Authoritarian temptation emerges in the new geopolitics, claims U.S. intelligence report

Authoritarian temptation emerges in the new geopolitics, claims U.S. intelligence report

The emergence of a non-democratic model of development could have an appeal to states in the Middle East, a senior U.S. intelligence official suggested yesterday. China and, to some extent, Russia, arguably represent an alternative to liberal democratic market economies, National Intelligence Council chairman Thomas Fingar told a meeting at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.


Previewing the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2025 report, due to be published later this week, he noted that the Middle East and Africa, amongst other places, “historically made the wrong choice in the ’50s and ’60s for the centralized, authoritarian model of development and paid a price.”


The short-lived unipolar moment of U.S. global hegemony had ended. “The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished,” Fingar said. America’s leadership was eroding “at an accelerating pace” in “political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas.”


One consequence of the shift of economic power from West to East is the “end of the Atlantic era”, says French analyst Laurent Cohen-Tanugi. This has profound implications since these new powers are “not only outside the West; they are often non-democratic“, he observes in his new book, The Shape of the World To Come: Charting the Geopolitics of a New Century.


The transatlantic partnership remains central to the West maintaining leadership. “Europe and the United States and generally all democratic and, even beyond that, moderate countries must work together…in trying to shape this multipolar world in an orderly way,” he contends.