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by ian bremmer
The United States is #winning.
At least that’s how it looks if you’re tracking the economy, market indices, or the parade of countries lining up to cut deals with President Donald Trump. Asian and Gulf countries have pledged trillions of dollars in foreign direct investment in the US during the Trump presidency. The United Kingdom, the European Union, and several Southeast Asian nations have offered non-reciprocal trade deals. Canada folded on its plan to impose a digital services tax. Japan made unilateral concessions on automotive tariffs and Nippon Steel. European pharmaceutical companies are relocating production stateside to avoid punitive tariffs. Consumer confidence may be in the doldrums, but spending remains resilient (driven by the wealthiest Americans). Combined with an artificial intelligence spending boom and massive deficit spending – enabled by the dollar’s ongoing status as the global reserve currency – markets continue betting on American liquidity and growth.
It’s a heady moment. But while the short-term picture looks strong, the United States is systematically trading long-term strategic advantages for immediate tactical gains, with the accumulating costs hiding in plain sight.
Start with immigration. For decades, the cornerstone of America’s technological, economic, and soft-power dominance has been its ability to attract the best and brightest from around the world. Talented engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs long chose the US because it promised opportunity, freedom, openness, and meritocracy – a fair shot at the American Dream. Now, the welcome mat is fraying. The Trump administration is increasingly hostile to immigrants (whether legal or illegal, skilled or unskilled), nativist sentiment among Americans is growing, and civil liberties (especially for non-white immigrants) feel increasingly uncertain. The numbers speak for themselves: International student arrivals to the US have declined by nearly 20% relative to last year. Meanwhile, China is rolling out new visas explicitly designed to poach high-skilled workers from the United States, and Canada is plastering airports with recruitment pitches. As America becomes a less attractive destination for top global talent relative to its competitors, the long-term economic damage will compound.
Then there are the universities. Yes, many humanities departments had grown intellectually insular and politically captured. Taking on these echo chambers for fringe woke ideology was long overdue. But the Trump administration has gone much further, slashing research infrastructure at America’s (and the world’s) finest universities. These institutions are what keep America at the cutting edge of advanced science and technology and draw the most talented students globally – the ones who become tomorrow’s leading researchers, inventors, and entrepreneurs. Undermining that ecosystem will erode one of the most important pillars of the US economy at a time when public trust in science itself is declining. Growing vaccine skepticism, embrace of conspiracy theories, reflexive rejection of expertise – these aren’t just cultural quirks, they’re a structural disadvantage when competing against countries where faith in science remains strong. They’re making Americans less capable of driving the next wave of technological advances, and therefore less likely to dominate the commanding heights of the world economy and geopolitics.
Consider artificial intelligence. The United States is racing ahead in consumer-facing AI – chatbots, engagement-maximizing social media algorithms, generative tools to produce yet-more-addictive slop, ever-larger language models that claim to be one step closer to superintelligence – because that’s where the money is. But these technologies are also fragmenting society, amplifying misinformation, and possibly contributing to a kind of collective psychosis. China, by contrast, has channeled AI development away from consumer applications in favor of defense and industrial uses, which carry less risk of social fragmentation and more strategic upside.
It’s a similar story when it comes to energy. The United States has become the world’s most powerful petrostate, producing more oil, gas, and coal than any other country. That’s not inherently a problem – fossil fuels will continue to power data centers, agriculture, and heavy industry for decades to come. But the US has effectively ceded leadership on post-carbon energy to China, which already dominates battery technology, solar power, next-generation nuclear, and supply chains for critical minerals. Washington is doubling down on hydrocarbons while letting the future of energy pass it by.
Or take trade policy. The Trump administration is imposing the highest US tariffs in a century – including on major allies, on countries with no bilateral trade imbalances, and on sectors where America lacks capacity to ramp up domestic production quickly enough to avoid shortages or inflation. Following Trump’s Oct. 30 meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping – which put escalation on hold for a year and lowered fentanyl tariffs on China from 20% to 10% in exchange for politically-sensitive soybean purchases – the effective US tariff rate on Chinese imports now sits at 32%, close to the rate on ASEAN countries and lower than on its strategic partner India and South America’s largest economy, Brazil, which actually runs a trade surplus with the United States.
The cumulative result is a roughly 17% regressive tax on American businesses and consumers, which are forced to pay more for intermediate inputs and final goods. Paired with a sharp turn toward industrial policy and state capitalism, the US is moving away from the free-market principles that made its economy so competitive in the first place. Targeted government intervention in select sectors (e.g., semiconductors, banking) can sometimes be justified on specific grounds (e.g., national security, financial stability), but history shows that broad protectionism and state direction tend to make economies less, not more, dynamic over time.
This short-term thinking extends to geopolitics. As I wrote last week, most countries are prepared to give the US wins – some pyrrhic, some significant – to avoid open conflict. But these same countries are also working to ensure they’re never in that position again. The EU has finalized trade agreements with Mexico, Indonesia, and the South American trading bloc Mercosur. Brazil is deepening economic ties with Europe, China, and Canada. India is working to stabilize relations with China while accelerating infrastructure projects that reduce its dependence on US markets. Saudi Arabia has signed a nuclear deal with Pakistan to hedge against future security neglect from Washington.
These moves aren’t costless – they require years of political capital, billions in investment, and new institutional architecture. Once built, they’re hard to reverse. But countries have learned the hard way that US policy can change course every election cycle with little in the way of policy continuity or long-term strategic planning, and they’re building alternatives now while accommodating Washington in the short run. Every four years, there’s a 50/50 chance that everything – not just the winners and losers but the rules of the road – shifts. Gone are the days when politics ended at water’s edge. That structural volatility reduces American leverage over time, even as it delivers wins for the world’s largest economy.
So when asking whether the United States will retain its lead over its allies and adversaries, the answer depends on the time horizon. Short-term? Absolutely. America remains by far the world’s most powerful country, so there’s a lot of room for damage before structural decline sets in. Moreover, artificial intelligence is about to change everything, and the US is one of only two games in town (China being the other) and still the preferred partner for most of the West and parts of the Global South.
But long term, the trajectory is troubling. The historical advantages the United States enjoyed over its peers – better physical and institutional infrastructure, superior demographics driven partly by immigration, public tolerance for inequality undergirded by perception of meritocracy, greater capacity for deficit spending – are all heading in the wrong direction, arguably unsustainably so. China, despite being in a weaker overall position, is doing what it can to exploit these shifts. And while Beijing faces severe structural challenges of its own, it benefits from the increasingly accurate perception that it takes the long view while America chases the next election.
Perhaps most worrying is the one thing everyone in a deeply divided America now agrees on: that the country’s biggest threat is domestic. They just disagree on who that threat is. That kind of inward turn ensures the bulk of the national energy and focus will remain on fighting internecine political battles rather than making the deeper, patient investments – in people, institutions, research, and infrastructure – required to keep the United States competitive a generation from now.
America is giving up long-term leadership in exchange for short-term wins. The question isn’t whether the United States will pay for this addiction to immediate gratification. It's only when the bill will come due – and how much it will cost.
Last week, I wrote about the political revolution that President Donald Trump has launched in the United States and how it has made America a fundamentally unreliable player on the world stage.
This week, I’ll take on another question I detailed during my recent “State of the World” speech in Tokyo: How can/should the rest of the world respond to this new reality?
***
When dealing with a leader of the world’s most powerful country who ignores counsel and acts on impulse, most governments will have to avoid actions that make Trump-unfriendly headlines. (Looking at you, Doug Ford.)
This is the logic that led Canada to surrender on its plan to impose a digital services tax earlier this year, and why a TV ad aired by the province of Ontario using clips of Ronald Reagan to criticize Trump’s tariffs was hastily taken down when the US president got angry. It’s why Japan was wise to make unilateral concessions on Nippon Steel and automotive tariffs. To safeguard their national interests, if a fight can be avoided, other governments should avoid it – by whatever means necessary. Let the spotlight of Trump administration hostility fall on others.
Many US allies have moved to proactively limit damage from any future fight with the White House. The United Kingdom, the European Union, and a number of Southeast Asian countries have offered non-reciprocal trade deals. See also Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Argentina, and El Salvador.
From governments that have much more bargaining leverage – like China, Russia, and India – we’ve seen that standing up for yourself and a willingness to absorb punches can create needed space. That strategy won’t work for everyone. Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Brazil and many others need to stay on a positive track with Washington.
But all countries, whatever their current relationship with the White House, will need to build their own long-term capacity and reinforce their own stability – to become more economically dynamic and competitive for the future.
That’s China’s current approach. Beijing has also doubled down on its support for existing international institutions, in part because it calculates that an American step-back will create new opportunities to change them.
In short, when faced with an America that’s become a more unreliable player on the global stage, one that can’t be counted on to safeguard allies who have underinvested in their own security, the right strategy is defense first, hedge second.
Just as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine persuaded Europeans to quickly reduce their own dependence on Russian energy, European governments want to avoid finding themselves at the mercy of shifting policies from Washington.
America’s traditional allies will have to regain their competitive position. That means a focus on growth, robust industrial policy, streamlined regulatory and bureaucratic authorities, and expansive investment in new technologies. They must attract and invest in entrepreneurship, assert more diplomatic leadership internationally, and accept responsibilities in building multilateral architecture.
Models already exist. In particular, there is Mario Draghi’s crucial competitiveness report for the European Union. On a smaller scale, there is Mark Carney’s thoughtfully crafted “Canada Strong” plan. Most every global leader should be thinking in these terms.
It’s easier said than done. The near-term politics of making these transformations is daunting. The EU is not a single state, and Europe's need for consensus rulemaking and pushback from more euro-skeptic governments (which could arrive even in France and Germany in the next election cycle) pose an enormous challenge.
There will be opposition from the fast-rising Reform Party in Britain and some provincial governments in Canada.
But once all these economic, political, security, and diplomatic investments are made, America’s unreliability, in the years well beyond Trump, will matter less.
As for hedging…
- Europe has committed to spend much more money on its own defense and to address the security coordination problems NATO will suffer without clear US leadership.
- The Saudis have signed a nuclear deal with Pakistan to hedge against any future security neglect from Washington, and there’s already more defense and intelligence-sharing among Gulf States.
- India’s Narendra Modi is working hard to stabilize his country’s relations with China and to temper their rivalry.
- The EU has finalized three free trade agreements — with South American bloc Mercosur, Mexico and Indonesia — and is working toward an agreement with India.
- Mercosur sealed a free trade deal with the European Free Trade Area, four European countries outside the EU. It has restarted negotiations with Canada.
In short, the defense and hedging strategies are well underway and likely to succeed to varying degrees in various places over time – though we should be more skeptical about even a medium-term turnaround in competitiveness.
We’re now living in a post-American order, with no one willing or able to fill the vacuum. China has its own problems and isn’t about to bite off more than it can chew. Which means a deeper G-Zero world, leading to more conflict, inflicting more damage, and lasting longer.
This trajectory isn’t sustainable. During the Cold War, it took the Cuban Missile Crisis to convince leaders that armed confrontation would be catastrophic – and that new communication channels and agreements were essential. We don't know what form “the crisis we need” to build a new order will take this time. But it's coming.
Until then? The old rules don’t apply anymore, and new rules haven’t been written yet. We must brace for sustained turbulence.
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For 20 years now, we've been warned about China's rise, America's decline, and the inevitable collision between the two superpowers.
That’s not what's happening today.
The bigger story of our G-Zero world, which I laid out during my “State of the World” speech in Tokyo on Monday, is that the United States – still the world’s most powerful nation – has chosen to walk away from the international system it built and led for three-quarters of a century. Not because it's weak. Not because it has to. But because it wants to.
From unpredictable to unreliable
There’s no historical precedent for this choice. Since the end of World War II, America's elected leaders have upheld a commitment to US leadership in a troubled world. In service of that goal, they’ve bolstered allies to make them stronger, more competitive, and more secure.
But American willingness to lead is now buckling under a politics of grievance. Citizens increasingly feel US institutions – and many of the nation's elected leaders – have failed to deliver on their promises and no longer represent them. For millions of voters, the social contract – the implicit promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, the system will reward you – has been broken. Trump is a symptom, a beneficiary, and an accelerant of this breakdown, but he didn’t cause it.
As Americans have lost faith in their own system, so they have turned inward: away from allies, collective security, free trade, global institutions, and international rule of law. This is the G-Zero world I’ve been writing about for years, a vacuum of global leadership that no one else is willing and able to fill.
It doesn’t help that America's allies have brought less to the table in recent decades. Europe, the UK, Canada, and Japan are lagging in productivity and growth, face weak demographics, and have chronically underinvested in defense and technological innovation. They're more dependent on Washington precisely when Americans want their government to do less globally.
Winston Churchill said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they've exhausted all other options. The United States has always been unpredictable: in elections, in trade agreements, even in matters of war and peace. But it was rarely unreliable.
Today it is both. The United States remains committed to existing international norms, treaties, and agreements only insofar as they serve the interests of President Trump and his political allies. Governments sign deals only to have Washington unilaterally change the terms. Suspend intelligence-sharing overnight. Cut lifesaving foreign aid. Intervene in the domestic politics of friendly democracies. Threaten the territorial integrity of allies like Canada and Denmark. Impose the highest tariffs in nearly a century. Abandon countless global institutional commitments. The list goes on. America's unreliability has become the central driver of geopolitical uncertainty and instability in today's G-Zero world.
But unreliability is only half the story. To understand the scale of the problem – how deep it runs, how long it lasts, what can be done about it – you need to understand what’s currently happening inside the United States: a political revolution.
As a political scientist, I don't use the word "revolution" lightly. It implies a fundamental change in a country's governance – an attempt to overthrow what exists and replace it with something new. Whether motivated by ideology, identity, or wealth, a true revolution always depends on the ability and willingness of powerful actors to seize an opportunity created by a belief across society that the existing system is broken and therefore illegitimate. In this sense, revolutions are made, not born.
There have been two state revolutions with truly global impact in my lifetime.
The first was Mikhail Gorbachev's socialist revolution. The Soviet Union had long been losing ground in its Cold War competition with the United States. An out-of-touch party elite and sclerotic economic system struggled to sustain the state and fund an arms race Moscow looked destined to lose. To reverse Soviet stagnation, Gorbachev unleashed radical internal reforms: political openness (glasnost) to encourage competing ideas, economic restructuring (perestroika) to inject competitive market elements into the centrally planned economy, and self-accounting (khozraschyot) to devolve power from Moscow to the Soviet republics.
These reforms quickly undermined the foundations of the Soviet system. They enabled citizens, oligarchs, and nationalists to question the regime's legitimacy, creating widespread internal opposition and social dissent. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc accelerated the Kremlin's loss of control, and a nationalities revolution led to Soviet disintegration shortly after. Gorbachev's revolution failed, taking the Soviet Union with it.
The second revolution was Deng Xiaoping's economic modernization of China. In the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party leader responded to China’s underproductive, inefficient, and technologically stagnant socialist economy by transforming it from central planning to state capitalism: open to private enterprise, foreign investment, and trade.
Western governments eventually embraced Deng’s reforms, culminating in China's WTO admission in 2001. But the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the collapse of Eastern European communism, and the Soviet implosion all persuaded China's leaders that political reform was too dangerous. The Party's monopoly on power became non-negotiable, and it remains so to this day.
Still, Deng's economic revolution was a spectacular success. China lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, sustained nearly 10% annual growth for two generations, and became a middle-income economy of 1.4 billion that currently leads the world in many frontier technologies.
Trump's political revolution
And now we turn to Washington. Is it right to call what's happening inside the United States a revolution? It's early to say for sure, but increasingly I believe the answer is yes.
The president of the United States says the greatest threat to America is posed not by Beijing or Moscow or terrorists. The true enemies, he warns, are members of the opposite political party: its supporters, its fundraisers, and even its voters. President Trump believes his return to power allows – demands! – the end of political checks and balances on his executive authority.
There's not much economic revolution here. Yes, Trump has imposed the highest tariffs since the 1930s. Yes, he's trying to undermine the Federal Reserve's independence. And yes, he's dabbling in state capitalism – golden shares in US Steel, a 10% stake in Intel, a 15% cut of certain Nvidia and AMD chip sales. But these are ad hoc moves, marginal decisions in the context of the broader US economy. They’re not doctrine.
Trump picks winners and losers to demonstrate power, to reward loyalty, to extract rents. There's no structural transformation of how markets operate or the way the private sector engages with (and often captures) the regulatory system. There’s no strategic restructuring of capital. In fact, President Trump has abandoned his signature promise from 2016: "drain the swamp." Corruption and self-dealing aren't an economic revolution. They're business as usual in America's increasingly broken capitalist system … just more permitted now.
But a political revolution is another matter. President Trump is consolidating executive authority by pushing the boundaries of the law. He’s usurping powers traditionally left to Congress, the courts, and the states. He’s tried to undermine his political opposition to ensure they no longer pose a challenge to him and his allies. In part, this is Donald Trump's transactional approach to power. But it's also political retribution – a form of revenge on those whom Trump believes did, or tried to do, the same to him.
President Trump has accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department of Justice to imprison him and of promoting a "cancel culture" approach to right-wing speech, including by deplatforming Trump himself from social media after the January 6 Capitol riots.
Trump says the left in America has demonized him and his allies as "fascists" in ways that promote political violence, and he can point to two attempts to assassinate him during last year's election campaign as well as the recent murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to make his point.
The president's choices have wide-ranging and lasting implications. Inside the United States, the president has won the total loyalty of the Republican Party and the reliable support of Republican lawmakers for his revisionist legislative and executive agendas.
He has begun a sweeping purge of America's professional bureaucracy – which Trump and his supporters call the "Administrative State" – and replaced career civil servants with political appointees who are personally loyal to the president. He has weaponized the "power ministries" – the FBI, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and many regulatory agencies – against his domestic political adversaries. And he has secured executive impunity from the rulings of an independent but no longer coequal judiciary.
In short, President Trump is replacing the rule of law with the rule of Don at home, much like he’s embracing the law of the jungle – where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must – internationally.
Unlike the Gorbachev and Deng revolutions, Trump's revolution follows no grand strategic plan. Instead, it's a relentless pressure campaign to test the limits of what can be done on every political front – a commitment to act opportunistically as the crises these policies create open new possibilities to consolidate ever more power. This plan was launched by targeting those of Trump’s opponents who are most vulnerable and least organized, such as undocumented immigrants, green card holders, transgender people, and elite universities. The administration has since moved into the broader political categories of funders, supporters, and enablers of his political opponents. All of this is being undertaken with the intention of normalizing behaviors that have long been politically taboo.
Will Trump’s revolution succeed?
How much more can President Trump accomplish before next year's midterms or by Election Day 2028?
Partially, it's a matter of degree. The United States already has a structural bias toward Republicans because of the Electoral College system through which presidents are elected. A candidate can win the popular vote but lose the presidency thanks to the demographic and geographic distribution of electors, which confers a roughly 2-percentage-point advantage to Republican candidates. Add aggressive gerrymandering – with both parties rigging district maps – and elections become even less representative, less competitive, less legitimate.
More concerning is the possibility of President Trump deploying the National Guard in Democratic cities under the guise of a declared "national emergency" to suppress voter turnout. Federal probes into Democratic fundraising and organizations already underway add to these pressures, making these tactics increasingly plausible – and the election is still more than a year away.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting Trump runs for a third term or suspends elections. The Supreme Court would block both moves. But uncompetitive elections? Elections that look more like a single-party system than a competitive representative democracy? With the broader checks on presidential power now in question, that's increasingly plausible.
Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the Democratic Party's current divisions mean the legislature functions less independently from the executive. Even if Democrats retake majority control of the House of Representatives (a Senate flip is very unlikely), they’ll have no power to enforce subpoenas or force a defiant executive branch to cooperate with their oversight efforts.
America's judiciary remains independent, but its power now pales in comparison to that of the executive. The Supreme Court, aware that Trump could refuse to comply with decisions he dislikes, regularly limits the scope of its rulings to preserve its own institutional legitimacy. Though lower courts aren't as restrained, their decisions can be and often are overturned, giving Trump more leeway to consolidate authority.
The media, constrained by profit-driven corporate owners, faces pressure from above to avoid antagonizing the White House. Social media is increasingly controlled by Trump's political allies (more so when the TikTok sale goes through) and, in the case of Truth Social, by Trump himself.
There are still US institutions that can check the president's power. The military stands as a bastion of professionalism – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's blind loyalty to the president notwithstanding – because its culture continues to prioritize service to the nation over loyalty to any individual. The Pentagon's purges of some high-level military officers have made headlines, but not like China's last week – and they don't undermine the military's core operational integrity.
The devolution of political power to states and cities also offers a buffer. Many US governors and mayors are competent technocrats who govern independently of Washington. Trump's attempts to weaken Democratic national powers don't threaten state and city-level governance.
Corporate and financial leaders, uncomfortable with political upheaval, tend to avoid political confrontation that could jeopardize their interests and those of their shareholders. Most will focus on regulatory influence instead.
And then there are the American people themselves. More than five million Americans turned out in thousands of "No Kings Day" protests across the country this weekend, the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam War. President Trump is a historically polarizing and unpopular president. But then again, so is the 2025 Democratic Party.
Remember: Trump was freely and fairly elected in large part because he embodied the political and cultural disruption that a plurality of voters craved. Most Americans who said they cared about democracy in 2024 voted for, not against, Trump, precisely because they were convinced the system was already broken and only he offered hope for change.
The fate of Trump's political revolution is uncertain, but on current trends, a constitutional crisis before the next elections looks increasingly likely. Possible outcomes range from a Republican break with Trump to a sustained political shift toward single-party rule in the United States. Nor can we rule out the kind of political chaos, realignment, and violence that America saw in the decades after the Civil War.
One thing I know for sure: the United States is not going back to the political culture that held sway a decade ago, before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator. The sooner the world accepts that, the sooner it can figure out how to respond and adapt to a post-American order. More on this next week.
A lighthouse in a stormy sea.
I get a lot of questions these days from people feeling worried, disturbed, even overwhelmed about the state of politics in the United States. Recently, I received a particularly heartfelt request for guidance from a concerned citizen that demanded more than a few honest but incomplete thoughts typed quickly in between meetings. I thought I'd use today's column to share her message (with her name redacted) and my full response, in the hope that you might find it useful, too.
* * *
From: [name redacted]
To: me
Not sure you will read this through…
The bottom line up front: I’m reaching out, not for reassurance, but for direction. Are there ways of engaging that you believe actually make a difference – paths for ordinary people like me who refuse to give up – I would be deeply grateful if you’d share them.
I’ve been a follower of yours since my introduction to you via Preet’s podcast. I just finished How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa. It lit a fire in me but also leaves me overwhelmed. I feel pulled to do more, but don’t know how beyond what I am currently doing: I make weekly calls through 5calls (dot) org, I write, I show up to local protests, but it feels like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a teaspoon.
How does a layperson create change? I’m not a lawyer or political expert, but a mom and the wife of a now-retired Lt. Colonel. For 24 years, I stood by my husband’s side, believing deeply in the idea that the sacrifices our family was making were for the greater good – that our country, for all its flaws, stood for freedom, truth, and accountability. That there was honor in this calling. But over the last eight years, and especially these past nine months, I’ve felt that foundation crumble. The freedoms I once believed were sacred are being chipped away, quietly and relentlessly.
I know you’re not an oracle. But I view you as someone who connects the dots with clarity, empathy, and integrity. Thank you for the work you do. You make people like me feel less alone, and that’s no small thing in times like these. I will take any guidance you can provide.
Respectfully,
[name redacted]
*
From: me
To: [name redacted]
Dear [name redacted],
I read every word. I wish I had a more satisfying answer for you, but the truth is I get messages like yours regularly – from people who've done everything they were told would matter, who show up, call, write, protest, and still feel like they're bailing out the ocean with a spoon. You're not wrong to feel that way. The foundations are shifting beneath us, and the tools we were told would protect democracy – engagement, institutions, information – are being undermined in real time.
Here's what I know: you're already doing more than most. The calls, the protests in Gaetz country, the refusal to look away – all that matters. Not because it guarantees any policy change, but because it keeps the muscle memory of citizenship alive. When people stop showing up, stop calling, stop caring, that's when the tidal wave actually wins.
But let's be honest, you are swimming against the current. We're living through a transformation in how power works. Grassroots civic engagement – the kind you're doing – is eroding not just because of political polarization, but because the systems that used to amplify individual voices are being replaced by algorithms that consolidate power in fewer hands. The social media business model is fundamentally incompatible with a healthy civil society – it welcomes bots, promotes extremism, and spreads disinformation precisely because those things maximize engagement. You're not just fighting bad policy; you're fighting a system designed to maximize division for profit. Traditional information networks are collapsing. The "messy middle" of democratic institutions is under sustained attack. And younger Americans especially are feeling a disenchantment that's hard to overstate.
So, what do you do when the infrastructure itself is compromised?
First, remember that erosion is uneven. Not all American institutions are decaying at the same rate. Some things still work extremely well: contract enforcement, capital markets, innovation. The judiciary remains independent in its decision-making. State and local governance remains mostly technocratic and independent of Washington. The professional military is still firmly loyal to country over leader. Your husband's service wasn't for nothing. That culture, that commitment to something bigger than partisan politics – it's one of the things that's holding. Imperfectly, but holding.
Second, stay local. National politics feels like screaming into the void because, increasingly, it is. But local politics – school boards, city councils, state races – still have leverage points where individual voices matter disproportionately. It's less glamorous, but it's where you can actually see cause and effect. And it's where the most consequential fights over voting access, education, and civil society are happening right now.
Third, build real community. Not just online networks, but face-to-face relationships with people who share your values – and people who don't. The coming years are going to require resilience, and that comes from knowing your neighbors, organizing locally, and creating mutual support systems that don't depend on institutions you can't control.
Fourth, focus on the 10%. Not every outrage requires your energy. In an environment where everything is breaking news, where uncertainty itself has become the dominant condition, the most important skill is figuring out which fights matter for outcomes. Don't let the noise exhaust you. Pick your battles.
Finally – and this is hardest – accept that you can't control outcomes, only your response. You stood by your husband for 24 years because you believed in something bigger than yourselves. That belief was real and justified. The question now isn't whether you can stop the tidal wave alone – you can't. The question is whether you're willing to keep standing for what you believe in even when the odds look terrible. Because the alternative – cynicism, withdrawal, giving up – guarantees the outcome you're trying to prevent.
That's probably not the roadmap you were hoping for. There's no secret lever to pull, no hidden strategy that makes this easier. The uncomfortable reality is that we're in a period where the old rules don't apply, and the new rules haven't been written yet. Closed systems are getting stronger than open ones everywhere you look. Power is consolidating in ever fewer hands. The trajectory is admittedly worrying.
But here's the thing about history: it isn't deterministic. Trajectories can shift. And they shift because people like you – people who refuse to stop showing up, even in the deep red parts of Florida – keep the possibility of something better alive long enough for an opening to appear.
You're not alone. There are millions of people feeling exactly what you're feeling right now. The work is finding each other, supporting one another, and staying in the fight even when it feels hopeless.
Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for not giving up. And thank you for writing.
Ian
* * *
This is not meant to be a partisan screed. The United States has a dysfunctional and unrepresentative political system that's become delegitimized in the eyes of its citizens in a way the country hasn't experienced since the Civil War. The stakes feel existential, but Americans across the spectrum feel powerless to change the system. Democrats and Republicans alike increasingly see their domestic political opponents as their principal adversaries. They only disagree on who those adversaries are. Many now believe non-legal means are required to fix things, with a fringe but vocal minority seeing violence as justified.
President Trump is both a symptom and a beneficiary of this reality, but he didn’t cause it. Widespread disenchantment with a system that has been deteriorating (and has been allowed to deteriorate) for decades opened the door to the revolutionary effort now underway in Washington to fundamentally upend the domestic balance of power. The outcome of that revolution will shape American democracy – and global geopolitics – for a generation.
I'll be digging into this and much more in my State of the World speech at our annual GZERO Summit in Tokyo next week. Watch it live at https://www.gzeromedia.com/stateoftheworld on Monday, October 20 at 8:30 pm ET.French President Emmanuel Macron as he poses for a picture as he welcomes Crown Prince and Princess of the Kingdom of Jordan for a meeting at the Elysee Palace in Paris on October 8, 2025.
France is in crisis – again. On Monday, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu resigned after just 27 days in office, making him the shortest-serving premier in the history of the Fifth Republic and the fourth to fall in 13 months. His government collapsed before it was even sworn in, unable to survive the toxic arithmetic of a deadlocked National Assembly that has made France virtually ungovernable.
The problem traces back to President Emmanuel Macron's catastrophic decision to call snap elections last year. That gamble, designed to head off the surging far right, instead entrenched a three-way parliamentary deadlock between the left, the center-right, and Marine Le Pen's National Rally. No bloc commands anywhere near the 289 seats needed for a majority. Worse, Macron’s far-right archrival emerged with just enough seats to topple any government by joining forces with the left on no-confidence votes. The Fifth Republic was designed to concentrate power in the presidency and avoid chronic instability, but the system depends on either a clear presidential majority or a clear opposition willing to govern in cohabitation. Any government emerging from such a deeply splintered National Assembly was destined to be fragile.
The immediate trigger for Lecornu’s resignation was the 2026 budget. France's deficit hit 5.8% of GDP last year, the highest since World War II, while debt climbed to 113% of GDP. Lecornu was hired to do what his predecessors couldn’t: form a government that could bring the deficit down and tackle France’s ballooning debt before the end of the year – politically painful cuts that alienated both the center-left Socialists (who demanded the rollback of Macron's pension reform) and the center-right (which balked at tax increases). When he unveiled his cabinet Sunday night, it looked less like the “rupture” with the past he had promised than a reshuffling of the old guard, complete with the return of Bruno Le Maire, the veteran finance minister widely blamed for adding €1 trillion to France's debt in his seven-year tenure. The backlash was swift. Even Lecornu's center-right Républicains minority coalition partners threatened to walk. He resigned before parliament could vote him out.
In an unprecedented last-ditch move to stem the crisis, Macron accepted Lecornu's resignation but asked him to spend two more days searching for a budget compromise that could provide "action and stability" for a new government. If Lecornu failed, Macron said he would "take all his responsibilities" – universally interpreted as a threat to dissolve parliament and call snap elections for November. Both his fractious center-right coalition partners and the Socialist swing group risk losing seats if elections are held soon.
That threat might have worked. By Wednesday, Lecornu's negotiations had found “possibilities for compromise,” with all parties except the far right and hard left agreeing on the urgency of passing a deficit-cutting budget by year-end, allowing Macron to appoint a new prime minister within 48 hours. The emerging possibility: a Socialist-led, moderate-left minority government. A budget deal would come at a steep price – and wouldn't be guaranteed. Macron would likely have to swallow the suspension of his flagship 2023 pension reform – a humiliating reversal that would increase France's deficit by €3 billion in 2027, with larger longer-term implications – and accept new wealth and business taxes reversing reforms he spent eight years enacting.
Even with the passive backing of Macron’s centrist coalition, such a government would be very fragile, holding 29 seats short of a majority. But that support is far from guaranteed: one centrist leader, ex-Prime Minister Édouard Philippe, said his 29 deputies would never support suspending pension reform. The Socialists have ruled out using emergency constitutional powers to pass a budget, meaning any legislation would require negotiating with hostile blocs. Macron could make massive concessions and appoint yet another prime minister – his fourth in a year – yet he could still end up with a government that collapses within weeks.
Alternatively, Macron could dissolve parliament and call the snap elections he threatened. That would relieve the short-term pressure for Macron to resign – something Macron has firmly ruled out but even some of his former allies, including Philippe, are now calling for. But it wouldn’t solve the underlying problem. Polls suggest Macron’s centrist bloc would be crushed and the National Rally would emerge strengthened but probably fall short of a majority, resulting in another hung parliament – more deadlock, more instability, more market anxiety.
Another hung parliament would make a budget agreement nigh impossible. Macron would appoint a technocrat or elder statesman as prime minister, who’d most likely be toppled within weeks. The president could, in theory, keep appointing new premiers indefinitely – but after losing four in a year and with approval at just 17%, that path would deepen the sense he's ignoring the will of parliament and the people. Macron could also keep a censured prime minister as caretaker for up to a year and roll over the 2025 budget into 2026 using emergency legislation. That would avoid a US-style shutdown but push the deficit toward 6%, spook bond markets further, and make France look even more rudderless. French borrowing costs have already spiked to near-Italian levels; the spread over German Bunds hit 0.88 percentage points on Monday, close to its widest since 2012. Markets are losing patience in Europe’s second-largest economy.
If the National Rally managed to eke out a narrow majority, it’d be able to push through a 2026 budget – but it would struggle to deliver fiscal credibility. A draft budget is supposed to go to parliament by next Wednesday. An election would delay the process by up to six weeks. Moreover, while Le Pen favors more social spending, her de facto number two and likely prime minister candidate, Jordan Bardella, favors tax cuts. Neither aligns with the deficit-cutting that markets, rating agencies, and the EU are demanding.
A National Rally government would also force an unprecedentedly adversarial “cohabitation” between Macron and a far-right prime minister. France has seen cohabitation between presidents and prime ministers from different political camps before, but never between figures so ideologically opposed. Under the Fifth Republic constitution, the president shapes foreign and defense policy, but major initiatives require parliamentary ratification. A hostile National Rally majority could actively undermine not just French fiscal discipline but also EU cohesion and support for Ukraine.
The bottom line is that a snap legislative election wouldn’t fix France’s governability issues – it would just reset the deadlock or hand power to the far right. Only a presidential election can break the logjam in a constitutional system not built to handle this kind of fragmentation. That means either 18 more months of paralysis, market jitters, and mounting public frustration to fuel the populist fire, or a reckoning that brings the far right closer to the Élysée Palace than ever.
Even if Macron limps through the next 18 months, the damage is done. Business investment has declined for two years straight. Household savings have spiked near pandemic levels as consumers brace for instability. Economists estimate the turmoil has already cost 0.5 percentage points of GDP. The longer the paralysis drags on, the worse this gets – and the more attractive the far right looks as the only force capable of breaking the logjam.
The cruel irony is that Macron launched his career in 2017 with a singular mission: save France from the far right by building a durable center that could unite moderates from left and right. He won the presidency twice by framing the stakes as existential – vote for me or watch democracy crumble. But his technocratic centrism and top-down reforms bred resentment, not compromise. His decision to ram through pension reform without a vote, then dissolve parliament in a desperate bid to reassert control, destroyed what remained of his base, entrenched deadlock, and elevated Le Pen to kingmaker.
Whether Le Pen’s appeal of her conviction succeeds or she is barred from office and replaced by Bardella, the far right is positioned to capitalize on the wreckage of Macron’s centrist project. The extremes he vowed to defeat are now stronger than ever. The only question now is whether France reaches that reckoning in the next few months – or in a year and a half.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meets U.S President Donald Trump at the White House on Monday September 29, 2025.
The turning point came during the United Nations General Assembly last week in New York. No, I’m not talking about the flurry of European countries that recognized a Palestinian state. Netanyahu was vocal in criticizing these symbolic gestures, but he knows they were just that – symbolic. Palestinian recognition doesn’t change any facts on the ground and carries little political cost for Netanyahu when a majority of Israelis oppose the two-state solution.
The first serious red line was drawn by the United Arab Emirates when it warned that it would pull out of the Abraham Accords if Jerusalem moves ahead with plans to annex the West Bank, killing any remaining hopes for a two-state solution, and with it, President Donald Trump’s signature foreign-policy achievement. Then, Trump himself drew a public red line against West Bank annexation while pushing a Gaza peace plan rejecting mass displacement that he negotiated with Arab and Muslim leaders on the sidelines of UNGA. The real catalyst for Trump's pivot to pressure Netanyahu came three weeks earlier, after Israel struck Qatar in a botched attempt to assassinate Hamas leaders, killing a Qatari security official in the process. The strike didn't just fail – it jeopardized relations with one of America's most important regional partners and taxed Trump's patience with Bibi’s go-it-alone approach.
Netanyahu got the message. Just days after vowing to “finish the job” of fully destroying Hamas before a largely empty UN plenum, Bibi came out of his Monday meeting with Trump saying the president’s peace plan “achieves our war aims.” Trump even got Netanyahu to call the Qatari emir to apologize for the strike. After almost two years of near-total intransigence and free rein, the turnaround was striking.
While there’s no public final text yet, the 20-point framework released by the White House includes: no annexation and no displacement at scale; all hostages (dead and alive) returned within 72 hours, thousands of Palestinian prisoners released, and humanitarian aid flows to resume; phased and gradual Israeli troop withdrawal; Hamas to disarm and cede power; international trusteeship of the Gaza Strip with regional participation on governance, security, and reconstruction; and a loose commitment to keep a path to Palestinian statehood alive, if barely.
This isn’t exactly what Arab leaders had agreed to last week. During his White House meeting with Trump, Netanyahu successfully reshaped the contours of the plan – which had been deliberately crafted in his absence – to better align with his political needs. Regional governments bristled at the changes, but they appear willing to back the plan anyway. Trump sweetened the deal with an unprecedented NATO-style security guarantee for Qatar, the first such commitment to an Arab state (though surely not the last).
There’s something in the framework for all sides to like and dislike – the mark of a good compromise. Palestinians and their regional backers get the promise of no annexation and no displacement, plus the hope – however faint – of future statehood. Netanyahu gets all the hostages back, Hamas disarmed and out of power, a security buffer, and Arab partners shouldering the bulk of Gaza's security and reconstruction. The Palestinian Authority gets a role down the line but would be out of the picture for the foreseeable future, while the statehood language is vague enough to give Netanyahu plausible deniability at home.
Make no mistake, accepting a ceasefire is a political gamble for Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister may struggle to keep his coalition together after agreeing to terms that Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and other hard-right allies have ruled unacceptable. But that’s not necessarily a deal-breaker – or a career-ender for Bibi. If his far-right partners bolt, he could potentially fall back on opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, who’ve publicly backed the proposal and have hinted they may give Bibi a lifeline, to stay in power and out of jail. Plus, what Israelis want is to bring the hostages home and keep the troops out of harm’s way, so a ceasefire that delivers those outcomes is politically sellable. Netanyahu could run on the ceasefire-and-hostage deal next fall – or he could call early elections to bank the fresh gains from his Iran "win" while pushing the fiscal pain of years of war into the next term.
In fact, the riskier long-term play for Netanyahu may be to reject peace and stay the present course. To be sure, you shouldn’t bet on Trump suddenly being willing to use real pressure (economic or military) against Netanyahu to actually enforce his red lines. More likely, the US president would huff in frustration at not being able to claim a Nobel Peace Prize while trying to wash his hands of the issue. But if Palestinians are removed from Gaza in large numbers or if the West Bank is annexed, the costs will become real for Israel – no matter what Trump does or doesn’t do. More Americans will keep turning on the Jewish state and voting in leaders responsive to their preferences. The Abraham Accords will unravel. And though Europeans wouldn’t muster EU-wide sanctions (unanimity is too high a bar), the pain from bilateral visa restrictions, investment curbs, and cultural boycotts will add up.
Netanyahu won’t pay a political price for prolonging the suffering in Gaza or rejecting Palestinian statehood. He’d most certainly pay one for making Israelis feel visibly isolated internationally. It may sound geopolitically inconsequential, but being barred from Dubai, Eurovision, or FIFA would resonate more powerfully with Netanyahu’s voters than a thousand UN resolutions. The prospect of Israel becoming apartheid South Africa is real and scary to most Israelis. That’s where the lever is now.
Hamas gets a vote, too, and it remains to be seen how it’ll respond to the peace proposal. The group has been severely degraded over the past two years, but it’s still the dominant military and political power in Gaza and maintains the ability to inflict damage on Israeli troops. It’s under pressure from multiple directions – Arab and Muslim stakeholders, especially its regional backers Qatar and Turkey, are pushing it to accept the ceasefire on offer for the sake of an immediate end to the bloodshed, while Trump has warned that he'll give the Israelis carte blanche to continue their military campaign if Hamas doesn't agree by Thursday. An outright refusal seems unlikely, but it's equally hard to imagine the group will surrender its weapons and give up what leverage it has left – the remaining hostages – without trying to at least negotiate less suicidal terms.
Even if both sides get to a “yes” in principle, peace would be far from guaranteed. The plan in its present form is too vague to be operationalized, and it could take several months of negotiation to hammer out all the details. Implementation would depend on Hamas and Netanyahu swallowing hard in ways they’ve long resisted. Every stage would be a tripwire, fraught with risks and opportunities for both sides to stall while blaming the other for failure.
But if a deal does go through and sticks, it would set the region on a radically better path than the one it’s currently on. Trump will have earned credit for it – something this author would be very happy to give him.
The UN General Assembly turns 80 this week, and the mood is grim. It’s not just the awful motorcade traffic in New York (do yourself a favor, walk or take the subway). Wars rage in Ukraine, Gaza, and Sudan. Autocrats flex their muscles with impunity. Democracies are fracturing at the seams. International cooperation is fraying as the G-Zero takes hold.
You'd think Climate Week – happening simultaneously in the Big Apple through September 28 – would add to the gloom given President Donald Trump’s skepticism of climate change (“the greatest con job ever perpetrated”) and outright hostility toward clean energy (a “scam”). But there's some genuinely good news for the planet buried in all this chaos: We may be at – or very near – peak oil demand.
This isn’t the old “peak oil” story that doomsayers have predicted for decades – the moment when the world runs out of accessible oil. Those theories have been proven wrong time and again – most recently when fracking and other extraction technologies turbocharged the industry’s productivity, unlocked new barrels, and turned the United States into the world’s top producer and exporter. What I’m talking about here is different. We're likely witnessing the moment when global appetite for oil finally starts to wane, driven not by scarcity but by changes in how the world consumes energy.
The most dramatic shift comes from China, whose appetite for fossil fuels kept global oil markets humming for thirty years. Between 2010 and 2020, Chinese oil imports doubled to 10 million barrels per day. That era looks to be over thanks to a demographic transition, a rapidly accelerating energy revolution, and slowing economic growth.
Start with demographics. China’s population peaked during Covid but has since shrunk by nearly 25 million people – roughly equivalent to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway combined – after growing by more than 155 million in the previous twenty years. Fewer people means less demand for gasoline and diesel – especially in a decelerating economy weaning itself off a housing and infrastructure construction binge.
Then there’s China’s energy revolution. In just five years, electric vehicles’ share of new car sales in China jumped from roughly 5% to over 50%. That alone took what used to be the world’s single largest growth market for gasoline off the table. But China’s technological transformation has gone far beyond cars. Beijing is also rapidly electrifying heating and heavy industry while deploying renewable power capacity (especially solar) at a historic scale. The country installed almost 270 gigawatts of new renewable energy in just the first half of 2025 – more than twice the new capacity installed by the entire rest of the world in the same period, six times what the US managed in all of 2024 at the heyday of Bidenomics, and more than India’s entire installed renewable capacity. The result: China’s oil demand has likely topped out and could enter structural decline as soon as this year, joining Europe and North America.
Not even a fast-growing India will be able to fill China’s shoes. Though still rising, Indian oil consumption growth has been uneven, slowed this year by infrastructure constraints. Unlike China’s, India’s economic expansion relies more on services than on oil-intensive sectors like construction and chemicals. The country is also now entering its own electrification phase. New Delhi wants EVs to reach a third of new auto sales by 2030, up from roughly 5% today. Even if that target slips, the direction of travel is unmistakable – especially as renewable technologies continue to get cheaper and better. India won’t fully replace China’s lost oil-demand growth.
Add it up and it’s increasingly plausible that global oil demand could shrink in 2025. Yes, consumption remains at record highs. But global demand growth has flatlined since the pandemic. Oil intensity across power, transport, and heating is plummeting everywhere. In the biggest consuming economies, oil use per capita has dropped by more than 15% over the past two decades. Europe’s green transition is uneven but persistent. America’s is slower than it could be but still ongoing, with renewables set to meet most incremental power demand because they’re cheaper to build and quicker to deploy at scale – the Trump administration’s “war” on them be damned.
Peak demand may not happen this year. Heck, it may not happen for another five or ten years. Prediction is hard, especially about the future. The debate on this question is as much political as it is analytical. That’s why the Trump administration has threatened to withdraw from the International Energy Agency over its “politicized” forecast of peak demand by 2030 – never mind that oil companies like Equinor and BP project a similar inflection point. But even the skeptics – especially the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Exxon Mobil – now only quibble about the “when,” not the “if.”
So how are oil producers responding to the existential prospect of a shrinking market? Not by cutting supply and creating a deficit that lifts prices, as you’d expect, but by pumping more. In fact, after cutting for years, Saudi Arabia and its OPEC+ allies are on track to raise output by more than 1 million barrels per day year-on-year despite stagnant demand growth. They're determined to regain market share from their non-OPEC competitors – particularly the US – by keeping the taps open and squeezing out the highest-cost producers, even if it means lower prices for themselves. Non-OPEC supply, however, is stubborn. US production hit a record this summer and will likely plateau rather than crash as industry consolidation, cost discipline, and efficiency gains keep shale output resilient. Brazil and Guyana will continue adding low-cost offshore barrels. And Norway can keep pumping into Europe almost regardless of global pricing.
The combination of weaker demand and increased supply will result in a world awash in relatively – and increasingly – cheap oil. This doesn't mean prices will crash to zero. The world will use lots of oil for a long time, and prices need to stay high enough to induce the necessary supply. OPEC can pivot to cutting if it wants to (though the cartel’s coordination and market-management powers are likely to weaken as the energy transition advances and structural demand for oil wanes). Output, investment, and prices will ebb and flow with business cycles, shocks, and geopolitical developments. But the overall environment points to lower demand and softer prices.
For consumers, this is a gift. Cheaper oil will be a boon to households and oil-importing economies across Northeast Asia, Western Europe, India, and parts of Southeast Asia and South America. For oil producers, not so much. Countries whose entire budgets are predicated on $80-$100 oil are about to face a reckoning.
The geopolitical implications are stark. China's strategic bet on post-carbon energy dominance looks to be paying off. The country that was arguably the most fossil fuel-dependent on Earth in 2010 is now the world's first "electrostate.” Not only is it the largest consumer of clean energy by orders of magnitude, but it has cornered the market on both the finished products and the key supply chains that drive the transition globally – batteries, EVs, solar panels, critical minerals. By contrast, the Trump administration’s decision to double down on America’s petrostate status while waging war on renewables has near-term political utility, but it’s a losing play in a world that will be increasingly powered by electrons, with implications for economic competitiveness, AI dominance, and national security. Beijing’s recent weaponization of its rare earths dominance was just a glimpse of what the US has risked by ceding leadership and leverage to the Chinese in the electrotech space.
A near-term peak in global oil demand is good news for the climate fight. The world’s biggest emitter is now seeing its first drop in emissions driven by the growth of renewables. Critically, China is also exporting massive amounts of cheap renewable tech to developing countries, helping them leapfrog the dirty growth phase every industrialized country has had to go through in the past.
That’s not to say climate is a solved problem. Aviation, shipping, petrochemicals – these sectors are hard to abate and will keep running on fossil fuels for the foreseeable future. Persistently low prices can also disincentivize change at the margins. Plus, mass electrification requires upfront capital spending – lots of it. Solar and wind have become the cheapest form of energy in most sectors across much of the world, but you still need to build grids, storage, and charging at scale. Governments facing weak economic growth, high interest rates, and tight budgets will struggle to fund the infrastructure investments they need to turn cheap kilowatt-hours into lower bills. That keeps the politics of the transition messy, particularly in the US and parts of Europe, where there are tons of potentially stranded assets and powerful vested interests.
Not to mention that a world in which Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party save the world from climate change will look quite different from one in which the United States and its democratic allies do. It won’t matter to the planet. But it’ll make a difference for the future of democracy and the balance of power.