January 13, 2025
We are kicking off 2025 by looking at some of the biggest geopolitical risks coming down the pike, from Trump's return to the White House, the tariff wars, our worsening U.S.-China relationship, and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. What will end up being the biggest risk in 2025? Here's our hot take: It won't be Trump, though he's a symptom. The biggest risk of 2025 is that this becomes the year the G-Zero wins. As longtime fans surely know, the G-Zero world is when no one power or group of powers is willing and able to drive a global agenda to maintain international order. We have lived with this lack of international leadership for nearly a decade. But in 2025, the problem will get a lot worse.
In a wide-ranging conversation on GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Francis Fukuyama warns that the United States is losing its ability to lead globally as political polarization and a lack of bipartisan consensus undermine its long-term influence. He argues that America’s retreat from the liberal world order it once championed creates a dangerous power vacuum, inviting instability and the resurgence of the law of the jungle in international relations.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
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A French navy boat surrounds the GRINCH oil tanker, intercepted by France in the Alboran Sea on suspicion of operating under a false flag and belonging to Russia's shadow fleet that enables Russia to export oil despite sanctions, and diverted to the port of Marseille-Fos, in the Gulf of Fos-sur-Mer, near Martigues, France, on January 25, 2026.
REUTERS/Manon Cruz
$90 billion: The amount of revenue that Russia has reportedly made from smuggled crude oil exports, after 48 companies worked together to help disguise the origin of the oil and circumvent sanctions that have been imposed since the full-scale war on Ukraine began.
People in support of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol rally near Seoul Central District Court in Seoul on Feb. 19, 2026. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment the same day for leading an insurrection with his short-lived declaration of martial law in December 2024.
Kyodo
65: The age of former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday after being found guilty of plotting an insurrection when he declared martial law in 2024.
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