The End of Global Trends: What We Can Learn From 28 Years of Scenario Thinking at the US Intelligence Community

The American report series Global Trends was, for nearly thirty years, a leading example of public strategic foresight. The National Intelligence Council (NIC), the long-term analysis body of the US intelligence community, published a report roughly every four years since 1997 on possible global developments over the following twenty years.

In September 2025, that came to an abrupt end. The Strategic Futures Group, the team behind the series, was disbanded, and a next edition was never published. What disappeared wasn’t just a series of reports, but also a remarkable case study in the evolution of scenario planning: from an analysis of driving forces to participatory simulations.

In Short

The NIC published seven editions of Global Trends between 1997 and 2021.
The reports were public, despite originating within the US intelligence community.
Each edition explored possible international developments over roughly twenty years.
The methodology evolved from driver analysis to scenario archetypes and simulations involving experts and stakeholders.
With the series discontinued in 2025, the planned eighth edition never appeared.

What Was Global Trends?

The National Intelligence Council has existed since 1979 and supports the US intelligence community with strategic analyses of international developments. Starting in 1997, the NIC published the Global Trends series: public reports on possible futures for geopolitics, security, the economy, technology, and international cooperation.

The reports were explicitly not predictions. They offered a framework for thinking through diverging futures, the forces that could shape them, and the uncertainties that complicate policy choices. The NIC described the series as a quadrennial outlook meant to help an incoming or returning US administration think through possible futures and their implications.

For strategic foresight professionals, the series is interesting because it shows how scenario planning can scale up: from relatively compact trend analyses to international expert consultations, participatory scenario development, and simulations of interactions between countries and other actors.

The Seven Reports

Year	Report	Central Contribution	Scenarios and Method
1997	Global Trends 2010	First edition; explored the future of key countries and regions, with attention to Russia and the rise of China	Foundation for later foresight work
2000	Global Trends 2015	Identified seven driving forces, including demographics, resources, and globalization	Driver analysis and dialogue with outside experts
2004	Global Trends 2020	Emphasized China, India, terrorism, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction	Davos World, Pax Americana, A New Caliphate, and Cycle of Fear
2008	Global Trends 2025	Described the shift of economic power and prosperity from West to East	A World Without the West, October Surprise, BRICs’ Bust-Up, and Politics Is Not Always Local
2012	Global Trends 2030	Combined four megatrends with fundamental uncertainties	Stalled Engines, Fusion, Gini-Out-of-the-Bottle, and Nonstate World
2017	Global Trends: Paradox of Progress	Explored the tension between progress and rising uncertainty	Islands, Orbits, and Communities; path gaming and broad outside consultation
2021	Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World	Analyzed a world of rising geopolitical, social, and ecological tension	Five plausible scenarios for 2040

The 2021 edition was the seventh, and so far the last, in the series. In it, the NIC worked with five scenarios: Renaissance of Democracies, A World Adrift, Competitive Coexistence, Separate Silos, and Tragedy and Mobilization. archive.dni

Why Did the Series Stop?

In September 2025, The New York Times reported that Tulsi Gabbard, as Director of National Intelligence, had disbanded the Strategic Futures Group. This team was responsible for the Global Trends reports. According to her office, a draft of the next report didn’t meet professional analytic standards.

Other interpretations linked the decision to the political sensitivity of long-term analyses covering topics such as climate change, international cooperation, and the position of the United States. That interpretation is worth noting, but should be presented as interpretation: the precise reasoning behind the decision hasn’t been made fully public.

Three Generations of Scenario Methods

The seven editions show a gradual evolution across three ways of building scenarios.

1. Driver Analysis (Drivers of Change)

The earlier reports centered on analyzing individual driving forces. Think of demographics, economic growth, natural resources, technological development, and countries’ international power positions.

The method is straightforward: identify a limited number of forces that could shape the future, explore multiple directions for each force, and combine them into coherent images of the future. For a quick, exploratory scenario exercise, this is often a good starting point.

2. Megatrends and Scenario Archetypes

In Global Trends 2030, the NIC drew a sharper distinction between relatively robust developments and fundamental uncertainties. Aging populations, individual empowerment, and shifting power, for example, were treated as major structural trends. At the same time, it remained uncertain how political systems, economies, and international institutions would respond to these forces.

That didn’t produce a single dominant future, but several archetypal worlds instead. Scenarios thereby became more than illustrations of a trend analysis: they made visible how the same trends can lead to very different outcomes.

3. Path Gaming and Simulation

The 2017 edition, Paradox of Progress, went a step further. Among other methods, the NIC used path gaming: a structured simulation in which participants representing different countries, regions, or other actors respond to events, choices, and each other’s behavior.

This kind of approach is especially useful when the future depends not only on trends, but also on strategic interaction. What happens, for example, when states, companies, international organizations, and social movements react to one another? A trend analysis can name that dynamic; a simulation makes it easier to actually experience.

For your own scenario exercise, these three approaches suggest a few practical choices:

Use driver analysis when you want a quick overview of relevant developments and uncertainties.
Use scenario archetypes when you want to show that the same trends can produce multiple, coherent future worlds.
Use simulation or path gaming when the choices and reactions of multiple actors are decisive for the outcome.

What Can Foresight Professionals Learn From This?

The key lesson from the Global Trends series is that scenario planning isn’t meant to correctly predict the future. Its value lies in making assumptions, uncertainties, dependencies, and strategic decision points visible.

That’s why the series remains useful, even now that it has ended. Not because the scenarios came true exactly as written, but because the reports systematically showed which forces could reshape the international playing field, and how different combinations of developments can lead to very different worlds.

For organizations working on long-term issues, that’s a useful reminder. Good strategic foresight doesn’t start with the question: what is going to happen? The better question is: which futures are imaginable, which signals deserve attention, and which choices make sense today across multiple possible worlds?