Forecasting vs Policy Work

No castle in Games of Thrones is complete without an extremely accurate map room! Apparently satellite imagery was available to all at a good price point.

Like many people in the business I'm a fan of the work of "StratFor", which is an ex-spook shop that does what they call "Strategic Forecasting" of geopolitical change. If you read their work carefully, a large amount of their methodology is an attempt to avoid a bias towards assuming that national or political leaders matter. 

If you just assume that every country has a set of resources and goals, and that it will act in its best interests, regardless as to who gets voted President, then over a long enough term you have a much better chance of making accurate predictions, is their play. 

It's an attempt to discover and analyze the emergent behavior inherent in the system, as opposed to getting caught up doing game theory and monte carlo simulations until the end of time. Using this mindset produces vastly different results from most predictive methods, and the cyber tilt on the playing field is notable. Early StratFor predictions used fundamentals such as the aging population or shrinking workforces in various countries, and indicated they would need to vastly increase unskilled labor pools by importing workers, but of course, modern predictions look at this as a gap automation will fill. 

But you can still look at the fundamentals - what resources do countries have, what are their geopolitical strengths and weaknesses and how will they be able to maintain their position using their resources. Geopolitical positioning has been altered by the Internet, of course, as everything has. And a large internet company is its own kind of resource. 

This is why when a paper comes out saying that Germany will have a strong VEP leaning towards disclosure any decent forecaster is going to look at that as an oddity. We are now, and have been for a long time, in a great-powers competition meta. Germany needs to ramp up as soon as possible on both its defensive and offensive capabilities. The real question is how close it gets to the 5EYES in order to do so. You can make these predictions without looking at all at who's in charge, or what the politics are.

The one hole, of course, that seems obvious in retrospect, is that non-state actors are vastly more important than any Westeros map can capture. Everyone asks about the Cyber-9/11 and then goes on to talk about Russia and China as if it was a Taliban plot to hit the WTC. In other words, we may be looking in the wrong direction entirely.