what a journalist or analyst can do is make the reader measurably less surprised by what happens in a given place over the middle-term future: five years, ten years, or fifteen years forward, say. And that is not an original idea. Ten-year forecasts or thereabouts are the time frame utilized by many corporations in their planning exercises, as I know from my own work as a geopolitical consultant for Stratfor and Eurasia Group. It is a matter of catching a place during a moment in time.
