Detecting and defusing threats, whether from external adversaries, internal weaknesses or broader economic and technological trends, is at the heart of a robust national security posture for any country. What if the biggest threat, however, comes from a government that chooses to blind itself to seeing such threats? Unfortunately, it seems as though the United States is about to experience a real-time experiment in doing just that.
Last week, The New York Times reported that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had eliminated both the Global Trends report and the Strategic Futures Group that compiles it. The Global Trends report was an effort to foresee medium- and long-term developments over a 20-year time horizon and assess their implications for U.S. national security. New editions of the report were assembled by a commission of independent intelligence analysts and published every four years. The elimination of Global Trends would be bad enough on its own, but it is just the latest example of the Trump administration’s failure to think about or plan for the future.
Getting governments to think about the long run is hard. Anyone who has worked in a national security bureaucracy is keenly aware of the aphorism that for government employees, the long run is two weeks. Most policymaking is process-related: Memoranda are drafted, redrafted, circulated, approved and then maybe, just maybe, implemented. Especially for policy principals, meaning Cabinet-level officials and their deputies, the daily news cycle often distracts from anything resembling long-term strategic foresight and planning. As Sandy Berger, who served as Bill Clinton’s national security adviser, put it, “Washington is a town in which the urgent always overtakes the important.” There is also the additional danger of equating anything problematic as a full-blown national security threat, so that everything becomes national security and national security becomes everything.
This is a problem. Urgent is not the same thing as important, just as black swans are not necessarily as big of a priority as gray rhinos. The more foresight that governments possess, the easier it can be to address policy problems before they metastasize into crises. Even though every political and bureaucratic incentive in the book rewards short-term thinking, the states that can cultivate long-term thinking will have an advantage in international relations.
Until recently, the U.S. government’s solution to this dilemma was to seed the executive branch with units tasked to think about the long run. This began immediately after the end of World War II, when then-Secretary of State George Marshall appointed George Kennan as the State Department’s first director of policy planning. Marshall’s key piece of advice to Kennan was to “avoid trivia” and focus on the important. From his new perch, Kennan fleshed out the grand strategy of containment against the Soviet Union that successive administrations executed during the Cold War.
Policy planning was just the beginning, however. As the national security bureaucracy expanded, so did the number of strategic planning and foresight units. The Defense Department created a wide array of offices to think about future threats and the future of warfare. The National Security Council developed a directorate focused on strategic planning. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence houses the National Intelligence Council, which developed the Global Trends reports. The intelligence analysts from Global Trendsconsulted far and wide in drafting these reports, even talking to academics like myself!
U.S. strategic foresight and planning efforts, and particularly Global Trends, have been the gold standard of such exercises around the world. Over the years, I have personally heard both U.S. and foreign officials explain that the Global Trends exercise was the benchmark against which other foresight units framed their own analytic exercises. Compared to its rivals, the U.S. held a decided advantage. As a recent assessment from the think tank New America concluded, “Beijing’s foresight capabilities significantly trail those of Western nations, including the United States.”
After just eight months in office, however, the Trump administration has decided to throw much of this planning and foresight architecture away.
In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth disestablished the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, or ONA, widely viewed as the Pentagon’s internal think tank. A Defense Department spokesman claimed, “The Department remains committed to conducting rigorous, forward-looking strategic assessments that directly inform defense planning and decision-making.”
Since nothing has replaced ONA, however, that claim seems risible. Indeed, Hegseth’s decision drew bipartisan criticism. “ONA played a large role in helping the US win the Cold War, by sharpening its strategic instincts and making its behavior more lethally competitive,” Hal Brands, of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, wrote in an op-ed. “Shuttering the office is an act of self-harm at a moment when hot wars rage in Europe and the Middle East and a new cold war, against China, is well underway.”
The reasons why Gabbard eliminated the Global Trends report and the Strategic Futures Group are particularly troubling, however. According to the Times’ report, “Some of the warnings, most notably on climate change, had become politically inconvenient, according to former officials.” An ODNI spokesperson basically confirmed that reporting, explaining to the Times that “a draft of the 2025 Global Trends report was carefully reviewed by D.N.I. Gabbard’s team and found to violate professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president’s national security priorities.”
The trouble with DNI’s claim is that, as the Times notes, “like so much in the Trump administration, what was once considered apolitical is now labeled political.” But the reality of climate change and the medium- to long-term threat it poses to U.S. national security are a matter of science and causality, not politics. And imposing a political lens on that assessment, or simply pretending that this is not the case, will not prepare the United States for climate-related threats to come—quite the opposite, in fact.
It could be argued that even if the United States fails to engage in such foresight exercises, it can freeride off others. After all, the U.S. has never possessed a monopoly on strategic insight. Other countries have developed their own strategic and policy planning units, and even the private sector has engaged in this kind of exercise. And U.S. efforts in this area were far from perfect. More than a decade ago, Michael Horowitz and Philip Tetlock criticized the Global Trendsexercise, concluding, “The reports almost inevitably fall into the trap of treating the conventional wisdom of the present as the blueprint for the future 15 to 20 years down the road … [and] have struggled to make accurate non-obvious predictions of big-picture trends.”
Highlighting the forecasting mistakes of Global Trends misses the point of the exercise, however. To paraphrase Dwight Eisenhower’s observation about military planning, forecasts are useless but forecasting is indispensable. Having units dedicated to strategic forecasting, strategic planning and threat assessment does not guarantee perfect foresight. It does ensure, however, that governments can be prepared to cope with unexpected or incipient problems. Eliminating these units deprives the national security bureaucracy of the necessary muscle memory to think about the long run.
Perhaps the Trump administration believes that since in the long run—as John Maynard Keynes remarked—we are all dead, such planning is unnecessary. As someone who occasionally participated in the Global Trends exercise, however, I can attest to the short-sighted nature of such a worldview. Like all immature leaders, Trump cannot see anything past his own time in power. But long after Trump leaves office, the United States will be paying the price of his self-imposed strategic blindness.
Daniel W. Drezner is academic dean and distinguished professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is the author of Drezner’s World.