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I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.
Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.
Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.
The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.
Predicting the future is vital to civilization itself. Capitalists must predict the future to know what products to develop. NVIDIA's sudden providence wasn't an accident - Jensen Huang was working towards GPU-based AI development for about 20 years before it became apparent that this was a big deal.
Predicting the future over the very long term is very difficult. I don't know how anyone could predict where the best scientists will come from in 3530, or even what form they'll take. A soup of high energy plasma perhaps, or something more arcane? Even so, the Romans might well have predicted that Latin-speakers would make the discoveries and they wouldn't be wrong - Principia Mathematica was written in Latin. Yet that would have little meaning.
However, we can make predictions in the medium-term, when the world still functions roughly as we understand it. You can look at a country like China and say 'wow this country has high potential for growth, its population is Very Large and has a long history of civilization, plus there's plenty of coal... If they get richer and better organized...' That's a fact-based observation, which only needs a little analysis to become a conditional prediction.
Significant non-obvious predictions can be made and gotten right. Imagine if the US had been a little more thoughtful about what Chinese growth would do to their superpower standing back in 1989 or 1990, after Tiananmen square. Or at the latest in 1996, after the 3rd Straits Crisis (what clearer sign could they ask for about the fundamental attitude of the Party). Suppose they'd tried to predict what Chinese leaders would do, given that the US had made it perfectly clear that they planned to undermine the rule of the Party via economic liberalization and the free flow of ideas... Would they not try to cut off foreign political ideas but keep the wealth? Grow stronger and then seek to challenge US hegemony in Asia, like any world power seeking to control their own region against an ideological enemy?
Or take NATO expansion in Eastern Europe. A fair few said it would lead to disaster, George Kennan for instance (who is not the biggest Russophile in the world) in 1997:
Lo and behold, we got nationalistic, anti-Western tendencies in Russian opinion, a Cold War and unfriendly Russian foreign policy. Medium-term predictions aren't easy but they can regularly be made and done right, it all depends on the competence of those who make predictions. There was a whole chorus of people who predicted the Iraq War would be a disaster and they were right too.
One might counter with the 'Japan is the greatest challenge to US in the Pacific' camp in the 1980s but these people were very very stupid. Japan obviously didn't have the energy or materials (or even the food security) to challenge the US, or the population size, or the military-industrial base, or the nationalistic foundation in internal ideology... This isn't hindsight but things that could easily be observed at the time. Even if Japanese economic growth continued at 1980s rates it couldn't challenge the US without taking a huge chunk of South East Asia. And Japan couldn't take a huge chunk of South East Asia unless it challenges the US.
He was right that it would turn Russia against the West; he was wrong that it would be "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era". He was expecting a new Cold War that might possibly escalate into WW3, while the US has barely been affected by the current war. Kennan, having spent most of his career with Russia as a peer of the US, could not conceive how much Russia would degenerate and how little of a threat it would pose.
If Russia's nuclear arsenal isn't a threat, what is?
The US has very much been affected by this war (Europe far more so). Aside from inflation, stocks of munitions have been greatly depleted. It turns out that GDP is not sufficient for producing artillery shells, Stingers or Javelins in sufficient numbers to supply a medium-high intensity war. Factories and machine tools are what the US needed, what they're scrambling to put together.
Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the US digging out dregs from fifty years ago - Hawk missiles were pretty good in 1970 but are somewhat desultory now: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4944652
Nor would the US MIC be outperformed by Russia in shell production: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/long-war-in-ukraine-highlights-need-for-u-s-army-to-modernize-ammo-production
Furthermore, a new Cold War that might escalate into WW3 is precisely what we have. That's the China-US conflict in the Pacific. Pushing Russia towards China was possibly the biggest and most braindead mistake the US has made.
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