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People gather outside the National Assembly after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, in Seoul, South Korea, on Dec. 4, 2024.
In an unexpected, late-night speech on Tuesday, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law, banning all political activity, taking control of all media, and suspending parliament. For all of a few hours, it turned out. Now, he's facing possible impeachment.
The announcement appeared to come as a total shock to all parties except the military, with even the head of Yoon’s party announcing he would “stop it, with the people.” Troops surrounded the National Assembly in Seoul soon after Yoon’s announcement to preempt resistance, but 190 of the chamber’s 300 lawmakers made it inside after midnight, with more held up at the gates.
Legislators unanimously voted to order Yoon to lift martial law, and Speaker Woo Son-shik declared the president’s action “null and void.”
Meanwhile, thousands of citizens arrived to demonstrate in the wee hours. They chanted “Abolish martial law!” and “Arrest Yoon Suk Yeol!” Demonstrators blocked an eight lane road and began organizing impromptu caravans to bring in protesters from across the country, but by 4 a.m. the crowds began to thin.
Soon after, Yoon caved in. He got back on television around 4:20 a.m. to announce he had called a cabinet meeting, and that martial law would be lifted within hours.
What the hell was Yoon thinking? It was “an act of political desperation,” says Eurasia Group’s Jeremy Chan. It wasn’t about North Korea or social order — despite Yoon’s claims, he explains. Yoon was “trying to send a message to the National Assembly and bring all legislative investigations to a halt.”
Yoon, who is deeply unpopular, has been trapped in a stalemate with the opposition that controls the legislature. They have repeatedly tried to launch corruption investigations against his wife, which Yoon always vetoes, and moved to impeach government prosecutors while stymying the president’s budget priorities. Still, Yoon’s calculus is not entirely clear, as he was not subject to impeachment proceedings.
What happens next? “It’s hard to see how Yoon survives this unless there’s some sort of other shoe to drop that we don’t know about yet,” said Chan.
On Wednesday, amid calls for Yoon to resign, South Korea’s opposition politicians began impeachment proceedings that could lead to a vote as early as Friday.
Two-thirds of legislators must vote in favor in order for Yoon to be impeached, and the opposition has the needed votes almost by themselves; it will take only a small number of votes from Yoon's party to pass. The impeachment must then be approved by the Constitutional Court of Korea, and if Yoon is removed from office, a new election will be held within two months.
Beyond that, it’s unclear whether Yoon might face any legal punishment for his attempt to suspend democracy, but two out of the last three South Korean presidents served jail time after their terms for considerably less serious violations.
How is the world reacting? Mostly with shock. US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell expressed “grave concern” but reiterated that Washington stands by its ally. President Joe Biden was briefed while traveling to Angola, and US officials say they are in contact with their counterparts in Seoul.
Plus: For more on why South Korea’s president declared martial law, check out Ian Bremmer’s latest Quick Take here.
With the US Thanksgiving holiday approaching, millions of American families will soon sit down to a turkey dinner.
That makes it as good a time as any to ask an important question: Why are turkeys, which are not actually from Turkey, called turkeys?
It’s a story of commerce, cuisine, and general confusion.
The bird that we know as a turkey is actually native to the Americas, where it was first domesticated by indigenous peoples thousands of years ago. Until Columbus showed up, no one in Europe had ever seen what we call a “turkey,” much less eaten one.
But in the 15th and 16th centuries, traders based in the Mamluk and Ottoman Empires – both known colloquially as “Turkey” – began exporting various species of tasty, exotic guinea fowl to Europe from Africa. People began referring to those birds first as “Turkey birds.”
Then, in the 16th century, colonists in the Americas began sending back to the Old Country the guinea fowl-like birds they found there. And people called those birds the same thing: turkeys. So in a case of mistaken identity, turkeys became turkeys.
But all of this naturally raises an even more pressing question: What are turkeys called in Turkey? (Türkiye, these days.)
Glad you asked. In Turkey, where turkeys are not from, turkeys are referred to as hindi, meaning “Indian birds.” This comes from the mistaken belief that the turkey-rich lands that Columbus and the other explorers had “discovered” were actually “India.”
You find this error reflected in the Russian word indeyka, the Georgian indauri, and the French dinde, a contraction of de Inde, meaning “from India.” The Dutch are, as is often the case, weirdly specific – for them it’s a kalkoen, meaning a “Calcutta hen.”
But we are still far from where the bird is actually from, the Americas.
And there the plot thickens further. In Brazil, the bird is known in Portuguese as a perú, because from the Portuguese empire’s perspective the birds came from somewhere near the Spanish-controlled territory of Peru. But in today’s Peru, a turkey is known in Spanish as a pavo, from a generic Latin word for pheasants.
In fact, to find an Indigenous word for this Indigenous bird, you have to go to Guatemala, where the local Spanish dialect calls it a chompipe, a word of Mayan origin thought to describe the sounds the bird makes.
Of course, everyone hears it differently. The Czechs call the bird a “krocan,” because that’s what it sounds like to them, while the Italians hear our “gobble gobble” as a tacca tacca, giving us their word for the bird: tacchino.
It gets weirder still. Macedonians call the bird a misirka, from the Arabic name for Egypt, Misr, which was the heart of the “Turkish” Mamluk empire. But in Egypt, it’s known in Arabic as diik ruumi meaning “Roman rooster.”
What’s Rome got to do with Turkey? A lot! In Arabic, “Roman” can refer to the Byzantine Empire, whose capital was Constantinople, later Istanbul, which is, to bring things full circle, Turkey.
So in a year when you may want to avoid talking openly about topics like trade, colonialism, and immigration at the Thanksgiving dinner table, you can now talk about all of those things by just talking turkey. Enjoy.
Test of a Russian ICBM, launched on October 26, 2024. Since invading Ukraine, Russia has placed its nuclear forces on ready and has increased testing and development of its ICBMs.
Anyone who watches soccer — “football”, whatever — knows that the wildest part of the game is always the last five minutes.
That’s when both teams, knowing that the end is near, take bigger risks. They open up on the field. They make longer passes, attempt crazier shots. And they usually score more goals.
There’s actually data to support this. One guy ran the numbers on more than forty thousand goals scored in international matches since the 19th century and found that yes, there is more scoring in the final moments of a game. After all, with the whistle about to blow, what’s a team got to lose?
That’s what’s happening in Ukraine right now.
Just over a thousand days since Vladimir Putin launched his unprovoked, full-scale assault on the country, the whistle on this phase of the conflict will sound soon — and by soon, we mean on January 20, 2025. That’s when Donald Trump will be back in the White House.
Trump, of course, has questioned Washington’s massive support for Ukraine and promised to end the war in “24 hours.”
Nobody knows what that really means, but everybody understands that whatever the battlefield looks like in mid-January will be the baseline for whatever Trump tries to do.
That’s why the past week or so in the Ukraine war has felt so much like the 85th minute of a deadlocked World Cup match. All sides are pulling out the stops to maximize the territory they control and the deterrent fear that they instill in their opponents.
The US and UK have now — after months of cautious restraint — finally given permission to Ukraine to use Western made long-range missiles to knock out military installations deeper inside of Russia. Washington also began shipping anti-personnel landmines to Kyiv, so that Ukraine could mine the frontlines that Russian troops are gradually pushing back every day now.
The Ukrainians wasted no time trying out their new Western weapons, firing at least two barrages of the long range missiles at Russian military installations.
Not to be outdone, Russia fired an “experimental” new intermediate range missile of its own into Ukraine. There was some dispute about whether it might count as an “intercontinental” ballistic missile or not, but experts noted that whatever you call it, the weapon was far better suited to nuclear payloads than to the conventional ones that it carried into Dnipro.
The unspoken signal was clear: we didn’t split the atom on you this time, but we are readying the tools to do so in the future.
Later in the day, Putin also declared that Russia has “the right to use our weapons against the military facilities of countries that allow the use of their weapons against our facilities.”
Translation: we have the right to strike military facilities in NATO countries.
Since the earliest moments of the war, many in the West have wondered — with frequent reminders from the Kremlin — if a cornered or slighted Putin might in fact use a tactical nuclear weapon against Ukraine. And if so, wouldn’t that invite a response from NATO that could escalate to a more direct confrontation between the world’s two largest nuclear powers?
A terrifying thought. And one that Putin revived this week by signing a new, looser nuclear weapons doctrine. Russia is now prepared to use its atomic arsenal in response even to certain conventional attacks.
The good news is: it’s hard to see anyone deliberately choosing the very worst and most radioactive outcomes right now. Putin is, after all, doing relatively well at the moment. Russia’s forces are advancing slowly but daily. A friendlier US president is about to take power. And breaking the nuclear taboo would risk a huge backlash, not only from Russia’s adversaries in the West, but from its friends in the Global South and China too. It just wouldn’t make sense.
The bad news is this: sense sometimes goes out the window in the final rush of a game. Miscalculations or miscommunications become more likely. When that’s on the soccer pitch, it means a turnover, a counterattack, a heartbreaking/exhilarating last minute goal.
But when it happens during a major war in Eastern Europe involving the world’s two largest nuclear powers, it can lead to a dangerous escalation that quickly takes on a life of its own.
The next two months are going to be the longest, and most dangerous, five minutes in the world.
World leaders assemble for a group photo at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on November 19, 2024. The gathering was overshadowed by Donald Trump's impending return to the White House.
At the G20 gathering this week in Brazil, a key question emerged: Has Donald Trump already cowed world leaders, two months before he even takes power? It certainly seems like it.
The G20 leaders arrived in Rio de Janeiro to deliver their best ideas for how, collectively, to solve urgent global problems like poverty, climate change, inequality, and war.
These summits are always a little about the old ultra-verbiage, sure, but they are also meant to burnish the legitimacy and importance of multilateral approaches to global challenges.
This time, the G20 got Trumped. Loudly. The president-elect’s America First 2.0 agenda hung over the proceedings like the fearsome black cloud in Don Dellilo’s novel White Noise.
How do we measure the Trump cloud’s impact? Just look at the summit’s final communiqué, the pre-negotiated summary these gabfests always release. They merit attention not only for what they say, but also for what they don’t. This time, what it didn’t say was a lot.
Take Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, for example. With Kyiv now using Western-made long-range missiles, and Putin responding by hinting at a nuclear response and flinging larger and larger missiles of his own, the communiqué’s authors played dentist, carefully extracting any teeth that might nip at the Russian leader, who of course did not attend.
“We highlight the human suffering and negative added impacts of the war with regard to global food and energy security, supply chains, macro-financial stability, inflation and growth,” it said, clearly using the secret diplomatic formula for verbal vanilla. If that alone weren’t enough for the toothless, it continued by calling for “the promotion of peaceful, friendly, and good neighborly relations among nations.”
No mention of Russia by name.
No mention of the illegal invasion.
No reminder that Putin continues to slaughter civilians and wreck critical infrastructure.
Nothing about human rights abuses.
This alone was a triumph for Putin as he eagerly awaits the return of Trump, who ran in part on questioning support for Ukraine and pledging to end the war in “24 hours.”
No one saw this more clearly than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“G20 countries are sitting in Brazil. Did they say something?” he asked. “Nothing.”
The impotence of the G20s Ukraine statement was probably best summed up by a man who is himself hanging by a thread politically these days: German Chancellor Olaf Sholz, who muttered, “It is too little when the G20 cannot find the words to make it clear Russia is responsible.”
Too little.
That might be the epitaph of this pre-Trump G20.
Knowing that Donald Trump will not continue support for Ukraine, and highlighting the truth that the Global South has never supported the US and EU’s hardline views of the Russian invasion, the G20 slinked away from calling out Moscow, just as they did last year. This signals that a Trump-brokered ceasefire, which will likely give Russia much of what it wants in terms of Ukrainian territory and neutrality, looks much more likely.
But Ukraine was just the start of the smallness.
The language on the Israel-Gaza war was a boilerplate call for a two-state solution and more humanitarian aid, without a mention either of the Hamas-held hostages, the Oct. 7 attack, or the 40,000 dead in Gaza. The statement on a global billionaire tax — a decades-old idea that was particularly dear to summit host and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — was equally eye-glazing: “We will seek to engage cooperatively to ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed.” OK … and then what?
Perhaps the only real positive was the launch of the Alliance Against Hunger and Poverty, in order to deal with the stunning fact that over 733 million people face food shortages every year. That could mean microfinance, food programs, and investment in sustainable food production. It is a good thing to see countries sign on to this even if the failure to eradicate hunger and poverty is, sadly, perennial.
Watching the leaders try to spin the summit’s accomplishments was like watching Rafael Nadal retire from tennis: a once-powerful champion reduced to swatting at balls he can’t reach, limping off the court to applause not for what he just did, but for what he no longer can do.
Like Nadal, these leaders know they are ceding the world to a new champion for the next four years, and they still have no idea what to do about it, except duck, stall, evade, and suck up.
Was there any pushback from these multilateral champions against a world shifting toward strongman isolationism, tariffs, and an American president who will begin the great retreat from the global stage of cooperation?
Not much.
The next G20 will be very different from this one, where leaders gazed up to see Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking their meeting.
At the next one, they might need to find the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.
Donald Trump on a throne spinning a globe on his finger.
The global response to Donald Trump’s imminent return to power has been nothing short of remarkable.
From Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu hinting at a potential Lebanon cease-fire as a "gift" to the president-elect, to Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky saying the war will “end faster” under the incoming administration, to European and Asian leaders expressing Stockholm syndrome-levels of excitement to work with him, foreign leaders have been lining up to kiss the president-elect’s ring since his election victory two weeks ago.
To be sure, most US allies and adversaries still dislike and mistrust Trump. But with memories of the clashes, chaos, and unpredictability of his first term still fresh, they know that they get crosswise with Trump at their own peril. The president-elect still believes America is being taken for a ride, values are something other countries use to constrain US power, and allies are only as good as the money they spend on US goods and protection. And Trump is willing to flex Washington’s full military and economic muscle – whether in the form of high tariffs or the withdrawal of US security support – to extract gains from other nations.
World leaders are accordingly doing everything they can to avoid becoming a target of his wrath, using flattery and favor to appeal to Trump’s ego and transactional nature in the hopes of getting in his good graces. After all, they know Trump is nothing if not willing to sit down with anyone – whether a longstanding democratic ally or a brutal dictator – to try to cut a deal that makes him look good at home.
The upshot is that at least in the early days of his presidency, Donald Trump is poised to rack up far more foreign policy wins than many people appreciate. Not because he’s a “stable genius” or a particularly gifted negotiator, but because he’ll be running the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, with leverage over virtually every country and less aversion to wielding it than any US president that came before him.
But that’s table stakes for Trump. There are three reasons why his ability to get concessions from other countries and put points on the board early on will be greater than during his first term.
First, Trump is no longer isolated, with a growing number of world leaders eager to welcome him to the international arena. Eight years ago, the president-elect was an outlier, with few true friends on the global stage apart from Netanyahu, Gulf leaders, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, India’s Narendra Modi, and a handful of others. But things have changed since.
Italy's Giorgia Meloni, currently the most popular G7 leader, shares Trump's views on immigration, social policy, and economic nationalism. Argentina’s Javier Milei, the chainsaw-wielding “Trump of the Pampas,” was the first foreign leader to meet with him after the election. In Canada, the Conservative Party's Pierre Poilievre is poised to replace Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, promising a much more Trump-aligned relationship. Germany’s Olaf Scholz will likewise soon be replaced, probably by the opposition conservative Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, a wealthy former businessman who is ideologically closer to the incoming American president. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is strategically positioning himself to become the new Shinzo Abe, going as far as taking up golf again to establish a closer relationship with Trump. The list goes on.
Trump is no more a fan of multilateralism than he was eight years ago. He remains mistrustful of alliances and indifferent to other countries’ values and political systems. But whenever he attends gatherings of the G7, G20, and NATO now, the president-elect will at least be surrounded by like-minded leaders who will be much more receptive to his “America First” agenda and inclined to play by his rules.
Second, the world is much more dangerous than it was in 2017, raising the stakes of misalignment with Trump. Major wars raging in Europe and the Middle East, heightened US-China tensions, and a more fragile global economy make the costs of being on the wrong side of the president-elect exponentially higher than they were during Trump’s first term.
And third, Trump’s domestic political power is significantly more consolidated this time around. The president-elect has unified control of Congress and a pliant Republican Party, knows his way around Washington, DC, and is surrounding himself with far more ideologically aligned loyalists than in his first term. Gone are the institutionalist career staffers and establishment Republicans who often checked Trump’s most disruptive impulses. For world leaders, this means alternative backchannels to get around the president-elect’s foreign policy preferences won’t be nearly as available or effective. Whether or not they like it, it’s Trump’s way or the highway now.
It’s no wonder that we’re seeing so many countries preemptively bend the knee, desperate to find common ground with Trump before he takes office. China, for instance, is floating potential concessions to avert an economically destabilizing trade war, from organizing a Ukraine peace conference to buying US Treasuries and increasing purchases of American goods. Iran granted a meeting to Trump advisor-extraordinaire Elon Musk in an apparent effort to facilitate a de-escalatory deal. Taiwan’s leadership is planning a massive new American arms purchase offer to show Trump they’re serious about paying more for US protection. Meanwhile, Ukraine is not only expressing readiness to negotiate a cease-fire but is also weighing several sweeteners – including potential business deals, access to the country’s natural resources, and Ukrainian troop deployments to replace US forces in Europe after the war – to convince Trump that continued US support is in his personal and political interests.
None of this means that every effort to appease Trump will succeed, or that Trump’s mere presence in the White House will end every war, de-escalate every conflict, and resolve every disagreement. If history is any guide, most attempts to strike a lasting deal with the president-elect will fail. In the long run, his approach will erode America’s influence on the global stage, deepen the G-Zero vacuum of leadership, and make the world a more dangerous place.
In the near term, however, Trump’s penchant for bilateral deal-making, disregard for longstanding American norms and values, reputation for unpredictability, and unrestrained leadership of the world’s sole superpower will increase the odds of improbable breakthroughs.
Welcome to Trump’s international honeymoon – it may not last long, but at least nobody’s having any fun.
People hold signs reading "Trump, we will not pay for the wall" and "Trump, stop the mass deportations" near the border fence between Mexico and the U.S., in Tijuana, Mexico March 13, 2018.
The president-elect has promised to deport between 15 and 20 million people, which is more than the roughly 13.3 million undocumented people estimated to be residing in the US. “There's a lot of uncertainty around how high deportations could go under Trump,” says Eurasia Group’s US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith. “I'd roughly estimate he will deport between 500,000 and 600,000 in 2025.” That would mark an increase from the current number of approximately 200,000 annually. But, Daponte-Smith added, “there's room for that number to move upward.”
What are Trump’s immigration plans? On the campaign trail, he promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally. So far, the president-elect has tapped immigration hardliners likeStephen Miller, Tom Homan, and Gov. Kristi Noem to serve as his deputy chief of staff, border czar, and chief of Homeland Security, respectfully – key positions for immigration and border security.
In a Fox News interview, Homan said deporations would prioritize “public safety and national security threats” as well those who disobeyed court orders to leave the country. For logistical ease, ICE would likely begin with single adults – although Homan defended Trump’s family separation policy and said that families “can be deported together.”
ICE would also likely prioritize immigrants from countries with Temporary Protected Status, because it has reliable biometric data on recipients, making them easier to find. TPS authorizes immigrants to live and work legally in the US when their home country has been deemed unsafe for return. Within TPS recipients, ICE would probably start with countries that accept the most return flights of deportees. However, Venezuela, which has the most people in the program, does not accept deportees. So Trump’s only option would be sending them to a third-party country, which would likely be met with legal battles. The TPS countries accepting the most removal flights are Haiti and Honduras.
Trump faces headwinds. On the logistics side, ICE already has 38,863 people in custody, and it “simply doesn’t have the capacity to handle one million deportations a year right now,” says Daponte-Smith. “If Republicans beef up funding for ICE and other enforcement agencies next year, that would help significantly,” and a united Congress will make this easier for them. But he also doesn’t buy that deploying the military would be much help picking up the slack. “The National Guard has no experience with deportations, and I doubt it would be easy to convert them to that purpose,” he says. Still, declaring a national emergency would also give the president more power to devote funds to the issue without congressional approval.
The other big headwind is political. “Mass deportations will create a huge political blowback, potentially involving large-scale street protests,” says Daponte-Smith. Even if Trump and his team are not responsive to this, it “could be an issue for congressional Republicans” ahead of the 2026 midterms.
This week, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping's new podcast, This Authoritarian Life, welcomes special guest Donald Trump to talk about a very (in)fertile issue. #PUPPETREGIME
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