All great so-called "prescient" people are, in my view, just those attentive to features of their contemporary environment that they regard as long-term.

Today, we can see the re-emergence of national boundaries, with: Brexit, the Russian invasion, and protectionist competition between the US and China.

The syrian mass migration to Europe was indirectly a climate event: the precipitating conditions of the civil war was mass crop failure. This also, in many ways, caused brexit.

So we have clear "climate -> migration -> national-borders" events today. We have clear great power politics today.

What else? Well consider declining birth rates in the west require more immigrants, but at the same time, anti-immigrant sentiment rises. Why can no leader tell their people the truth? Why can't they say, "we're all too old to support our own populations"?

I don't know. But the lack of that question posed to the public is conspicious and alarming. In the UK case, the leader of the centre-left opposition is even so deranged to suggest that our national health service shortages (100,000 positions!) should be filled by more training of our own population. This is economically and politically incoherent; and I'm quite sure he knows this.

This is economically and politically unsustainable: the driver towards anti-immigrant sentiment and national boundaries *HAS* to collide severely with the need for young immigrants and the "almost-here" health crisis of the west agining population.

Either the future is one in which political leaders and western populations can reconsile themselves to their dependence on young immigrants, accept relatively mass migrations, and adapt their political cultures to cope. That is the "EU will work, eventually" view.

OR, we take the Brexit-Russia lesson, and say the west will find a national-militaristic solution to the problem.

At the moment, we're already a decade past needing to explain to western publics that immigration is not only economically beneficial, but necessary. We havent done so. At the same time, we've done the opposite.

I'd suppose then that, knowing only what we know now, the "Russian trajectory" is the more likely one. The EU nations build armies, the US plays economic empire, China plays wargames in asia all the while our need for mass immigration plays out.

Where does that lead? The best guess I can make is: empires. Along the "Russian-line" of future history, nations are still a deeply inefficient economic unit, but increasingly "politically efficient" at regulating national identities.

With that tension, arises the need to bundle nations into empires.

I think the Russian invasion of Ukraine has delayed this future a couple decades; but I only see a reversal towards the liberal alternative if new liberal institutions emerge. China-India-Russia need an "EU", and likewise, so does Europe. On that timeline, we get liberal supra-states able to negotiate migrations, transitions to aging nations, etc.

But as the EU requried WW2, probably that liberal future (if ever realised) will require a comparable war. Perhaps an "asian civil war" in the manner that WW2 was a european civil war.

Liberalism (in the sense of rights-based institutions) is just what happens when no amount of people dying will resolve conflict, so nations are forced to give up. It was a product of intra-Christian warfare; and possibly the likely state of the early 22nd century.

Assuming Asia has the "civil war", which seems somewhat probable.