Stratfor has 11 chilling predictions for what the world will look like in 10 years

Except maybe for Russia the world is teetering on the edge of a financial Calamity. I mean a World Wide depression. Every Country is in hock up to their eyeballs and most major corporations are the same way.

“1. Russia will collapse ...”

Male bovine excrement.

Think about it.

From a historical perspective.

5.56mm

My Predictions—With my Swami’s Turban on tight and my focus on the Christal Ball—I predict....
1. 2016 Queen Elizabeth Dies Charles is made King.
2. Hillary will not get the Nomination for the DEMs
3. War between Russia and Turkey.
4. Right wing Government takes power in Germany.
5. New Facist Party wins in Spain.
6. Revolution in Iran—civil war.
7. Saudi Arabia will fall in a revolt.
8. Trump will win big—build a wall.
9. New diseases will hit the world—a Billion die.
10. Trump will be assassinated—Ted Cruz President.
11. Unrest in most of the world.
12. China is hit by Civil War—and go back to Maoist Ideals and beliefs.
13. War betwen China and India.
14. Argentina will go fascist.
15. The Pope will be assassinated.

So basically, all the major powers and rich countries are in for trouble. That's basically the dynamic. The problem with the prediction is that poorer countries are also going to face the same strains and may find their problems harder to deal with than the rich countries do. That's one reason why they've stayed poor.

If Russia breaks up, there will be any number of wars (hot and cold) going on --Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Transnistria, Chechnya, Tatarstan, the Far East -- as well as jihadi wars in Central Asia and the Caucasus.

I don't see Japan becoming a major military power, and I wonder about how Japan could be exempt from the problems they see the other rich countries facing. Maybe STRATFOR is just trying to be contrarian: everybody on top goes down and Japan, which has been having trouble for some time, has to start going back up.

Like the “predictions “ of Nostradamus, so broad that the author will be able to claim success no matter what happens.
Nonsense.

How about this prediction;

Democrats will have to acknowledge we live in a Constitutional Republic. And respect the constitution. And/or, crack down on borders and immigration policies... Eventually. Or... they will be wearing Burkas, and hear this out;

-A pure democracy, that we have been drifting toward the last 30 years, allows the 51% majority to enslave the 49%.
-Demographically, muslims are out reproducing the west, by at least 2 to one.
-Eventually even in this country if unchecked, Muslims will outnumber christians,atheists, Jewish, or any other ‘infidel’..,

Add it up and all democrat women are wearing burkas, or they will have to come to Jesus,,,, or the Republican constitutional conservatives. And nobody will look better in a burka than that idiot Debbi Wasserman Schultz...

Excellent article about stratfor being clowns and having nothing to add.

PURE BULL! The US is teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Like nation can sustain the expenditures being made, plus the projected increases the moocher class wants with the impending death of the middle class!

And the US has an economy that could survive such a global catastrophe.?

Thanks for yer wit.

Based on this, Stratfor is garbage.

-A pure democracy, that we have been drifting toward the last 30 years, allows the 51% majority to enslave the 49%.

Worse than that, I think.

Most elections only require a plurality of votes; not a majority. eg - Clinton won the Presidency twice with less than 50% of the votes.

So the Democrat Party, with about 30% of the vote, combined with massive election fraud, disinformation, intimidation, etc, gets to terrorize the other 70%.

From that point we are free from the bounds of civilized western law and society.

The liberals don’t define my reality, morality or priorities.

Yea, bad for the country.

Civil war.

But freedom and liberty are not defined by any government. They are defined by what is between your ears.

Reminds me of the Kingston Trio song, The Merry Minuet, for some reason.

Optimist. We will be salvaging bent tin cans in a radioactive landscape, with ghouls and supermutants around every corner, and Raiders in Diamond City, and Gunners in the Fens.

We are so screwed.

10 Year Forecast bump for later.....

Thanks SeekAndFind. The underlying Stratfor analysis came out this past February.

We see the U.S.-jihadist war subsiding. This does not mean that Islamist militancy will be eliminated. Attempts at attacks will continue, and some will succeed. However, the two major wars in the region will have dramatically subsided if not concluded by 2020. We also see the Iranian situation having been brought under control. Whether this will be by military action and isolation of Iran or by a political arrangement with the current or a successor regime is unclear but irrelevant to the broader geopolitical issue. Iran will be contained, as it simply does not have the underlying power to be a major player in the region beyond its immediate horizons.
Global jihad will stop after the Iranian mullahcracy is obliterated, and the price of crude oil remains low basically permanently.
The diversity of systems and demographics that is Europe will put the European Union's institutions under severe strain. We suspect the institutions will survive. We doubt that they will work very effectively. The main political tendency will be away from multinational solutions to a greater nationalism driven by divergent and diverging economic, social and cultural forces.
Stratfor is anti-nationalist, or more accurately, against self-determination and local control.
Russia will spend the 2010s seeking to secure itself before the demographic decline really hits. It will do this by trying to move from raw commodity exports to process commodity exports, moving up the value chain to fortify its economy while its demographics still allow it. Russia will also seek to reintegrate the former Soviet republics into some coherent entity in order to delay its demographic problems, expand its market and above all reabsorb some territorial buffers.
The thugs running the NeoSoviet Empire are not concerned about that, they're only interested in world hegemony, just like their Leninist/Stalinist/Marxist predecessors. Russia's demographic decline is a real thing, though. I'd love to see what Stratfor regards as Russia's budding 'process commodity exports', because they only major exports Russia currently has are hydrocarbons ('raw commodity exports') and arms.
China's economy, like the economies of Japan and other East Asian states before it, will reduce its rate of growth dramatically in order to calibrate growth with the rate of return on capital and to bring its financial system into balance. To do this, it will have to deal with the resulting social and political tensions.
No China won't. China will seek to borrow and then expropriate a world-class banking system, which it currently lacks, as it tries in vain to cope with 40% of its population carrying TB, atmospheric and water pollution, and implosion of the younger demagraphic which won't exist to enter the workforce. Top that with the next five to ten years of emigration to better places to live, and prepare to make a killing selling prepper paraphernalia to the Chinese market.
From the American point of view, the 2010s will continue the long-term increase in economic and military power that began more than a century ago... remains the overwhelming -- but not omnipotent -- military power in the world, and produces 25 percent of the world's wealth each year.
The US produces *at least* 25 percent of the world's wealth each year, and consumes less than 20 percent of the world's resources in the process of doing that. As the current gen of new weapons systems development culminates, and several subsequent generations come about over shorter development cycles, the "military superiority beyond question" scenario will come to fruition.
The current confrontation with Russia over Ukraine will remain a centerpiece of the international system over the next few years, but we do not think the Russian Federation can exist in its current form for the entire decade. Its overwhelming dependence on energy exports and the unreliability of expectations on pricing make it impossible for Moscow to sustain its institutional relations across the wide swathe of the Russian Federation.
Putin and his Thugs and Buttboys have to try to press-gang as much military manpower as it can, while crude prices continue their long downward slide and natural gas production triples, quadruples, or more over the next 20 years.
...the European Union will never return to its previous unity, and if it survives it will operate in a more limited and fragmented way in the next decade. We do not expect the free trade zone to continue to operate without increasing protectionism. We expect Germany to suffer severe economic reversals in the next decade and Poland to increase its regional power as a result... The European Union will be unable to solve its fundamental problem, which is not the eurozone, but the free trade zone. Germany is the center of gravity of the European Union; it exports more than 50 percent of its GDP, and half of that goes to other EU countries. Germany has created a productive capability that vastly outstrips its ability to consume, even if the domestic economy were stimulated. It depends on these exports to maintain economic growth, full employment and social stability. The European Union's structures -- including the pricing of the euro and many European regulations -- are designed to facilitate this export dependency.
This German productivity makes the German state and by extension the EU vulnerable to countries fond of high-markup goods made in Germany, such as fine German automobiles. The pressure on this will be twofold -- number one, the decline in the cost of energy (and therefore of all goods) will make quality autos from Asia more attractive again, including in plum markets like the OPEC Middle East; number two, the prospect of embargo by other large markets -- such as the US -- means Germany and the EU are subject to, well, blackmail.
Mediterranean Europe and countries such as Germany and Austria have completely different behavioral patterns and needs.... the Ukrainian crisis and Eastern European countries' focus on the perceived threat from Russia... creates yet another Europe -- four, total, if we separate the United Kingdom and Scandinavia from the rest of Europe. Considered with the rise of Euroskeptic parties on the right and left, the growing delegitimation of mainstream parties and the surging popularity of separatist parties within European countries, the fragmentation and nationalism that we forecast in 2005, and before, is clearly evident.
Norway has a huge share (on a per capita basis) of EU-area oil production. I believe Scotland's (calc'd by separating it from the rest of the UK) is right behind it, then the entire UK. Production of methane and petroleum from offshore Israel and Cyprus will be arriving in the European market within a generation, as will the post-national fields in Libya and Algeria.
The United States will continue to be the major economic, political and military power in the world but will be less engaged than in the past. Its low rate of exports, its increasing energy self-reliance and its experiences over the last decade will cause it to be increasingly cautious about economic and military involvement in the world. It has learned what happens to heavy exporters when customers cannot or will not buy their products.
Rubbish. Jihad won't decline because of Marxist historical inevitability (which is mythical and agitprop), it will require destruction of its finances and training camps (the Iranian mullahcracy, and OPEC freelancers); our Russian and Chinese enemies need to be kept in their boxes through continued skillful policies, until their demographic declines/implosions, and that involves support for our allies (the EU, Republic of Korea, Japan, India, etc, along with Israel and Egypt); and the border wall needs to be constructed and maintained while drug cartels are actively interdicted.
To Russia's west, Poland, Hungary and Romania will seek to recover regions lost to the Russians at various points. They will work to bring Belarus and Ukraine into this fold. In the south, the Russians' ability to continue controlling the North Caucasus will evaporate, and Central Asia will destabilize. In the northwest, the Karelian region will seek to rejoin Finland. In the Far East, the maritime regions more closely linked to China, Japan and the United States than to Moscow will move independently... There will not be an uprising against Moscow, but Moscow's withering ability to support and control the Russian Federation will leave a vacuum. What will exist in this vacuum will be the individual fragments of the Russian Federation. The issue in the first half of the decade will be how far the alliance stretching between the Baltic and Black seas will extend. Logically, it should reach Azerbaijan and the Caspian Sea. Whether it does depends on what we have forecast for the Middle East and Turkey.
Well, yeah!
In countries like Libya, Syria and Iraq, we have seen the devolution of the nation-state into factions that war on each other... This process follows the model of Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, when the central government ceased to function...
Weird coincidence that all four have or had large muzzie populations, eh? Lebanon's gov't disintegrated because Arafat's PLO tried to overthrow the Kingdom of Jordan, got its ass handed to it, and was allowed to flee to Lebanon, where it systematically undermined the always delicate power balance guaranteed under the Lebanese constitution. Within months of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, the mullahcratic regime established a foothold in Lebanon, and triggered a renewed shooting war among the Lebanese and the Syrian invasion, which was followed by nearly 30 years of Syrian occupation along with the presence of at least partly foreign proxies of the Iranian regime.
...the Arab states south of Turkey, represents a threat to regional stability. The United States will act to mitigate the threat of particular factions, which will change over time, through the use of limited force. But the United States will not deploy multidivisional forces to the region.
The only way to stabilize the region is to destroy the Iranian mullahcracy and make sure the price of crude remains stable and below $30 a barrel. Syria and Iraq are failed states, actually failed pseudostates. Ultimately, assuring a peaceful environment for Arabs means to impose external rule on them.
As the reality sinks in, it will emerge that, because of its location, only one country has an overriding interest in stabilizing Syria and Iraq, is able to act broadly -- again because of its location -- and has the means to at least achieve limited success in the region. That country is Turkey... Iran is not in a position geographically or militarily to perform this function, nor is Saudi Arabia. Turkey is likely to try to build shifting coalitions ultimately reaching into North Africa to stabilize the situation. Turkish-Iranian competition will grow with time, but Turkey will keep its options open to work with both Iran and Saudi Arabia as needed.
Not a chance, but if Turkey wants to try -- which it doesn't -- it will be Turkey that bleeds. Russia and its trolls want Turkey to bleed.
Turkey will not be ready for a completely independent policy in the Middle East and will pay the price for a U.S. relationship. That price will open the path to extending the containment line to Georgia and Azerbaijan.
See the Stratfor discussion of post-Russian-Federation economic and political ties, above. Turkey is the cork in the bottle for SE Europe, and is also in a good position economically, making it the best trading partner for SE Europe. It has already assumed that role.
International capitalism requires a low-wage, high-growth region for high rewards on risk capital... The map of these countries shows that they are concentrated in the Indian Ocean Basin. Another way to look at it is that these are the less developed countries (or regions) in Asia, East Africa and Latin America. Our forecast is that in this next decade, many of these countries -- and perhaps some not identified -- will collectively take on the role that China had in the 1980s.
This has already been going on for years.
The greatest advantage the United States has is its insularity. It exports only 9 percent of its GDP, and about 40 percent of that goes to Canada and Mexico. Only about 5 percent of its GDP is exposed to the vagaries of global consumption... The United States is also insulated from import constraints. Unlike in 1973, when the Arab oil embargo massively disrupted the U.S. economy, the United States has emerged as a significant energy producer. Although it must import some minerals from outside NAFTA, and it prefers to import some industrial products, it can readily manage without these. This is particularly true as industrial production is increasing in the United States and in Mexico in response to the increasing costs in China and elsewhere... The United States is a haven for global capital, and as capital flight has taken hold of China, Europe and Russia, that money has flowed into the United States, reducing interest rates and buoying equity markets.
The US has maintained historically low and declining interest rates (with some pretty small and short-lived upticks) since the Reagan administration. The Republican congress forced balanced budgets during Bill the Rapist's administration, and subsequent deficits that arose as a consequence to 9/11 have been floated by countries (such as China) with large trade surpluses with the US. A consequence of low interest rates are instabilities in the banking system, as well as constraints on capital formation. Both of those things facilitated and accelerated the export of manufacturing jobs.
The United States has 50-year cycles that end with significant economic or social problems. One cycle began in 1932 with the election of Franklin Roosevelt and ended with the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It began with a need to rebuild demand for products from idle factories and ended in vast overconsumption, underinvestment and with double-digit inflation and unemployment. Ronald Reagan's presidency laid the groundwork for restructuring American industry through a change in the tax code and by shifting the focus from the urban industrial worker to the suburban professional and entrepreneur. We are now about 15 years from the end of this cycle...
There is no such thing as 50-year cycles. It's nonsense.
Currently, the median household income in the United States is about $50,000. Depending on the state you live in, this is actually about $40,000. That allows the literal middle to buy a modest home and live frugally outside major metropolitan areas. For the lower middle class, the 25th percentile, this is almost impossible.
The US needs to become a net exporter of energy, with a large domestically supplied surplus of low-cost energy, and needs tax reform along with electoral reform.