It predicts "a unified Korea" is likely but also sees U.S. leadership eroding "at an accelerating pace" in "political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas."

The "Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World" which appears to have been completed in August just when the financial crises started to hit, is still as close the general population gets to first hand intelligence information.

In the  forecast, it is not just the United States that loses clout, it also predicts plummeting influence for the United Nations, the World Bank and a host of other international organizations that have helped maintain political and economic stability since World War II. It is unclear what new institutions can fill the void, he said.

In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country. "There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system."

Furthermore by 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.

For poorer countries, climate change "could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," while the United States will face "Dust Bowl" conditions in the parched Southwest. The conclusions are in line with earlier intelligence assessments this year, that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.

Floods and droughts will trigger mass migrations and political upheaval in many parts of the developing world. But among industrialized states, declining birthrates will create new economic stresses as populations become grayer. In China, Japan and Europe, the ratio of working adults to seniors "begins to approach one to three."

The United States will fare better than many other industrial powers, in part because it is relatively more open to immigration. Newcomers will inject into the U.S. economy a vitality that will be absent in much of Europe and Japan -- countries that are "on a good day, highly chauvinistic."

Energy security will also become a major issue as India, China and other countries join the United States in seeking oil, gas and other sources for electricity. The Chinese get a good portion of their oil from Iran, as do many U.S. allies in Europe, limiting U.S. options on Iran. "So the turn-the-spigot-off kind of thing -- even if we could do it -- would be counterproductive."

Incidentally the new assessment also sees a continued threat from Iran. This comes when the conclusion contained in the report leaked by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna today Wednesday, Nov. 19, for submission to the agency’s board Nov. 27-28 that Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb. See also the New York Times:"Iran Said to Have Nuclear Fuel for One Weapon," by William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

The reports  notes that the United States had eliminated two of Iran's biggest enemies: Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

As for the financial crises the report says that the US-Dollar will lose its role as the strongest currency in the world, and that India and China soon will stand together with the US at the top of a “multi-polar” world whereby a continued rise of Russia is doubted.

What our own (2008.world-journal) assessment about the economy as per today concerns, it appears the downturn has three strands.

In the United States, the subprime housing collapse triggered a liquidity crisis. In Europe, the American liquidity crisis triggered a much broader and deeper housing crisis. And in Japan, and the rest of East Asia, the enervated demand in the United States and Europe is now triggering an export crisis. Three very different but interlinked recessions have now formed something that the world has not seen since 1975: simultaneous recessions throughout the developed world.

Whereby the global economy is in a situation where countries are going to start cracking. Iceland, actually, has cracked already, but with only 330,000 inhabitants, it conceivably could have gone down in flames without being a harbinger of things to come in the rest of the world.

Hungary and Pakistan, however, may be a different story. Both are entering International Monetary Fund receivership, and the mutating economic dysfunction in each holds dire consequences for many other countries. Hungary is an EU member, and the European Union’s efforts to stabilize it are leaving the bloc less well-equipped to address rapidly growing problems in Latvia, Estonia, Romania, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and France (with the problems erupting roughly in that order).

Pakistan, for its part, has become ground zero in the U.S.-jihadist war, and having an economic collapse there would, to put it mildly, complicate any efforts to find the al Qaeda apex leadership. And that does not even begin to address the economic fissures that are opening in places as far afield as China, Russia and Brazil. Economic weakness inevitably has military and political consequences, and the wave is only now beginning to crest.