At the end of the twentieth century, most commentators foresaw peace and prosperity in the first quarter of the twenty first century. Expecting peace was a projection of the recent past into the immediate future. America had won the Cold War, was confident of its dominant place in the world and of the solidity of its political liberalism and open-markets capitalism, and the world was receptive to America’s expanding presence and messages. Indeed, America as a political system and as a society, was largely admired, and often many aspects of its socioeconomic and political characteristics imitated, in large parts of the world. The European Union was irrevocably moving towards a free markets model, inspired at least in large parts of Central and Eastern Europe, by the American model as much as by European ideals. China, especially after joining the World Trade Organisation, was expected to gradually come closer towards the American economic system, and in the assessment of many in Washington, this was to slowly but surely nudge China towards political openness and perhaps a slow erosion of the ideology of the ruling Communist Party. Even in Russia, the inheritor of the Soviet Union, many in the West saw the potential emergence of an ally that would discard its Soviet garb and embrace Western political and cultural ideas. As for the Global South, America was indeed largely admired, not just for winning the Cold War, but much more for its economic prowess, intellectual and artistic and technological creativity, and for a positive energy that the Clinton years seemed to exude.

Expecting peace gave rise to expecting prosperity. If no world war, cold let alone hot, was expected, if most parts of the world were prioritising economic reforms to catch the train of the American-flavoured globalisation, and if there were no competing political economy models to rival that of the United States, then the notion of strategic competition in the political and military spheres could be put aside.

There were crises, such as when the tech bubble burst in the early 2000s, which led to a serious crash in global equity markets. But these were interpreted as bumps in the road, consequences of capitalistic excesses that neither scarred the prevailing economic model, nor deviated from the trajectory - most of the world seemed to be on - leading to further political liberalism.

How different the scene looks today. The failure to foresee what actually unfolded in the past twenty five years transcends identifying geopolitical frictions and their consequences, or discerning fault lines in the global financial system. The failure was in comprehending both, simmering problems in the political economy of systemically important countries, and agonies some cultures have been experiencing in the past few decades and which were near the points of explosion, and the links between the two.

Perhaps the problem lied in the methodology. Strategic foresight remains a nascent discipline, largely anchored on economic models with few borrowings from mathematics, and a lot of pretences that sparkle presentations but lack real substance . It still lacks the practical application of the imagination that other disciplines, such as sociology and anthropology, have come to embrace. A serious reading of history and observations of the present, with a willingness to deviate from herd-mentality, could have developed scenarios that do not extrapolate linearly from the past.

Today, as we move into the second quarter of the twenty first century, we look behind us at the past twenty five years, and see the beginning of a new Cold War that will almost certainly be more acute than the first, for China is, in many ways, much stronger than the Soviet Union was, even at the height of its power. We also see behind us the rise of radical sociopolitical forces across almost the entire world, many of which have already come to power in a number of the most influential countries in the world. We see revolutions that gripped systemically-important countries, and whose effects continue to reverberate in these countries, and beyond in the regions they belong to. And we see the shaping up of a multi-faceted cultural war, whose protagonists draw blatantly on religious identities, most of which are constructed out of imaginations rather than construed from serious readings of history. And of course we see technological innovations that promise as well as threaten the introduction of dramatic changes that would likely alter human life.

This series will look at the key geopolitical, socioeconomic, and cultural changes that have begun in the past twenty five years. The objective is more reflection than prediction. Today anyone serious, not intellectually and egoistically consumed by the vicious cycle of sensationalism gripping all forms of media, would refrain from confident assertions about the future. The hope is that reflecting on the characteristics of these key trends of the past quarter century – to be informed by the past but not beholden to its constructs - would stir thinking about how to identify the constructive and destructive elements that will help shape the foreseeable future. The series will look globally but will apply its analyses more on the wider Middle East and especially the Arab world – for although almost all parts of the world face major challenges, we in the Arab world face a seriously difficult situation, largely out of our own making.