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Results for Eurasia Group Foundation
What role do US voters want Washington to play on the global stage?
That’s the basic question posed by a new survey from the Eurasia Group Foundation, a public education nonprofit founded by Ian Bremmer that is separate from Eurasia Group, our parent company.
The report is called “Views of US Foreign Policy in a Fragmented World,” written by Mark Hannah, Lucas Robinson, and Zuri Linetsky.
The Foundation surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,000 voting-age Americans for their opinions on US foreign policy. Here are a few of the more provocative findings that highlight differences among Americans as we move toward the 2024 presidential election.
The most important finding is that respondents who identify as Independents agree more often with Republicans than with Democrats on most foreign-policy questions included in the survey.
- Americans approved of the US response to Russia’s war in Ukraine by a margin of 43% to 26%. About a third hold a neutral opinion. But almost twice as many Democrats support America’s response to the war as Republicans or Independents.
- A clear majority of all respondents (58%) said the United States should push for a negotiated settlement in the war in Ukraine, but Democrats are much more supportive of Ukraine’s NATO ambitions than Republicans or Independents — 84% vs. 64% and 62%.
- Republicans and Independents are about twice as likely as Democrats to list a potential war with China among the top three threats facing the US — 37% and 33% vs. 18%. It’s ranked in the top two threats among Republicans and in the bottom two among Democrats.
- Republicans (33%-23%) and Independents (37%-32%) are more likely to want to decrease US engagement in organizations like the UN or NATO. Democrats (37% to 9%) are four times as likely to want to increase it.
There is one area where Independents fall between those aligned with the two big parties.
The priority national security topics for Democrats are human rights and climate change. For Republicans, it’s immigration and defense policy. For Independents, it’s immigration and human rights.
There are two major questions where Independents aligned more closely with Democrats.
- Twice as many Independents and Democrats support a decrease in the defense budget, rather than an increase. Republicans are about evenly split.
- Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all tilt toward intervention in a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan — but Republicans are 40% more likely than Democrats or Independents to “strongly support” a military operation.
There are also several differences in foreign-policy views between racial and age groups in the report. The full document is worth a read.
What is power without accountability? Impunity. On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer and President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, discuss the Atlas of Impunity, a global project created by Eurasia Group, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and funded by the Open Society Foundations. You can find the Atlas of Impunity at: www.atlasofimpunity.com. The Atlas ranks every country in the world on five aspects of impunity: conflicts, human rights, governance, economic exploitation, and environmental degradation.
Miliband argues that impunity, or “the exercise of power without accountability,” is increasing and “covers swaths of national and international life,” well beyond just war zones. He also emphasizes the importance of including the environment as a standard of of measuring impunity.
The Atlas of Impunity is meant to be a tool for people around the world to see how their own country scores on the five indicators. And what does this Atlas tell us? Miliband stresses the need for a “countervailing power, which starts with transparency,” followed by actions that "governments, businesses, and civil society” need to take to counter the increasing danger of the abuse of power.
Watch the GZERO World episode: Challenge of survival/Problem of governance: Aid for Turkey & Syria
The US and China are competing for influence around the globe, but tensions are particularly high in East Asia, where China is the dominant power and the US is working to stop the region’s drift toward Beijing. The Eurasia Group Foundation surveyed 1,500 people across Singapore, South Korea, and the Philippines – three countries caught in the middle of the US-China rivalry with significant historical, economic, and diplomatic ties to both superpowers – for their views.
“We found that the US is still held in high regard in the countries we surveyed, much more so than China, but that most think increasing tensions between the two countries will negatively impact their country's national security and domestic political environment” says Caroline Gray, a senior EGF researcher.
We took a look at the data to see how the US and China are faring in their competition for influence in East Asia.
Agriculture is the foundation of human civilization, the economic activity that makes every other endeavor possible. But historically, says International Fertilizer Association Director General Alzbeta Klein, the subject hasn't received attention in climate talks.
"It took us 23 climate conferences to start thinking about agriculture," she said during a GZERO Live event organized by the Sustainability Leaders Council, a partnership between Eurasia Group, GZERO Media, and Suntory. "The problem is that we don't know how to feed ourselves without a huge impact on the environment."
The good news is, leaders are catching on to the notion that a holistic approach is the only way forward.
Watch the full livestream conversation: The global water crisis and the path to a sustainable future
In the traffic jam of elections that is 2024 – there are over 50 this year worldwide – the US is still the BelAZ 75710 mega hauler of elections, the biggest rig that carries more payload than any other on the political road. So when it tips over, it’s impossible to ignore. Everything matters about the US 2024 election, and we have to stay within the nonpartisan lines to avoid veering off-road.
So after Donald Trump gave a fiery speech in Ohio last weekend about an impending “bloodbath” if he’s not elected, it’s worth sorting through the carnage of coverage to see what he meant. “Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole…” he said. “That’s going to be the least of it, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country. That’ll be the least of it.”
Did he mean another civil war, as some thought? Or, more plausibly and as his campaign has claimed, did he say it in the context of the auto industry and his concerns about high tariffs from China and Mexico?
That matters. Still, even the most charitable interpretation of Trump’s remarks – and I do think he was referring to the auto industry – doesn’t mean he wasn’t also playing footsie with apocalyptic, blood-soaked rhetoric, as he has long done. Warning people about illegal immigrants “poisoning the bloodstream" of the nation and openly talking about being a “dictator” are now standard parts of his campaign playbook.
The bigger problem is that the fallout obscured a much less difficult-to-interpret and more important moment in Trump's speech in which he openly rebranded the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, as “patriots” and those who went to prison after fair trials as “hostages.” It’s as if Jan. 6 is some 1979 redux of the Iranian hostage crisis and not a deadly attempt to overturn a free and fair US election. “You see the spirit from the hostages, and that's what they are, is hostages,” he said, adding: “And we’re going to be working on that as soon as the first day we get into office. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots.”
The point is that this election is already overturning political norms in ways we have never seen in the US. There are other dynamics worth examining as well. Are Joe Biden and the Democrats radically shifting their support not only away from just the Netanyahu government’s wartime policy, but from Israel in general? What could that mean over the long term in the Middle East? What about getting more support for Ukraine? Or, as Ian Bremmer wrote for GZERO yesterday, how will America's new role as a fossil fuel superpower under a Democratic president play out politically and from a climate change perspective?
These are the core election questions this year. Is the US on the precipice of making fundamental changes to its role in the world and to its core democratic values? In her peerless book, “These Truths,” historian Jill Lepore surveys US history and asks whether the country has always lived up to its foundational values. It is the most important modern history book about the US, and its core thesis is playing out in real-time in the 2024 election.
This is a historic moment of testing that merits deeper coverage. That’s why we at GZERO are boosting our coverage of the US election and its impact on global politics.
First, check out our Election Watch section on the website, where we will aggregate our US and global elections coverage so you can get a clearer picture of what’s happening and what it means.
From April, we will also be changing our weekly video series with Eurasia Group’s Managing Director and lead Washington analyst Jon Lieber to “US Politics: Election 2024” and combining that with the weekly series “3 Big Things to Watch in the Election.”
We will also be continuing to track disinformation and the impact it has on the election as we did last month with the death of Alexei Navalny.
This weekend, on our weekly PBS TV program “GZERO World,” Ian Bremmer dives into the impact US foreign policy may have on the 2024 presidential election. The big question: Would a Trump second term bring considerable change to the way the US does business abroad? Ian’s guest this week, Harvard Kennedy School professor and acclaimed political scientist Stephen Walt, says it probably won’t. Ian disagrees. Tune in for a great debate.
It’s the first of several episodes Ian will devote to covering the US election and America’s impact on the world over the coming critical months.
So, get ready for more coverage and what we do best: more insight into what it means, why it matters, and where we are all headed. Let us know what else you want to see us cover.
“Those clouds are not real,” the woman standing next me at the car pickup spot said, pointing to the overcast skies above San Diego.
I had just arrived here to speak to a group of business leaders about Eurasia Group’s Top Risk report and the political landscape ahead in a year of polarizing elections.
“Sorry?”
“It’s usually beautiful and sunny here, but now with the cloud seeding, all we get is this,” she explained, adopting that apologetic tone proud locals use when their home isn’t exhibiting its best for a visitor. She interrupted her weather flow to give me some other tips about local restaurants — “check out Roberto’s taco stand” — and hiking in the area, before returning to the weather.
“Yeah, you know all those floods we had this past month?” she asked rhetorically. “They’re from these clouds the climate folks created with their cloud seeding because they want to block out the sun to cool the Earth down.”
And then she added the kicker: “And it’s poison, you know.”
Of all the risks I had come here to talk about, the poison-fake-clouds-causing-floods risk did not make the agenda. But the theory is so pervasive in California that the LA Times just wrote a long story in order to, well, rain on the conspiracy parade.
A quick background might be in order.
Cloud seeding is not new. It’s been around since the late 1940s, when a meteorologist named Vincent Schaefer first tried to stop ice from forming on airplane wings by firing chemicals like silver iodide into the air to stimulate condensation. Since then it’s been happening all over the world to induce rain or reduce hail storms — but it’s not a Harry Potter magic trick that can cause mass flooding. Cloud seeding, at best, can increase precipitation by about 5%-10%, which won’t get Noah rushing to build an ark.
Silver iodide is the chemical most often used and there are legitimate health and environmental questions about the levels. The EPA and state governments regulate all cloud seeding programs. And there are multiple studies that show the levels of silver collected from cloud seeding are more than a 1000 times lower than EPA standards for drinking water and therefore have very minor environmental, toxicological or health impacts.
So, did cloud seeding cause the two flooding events that took place between Feb. 3-8 and 18-19? Nope. As the Times reported, the body in charge of the project, the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority (SAWPA), hadn’t even conducted any cloud seeding operations since Feb. 1, and even then, they didn’t do it in the San Diego area.
I didn’t intend to go up the whole cloud seeding hole, but the short encounter prompted me to think about the polarization in both the US and Canada, where people no longer debate different ideas based on a shared set of facts, but believe in different realities. Genuine, substantial conversations between people who disagree on key events, like say, the war in Gaza, are just not happening in places like college campuses — where they should — because each side sees the other as illegitimate, as if one is looking at fake clouds and the other at the real thing.
University administrators are now so fearful of getting involved in any way other than making anodyne statements — they don’t want to be “Harvarded” and alienate students, donors, and politicians or all three — that campuses have become bunkers of protest, not bastions of political debate.
It's also playing out politically in the US election cycle, where perception is driving reality. Look at the strong economic news. Last quarter, US GDP increased at a 3.2% annualized rate, business investment is up, consumer spending is up, the market is up and wages are up — but Biden’s poll numbers are down.
Biden is getting no credit for strong economic news and Donald Trump is sustaining no damage from bad legal news because partisan voters simply see what they want to see. Biden’s problem is no longer inflation itself — it has come down dramatically — it’s vibe-flation. Biden simply doesn’t look like the good news he’s delivering. He looks weak while his facts are strong. Trump looks strong while his facts are weak. And it’s working for Trump.
The self-reinforcing reality bubbles of partisan politics make it next to impossible to break out of these myopic views because there are no institutions with enough trust to set a benchmark of consensus and corrective facts.
As Gallup polling on trust consistently shows, confidence in US institutions is at all-time lows and going down: “The five worst-rated institutions — newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business and Congress — stir confidence in less than 20% of Americans, with Congress, at 8%, the only one in single digits,” wrote Gallup’s Lydia Saad.
If someone doesn’t believe the clouds are real, why would they believe the facts about the economy are real?
Everything is political. That’s our mandate here at GZERO, but it doesn’t mean everything is up for grabs. Seeding clouds of doubt with conspiracy theories everywhere erodes the foundational gift of our democracy, which is to have passionate disagreements respectfully with our neighbors and still manage to get big things done together. To do that, facts matter.
That’s why, with crises growing all around the world and the election cycle whirling ever faster, we at GZERO are committed to having humane, non-partisan, robust coverage about different, conflicting points of view — but at least with an agreed upon set of basic facts. To alter an old saying, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own clouds.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, needs more chips. He needs a lot more chips. The only thing stopping his $100 billion startup — if you can still call it a startup — may be the current supply of powerful chips.
The semiconductor fabrication process is notoriously slow and expensive, and the global supply chain runs through a few big, highly specialized firms. There are only a small number of companies that actually design chips made for generative AI — AMD, Intel, and Nvidia. And they’re pricy: Nvidia, which is set to take 85% of the market next year by one estimate, sells its H100 chips for about $40,000 a pop.
Naturally, Altman wants to make his own chips, but to make that dream a reality, he’s asking for an obscene amount of money.
How much does Altman want to raise?: According to the Wall Street Journal, Altman is deep in talks with investors with the goal of raising $5-7 trillion for a new chip venture.
“The dollar amount he’s reportedly trying to raise — $7 trillion — eclipses not just the semiconductor investments made by governments, including the United States’ $39 billion investment in chip manufacturing, but also the size of the entire semiconductor industry,” says Hanna Dohmen, a research analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. “It cannot be overstated how massive this sum of money is.”
Eurasia Group’s Director of Geotechnology Alexis Serfaty calls the sum “preposterously high and also seemingly arbitrary,” and says while it helps that OpenAI would be a built-in customer for this new chipmaker, the semiconductor industry is a difficult one with a propensity for demand gluts and supply chokepoints at every turn. Also, it would require strong leadership. “There are only so many people in the world with the expertise and experience to run an advanced fab, let alone the 300 [facilities] that $7 trillion would buy,” he adds.
Money can buy a lot — but it might not be able to solve the problems that every chipmaker already faces.
Who’s going to give him all that money? Altman has reportedly met with Masayoshi Son, CEO of the influential Japanese investment company SoftBank, and officials from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, one of the world’s largest chip fabrication companies, about investing in his new venture. Altman reportedly wants to “raise the money from Middle East investors and have TSMC build and run” new chip fabrication plants.
But the real eyebrow-raising potential investor isn’t in East Asia; it’s in the Middle East. In recent weeks, Altman has reportedly met with Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates’ security chief, to discuss the venture. OpenAI already struck a deal in October with the Emirati technology company, G42, to bring AI solutions to the Middle Eastern market, laying the foundation for additional business support from the wealthy nation.
This is going to cause geopolitical headaches, right? Almost definitely. Washington is extremely touchy about foreign investment in US companies and even more hesitant when it comes to scarce critical infrastructure such as semiconductors.
“While the US government is eager to bring chip manufacturing to the United States, it would likely be reluctant to do so with the involvement of the UAE government given existing concerns about Emirati companies’ relations with Chinese counterparts,” says Dohmen, who notes that, under US law, companies need licenses to even export certain semiconductors to the UAE.
America’s number one concern is China. Not only has the Biden administration invested heavily in the US chip industry, but it has launched a no-holds-barred campaign to prevent China from getting its hands on chips or even cloud-based AI. Over the past few years, the Biden administration has exacted stringent export controls that seek to prevent any global semiconductor technology, if it’s made with US parts, to do business with China, who it fears will use AI to supercharge its military. Dohmen adds that lawmakers are worried that G42 is already “dealing with blacklisted Chinese firms.”
Simply put, Serfaty says, “Altman’s partnerships with foreign governments could conflict with this US national security strategy.”
Could the US take action against this new venture? Yes. The US government has taken the extraordinary step to block foreign investment in chip companies. In 2018, the Trump administration blocked the sale of the US-based Qualcomm to the then-Singapore-based Broadcom, citing national security concerns. (Broadcom has since moved its headquarters to the US). That administration also blocked the sale of Lattice Semiconductor to a US private equity firm funded by Chinese capital.
Altman could be inviting antitrust scrutiny, as well. If he controls both the country’s most important generative AI company and the chip supply chain it relies upon, he’ll raise eyebrows with any antitrust regime — even if it’s not the current tech-hungry one overseen by the FTC’s Lina Khan and the DOJ’s Jonathan Kanter. The government is already starting to look into Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in OpenAI.
In short, all eyes are on OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker and its once-embattled, now-emboldened chief have their sights set on global AI domination. Whether it’s $7 trillion or far less, they’re due to make a real attempt to solve the chip problem that appears to stand in the way of true unbridled success.
On Saturday, Iran launched the Soraya satellite about 750 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, its highest orbit so far. Iran’s civilian space program first successfully launched a satellite back in 2009 and then had some success with light, limited-lifespan satellites, but it struggled with more heavy-duty rockets, leading to multiple failed launches.
Today, space tech is a key priority for Tehran, and it kicked off 2023 with a 10-year plan to reach its goal of sending a human into the final frontier. It will have Moscow’s help along the way, thanks to an agreement signed in December 2022 formalizing cooperation between their space agencies. An Iranian imaging satellite had already caught a ride on a Russian rocket in August 2022, one month after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iran. It was his first foreign trip following his invasion of Ukraine, for which Iran has supplied key drones.
Hermit Kingdom blasts off
North Korea’s space program managed only two successful satellite launches before last year. But in September 2023, after two embarrassing failures to launch a spy satellite, Putin hosted Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un at a spaceport near Vladivostok. Kim pledged to support Putin in Ukraine, while Putin told reporters he would help with North Korea’s space program.
Lo and behold, about two months later, Pyongyang finally got its spy satellite in orbit. Kim is aiming to launch three more this year.
What to watch
Western governments are worried that lessons learned from putting satellites in space could be applied to dropping nukes on cities.
It’s not an idle concern: The rockets Pyongyang used for its successful satellite launches are based on the Taepodong-2 and Hwaseong-17 ballistic missiles. The Qaem 100 that Iran used on Saturday was designed by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite branch of the Iranian military that controls the missile forces.
Greg Brew, an Iran analyst at Eurasia Group, says Iran is playing at a larger nuclear hedge strategy. Tehran, he says, focuses on developing civilian nuclear and rocket technology that will allow a “sprint” to build nuclear bombs and ICBMs if needed – without attracting international opprobrium from building and testing them in the meantime. But while Russia may be willing to help with the civilian side, Brew adds, nuclear tech is an ace Moscow holds close.
“The evidence would suggest Iran-Russia space cooperation is still focused on non-weapons aspects, but it all lays the foundation for potential further cooperation to develop,” he said.