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By Ekaterina Blinova, Sputnik

Despite its impressive gains, the United States is not skillful at modeling the future, notes a French expert, pointing to the CIA's evident failure to predict the rise of Russia in 2015.

According to Thomas Flichy de La Neuville, a French expert in geopolitics, the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) blatantly failed to predict the rise of Russia and the emerging threat of radical Islam in 2015 in its famous "Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts," released in 2000. It has turned out later that many of ideas stated in the report were divorced from reality, the expert pointed out.

NIC's Global Trends 2015 stated that by 2015 Russia would face tremendous decline of its geopolitical power. Furthermore, the NIC suggested that Russia would remain weak internally and unable to establish a powerful alliance to counterbalance the US hegemony. Alas, the CIA analysts could not even imagine that by 2015 Moscow would build a partnership with China and Iran, dealing a serious blow to US strategic plans in Eurasia.

The US intelligence analysts also miscalculated the capabilities of Russia's Army in 2015. According to the NIC Russia will be unable to maintain conventional forces, let alone "to project significant military power with conventional means," and will rely mostly on its waning nuclear arsenal to deter its neighbors. Again, the prediction has not come true.

The French expert nailed another myth, created by the CIA back in 2000. "By 2015 "Eurasia" will be a geographic term lacking a unifying political, economic, and cultural reality," the US intelligence analysts asserted and went wrong.

What make the matters worse, the CIA experts also failed to foresee the growing threat of radical Islam, emphasized Thomas Flichy de La Neuville.

Describing the prospects of the Middle East, the Americans wrote about "new social dynamics" not impacted by Islamic radicalization tendencies.

Although the alarming signs of the Islamic extremism had emerged by 2000, there was not a word about the gradual revival of radical Islam in the 100-page document, the expert pointed out.

Regardless of the fact that the NIC's "Global Trends 2015" geopolitical prognosis proved wrong, the following report "Global Trends" 2030 was widely promoted and sold to Western readers waiting for new "prophetic" insights of the US scholars into the future. "The world in 2030 seen by the CIA" was sold as "The Bible of experts," Thomas Flichy de La Neuville remarked ironically.