LO,
The Congresscritters who will vote on those buys are still serving time on school boards, on city councils, or fetching coffee on the Hill.
Or, will be political neophytes with no experience whatsoever. Very quickly the newcomers to Washington, DC are taught the ropes of power and survival by those that are there and existing agenda moves forward with little change. K Street lobbyist and now unlimited corporate $$s to political PACs assure that.
2030 is 15 years away. What did you think 2015 would look like in 2000, before the Cole bombing?
If you are asking about Middle-East landscape change, pre-2000 to current, it was predictable prior to the October 2000 Cole attack that significant change was occurring. In fact, there was a similar, but not well publicized attack in January 2000 on the USS
The Sullivans also in Aden. The attack failed because the explosives in the boat were too heavy, the boat sank and the attack aborted.
The US policy and strategy in the Middle-East was fixed in concrete for 40 years leading to the Cole, but nothing geopolitical ever stays the same. Al-Qaeda came into existence prior to the Cole and was responsible for the 1998 US Embassy bombings prior to the Cole. The US had no strategy to deal with the Al-Qaeda organization until after 9/11 just as today there is no strategy in dealing with ISIS. I have always been an admirer of Sun Tzu, author of
The Art of War. It isn't so much battlefield tactics that win wars, but strategies. Here is one of Sun Tzu's comments:
"Thus those skilled in war subdue the enemy's army without battle .... They conquer by strategy."