The Trump administration will “examine and potentially rebaseline our relationships around the globe,” Flynn said during an event at the U.S. Institute of Peace. But he added that “alliances are one of the great tools that we have,” that one of America’s strengths is its “unapologetic defense of liberty,” and that the United States “must and will remain a superpower” and “indispensable nation,” borrowing a phrase from the Clinton administration.

Today, however, major powers are struggling to cooperate on issues of global consequence and acting aggressively in their respective parts of the world, the NIC observes. In the coming years, the council envisions the current international system fragmenting “toward contested regional spheres of influence.”

In one example of what this new world might look like, the authors imagine that by the early 2020s—when Donald Trump, who is never mentioned by name in the report, could conceivably still be president—China, Russia, and Iran come to believe that the United States is retreating from the world because of its divisive domestic politics and messy government finances. As a result, the Chinese, Russians, and Iranians set about expanding their influence over neighboring countries, such that, by the mid-2020s, the “powers at the center of [regional] spheres [are attempting] to assert their right to privileged economic, political, and security influence within their regions.” The report’s authors, for instance, envision China seeking to address poor environmental conditions in the country by diverting rivers or injecting sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere, harming nearby states in the process. The scenario reaches a climax during the Indo-Pakistani war of 2028, which involves the first use of a nuclear weapon in a conflict since 1945—and jolts the world’s great powers into cooperating with each other again.

The report—which, among other sources, draws on field visits to 36 countries and territories and consultations with various experts in and out of government—predicts that global economic growth will slow: “India will be the world’s fastest growing economy during the next five years as China’s economy cools and growth elsewhere sputters,” the authors write (U.S. economic growth is expected to be “modest”). It predicts that the threat of terrorism will grow: “Although the location of religiously driven terrorism will fluctuate, the rise of violent religious nationalism and the schism between Shia and Sunni are likely to worsen in the short term and may not abate by 2035,” the authors note (a pretty safe bet for a religious schism that has persisted since the seventh century). Within and across countries, the study asserts, “information ‘echo chambers’ will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events” (not that shared understandings of events has ever been the world’s strong suit).