U.S. Relations With the People's Republic of China (2008)

Office of the Director of National Intelligence

Remarks and Q&A by the Deputy Director of National Intelligence
For Analysis & Chairman, National Intelligence Council
Dr. Thomas Fingar
The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Washington, DC
November 18, 2008

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DR. THOMAS FINGAR: Thank you, Matt. Let me begin with first a note of modesty. I think it's probably an accurate statement that everybody in this room knows more about the Middle East than I do. But that's what makes this useful, valuable to me, to continue a process of dialogue, of consultation with regional and functional specialists, to both stimulate thinking on your part, provide ideas to us as we think about the future, think about what to focus on, what we should collect, what kind of analytic cadre we should build. And in some respects, this is a continuation of the roughly year-and-a-half process that resulted in the preparation and later this week the publication of "Global Trends 2025."

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But it's not a completely negative aspect. Looking at the region as a whole, the age structure will be roughly the same as that of Taiwan or South Korea at the time that each of them began their sort of industrial takeoff. The dependency ratios will be pretty good. There will be a large working-age population with a relatively small burden of senior citizens to support. And as one moves through the period between now and 2025, again, the projections are that the population growth rates will go down so there will be fewer dependents at the bottom. So there will be at least a potentially mobilizable workforce to move the region away from its heavy dependence on commodities, primarily oil and gas in the Middle East.

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I mentioned dependence on oil and gas and commodities more generally, and as one looks out to 2025, one can project continued rise of China, India, Brazil, the rising powers. Large populations, tremendous requirement for energy, keeping demand and prices up for a very long time; money continues to pour into the region. That gives a certain cushion and capacity to any of the regimes that have these resources to buy off demands for perhaps more fundamental change, but the very high prices that we saw not that long ago gave increased attention to alternatives to oil and gas that we've experienced before in the late '70s, early '70s. It may be that the world is more serious this time about actually finding alternatives.

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But the rising powers, specifically or particularly China but to some extent also Russia, arguable have an alternative model here. It's not so democratic, a larger role for state, larger role for state capitalism, that the Middle East is a region that, like Africa and a lot of other places, sort of historically made the wrong choice in the '50s and '60s for the centralized, authoritarian model of development and paid a price. Now, a variant or an alternative to the Washington consensus in the short term – but a short term that now, in the case of China, now extends over decades – may have some appeal. Can it work as well in the region with very, very different kind of traditions, populations, expectations, relationships to authority as it has in China and Russia? But there may well be an alternative model, and as those – if, or to the extent that alternative model is pursued in some countries in the region, it could alter intraregional relationships and relationships with outside powers. I'm sure I have dissatisfied anyone who came looking for the crystal ball take on the region, but if I have left you with a lot of questions and a lot of, yeah, but you forgot, then it's been successful from my point, and why don't I throw this open to your take on the region in 2025.

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QUESTION: We've gone from a world of two superpowers to, more recently, one superpower. As the last weekend, the G-20 meeting, showed, the tectonic plates of power are shifting. How do you see the balance of power in the world in 2025? Is it going to be two superpowers, the U.S. and China; multi-powers; blocks of power? What does it look like?

DR. FINGAR: Multi-power, multi-power. And, historically, multi-power eras have been less stable than either bipolar balance of power or unipolar.

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