The United States will no longer play global policeman, and no one else wants the job. This is not a G-7 or a G-20 world. Welcome to the GZERO, a world made volatile by an intensifying international battle for power and influence. Every week on this podcast, Ian Bremmer will interview the world leaders and the thought leaders shaping our GZERO World.
Presented by
Listen: Ian brightens things up by talking cyber warfare with David Sanger.
Listen: Ian brightens things up by talking cyber warfare with David Sanger.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.This week, Ian Bremmer sits down with University of Miami historian and Cuba expert Michael Bustamante to make sense of the US-Cuba standoff.
Cuba is in its worst crisis in 30 years, with basic necessities like fuel, water and food in short supply. Between one and two million Cubans have left in the past five years, the largest exodus in the island's history. And the opposition is too weak, too scattered, and too decimated by exile and imprisonment to be a real political alternative.
Trump says 2026 is the year of liberation. But Bustamante argues the hard realities don't match his expectations, and a military invasion is unlikely. A purely economic deal, closer to Obama's 2015 opening, might suit Trump's deal-making instincts, and Cuba's government has signaled it could live with that too. But it would be a betrayal of everything Cuban Americans in South Florida have been promised. And for Marco Rubio, it would be a defining political problem. Together, Bustamante and Bremmer discuss the realistic outcomes -- will Trump get what he wants, and can the 80 years old communist regime survive this crisis?
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Historian Michael Bustamante joins Ian Bremmer to discuss Cuba's economic freefall, Trump's end game, and the hopes of Cuban Americans.... More >
The Kim dynasty has outlasted every threat for 80 years. Wall Street Journal's Jonathan Cheng explains how, and why the Iran war just made Kim Jong Un seem untouchable.
North Korea has nuclear weapons, a succession plan hiding in plain sight, and a personality cult that has outlasted Stalin's and Mao's combined. Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau chief Jonathan Cheng argues the world keeps misreading Pyongyang because it insists on reducing it to an authoritarian state.
North Korea is also a religious society, built on a divine rule centered on a "god-king", Cheng argues. Kim Jong Un, third generation leader of the Kim dynasty was able to consolidate his power while developping the nuclear arsenal his father had succesfully created.
Now, with the Iran war reshaping global order, Kim's long bet on nuclear weapons looks like the smartest foreign policy call of the century. North Korea, long treated as a pariah nuclear nation on the international stage, seems to be taken seriously by top China has quietly dropped "denuclearization" from its own documents. Trump calls Kim Jong Un a friend. And Kim is already preparing a successor, his daughter, reportedly 12 years old, in plain sight.
Subscribe to the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
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Rising energy prices, higher inflation, and growing economic uncertainty — a Harvard economist says the fallout from the Iran war is already being felt.
On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Harvard economist and former IMF Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath to unpack how the conflict is rippling through the global economy. As oil and gas prices surge, inflation is climbing, adding new costs for households and businesses and putting pressure on growth worldwide.
Gopinath explains that while the immediate hit to global growth may seem modest, the bigger concern is longer-term “structural damage”—the slow-moving economic shifts caused by trade fragmentation, strained alliances, and geopolitical conflict. They also discuss why the US may be more insulated than other economies, how China is positioning itself for a more fragmented world, and whether the recent boom in AI investment can offset some of the economic drag.
As inflation rises and global economic ties continue to shift, what comes next may matter even more than the immediate shock.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published
On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Harvard economist and former IMF Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath to unpack how the conflict is rippling through the global economy. As... More >
For sixteen years, Viktor Orbán has dominated Hungarian politics, rewriting rules, consolidating power, and positioning himself as Europe's leading nationalist and Donald Trump's closest ally on the continent. But with parliamentary elections approaching on April 12th, his aura of invincibility is finally cracking. Opposition candidate Péter Magyar, a conservative former Orbán insider, is polling ahead by double digits, and the Trump administration is scrambling to help keep its favorite European in office.
Krastev explains what most Americans get wrong about Orbán: that his real economic patron isn't Trump but China. Chinese investment in Hungary now exceeds Chinese investment in Germany and France combined, and Beijing's interest is straightforward: Orbán's willingness to veto any EU anti-China policy. Krastev also breaks down Orbán's ideological roots, arguing he is far closer to Putin than to Trump, anchored in 19th-century Hungarian nationalism and the grief of a nation that lost everything after World War I.
Together, Krastev and Bremmer look ahead to what an Orbán loss would mean for Europe's far-right parties, for EU policy on Ukraine, and for Trump's own political brand. "For President Trump and for President Putin," Krastev says, "Orbán losing is going to be their personal loss." And if Trump's oldest, best-known European ally falls, being backed by Washington may soon be worth far less than it once was.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published
Ian Bremmer sits down with Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and political scientist, to discuss Hungary's consequential upcoming election and what it means for the far... More >
Historian Michael Bustamante joins Ian Bremmer to discuss Cuba's economic freefall, Trump's end game, and the hopes of Cuban Americans.... More >
Listen: What does global energy transition look like in a time of major geopolitical change, including rebalancing of trade? In this special episode of "Energized: The Future of Energy,” host JJ... More >
Creating artificial human retinas in zero gravity. Mining rare minerals on the moon. There seems to be no limit to what could be possible if we continue to take our more important industries to... More >
At first glance, Hungary’s Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar may appear to be the antithesis of the man he defeated in the April 12 election, Viktor Orbán. Yet the pair might be closer than you think... More >
In this episode of The Ripple Effect: Investing in Life Sciences, host Dan Riskin speaks with Patrick Horber, President of Novartis International, and David Gluckman, Vice Chairman of Investment... More >
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