The enemy of conventional wisdom (uncritical acceptance of the status quo), says John Kenneth Gabraith, is not ideas but the march of events.  And boy, have events have been marching to a quickening rhythm in 2008. Perhaps the most important amongst the debt-fuelled dramas of the financial sector and grim environmental news from climate scientists, is the unexpected arrival onto the US political stage of that rarest of animals – a one in a million leader on the side of the angels.

The importance of Barack Obama (for it is he) is confirmed by a new report from the US National Intelligence Council (NIC), Global Trends 2025: a transformed world. This normally conservative organisation sees the world at “one of those great historical turning points” with intersecting factors and the role of leadership crucial to the outcome.

NIC finds that the next 20 years will be fraught with greater risks than it foresaw in 2003, including “the growing prospect of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East and possible interstate conflicts over resources. The breadth of transnational issues requiring attention also is increasing to include … resource constraints in energy, food and water, and worries about climate change. Global institutions that could help the world with these transnational issues and more generally mitigate the risks of rapid change currently appear incapable of rising to the challenge without concerted efforts by their leaders.”

The NIC cites three lessons from the last century: leaders and their ideas matter; economic volatility introduces a major risk factor; and geopolitical rivalries trigger discontinuities more than does technological change. In a world in which the US is no longer omnipotent, with other centres and philosophies of power, and with unprecedented discontinuities from transnational forces including climate change, terrorism, demographic bulges, migration and resource competition, the greatest of these, concludes the report, is leadership. “Historically … leaders and their ideas – positive and negative – were amongst the biggest game-changers during the last century.”  

So are there any reasons why this report should be more influential than the 1981 Global 2000 report to the US president on the interplay between the environment, population and resource?  Famously commissioned by Jimmy Carter as a “foundation of our longer-term planning” yet ignored by Ronald Reagan (who tried to stifle its publication), its conclusion was similar to that of the NIC: “the world - including [the US] – faces enormous, urgent and complex problems in the decades immediately ahead.” 

As you would expect, the NIC report shows everything has got a whole lot worse over the last 20 odd years.  So much worse that it graduates social and environmental challenges into the language of geopolitics and the core rather than peripheral business of leadership (Obama has an unexpurgated version of the report). Oh, and it arrives on the President elect’s desk at a time when there is a vacancy sign up for an angelic logic within which to make sense of what to do next.  The conventional wisdom championed by Ronald Reagan is, literally, bankrupt.

The NIC report does not offer the new US president a to-do list, but it does suggest a new logic from which to look out onto the world and consider what needs to be done in a way that fully interconnects the economic, social and environmental challenges. All the evidence is that Obama is on the right track, not least with his appointments to his energy and environment team and the recent announcement that the wonderful John Holdren will be his Chief Scientific Advisor. 

But while great historic turning points require a one in a million leader, the smoothness of the transition will depend on how quickly and effectively others exercise their leadership and rally round in support. It could so easily go horribly wrong.