Forecasting
But the difficulty of long-range forecasting also weighs in favor of over-emphasizing the short term. Evaluating short-term decisions without appreciating how policymakers understand long-range trends almost invariably leads to misunderstanding. Policymakers, however, rarely make clear how they think about long-term trends, which works to insulate their decisions from analysis and scrutiny.
In this context, it’s helpful to think about the tools that policymakers and analysts have for forecasting long-range trends in international politics. In a recent book for MIT Press, Evan Hillebrand and Stacy Closson (two colleagues of mine at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School) outlined eight potential futures, based on three dichotomous variables: low/high energy prices, low/high economic growth, and geopolitical harmony/disharmony.