at the hands of "Left Behind"-reading crypto-fascists).
However, I've noticed that so many future scenarios that appear in papers here operate by one major assumption: the United States is proactive, and the rest of the world is reactive. This certainly makes things easier when looking in the crystal ball, but history has always shown that world-changing events come out of left field. Who would have thought the War for Iraqi Oil would have been so derailed by North Korea suddenly sticking their heads in? That country has inadvertantly been one of the biggest helps in creating anti-war sentiment here because they have underscored the great hypocrisy in the BushJunta's "Axis of Evil" statement.
An even greater example is the fall of the Soviet Union. Futurists in the mid-'80s, following the cold war policies of the Reagan/Bush administration, probably saw the standoff between the Soviets and the U.S. as lasting many more decades. Certainly, the U.S. were not going to make any concessions, and the Soviets were such a bloated totalitarian state that it seemed impossible to even think it would change.
But it did, and once one little incident happened (in hindsight, many Hawks credited the cold war for pushing the Soviet Union into such financial dire straits) it had a snowball effect. Was it Gorbachev? Was it just a simple change in thinking?
How can we forecast those things happening?
Stay tuned, is all I can say.
