lit a candle 3h agook so i read Global Trends 2030 back when i was still working in manila, a colleague printed it out for the whole office because it was going around, this was years ago now. i did not even register his name properly at the time, you know how it is, you read the report not the author page. anyway i only connected the dots last year when i picked up World to Come at a secondhand stall here, 2025 book, Trump stuff, and there was his name again. 73 is not that old really. i keep thinking about that line in the report about 2030, how some of it actually happened the way he said. anyway. rest well sir edit: just checked, he died in october, i am only seeing this now
Their story
Mathew James Burrows, known to colleagues as Mat, was an American historian turned intelligence analyst who spent almost three decades inside the US government and then became one of the best known voices in strategic foresight in Washington. As the principal author of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends reports,…
Mathew James Burrows, known to colleagues as Mat, was an American historian turned intelligence analyst who spent almost three decades inside the US government and then became one of the best known voices in strategic foresight in Washington. As the principal author of the National Intelligence Council's Global Trends reports, he helped shape how presidents, policymakers and foreign governments thought about the long-term future. The Stimson Center, where he led the Strategic Foresight Hub, announced his passing in October 2026. He was 73.
Burrows was born on 31 August 1953 and grew up in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. He credited his mother, a housewife with a deep curiosity about the past, with opening his mind to history. He liked to recall that when he was four or five she took him to the library and borrowed books on the French Revolution, an early spark for a lifelong fascination with Europe and with how great orders rise and fall.
He studied American and European history at Wesleyan University and then went to the University of Cambridge, where he earned his MA and PhD in history. His doctoral research examined French policy in the Middle East before the First World War, and in 1986 he published an article on the subject, "Mission Civilisatrice: French Cultural Policy in the Middle East, 1860 to 1914", in The Historical Journal. He spent a couple of years living in Paris, then returned to Ohio, where he taught at Cuyahoga Community College and worked at a local archive while living with his parents.
Around Thanksgiving 1984 he answered a CIA recruitment advertisement in The New York Times. After a long application process he started at the agency on 6 January 1986 as an analyst in the European Office of Analysis, writing pieces for the President's Daily Brief. Over the following years he moved through a series of demanding assignments. He served two years at the US Mission to the European Union in Brussels, became the first intelligence community fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York in 1998 to 1999, and then worked as special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke at the US Mission to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001. In 2001 and 2002 he was deputy national security adviser to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and he spent a short period in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center after the September 11 attacks.
In 2003 the chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Ambassador Robert Hutchings, brought him to the NIC. There Burrows found his life's work. He was the principal drafter of Global Trends 2020: Mapping the Global Future (2004), and in 2005 he set up the NIC's Long Range Analysis Unit, which later became the Strategic Futures Group. He led the teams that produced Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (2008) and Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds (2012), and in 2007 he was appointed Counselor to the NIC, its number three position. Under his direction the reports became more open and more global, drawing on consultations with experts, academics and governments on several continents, quantitative modelling from the Pardee Center at the University of Colorado, and demographic work by researchers such as Richard Cincotta. The 2008 report was widely noted for its warning about the risk of a new global pandemic. He also oversaw Global Governance 2025, published with the EU Institute for Security Studies in 2010, and helped European institutions build their own foresight capacity through the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS).
Burrows retired from government in 2013 after 28 years of service at the CIA and the State Department. He joined the Atlantic Council as director of its Strategic Foresight Initiative and later co-directed the council's New American Engagement Initiative. He wrote The Future, Declassified: Megatrends That Will Undo the World Unless We Take Action (2014), worked with the Russian academician Alexander Dynkin on Global System on the Brink: Pathways toward a New Normal (2016), and produced the Global Risks 2035 report and its 2019 update. He then moved to the Stimson Center (in 2022 according to Wikipedia, 2023 by Stimson's account), where he served as Counselor in the Executive Office and program lead of the Strategic Foresight Hub. With the German political scientist Josef Braml he wrote Die Traumwandler (2023) and World to Come: The Return of Trump and the End of the Old Order (2025).
Burrows was known for taking unfashionable positions when he believed the evidence pointed that way. He argued that the post-Cold War order was ending, that the United States needed to adapt to a more multipolar world, and that diplomacy with rivals deserved more attention than it received. He often said that intelligence analysis was good at incremental change but weak at spotting disruptions, and he built his foresight work around scenarios meant to stretch the imagination of decision makers.
Colleagues remembered him as generous, modest and kind. Stimson Center President and CEO Rachel Stohl said he "embodied the best of public service: intellectual honesty, independent judgment, and a profound commitment to making the world a better place." Tributes came from former colleagues across the Atlantic Council, the Stimson Center, the European foresight community and journalists such as Edward Luce of the Financial Times, who wrote that Burrows "elevated strategic foresight into an art form." The cause and place of his death were not made public.
Biography adapted from https://www.stimson.org/2026/stimson-center-mourns-the-passing-of-mathew-burrows-pioneering-voice-in-strategic-foresight/.
In their own words
“I never believed that history has ended.”
Mathew Burrows, Stimson Center podcast "A Life in the CIA", 2025
“The human intelligence is very good on incremental change. It's not very good at spotting disruptions.”
Mathew Burrows on the limits of intelligence analysis, Stimson Center podcast, 2025
“The post-Cold War order has been dying for some time. Trump will tear it down but what comes next could be better or worse. It's is up to all of us to make it better. That's what the book is about.”
Mathew Burrows on X about World to Come, 18 January 2025
“Mat embodied the best of public service: intellectual honesty, independent judgment, and a profound commitment to making the world a better place.”
Rachel Stohl, Stimson Center President and CEO, October 2026
“Mat elevated strategic foresight into an art form. He will be sorely missed.”
Edward Luce, Financial Times, on X, 24 October 2026
Photos
2Mathew Burrows
by People Forever
Mathew Burrows speaking at an event
by People Forever
the 2012 Global Trends report got passed around our office too, strange how it travels