Publisher's Synopsis
The first section explores the global future through 2035. Our story of the future begins and ends with a paradox: The same global trends suggesting a dark and difficult near future, despite the progress of recent decades, also bear within them opportunities for choices that yield more hopeful, secure futures. In the pages to come, we use multiple time horizons to help explore the future from different perspectives, to illustrate the risks for sudden discontinuities and deep, slow-moving shifts, and to flag decision points. The second section examines the challenge in future threat definition. In order to do so, it is necessary to understand where identification of threat originates, and how and why such identification is made in the context of international political relations. This analysis makes fairly heavy use of the ideas in Thucydides' great History of the Peloponnesian War. Effort is expended here to explain why a work written in Greece, in the late-5th century B.C., has high value for us today as a vital aid to understanding of our own current, and indeed future, security context.
