Thomas Fingar examines the United States and the Islamic world in 2025

Offering the first of the 2009 FSI Director's seminars, Thomas Fingar, the 2009 Payne Distinguished Lecturer, and the nation's first Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis and Chairman of the National Intelligence Council (2005-2008), set forth major challenges identified in the recent National Intelligence Council study Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World. Against that backdrop, Fingar then asked what the U.S. relationship with major Muslim countries might look like in 2025, what the salient trends and drivers would be, and how prepared governments are to deal with those trends.

Underscoring the complexity of the Muslim world, Fingar chose to examine extant and emerging trends in five discrete regions – the Maghreb, the Levant, the Gulf, South and Central Asia, and Southeast Asia – and state capacity to deal with these challenges as they escalate simultaneously and exacerbate one another.

In an accompanying paper, Fingar emphasized that Washington should eschew attempts to formulate an overarching strategy for countries with large Muslim communities, in order to increase the efficacy of policies tailored to address specific issues in specific contexts. Noting that U.S. relations with Islamic countries will be multifaceted and diverse, Fingar said that governments will – or should – welcome this approach, because it offers unprecedented opportunities for collaboration on complex issues that directly affect the lives of people in and beyond the Islamic world.