CRYSTAL GLOBE

From warfare to energy, two prominent futurists examine the key trends that will
shape the twenty-first century

The twentieth century is already dead; the twenty-first is being born nearly ten
years early. In large part, we can thank Mikhail Gorbachev for that. Science,
medicine, and technology will change our lives dramatically in the years to
come, but the most important factor now shaping the future is the political and
economic revolution triggered by the Soviet president's decision to call off the
Cold War.

For some 40 years after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union
fought for global supremacy. Shooting wars broke out in Korea, Vietnam, and
many other proxy pations. Yet the real contest was not military: It was between
the competing economic systems, Communism and capitalism. And on those terms,
the Soviet Union clearly lost; central planning has reduced the country to near
starvation. Soviet political power has suffered as well. In a rare lucid
moment, Saddam Hussein even declared that the world now has only one superpower,
the United States.

Yet America did not win the Cold War as its leaders once fantasized. The dream
of world dominion could survive only so long as the warring superpowers
frightened smaller nations into joining one of their camps. When the Soviet
Union gave up the battle, it freed both its own satellites and those of the
United States to seek their own futures.

In only two or three years, their search has wiped away the rigid postwar world.
What new structure will replace the old is still a mystery. Yet the outlines
of a new, more flexible world order are already clear. In Crystal Globe: The
Haves and Have-nots of the New World Order (St. Martin's Press, 1991), from
which this article is adapted, we examine 74 trends now shaping the world of
the year 2000. Here we present 20 of the most important.

WARFARE

1. Gorbachev's "new thinking" has cut the risk of widespread nuclear war almost
to zero, but it has also made the world safer for local and regional conflicts.
During the Cold War, the superpowers could restrain their aggressive junior
allies from attacking their neighbors. With the nuclear threat effectively
gone, would-be antagonists feel less inhibited. Saddam Hussein was only the
first of many small despots who will try to win by conquest what they cannot
achieve by negotiation.

2. Brushfire wars will grow more frequent and bloody. Four of the most likely
will involve India and Pakistan, Greece and Turkey, Israel and the Arab
countries (though we believe they will succeed in settling their differences by
the end of the century), and Northern Ireland, which will remain its own worst
enemy.

3. International bodies will take over much of the peacekeeping role the
superpowers are now abandoning, The Warsaw Pact has already disappeared, and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will be radically transformed now that
it is no longer needed to defend against a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.
Both alliances may be replaced by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe, a group of 33 nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union.
NATO is seeking a new reason to exist, however, and may find it serving as an
emergency strike force for the United Nations. The UN's peacekeeping forces will
intervene to suppress conflicts throughout the world, especially in the Middle
East as well as in Southwest Asia.

4. Look for a new wave of terrorism throughout most of the world's trouble
spots:

• In Northern Ireland, the IRA has stepped up its violence in recent months,
sometimes forcing civilians to cooperate in missions such as bombing cars at
British checkpoints. This is a clear sign of things to come.

• In the Middle East are three obvious sources of terror:

Abul Abbas leads one of the extremist PLO factions inflamed by Saddam Hussein's
aggression. Muammar Qaddafi, a longtime ally, recently kicked him out of Libya.
Some observers believe that Qaddafi may have been trying to curry favor with
the West; we suspect that it was just a falling-out among thieves.

Abu Nidal, who heads another of the PLO's splinter groups, also has ties to
Saddam. After Iraq's bloody defeat he's almost surely plotting against the
West.

Finally, Yasir Arafat's Al-Fatah faction may return to terrorism in an effort to
reclaim its Palestinian following.

• And in northern Spain, Basque separatists of the ETA are still fighting for
autonomy. They will never receive it nor give up the fight in the Nineties.
Next year, the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's voyage to America, will
be particularly bloody, the ETA warns.

5. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons will continue to spread among
Third World powers, some of which will be tempted to use them. Libya, Iraq, and
nearly two dozen other developing nations have developed either chemical or
biological toxins or both, and many have already stockpiled completed weapons.
Most of the rest are hurrying to do so.

Inexpensive, easy to make, easily concealed chemical and biological weapons also
could become the terrorist threat of the future. Both Action Directe in France
and Germany's Red Army Faction have reportedly made chemical weapons, though
neither group has used them to date.

WORLD ECONOMY

6. The world economy will grow at a brisk 4.5 percent annually in the next
decade, becoming ever more tightly interlinked. When a car can be made by
Chrysler in Mexico with Japanese parts and sold in the United States, it
becomes almost impossible to label a product by nation of origin. Already 39
percent of the parts for goods "manufactured" in the United States are imported
from other countries. Protective tariffs will therefore become obsolete, and
trade will flourish as a result.

All this will do the developing countries little good, however. Between now and
2000, they will fall further behind the industrialized nations, largely because
their populations will continue to rise faster than their incomes.

7. The European Community (EC) is destined to become an even stronger economic
power than the United States or Japan. By 1992 the EC will represent an
integrated economy of 325 million people, with a gross domestic product of $4
trillion. By 1996 the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries will
join with the EC to create a market of 400 million people with a $5 trillion
GDP. Sweden, Norway, Finland, Yugoslavia, and Switzerland will join the
founding 12. By 2000, most of the former East Bloc countries will join the EC.

A new generation of trains is uniting the European continent, making it far
easier to do business. By 2015 the 300-mile trip from London to Paris will take
less than three hours. Passengers will be able to board a morning train in
London and get off in Lisbon, Hanover, Amsterdam, or Marseilles later that day

8. Western bankers are at last accepting the obvious truth: Many Third World
debtors have no hope of ever paying ing back overdue loans. Creditors will thus
write off one third of these debts and in some cases more. One major reason:
the Brady Plan. It swaps Third World debt for bonds guaranteed by the U.S.
Treasury, in exchange for a 35 percent reduction in the loans.

In part, this new flexibility also serves as a reward to the debtor nations for
changing their ways. Brazil once poured its foreign loans into highways from
one uninhabited corner of the Amazon basin to another; poverty-stricken African
countries built steel mills in jungles with no markets for their products.
Today many debtor nations are investing in profitable, job-creating industries.
Mexico and Chile have rebuilt their economies along modern, capitalist lines.

There is a lot at stake. Latin America owes some $420 billion in foreign debt,
sub-Saharan Africa $116 billion, Eastern Europe $134 billion. In all, the top
50 debtor nations owe a total of $1.3 trillion. For such nations, debt
forgiveness could stave off bankruptcy and probable dictatorship.

9. Washington, DC, will supplant New York City as the world financial capital.
By 2000, and probably well before, the capital city will be home to both the New
York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange and to many of the major
corporations now headquartered in New York City. No fewer than a dozen of New
York's major financial institutions are already plotting their escapes from the
city's high taxes and negligible public services. They will move where the
power is, where they already support legions of lobbyists, attorneys, and
influence peddlers. Washington is the only place for them to be.

ENVIRONMENT

10. People the world over will become increasingly sensitive to environmental
issues as the consequences of neglect, indifference, and ignorance become ever
more apparent One fifth of Taiwan's farmland is now dangerously polluted; most
water must be purified for drinking. Much of Eastern Europe is so contaminated
by industrial waste that it will take decades and billions of dollars to clean
up the mess.

Policies and programs on global, regional, and national levels will emerge to
repair damage already done and to prevent future damage. International
organizations, particularly the UN, will help to coordinate these efforts.

11. In the Nineties, air is not just for breathing anymore; it's for debating,
regulating, and cleaning. Air pollution and other atmospheric issues will
dominate eco-policy discussions for years to come. Blame global warming for at
least some of the spread of Africa's deserts. Before the process runs its
course, two fifths of Africa's remaining fertile land could become desert. Up
to one third of Asia's nondesert land and one-fifth of Latin America's may
follow.

The acid-rain problem in the United States and Canada will not be the last of
its kind. It will happen to many of the developing nations in the next decade.

As a first step in cleaning up the mess, 137 countries will likely sign the
far-reaching World Climate Treaty in Brazil in 1992. Dragging its feet, the
United States will finally join the bandwagon.

12. Though water will remain plentiful in most regions, some parched, populous
areas will run short. In the Middle East and the American West, populations
have already outgrown their water supplies; they are in for dry times by the
turn of the century. By the year 2020, as many as 25 African nations may face
serious water shortages.

Decades of irrigation are also taking their toll, as dissolved minerals from the
water make the land too salty to support most crops. By 2020 agriculture in
California's fertile San Joaquin Valley could be only a memory.

13. If you live in a developed nation and are not yet recycling your garbage,
you have that to look forward to. Within the next decade, most of the
industrialized world will all but run out of landfill space. Governments will
respond with a flood of new regulations and waste management programs designed
to turn back the tide of trash. Among them will be the Pacific and Latin
American nations, which until now have accepted refuse from the United States,
Japan, and Europe.

For now, recycling is a necessary nuisance. By 2000 it will become a valuable
resource as researchers find profitable new uses for materials still being
discarded. Recycling will save energy as well; remanufacturing takes less power
than the full iron-ore-to-Cadillac production process. And discards can provide
energy: At least one Israeli power plant runs on ground-up tires exported from
landfills in the United States.

One other development will help: new packaging materials and techniques that
produce less waste.

ENERGY

14. Despite all the calls for alternative energy development, oil will provide
more of the world's power in 2000 than it did in 1990. OPEC will supply most of
it. Demand for OPEC oil grew from 15 million barrels a day in 1986 to more than
20 million barrels just three years later. By 2000 it will easily top 46
million barrels daily.

If oil production outside the OPEC nations has not yet peaked, it will come
soon. By 2000, or soon after, both America's Prudhoe Bay and Britain's North
Sea oil fields will run dry.

15. Oil prices will not rise; instead, by 2000 they will plummet to between
seventeen and nine dollars per barrel. Even those prices offer huge profits to
the producers. It costs only $1.38 per barrel to lift Saudi oil out of the
ground. OPEC just is not very good at throttling back production to keep prices
up when their market is glutted. They will not get any better at it in the
Nineties.

And the market will be glutted. The most industrialized nations have a
three-month supply of oil in tankers and storage facilities. Most have a similar
amount in "strategic reserves."

Finally, if the price of oil starts to rise, new methods for recovering oil from
old wells will become cost-effective. Techniques already developed could add
nearly 50 percent to the world's recoverable oil supply, and cheaper methods are
likely to appear by 2000.

16. Growing competition from other energy sources will also help to limit the
price of oil. Natural gas burns cleanly, and there is enough of it available to
supply the world's entire energy needs for the next 200 years. Nuclear plants
will supply 12 percent of the energy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union by
the end of the century. Even the United States appears to be sidling up to the
recognition that modern, well-run power plants like Canada's CANDU technology
can be safer and less polluting than coal- and oil-fired generators.

Solar, geothermal, wind, and wave energy will ease power problems where they are
available. But they will contribute only a small fraction of the world's energy
in the foreseeable future.

Nuclear fusion, the energy produced when small atoms are combined to form larger
ones, probably will not supply practical power before 2020. A pollution-free
hydrogen economy will not become practical until later in the next century and
will remain costly.

SEPARATISM

17 Nations are forming loose confederations, either by breaking up the most
centralized countries along ethnic and religious lines or by uniting independent
states in international alliances. This is the world's most important political
trend.

• Eastern Europe: Yugoslavia will soon split into a loose confederation,
based on the region's three dominant religions: Greek Orthodoxy, Roman
Catholicism, and Islam. Czechoslovakia is already loosening the ties between
its Czech and Slovak regions. And, following a brief, unsuccessful attempt at a
new repression by the right wing of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union will
reorganize itself into a confederation of 12 largely independent states. The
Baltic nations-Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia-will regain their independence.

• European Community: The Continent will form an effective confederation of
12 states in 1992, 17 by 1996. Eastern European states will become associate
members by 2000.

• North America: After Quebec secedes from Canada, probably in 1996, the four
Eastern provinces will join the United States by 2004, the Western provinces by
2010. In a recent poll, 60 percent of French Canadians opted for separation.
The provinces of Manitoba and New Brunswick have already contacted the U.S.
State Department for information about how to become part of the United States.

• Asia: The leases are about to run out on Hong Kong and Macao; the British
and Portuguese colonies will rejoin mainland China no later than 1997. If
Beijing lives up to its promise to preserve their capitalist life-styles, Taiwan
will seek to join the People's Republic shortly after that. Eighty percent of
the Taiwanese asked in one recent poll said they wish to rejoin the mainland.
Even the two Koreas will reunite before 2000.

• Middle East: Saddam Hussein inadvertently gave Israel and its Arab
neighbors their best chance for peace in 40 years-and they seem to be throwing
it away. Fortunately, leaders on both sides recognize the blunder, even if they
cannot prevent it. Hostilities will escalate there again, but this time Israel
will trade its captured lands for peace. By 2000, economic and political ties
will start to bind the region into a prosperous and tranquil community.

POPULATION

18. In the industrial countries, the "birth dearth" has cut growth almost to
nothing; in the developing world, the population bomb is still exploding. The
primary cause is economic, not medical. Throughout the industrialized world,
workers can look forward to national retirement programs or social security. In
the developing lands, those too old to work rely on their children to support
them, so they have as many children as they can. Yet, thanks to better health
care, children have a better chance to survive into adulthood. This contributes
to population growth.

19. The AIDS epidemic will slaughter the defenseless by the millions. According
to the World Health Organization, the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) will infect up to 40 million people by 2000.

In 1990 some 5 million people in sub-Saharan Africa already carried the disease,
twice as many as just three years earlier. By 2000, 90 percent of the
individuals in sub-Saharan Africa will test positive for the HIV virus.

In the long run, medicine will provide ways to prevent AIDS and even to cure it.
They will come much too late for today's victims, and it will be many years
longer before adequate supplies reach the Third World.

20. A host of new medical technologies will make life longer and more
comfortable in the industrialized world. Many years will pass before they
spread to the developing countries. Experimental brain-cell transplants will
aid victims of retardation and head trauma by 2001. Surgeons will repair sick
hearts by grafting in healthy muscle from other parts of the body. In many
operations, laboratory-grown bone, skin, muscle, and blood cells will replace
donor tissues.

Not long after the turn of the century, the first antiaging treatments will
extend the human life span to more than a century of vigorous health, though it
will be decades later before we can be certain that they work as well in humans
as in lab animals. Best bet: melatonin, the natural hormone that regulates the
body's "clocks." Our bodies produce less of it as we age. Supplements prevent
many of the effects of aging in animals and', in fact, extend their life spans
by 20 percent, without causing adverse side effects.