Mathew Burrows, program lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub, joins us to discuss his career in the CIA and the National Intelligence Council, where he was the lead author of Global Trends, a non-classified report released every four years as an aid to incoming administrations. We also discuss transformative global events of recent decades, the mechanics of predicting trends, and what policymakers often get wrong in confronting the world. *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Mathew Burrows, program lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub, joins us to discuss his career in the CIA and the National Intelligence Council, where he was the lead author of Global Trends, a non-classified report released every four years as an aid to incoming administrations. We also discuss transformative global events of recent decades, the mechanics of predicting trends, and what policymakers often get wrong in confronting the world.
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*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
In this show, guests from across the political spectrum and from every corner of the globe share their views in their own voice. While the Stimson Center seeks to provide access to a wide variety of perspectives, it does not endorse any particular position. We leave it to the listeners to judge the validity and value of the views expressed by the guests.
My guest today is Matthew Burrows, whose long career in the intelligence community ended with 10 years at the National Intelligence Council, where he was the lead author of Global Trends, a non-classified report released every four years as an aid to incoming administrations. After retiring from government service, Mat served as Director of Foresight at the Atlantic Council, and is now program lead of the Stimson Center’s Strategic Foresight Hub.
In this episode, we looked back at Mat’s career in the CIA in the National Intelligence Council. In a few weeks, we’ll release a second part of the conversation, where Mat and I consider what the world might look like in the next decade or two. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Mat, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:33] Mat Burrows: Well, it's great to be here with you.
[00:01:36] Peter Slezkine: So, we are now colleagues at the Stimson Center. Before that, you were at the Atlantic Council. And before that, you had a long career at the CIA and the National Intelligence Council. So, that is the part of your career that we will focus on most for this episode. But before that, let's begin at the beginning. Where were you born? What did your parents do? Where did you go to school, and what did you study?
[00:02:01] Mat Burrows: Well, I was born in Lakewood, Ohio, which is a suburb of Cleveland, and grew up there until I went to Wesleyan University in Connecticut where I studied American and European history.
[00:02:16] Peter Slezkine: And what did your parents do? So, what family did you grow up in?
[00:02:19] Mat Burrows: My mother was a housewife. I mean that. But I have to say it was the one who opened my mind to history to other countries, their cultures, and literature. From a very early age, he tells a story, I think I was four or five, because I had read something about the French Revolution. And so, I went to the librarian and said, “Is there another book on the French Revolution? I would like to read.” And the librarian went to my mother and said, “I've never had a child ask me for a book on the French Revolution.”
[00:03:00] Peter Slezkine: And you thought the French Revolution was just an exciting period.
[00:03:03] Mat Burrows: Well, I knew…
[00:03:04] Peter Slezkine: Who were you rooting for, Lafayette, Robespierre, Danton?
[00:03:08] Mat Burrows: I actually have appreciation for them all. At that point, it was more about the event itself, the fall of the Bastille. And I saw… I think at the time there was a drama on The Tale of Two Cities. I remember that. And The Scarlet Pimpernel, obviously, with the rescue of aristocrats from being executed. It piqued my interest. And actually, it stayed with me. I still have an abiding interest, something that, in my spare time, I have continued to read.
[00:03:43] Peter Slezkine: I loved that period myself, but I was more drawn to the Napoleonic age. And I had all the soldiers, all the different kinds of cavalry when I was a kid. And I would memorize the different battles. And I would move my soldiers around to recreate Waterloo and Austerlitz.
[00:04:00] Mat Burrows: I was less on the military. Although, I did have some toy soldiers. More drawn maybe to the psychology. I was interested always in how they got to where they were and what ideas led them to what they did. And of course, later, when I was at University of Cambridge doing my doctorate, and I did it on a French topic, which was their policy before the First World War in the Middle East.
I lived in Paris for a couple of years. So, when you live in Paris, I mean, history surrounds you. I mean, every street is named for some battle or even defeat or political event. So, obviously, I, kind of, relived part of my childhood visiting a lot of the revolutionary sites and going to museums.
[00:04:56] Peter Slezkine: So, you studied history at Wesleyan and then did a Ph.D. in history at Cambridge?
[00:05:03] Mat Burrows: Yes.
[00:05:03] Peter Slezkine: And then moved on directly to the CIA. What can you tell us about that transition?
[00:05:09] Mat Burrows: Well, I came back after getting the Ph.D. from Cambridge. And my original attention was to try to get a job in a U.S. university, which is very hard. It's still very hard. And I think I taught in a community college. But I happen to see-
[00:05:29] Peter Slezkine: Where did you teach at a community college?
[00:05:30] Mat Burrows: Cuyahoga Community College.
[00:05:32] Peter Slezkine: At what city is this?
[00:05:33] Mat Burrows: In Cleveland.
[00:05:34] Peter Slezkine: In Cleveland.
[00:05:35] Mat Burrows: So, I was living back with my parents. And one Thanksgiving, I think the first year, the second year after I returned, on Thanksgiving, I remember seeing an ad that the CIA had placed, looking for people — didn't specify exactly for what.
[00:05:55] Peter Slezkine: So, the CIA would place ads in the newspapers.
[00:05:58] Mat Burrows: In the New York Times. It still does, occasionally, I think I've seen since then. So, in that period, you don't have the internet. So, what I did and what everybody else was doing was developing a CV and then printing off about 200 or 300 copies. And then, usually, add a cover letter why you wanted this job and that you'd always dreamed of working for X or whatever it is. And I thought, well, why not just put it in? It's, kind of, a standard. I don't think they even asked for much of a letter or anything beyond a CV. So, I did that, completely forgot about it. And five months later, I think it was March…
[00:06:43] Peter Slezkine: Of what year?
[00:06:44] Mat Burrows: So, this would've been ‘85. So, five months later, I was working at that time in a local archives. And for whatever reason, I was talking to my mother at home and she said, “You know, there's this strange brown paper envelope for you. It has no return address on it or anything.”
So, when I got home, opened it, there was still no letterhead but I could figure out from what they were asking me. And I suddenly recollect that I actually applied to the CIA. They were asking that I go out and take a test that they gave all over the country. But they're usually in university. So, Saturday morning, I went. It was a very simple task. It was, kind of, like, what is the capital of Egypt? And for, you know, multiple choice answers there.
So, I went and did that. And then I got a call about, I don't know, three weeks later, “Could you come down to Cincinnati?” And yeah, so I got on a plane, went down to Cincinnati, and then they tell you, “Ask for this person at this hotel.” And these were obviously interviews for the operations side.
So, I did that and didn't really hear anything after that. I did a couple of those trips. But then I got a call, “We'd like you to come down to Washington and interview.” And this time it was on the analytics side. So, I went down, had the interview at the European office of analysis. And it was very simple. This guy, like me, was a Francophile. He wanted to talk about French history, meter on, it was still around at that point. All these things, which I did, I mean, I was immersed in it, so it was pretty easy.
And then he, more or less, said, “Well, we're really enthusiastic about you.” And then he brought in a couple other people, and I talked more about their question. And then a couple weeks later, I got a call that, “We're going to send you a conditional offer. That means that you have to pass all the security and all the physical.” So, that took another six months. And there was another trip down for the polygraph.
[00:09:26] Peter Slezkine: Did they pay you anything in the meantime?
[00:09:28] Mat Burrows: They pay all the expenses on the trips.
[00:09:31] Peter Slezkine: But you're supposed to be earning money separately for an indefinite period of time in some job that you're not committed to while waiting for the CIA to, perhaps, take you up.
[00:09:41] Mat Burrows: Yes, that's the deal. So, I heard, I think, in November. So, I started on, I think it was the 6th of January, 1986. So, I came down and began in that office. And honestly, it was like being back in the university. I was in a unit that had all Ph.D.s., all on European topics. There was a, kind of, quantitative section to it, which was fascinating.
And I remember, we'd have these great discussions and then you have to learn a certain style of writing, which has been ever useful since then, which is the bottom line up front, very concise. But within a couple months, you're writing for the president. So, at that time, you wrote one that went to a broader audience. And then from that they made it into a what's called a PDB.
[00:10:41] Peter Slezkine: Presidential Daily Brief.
[00:10:42] Mat Burrows: Daily Brief. And I couldn't pick a better time to be in Europe because what happened three years later?
[00:10:55] Peter Slezkine: Yeah, Perestroika, fall of the wall. Exciting times. Not quite the French Revolution, but change of a historical scale.
[00:11:02] Mat Burrows: Yeah. And those, you know, for promotion you want to have a crisis because you're working, I mean, quite hard throughout that area, but you're rewarded.
[00:11:13] Peter Slezkine: Wait. So, before we get to the collapse of the communist bloc, when you were thinking of joining and then joined the CIA in ‘85, ‘86, what was your impression of the CIA and American intelligence? The church committee hearings had been held a decade previous. The reputation in certain quarters of society of the CIA was at a nadir. The university Ph.D.s, probably on average, were relatively suspicious of this organization. So, what was your sense of the CIA as an institution in the mid-‘80s?
[00:11:54] Mat Burrows: In the mid-’80s, obviously, I hear a lot of that. You know, I was very opposed to the Vietnam War. So, yes, not a very good reputation. But when I was applying, I mean, obviously, like a lot of young people now, you're trying to get a job. So, that's your uppermost. You know, obviously, despite the interviews I had with the operations side, I was not going to be a good fit. And I'm glad that they never made an offer. And the analytics side, which I had very little knowledge, although a professor at Wesleyan had told me about it and had actually suggested that it's someplace that I may want to consider. And I think he had been a consultant with him on certain things. So, I didn't have much knowledge of it.
[00:12:50] Peter Slezkine: But you didn't feel like there was anything icky, to use a technical term, about joining the CIA?
[00:12:54] Mat Burrows: No, because from what the description, they wouldn't tell you exactly what your job was, what kinds of things that they did, and so on. It seemed very much related to what I had done as a Ph.D. researcher, you know, investigating issues. The appeal, though, you know, because you love knowledge and you love data, I mean, is you got a lot more data there than the journalist necessarily has on this topic.
The great thing about the CIA, at least in that area, is that they invested a huge amount in their people. I mean, in terms of really training. And then, if you look at my whole career, I was out of detail to other parts of the U.S. government overseas up in New York to help Holbrooke. I mean, there are a huge number of opportunities. And I think, overall, I would say that I was constantly challenged and I felt that I was really learning a lot more than if I had actually gotten a university job.
[00:14:12] Peter Slezkine: So, the slow and then sudden collapse of the communist bloc, which you witnessed up close, it was obviously an exciting moment. It was good for your career. But as an analyst, do you remember what you made of it at the time? Did you have any interpretations of events that were not in line with most of your colleagues? Did you hold any eccentric opinions? Was there anything that you thought at the time that was born out in the future or anything that you got really wrong about this massive historical transformation?
[00:14:49] Mat Burrows: Well, I think, first working in Europe, we were out front and seeing that German unification was going to happen. There were people that thought, even with the protests and the fall of communist regimes in the Warsaw Pact, that, somehow, this line between east and west was going to be there. And it was very difficult, I think, for some of the Soviet analysts to understand. And, you know, this is all documented. There was a huge debate whether Gorbachev was for real that had proceeded. Gates, who was CIA director one time, was terribly skeptical.
And so, I think we had a better understanding of just how momentous these events, really. They were not just one single event, but a series of events for European history, and you could say in global history.
I think where, probably, I was, and I have always been a little bit more skeptical, was on U.S. unipolarity. I mean, I never believed that history has ended. I mean, that just doesn't sound true to me, you know. But I don't think the full dimension of what was happening really came together for me until a decade later, when I was starting the Global Trends work, which is a 15-year look ahead, that the National Intelligence Council, part of the intelligence community, but separate from CIA, and where I worked at the time…
[00:16:41] Peter Slezkine: So, let's situate this. So, at what point did you move to the National Intelligence Council? What is the National Intelligence Council, otherwise known as the NIC? And what is the Global Trends work?
[00:16:50] Mat Burrows: I should say, before that, I had a couple interludes. So, I was in Brussels. I worked at the U.S. mission to the EU. So, I learned a lot about the European Union and also how that had changed. And that was one of the big, I'd say, big changes that U.S. policymakers were worried about, actually. I mean, they were… now, we talk about Europe as not pulling its weight. At that time, there was a fear it would pull its weight and then diminish the U.S. role in NATO and take over its own defense. I mean, it was strange when you're looking back now, I mean, how worried we were about that one now.
[00:17:32] Peter Slezkine: What was the U.S. doing to deal with this potential problem of a NIU that would get too strong? Because the U.S still had extraordinary levers. Why didn't it pull them? Or, did it?
[00:17:44] Mat Burrows: Well, they were reassured by the British Prime Minister major at the time that enough had been watered down on the security and defense. It was called identity. And there were reassurance by other European leaders that it wasn't a threat to them.
[00:18:03] Peter Slezkine: So, the primary concern was Europe becoming too autonomous in the security sphere. There was no real anxiety about the EU becoming economically too powerful or closing itself off with [crosstalk 00:18:18].
[00:18:18] Mat Burrows: Well, Europe already had those powers, I mean, on the trade.
[00:18:22] Peter Slezkine: But didn't have a single currency until [crosstalk 00:18:25].
[00:18:25] Mat Burrows: No, it didn't have a single currency. I don't remember that as being a huge concern, much more the defense. The worry was that they would get together and decide for themselves on defense and then lay it on the table and the Americans at that point would have to accept it, whatever was decided by the collective EU. Of course, that was total misconception about how the EU worked. But that tells you, kind of, about the U.S. insecurity. You know, looking back, I mean, we think of the unipolarity as, kind of, all powerful U.S., but in some sense, there was still a sense of insecurity about the Europeans.
And you have to remember that this was the generation who had lived through, I mean, the Greenpeace demonstrations and trying to get the Germans to accept short-range nuclear missiles and so on. And also, the Germans being out in front on going forward, they taught with the Soviets and so on.
So, they had a view of the Europeans as wayward. So, afterwards, I mean, you master it and you had a lot of enthusiasm by Europeans to be a power on the world stage, which it hadn't before that because the continent had been divided. And this is, you know, Europe free and independent. And so, that idea was unnerving.
I think, you know, Yugoslavia is what basically burst that bubble, both on the European side that they realized they couldn't manage, immediately the French and the Germans squabbled about putting sanctions on Serbia. And then they couldn't stop the conflict without the help of the U.S.
I, during those ‘90s had, as I said, gone to Brussels. But then, also, at the end of that, gone to New York to be the intelligence guy at the U.S. mission to the UN under Holbrooke. And that's where I really gained an appreciation of what was happening globally, because anybody who has worked at the UN knows you have to deal with a scattering of unrelated issues that are cropping up in all sorts of places that you really have very flimsy knowledge of African Asia, South America.
[00:21:03] Peter Slezkine: And once you gain a bit better knowledge, maybe you realize that they're not entirely unrelated, after all.
[00:21:08] Mat Burrows: That's correct. And you begin to see the world is less Western. So, to go back to some of your questions on the NIC, NIC stands for National Intelligence Council. Everybody else has NIC, but I guess the intelligence community where you say it, NIC. And I was called up one day by the NIC chair, who was Ambassador Hutchings and who I'd known a little bit. He worked on East European countries. He had been Radio Free Europe head. And he knew me because I'd been working on some of those issues. And he called me up. And at that time, I'd come back from treasury. I was put in CTC, which was a counterterrorist office. I was not really suited to that, but that was the era of 9/11.
[00:22:06] Peter Slezkine: So, this is what year?
[00:22:07] Mat Burrows: 2002.
[00:22:10] Peter Slezkine: Oh, so, the very start of the counter terror era.
[00:22:12] Mat Burrows: Yeah. And I worked there just barely six or seven months. And he said, “Could you come up?”
[00:22:20] Peter Slezkine: Wait. So, really quickly, did the CIA blow up the World Trade Center?
[00:22:24] Mat Burrows: No.
[00:22:26] Peter Slezkine: Okay. On we go.
[00:22:28] Mat Burrows: So, he said, “Could you come up and talk to me?” So, I went up and he talked about this job, which was basically to handle the editorial staff and to write analytic products that the other seniors in the National Intelligence Council didn't really want to touch.
So, the NIC is organized in terms of silos. You have national security officers. I think they're now 15 or 16 of them. So, few more than in my day. And so, you have the NIO for Europe, the NIO for Russia, NIO for South Asian. And then you have functional NIOs as well. And so, on WMD, that NIO was the author of the infamous NIE, National Intelligence Estimate, on Iraq before the invasion.
[00:23:32] Peter Slezkine: Can we dwell on that for a second?
[00:23:34] Mat Burrows: Sure.
[00:23:34] Peter Slezkine: Because I was a bit glib about 9/11. But nonetheless, this was clearly a moment of reckoning for the American intelligence community, both the fact that 9/11 happened and then WMDs that turned out not to exist. So, on the inside, did it feel like this was a great failure? Describe that period.
[00:23:54] Mat Burrows: Well, there was a huge amount of angst, disappointment. I mean, after 9/11 that the intelligence community hadn't been able to pinpoint exactly the threat that Al-Qaeda was posing, you know, and what kind of operation they were going to carry out against the U.S. inside the U.S. Those who worked on it — I didn't directly work on it — know that something was up. But they were not clear what that was. And as you recall, they had a hard time getting the Bush administration — this is George M. Bush's — attention. And he had come into office with the idea that the U.S. was going to back out of a lot of things. This is a recurring theme in the U.S. foreign policy going back.
So, yes. The director at the time, George Tenet, was very upset that they hadn't been able to warn what happened. And as a result, I mean, one of the first reforms was to establish a red cell, which basically had the task of really questioning all the orthodox conventional views, first, on terrorism and then more broadly.
The NIC was not as affected by 9/11, but the Iraq war, which revealed that there was no WMD threat, and that the sources in the NIE pointing to the threat were completely fallacious. And that did rock the NIC. And there were, I think, very good reforms carried out. One thing in NIE's, there was an emphasis on now putting in scenarios.
So, I’m talking about different ways, you're talking about Iraq or you're talking about Afghanistan, how this issue could develop, having outside peer review, comments right at the front so the president could see what other eminent authorities thought about this. And that meant that, actually, they had to provide day-long security clearances because some of these people came from… didn’t have, in particular, for some of the very highly-classified ones didn’t have those clearances.
And the language had to be much clearer. There are unclassified versions of this, but you talk about different confidence levels for different assessments. I don't think that changed except it was a lot clear what we meant by that. And that was one of my first jobs, developing a table about what high confidence means and low confidence, and so on. And putting that again right in the first pages of an NIE, and then also a scope note as to what… we were very clear about the quality of the intelligence we had. So, that, again, we didn't fall in the trap that Iraq and NIE did.
[00:27:21] Peter Slezkine: One final question before we get to the Global Trends. What was the reaction internally to the Snowden saga?
[00:27:29] Mat Burrows: I mean, you know, there's a huge loss. Basically, it’s clear that the U.S. enemies learned a lot from him, including methods and sources. Everybody was very distraught. And the fact it was an inside job, I mean, it's one thing if some Russian spy manages to get access. But the fact that somebody who is employed where you put trust in, unloads what was a huge stash, and puts it out there in public.
[00:28:10] Peter Slezkine: And his justifications, moral justifications, didn't hold water. The revelations that these agencies were spying domestically when they shouldn't have formally, that there were testimonies to Congress, which denied this fact. Although, it seems to have been happening.
[00:28:25] Mat Burrows: Well, I mean, you have to balance it. And I think there's huge damage in terms of revealing U.S. secrets. And you may not know what those. You cannot know the full harm that you have unleashed. Whereas, there are other ways, whistleblower channels, that could have dealt with some of what he thought were wrongs.
[00:28:54] Peter Slezkine: Okay. Onto global trends. So, were you involved in the very first of these publications? When did they [crosstalk 00:29:00]?
[00:29:00] Mat Burrows: No, I wasn't involved. So, there's a 1997. There's actually two, I think. There's one in NIC produced, the other is INR, just the state department’s intelligence unit. And they were classified. Then, the one that really started it off was Global Trends 2015, published in 2000, and there was a decision at that time to make it unclassified. The other ones have been declassified now. And this caused, I'd say, almost a media storm because very few intelligence products are unclassified. This was very detailed. And it showed that the intelligence community had the capability to do, we call it sometimes blue sky analysis, going beyond… I mean, there's very little intelligence of basis. I mean, most of what is in all the Global Trends is open source material. But you're putting it together, you're using your analytic skills, and you have a knowledge of what you may see in channels. But there's very little intelligence channels that deal with the future. I think this showed that, you know, we were really out there thinking about what the world could be. And we’re independent thinkers about it, not necessarily following anybody's scripts in the government and of policymakers.
It was a revelation to a lot of people in academe. And it was a revelation to a lot of people in the intelligence community. And the impetus came from the head of the CIA. It was called the DCI because he also headed the intelligence community. But that was Woolsey. And he thought the intelligence community, CIA, was too stuck in the Cold War mentality. And he brought in Enon Shuttle who worked at the UN to come down and really take a look broadly at what was happening in the world. And basically, Global Trends 2015 is organized by trends. There's very little scenarios. And looked at this world, which talked a lot about globalization.
[00:31:36] Peter Slezkine: It must came out when?
[00:31:38] Mat Burrows: 2000.
[00:31:39] Peter Slezkine: So, I was looking 15 years ahead.
[00:31:41] Mat Burrows: Yeah, 2015. So, the assumptions when I started it, I didn't know this was in my job description, although I loved the fact later on as I was doing it. But Master Hutchings asked me and others in the NIC thought this was very important to keep doing. So, there was really no NIO that wanted to take it on. And he came down and said, “Would you pull it together and write it?”
Global Trends 2015, I think, was a little too static when I read it. This was in 2003, 2004. And I wasn't the only one who had this. And there was a line in Global Trends 2015 that said there's going to be more continuity than change. And already, by 2003, when I saw this, I thought, that's wrong. I think there's going to be much more change than continuity.
And Global Trends 2015 went out and talked to a lot of American experts. Well, that’s where Hutchings really… you know, he had this phrase that, if you want to know anything about the future, you have to get out of Washington. And that meant going to the rest of the world. And then each, one after that, went to more places in the world. And we ended up about 20 countries, including Russia and China.
And, you know, I think most people in Washington, really, they never had an idea at that point in 2003, the extent to which China was going to really change the world. And we prepared slides and these went to really senior policymakers. And one of them was who integrates who. And it was thrown out. “How dare you even ask that question? It was so beyond.” And these were really serious.
[00:33:45] Peter Slezkine: You mean whether China would converge toward the American liberal model or the U.S. might actually be pulled toward the larger Chinese pole?
[00:33:55] Mat Burrows: Yes.
[00:33:56] Peter Slezkine: And even the suggestion that it could go either way caused a huge scandal.
[00:33:58] Mat Burrows: Even the suggestion. You know, we thought we were somehow insane or deranged out there to even pose that question, because at that time China was going to be like a giant Japan or something.
[00:34:16] Peter Slezkine: Without American military bases, that seems to be a pretty substantial effort, other than scale.
[00:34:21] Mat Burrows: Well, we made the case look it's an ancient civilization. It has its own ideas. And yes, it's very tied. I mean, that's the era of Chimerica, when it's very economically dependent on the U.S. But if you look back in history with globalizations, and there have been others not quite obviously the same or as deep as the one in the ‘90s, other countries begin to rise up. And it's not necessarily so that the top one remains in that position, because just as Britain has helped other countries and the empire to rise up and it declined, and I'm not saying that Britain is like America, but there is a factor to globalization. And this is a change factor that means that you may not have your advantage forever.
Very few people agreed with that. But to me, it seemed the change was really picking up by the end of the 1990s. And it was evident that China was a different animal than anything we had seen. Actually, in the past century, I mean, most ideas of China was that it couldn't get its act together. And it wouldn't, because it was weighed down by ideology and Mao and cultural wars and the whole bet.
So, I have to say that the Bush administration did take, and other people were beginning to say the same things. Seriously, they developed in the second administration the strategic partnerships. And there were people who were talking about how China was going to have a global role. But that was a period of the responsible stakeholder. I mean, that was beginning, I would say, opening the eyes to this was a different sort of game than we had encountered, at least since the end of the second world war. The effort grew. I think, overall, Global Trends has a very good track record.
[00:36:38] Peter Slezkine: So, how many were you involved?
[00:36:40] Mat Burrows: Three. I was the principal author on three.
[00:36:42] Peter Slezkine: So, those were written in which years, predicting trends up to what year?
[00:36:47] Mat Burrows: So, the first one came out in 2004. They always came out after the election, before the inauguration.
[00:36:54] Peter Slezkine: As a guide to the incoming president?
[00:36:57] Mat Burrows: And to the administration, because one thing, it helps with the development that usually happens with a new administration, even a returning one, of a strategy review. And then you have the Pentagon used to call it the quadrennial review. So, the Global Trends feeds into that, feeds into the national security strategy.
And then what I found out later is, a lot of officials who are coming back into government and being confirmed in new jobs used it because it was unclassified and they could get back up to speed on certain issues in it. And then we always had to send three copies to the Financial Times because they tended to use it. When some new issue came up, “Well, what does Global Trends say?” And that was part of its purpose of orienting your thinking, maybe, to how this was going to develop and what was happening, why it happened. So, the first one, 2004, the next one, 2008, so that's going into the Obama, and the last one was 2012.
[00:38:10] Peter Slezkine: And each one is looking 15 years into the future?
[00:38:13] Mat Burrows: Roughly, 15 to 20. I have to say it's hard to get out that far. And we had it reviewed by outside reviewers, just to see how accurate we were. And the criticism, I mean, there's a lot of praise that we got all the elements right, what were important. One criticism was that what we’re predicting was going to happen, always was happening sooner than we predicted it would happen. And I think that is testimony to the rapid change that we have seen.
[00:38:48] Peter Slezkine: So, you got the trend right, but the timeline slightly wrong?
[00:38:51] Mat Burrows: Yeah. And just to give a plug here to the DNIs who I worked with and NIC chairs, they left it to the analysts to decide what those trends were. What has happened now with its disbandment of the unit and censure of the draft that was waiting there for publication.
[00:39:16] Peter Slezkine: So, no Global Trends came out after this latest election. The draft was ready, but it was never published.
[00:39:21] Mat Burrows: Yeah. That never happened. And in fact, I know a case because we had put in U.S. relative decline beginning in 2008. And that was based upon power diffusion, you know, that there were more actors, more powerful competitors in it. Obama's national security advisor, Tom Donilon, didn't like it. And he actually talked to the DNI, who was General Clapper at the time. And it was so left up to the analyst. There's a phrase, “truth to power,” and that was adhered to. And it's a terrible shame about this going under. And the next one can't be produced, obviously, in this four-year span for who is elected in 2028.
[00:40:12] Peter Slezkine: Because that whole unit has been disbanded.
[00:40:14] Mat Burrows: And it takes two years to do.
[00:40:16] Peter Slezkine: And the work is not underway after the previous draft was squashed. There's no work on the next one.
[00:40:22] Mat Burrows: Yeah.
[00:40:22] Peter Slezkine: So, you've named a number of predictions that you made. One was at least a question of whether China or the U.S. would be a more powerful pole or who would exert more pole, on the other, which then created an outcry, a declaration or prediction that the U.S. would enter a relative decline, which was also politically unpopular. What were some other trends, scenarios?
[00:40:50] Mat Burrows: Well, we published in 2008, a prediction on the pandemic.
[00:40:55] Peter Slezkine: In 2008?
[00:40:56] Mat Burrows: Yeah. We got everything right except we had a much higher mortality figures, which I think, probably, would've been right except for the development of the new vaccines.
[00:41:09] Peter Slezkine: And you just assumed that increased globalization would lease.
[00:41:13] Mat Burrows: I mean, we worked with health officials on this. So, we're using a lot of their data. And they were on the mortality figures, and so on.
[00:41:24] Peter Slezkine: But that there would be a pandemic. The reason for believing this to be the case was just increased contact among populations and animals across the world.
[00:41:32] Mat Burrows: Yes. And particularly, the fact, I mean, we said China in this because of the wild animal markets. So, it's not just that somebody encounters a wild animal, but they're also feeding. It's right there in markets and potentially going in food stream.
[00:41:55] Peter Slezkine: Although most people now believe that the lab leak thesis probably is more likely true than not. Or do you still hold on to the wet market?
[00:42:03] Mat Burrows: I mean, I cannot say for sure. I mean, I don't have the data. To my mind, I mean, I don't think either has been conclusively proven or disproven on it. But nevertheless, I mean, we saw that as a danger and a risk.
[00:42:21] Peter Slezkine: What was your methodology? You already said that getting out of Washington, talking to people around the world was essential. But how does one go about predicting the future, determining trends, offering scenarios?
[00:42:38] Mat Burrows: Well, I worked a lot with the PAR²A Center of the University of Colorado who has an open source model, international futures. But that was usually the first stop. They would work with me at the beginning of modeling out different trajectories. And then we were looking for things that didn't seem right but were oftentimes a clue to something that may be happening. I mean, you're looking really a lot for weak signals. And they have a huge database. So, we are looking for irregularities, things that surprise. And then, also, the general trend lines, the cumulative effect of some of the existing trends.
[00:43:30] Peter Slezkine: So, the surprises are a subjective measure. You, sort of, take stock of the world and see what doesn't fit. And the trends are in the numbers. You look at big data sets.
[00:43:40] Mat Burrows: Yeah. But you begin with surprises. You then ask yourself, why? Why am I surprised by this? Is it just that I'm ignorant of this whole subject matter? Or is there something happening there? Is there a confluence of a couple of trends that are interacting and producing something that we didn't expect?
I engaged a demographer, quite innovative one, Rich Cincotta, who helped me look at what was happening demographically and why that was important. That was a period where looking a lot at youth bulges, but also eye-opening windows, where you had demographic dividend, and which countries, which continents, which regions. I mean, demography is usually a good base to begin because there's a certain amount of certainty. 15 years, hence, practically, you know what the population composition in most cases is going to be.
But then, going beyond, which I said with the PAR²A center, looking at education, health, where other features we talked about, one of our concepts in the last was individual empowerment. Its flow from the internet, from connectivity. And that included access to a lot more harmful instruments of violence. So, there was a trying to get our handle on what the changes were, where they were happening, how they were happening. And then from that beginning to put together a structure. And I used in the last structure where looked at a lot of trends, which are not going to be easily shaped by policymakers, because this is for a policymaking audience. So, you have to think [crosstalk 00:45:05].
[00:45:38] Peter Slezkine: So, this is what is called structural in the academic lingo.
[00:45:41] Mat Burrows: Yeah, what we call the megatrends. So, these are ones that, really, they have very little power over. And in a sense, they're the parameters in which they have to operate.
[00:45:55] Peter Slezkine: So, demography would be one such example.
[00:45:57] Mat Burrows: Demography is. But there were others. We had in there economics, some of the technology. And then other ones which were more uncertain. And because they were uncertain, there was more the ability to shape them, a series of four or five.
And then the last section was on scenarios. And looking at ones in particular that were not being focused on by the policymaker. So, we're looking at one on hurricanes in New York before Sandy, because we knew that New York was overdue for one. And that’s also very vulnerable because of how the utilities are in the subways. That's obviously happened with the blackout in lower Manhattan.
And then talking to lots of people. I remember we went down to Oak Ridge, and I remember being impressed because he was talking about the collapse of the electric grid. If that would happen, no one knows how to actually get it up and going, because if you try, say, you can get it up in one region that's divided into different regions, and then you go to pull it up in another one, the other one may collapse again. And since then, if you look at some of the websites on electric companies, they talk about the difficulty sometimes with getting the grid back. And looking at electric storms. And it was… you know, we were trying to get a sense of big risks because we had the White House was very interested in black swans. And they were always asking for, what are the possible black swans coming up? So, you were looking. And we have in the last, the 2013 we list a whole bunch of black swans that we saw coming up as possible in the next 15 years.
[00:48:09] Peter Slezkine: So, you have correctly discovered certain vulnerabilities, whether pandemics or hurricanes in New York. Did you ever see policymakers react? I mean, it doesn't seem like we were terribly well-prepared for COVID. And New York City was not terribly well-prepared for Hurricane Sandy, even though you had outlined both of these possibilities years ahead of time.
[00:48:37] Mat Burrows: I think George W. Bush was very good on, like, Asian flu and understanding. And there was a health office we had in the U.S. embassy in Beijing that Trump took out in the first. He decimated that office in the NSC. So, you can't necessarily get policymakers to take some of it seriously. That's just not Trump. There are others, too. And I would say that there's a real gap there between what analysts are seeing and what the policymakers are able to grasp and implement.
And I think, in some ways, they get overloaded and they tend… for some of them, when you're trying to tell them this could happen, it's best to use a historic analogy because I think there's a feeling of another intel guy coming with a bad news story for me. You know, I got so much on my plate as it is, and I mean crisis is piling up, daily crises. That's a real problem. And I think there's very little time that's set aside. If you look at the schedule on PCs, these are principal committee meetings and deputy committee meetings on foreign affairs issues, there's very little time spent on longer term.
It is a problem, too, I think with other parts of the government, that they're just swamped. You know, even for presidents who want to, there is no structure for actually setting aside time.
[00:50:26] Peter Slezkine: So, policymakers are swamped. They have to deal with crises as they come. But on a more theoretical or methodological level, what do policymakers and the expert class get wrong most often? In your opinion, when they comment on current affairs, clearly presuming some future trajectory, where do you think they make the most mistakes in their presentation of the picture?
[00:50:57] Mat Burrows: Well, the mistakes, and this is the case even with analysts, are on big disruptions. And there's probably some scientific basis for that. The human intelligence is very good on incremental change. It's not very good at spotting disruptions. And they can't imagine that something that was a change is a huge assumption that they have about how the world works could actually happen. We've seen it over and over again in this last decade from, you could say from 9/11, financial crisis, China, Russia.
[00:51:39] Peter Slezkine: Or starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of your career.
[00:51:42] Mat Burrows: Yeah, which, you know, the intelligence community did not see. So, it is very difficult.
[00:51:49] Peter Slezkine: So, everybody's looking for black swans, but nobody actually builds them into their assumptions about future trajectories.
[00:51:56] Mat Burrows: Yeah. And you know, when you're trying to tell them this, you can't say it's going to happen on September 11th, 2001. I mean, there's no way.
[00:52:06] Peter Slezkine: If you're a prophet, you can say that the end of the world will happen at this date, at that time.
[00:52:12] Mat Burrows: But it's very hard to argue that case. But, you know, you can say today that U.S. looks that a financial crisis could happen. I mean, it's written about a lot in the financial papers. But I don't think… I'm not sure the markets believe it, and I'm not sure the policymakers believe it, either, really believe it. I mean, they just think this is the mutterings again of the discontented. They just want to bring down everybody.
[00:52:43] Peter Slezkine: What do you make of the fashion for prediction in Silicon Valley and other areas these days, something like polymarket where people bet about things happening or not in the future, and then you get the aggregate and then let the market make predictions?
[00:53:01] Mat Burrows: Well, they're usually on very specific issues. Will Trump go have a third term? Or will Putin die? But when you're thinking about things that, as Rumsfeld used to say, the unknown unknowns-
[00:53:17] Peter Slezkine: Then nobody can formulate the question that the people will bet on.
[00:53:17] Mat Burrows: … you can't predict because… Yeah. And that's akin to the disruptions of surprises and shock. That's the hardest. And even when you, you know, try to make a good case and you have a certain amount of evidence, you're not going to have overwhelming evidence for a lot of these things to happen, such and such a day done by this or that person.
Without that, they tend to discount it. The only ones who don't are people sometimes who've lived through them. How I got into strategic foresight was that I remember I was asked to predict something and write it up for the president. And so, I did a prediction. And then my very wise manager said, “Write a piece on why the opposite of what you said will happen.” And I wrote that up. And I realized that you could reorganize the data points and you had a pretty good case that the other would happen.
Now, I stuck with my first hunch, and I was correct, but things have developed in this situation. And I realized that what I said wouldn't happen was going to happen because I recognized, from the elements that I had written about, that there would be that change. And I was fortunately correct. Although the White House at the time didn't like that.
[00:54:57] Peter Slezkine: Could you tell us what this was about, or no?
[00:54:59] Mat Burrows: No.
[00:55:00] Peter Slezkine: Okay. Well, that adds a little bit of spice to the interview when there's some classified material that's being hinted at obliquely.
You've lived a long life and looked far in the future. You're a modern-day Merlin, so let's maybe have another episode where we focus entirely on the future.
[00:55:15] Mat Burrows: Anytime.
[00:55:17] Peter Slezkine: Wonderful. Thanks so much.
Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss out on any episode. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.