“All other things being equal” is how economists hedge their bets. When they predict that X will happen they attach this caveat: that all Y's remain unchanged. Although manufacturers and traders may not be aware of it, most are doing much the same thing as they gear up their global supply chains. The assumption they're making is that today's environment of liberalized trade will continue to prevail, that globalization is a fixed constant.

What we all know about the real world, though, is that things don't work that way. One action unexpectedly begets another; processes are inter-dependent; politics trumps logic. The un-thinkable routinely occurs and the supply chain is captive in ways that can't be imagined. Or are there ways to protect supply chains in advance?

That's the question they're asking at the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics these days-is it possible to see into the future? Researches are engaged in an extensive, multi-year (and multi-million dollar) effort called The Supply Chain 2020 (SC2020) Project. Think of it as an attempt to posit a half dozen scenarios about the shape of the world in the year 2020 and, from them, deduce how effective global supply chains can operate within each particular model.

To learn more, I recently spent time in Cambridge with Director Larry Lapide and several of his colleagues. In future issues of World Trade we will deal more extensively with what promises to be landmark work, but for the moment it's important to underscore their central proposition: all things do not remain equal.

The implications of this should be heeded closely. Supply chains, in their fundamental design and processes and strategic principles, need to be sufficiently flexible to respond to what otherwise might be fatal changes in the world's economic macros.

What could prove so disruptive? Radical dislocations in energy availability and price. Major environmental changes coupled with intensified public regulation. Quantum leaps in the accessibility of information. Pandemics that wipe out huge portions of the population. Religious fundamentalism hostile to modernity and science.

Or, and this is a real wild card that many corporate supply officers are ignoring, the fragmentation of the multinational approach to free trade into a handful of rival trading blocks insulating their markets from each other.

Conventional wisdom currently dismisses local protectionism as something that's fading away, an obsolete historical anachronism. But alternative approaches do continue to exist. China is leading the way in organizing its neighbors into a trading bloc (ASEAN, Association of Southeast Asian Nations), the European Union has already shown willingness to assert its will.

Even here in the United States we're seeing early warning signs. The policy of the Bush Administration has tilted heavily toward regional (CAFTA) and bilateral agreements (with the likes of Bahrain and Morocco), something critics argue has more to do with the exploitation of political leverage than the optimization of free trade.

The MIT message is that change is endemic in the emerging global economic system-we can't say precisely what kind of change, but we know it'll occur. And as enterprises ally themselves in ever more fundamental ways with strategic partners in diverse parts of the world, their supply chains will be called upon to weather the shock of those changes.