The Future of U.S. Foresight

Over the past decade, scholars and practitioners have called for the U.S. government to institutionalize strategic foresight at the highest levels. In 2012, Leon Fuerth published a detailed proposal for restructuring the U.S. government to link foresight with policymaking, including establishment of a dedicated component within the Executive Office of the President.¹ In 2016, the National Academy of Public Administration called for the incoming White House team to integrate foresight with policymaking government-wide²—an idea that Jordan Tama echoed in his report on quadrennial departmental reviews. He recommended establishing “new offices and positions throughout the government dedicated to conducting long-range analysis, and creating a position or unit based in the White House with responsibility for promoting the development and coordination of government-wide foresight activities.”³ Also in 2016, in a report on fragile states, William Burns, Michèle Flournoy, and Nancy Lindborg called for the establishment of a strategic foresight cell within the National Security Council. In their 2017 book, Warnings, Richard A. Clarke and R.P. Eddy suggested creating a National Warning Office in the White House that would scan the horizon for dangers, drawing on future-oriented officials from every cabinet agency.⁴ And, in 2019, futurist Amy Webb called for the president to create “a centralized office championing strategic foresight,” focused on scientific and technological developments.⁵

In addition to these suggestions, other countries offer a plethora of institutional models for incorporating foresight into policymaking.⁶ For example, Policy Horizons is a federal organization whose “mandate is to help the Government of Canada develop future-oriented policy and programs that are more robust and resilient in the face of disruptive change on the horizon.”⁷ Finland has foresight processes tightly linked with the legislative and executive branches, including via the Foresight Centre in parliament, and the government is required to produce a report on the future that articulates long-term strategy.⁸ Singapore has perhaps the world’s most well-developed strategic foresight system in its Center for Strategic Futures, which uses scenario planning and other tools to influence national policy.⁹ Also notable is the European Commission (EC), which issued its first strategic foresight report in 2020, emphasizing the role that foresight could play in improving resilience to disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic.¹⁰ The EC’s Directorate-General for Research and Innovation issued a report in August 2021, providing not only a set of scenarios, but also a guide to “future-proofing” policies.¹¹

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the United States lags many of its friends and allies in leveraging strategic foresight to improve policymaking. Fortunately, for the moment, there appears to be less reason for concern that the United States is falling behind its competitors. Setting aside flawed caricatures of a long-term Chinese strategy to achieve global hegemony,¹² Beijing’s foresight capabilities significantly trail those of Western nations, including the United States. Analyst Paul Charon reports that there are apparently no political or military organizations dedicated to strategic foresight: “[T]his reluctance to engage in foresight research can be ascribed in large part to the weight of the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology which discourages such speculation about the evolution of the international system.”¹³ By contrast, Russia has a strong interest in foresight, incorporating it into planning documents that have 10- or even 20-year time horizons, but policymaker consensus seems to have converged on a single future in which the West declines over the medium to long term, with the United States struggling to retain primacy.¹⁴ The point, then, is not that there is a “foresight gap” but that the United States is unnecessarily leaving itself vulnerable to surprise and disruption.

That sets the stage for strategic disadvantage, particularly amid international crises. Fuerth argues that the United States needs to stop bouncing from crisis to crisis and instead find a way of dealing with modern challenges and the uncertainty of the future: “The United States is confronted by a new class of complex, fast-moving challenges that are straining the capacity of national leadership to ‘win the future.’”¹⁵ Washington is failing to exploit the benefits that institutionalized strategic foresight provides. According to Flournoy, a national foresight function could provide the White House a “low-cost, high-value” way to “look over the horizon and try to anticipate what’s coming … and [it] might give them a much broader and more effective set of options to engage early, rather than waiting until it hits them in the face and it’s a crisis.”¹⁶

This report proposes formalizing such efforts through a President’s Foresight Advisory Board (PFAB)—an entity resembling other external commissions, such as the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB), which Dwight Eisenhower established in 1956 to provide institutionally independent advice on U.S. intelligence, or the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which can also trace its lineage to the Eisenhower administration.¹⁷ In such a model, the president would appoint the board’s members, who could be staffed by officials seconded from throughout the U.S. government. Although, as discussed earlier, the White House national security staff has at times incorporated foresight into its work, institutionalization increases the chance of influence. An advisory board offers several structural benefits.

• A PFAB would have a direct line to the president. The strength of that connection would be a function of the president’s interest in foresight, but that would be true of any effort to institutionalize imagination: it will be only as valuable as the president wants it to be. An advisory board structure eliminates the organizational layer that would exist between, say, a strategic foresight cell on the NSC and the president.
• As an advisory board, the PFAB would be able to avoid operations, avoiding the push-and-pull of tactics and strategy. That said, to improve its effectiveness, the board would need to remain apprised of operational issues, whether through regular briefings or liaising with operational staff.
• Unlike the National Intelligence Council, which produces the Global Trends reports, the PFAB would be able to make policy recommendations. It could therefore more explicitly tie conceptions of the future to decisions in the present.
• Although much of this report has focused on foresight in national security, the future is not simply a national security issue, and foresight can aid domestic policy formulation, as demonstrated by the four snapshots in the previous section. Putting a foresight cell within the National Security Council staff would restrict its scope. While a lot of surprise lurks abroad, the United States has encountered many surprises at home, too.
• Over the years, rotating the staff of the PFAB would create a cadre of government officials who have had direct strategic foresight experience. Project Evergreen showed both that it is not necessary for such staffers to have prior experience and that, once they have that direct experience, they often bring it back to their home institutions.

Presidential advisory boards do not present a perfect model. The PIAB’s influence has varied over the years, it has occasionally been used as a convenient place for presidents to stash unqualified political patrons,¹⁸ and its productivity is difficult to measure because so much of its work is classified. That said, one thorough academic analysis found: “[T]he board has made important recommendations—the establishment of the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, and the Defense Attaché system—that have clearly improved the intelligence community. At times the board’s recommendations have been important factors in intelligence-related policy decisions.”¹⁹ One reviewer for the CIA’s in-house journal wrote, “the PIAB has a reputation for providing insights into National Security decision-making and producing useful assessments on the future of intelligence.”²⁰

Ultimately, the institutional form that a national-level strategic foresight body takes matters less than presidential support of it. The White House is constantly beset by the press of current events, so it will take leadership from the Oval Office to look up from “the smoke and crises of current battle,” as Dean Acheson put it.²¹ But looking up—peering beyond the present—is sensible only if one has the instruments to penetrate the fog of the future—the cloud of uncertainty that encourages a return to the relative clarity of the present.

Strong forecasting practices can help transform much short-term uncertainty into probabilistic risk, but policymakers must make many decisions under conditions of irreducible uncertainty, at which point they require foresight. It is neither true nor useful to say that anything could happen—nor is it feasible to prepare for every conceivable eventuality—but policymakers need tools for building guardrails of plausibility around potential futures. Strategic foresight provides the tools needed to imagine alternative futures. By using them—indeed, by coordinating their use among the federal agencies already using and experimenting with them—the U.S. government would find itself far stronger. Scenario planning and other foresight techniques offer no guarantees, but the costs of avoiding the long-term future are manifest and manifold: lost GDP, higher unemployment, failing infrastructure, environmental catastrophe, weakened security, and increased susceptibility to surprise. Given the modest cost of foresight efforts, the return will therefore almost certainly dwarf the investment. Imagination has traditionally been a woefully undervalued strategic resource, but there is no reason the United States need continue that tradition.