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Political violence is on the rise again, at home and abroad
In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader. The leader miraculously survives, and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence. Does that sound familiar? Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia. But Fico is just one of many leaders or high-level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.
Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.
Watch full episode: Trump, Biden & the US election: What could be next?
Season 7 of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, launches nationwide on public television stations (check local listings).
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Covering Columbia's campus protests as a student and GZERO reporter
The past few weeks of student protests, counter-protests, and police activity at Columbia have been the tensest moments the University has seen in over 50 years. What’s it like to be a student and graduating senior during this historic moment?
When GZERO writer Riley Callanan began her senior year at Barnard, the women’s college within Columbia, she never expected it would end this way: thousands of student protesters, an encampment and takeover of an administrative building, the attention of the national news media, armed police officers swarming campus, and, ultimately, a canceled graduation ceremony. Now, as she tells colleague Alex Kliment on GZERO World, instead of senior galas and grad parties, Columbia students are having intense debates over the Israel-Palestine conflict, antisemitism, and free speech.
Callanan has been documenting it all—from the early protests on the academic quad to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson delivering on her library steps. GZERO correspondent Alex Kliment sat down with Callahan to hear more about what it’s like to be a college senior in 2024, what she saw during the protests, and what happens after graduation.“We absolutely need to change the default setting on campuses from confrontation is romanticized to cooperation is the norm."
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week on US public television (check local listings) and online.
- With summer looming, where will student protesters turn next? ›
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- Chaos on Campus: Speaker Johnson's visit fans the flames at Columbia as protests go global ›
- Columbia & Yale protests: What campus protesters want ›
- Campus protests spill over into US political sphere ›
What the Trump trial circus is missing
On the first day of the first criminal trial of a former US president, I couldn’t resist. The courthouse is 15 minutes from my desk here in New York, so I jumped on the 6 Train and headed out to the scrum of protesters, counterprotesters, journalists, police, and other gawkers in Lafayette Park outside the courthouse.
There was lots – lots – of yelling. Just as I arrived, a guy in a “Gays for Trump, You got a problem with that, Bitch!” T-shirt was at the center of a smartphone scrum screaming at a woman holding a “Trump is the Definition of Depravity” sign that she was a “pedophile.”
Before long, content creators from both sides of the national divide were on the scene, livestreaming and shouting at each other about Hunter Biden, about inflation, about child labor, about immigration. Even Triumph the Comic Insult Dog barked into the mix, asking one of several Proud Boys stalking the scene in wraparound shades: “If Trump is convicted, do you think he’ll be sentenced to four years … in the White House?”
The only people not screaming, as I recall, were four elderly Chinese-American ladies in huge sunglasses, sitting on a bench under a leafless sweetgum tree, holding hand-painted signs that read: “Kangaroo Court, Banana Republic.”
It was, in all, the usual performative mayhem about the usual subjects. But the one thing that almost no one was actually yelling about was the thing that was going on inside the building 100 feet away: the trial itself.
All that circus, and hardly a word about the elephant in the ring.
But isn’t that how a lot of us talk about Trump’s trials and titillations these days? We argue about the politics rather than look at the merits. And that’s a bad thing.
For Trump, the political cage matches keep the focus right where he wants it: on the narrative that he, as a popular threat to a corrupt establishment, is the victim of a political witch hunt. That the ruling party is using the justice system to silence a political rival. That those ladies with the big sunglasses under the sweetgum tree are right.
On the other side, people talk about the long-coming legal downfall of a demagogue seen as a threat to the Republic itself. The Capone of politics nabbed on his own kind 0f tax rap.
“People know what verdict they want in this case,” says Richard Klein, a professor of law at Touro Law School and a longtime trial criminal defense lawyer. “But few people are focusing on DA Bragg’s case against Trump. They're focusing on all the noise around it.”
To review, briefly. Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg alleges that Trump falsified business records to conceal a payment that was made, in the fall of 2016, to a porn star who says she and Trump had a fling.
“Hush money” is bad, but that’s not actually what the trial is about. Paying someone to keep quiet isn’t necessarily a crime, and fiddling with business records in New York isn’t a felony.
Bragg’s case elevates the charges by arguing that this book-cooking was done with the intention of committing other felonious infractions – including, it seems, a conspiracy to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and commit tax fraud.
To prove this intent, Bragg will bring various witnesses, including Trump’s former lawyer and fixer-in-chief Michael Cohen, who made the payments, as well their recipient, the actress known as “Stormy Daniels.”
Legal scholars like Klein say Bragg’s approach is something of a high-wire act. He is linking dozens of lower-level crimes – some of which Trump appears to have admitted publicly – to harder-to-prove felonious ones, and then asking a jury to decide that Trump did all of this to sway an upcoming election rather than, say, simply to save his marriage or protect his kids from scandal.
The key witnesses, moreover, aren’t exactly folks with an unblemished reputation for truthtelling. Cohen has already admitted to lying under oath previously.
How much does this matter? If Bragg fails to convince the jury, Trump will be vindicated – look, he’ll say, these kangaroo court prosecutors came at me and 12 very good people of New York saw through it. This will color the politics of the other three cases he faces.
If Trump is convicted, of course, it may not move the needle for the 35% of “you got a problem with that bitch!”Americans who are unwaveringly fanatically loyal to him.
But about half of Americans say if Trump is convicted he should not be president again. That includes 14% of Republicans and, perhaps more importantly, a third of independents who say a guilty verdict would sway their vote. In a tight election – and this one will be tight – that could certainly be the difference.
As I went to file this, news broke that the jury has been set for the trial. And so we’re off. I may not be able to resist heading down to Lafayette square for some good mayhem again in the coming weeks – but as a society it’s a mistake to let that political circus distract us from the real drama in the courtroom itself.
Does America need a draft?
A few days ago – while cleaning out a dresser drawer filled with some old pocket squares, a box of cufflinks, a bag of dead-battery watches, a wad of bills from Brazil, Russia, and Colombia, and a hollowed-out dried gourd filled with guitar picks – I came across something related to the news these days: my father’s US Army dog tags from the 1950s.
As a refugee from the various horrors that had befallen his home country of Czechoslovakia a decade earlier, my father chose to serve in the US Army, both as an act of gratitude for the US role in liberating Europe and as a way to root himself in his new home. For millions of other young men in those days, however, the army was compulsory – the draft was still in effect.
The draft, of course, lasted until the 1970s when it was scrapped as part of the national reckoning over America’s political and military failures in Vietnam.
Could it ever come back? Should it?
As it happens, a number of close US allies are again wrestling with the question of whether to reintroduce military conscription.
In Europe, countries spooked by Vladimir Putin’s appetite for empire and Donald Trump’s distaste for alliances are scrambling to shore up their armies. This year Latvia reinstated a draft, following similar moves in recent years by Sweden and Lithuania.
But it’s not just small nations along Russia’s prickly borders. Germany, which dropped its draft in 2011, is now mulling a return to compulsory service to address a shortfall in troops.
Meanwhile, in Israel, with the war in Gaza raging, there have been fresh calls to end the religion-based military service exemptions for Israel’s 1.2 million ultra-Orthodox Jews.
On the surface, these are debates about military preparedness and resources. But they are also about something deeper: the social contract between people and the state. If the government asks you to give up two years – or even to risk your life – under what circumstances would you say yes?
One might be: a good reason to fight. The Europeans worry that an expansionist Russia could eventually bring war to their borders. Top Russian generals spouting off about a “a wider European war” do nothing to reduce that anxiety. For the Latvians or Swedes or the Germans, there’s a clear and present enough danger.
Another might be: You generally trust your countrymen and your government. Sweden and Germany are both societies near the top of the list among OECD rankings of trust in government. Austria and Switzerland, which have proudly clung to their drafts and national service programs for decades – are too. Israel, for its part, may have a nasty and combative politics, but among Israeli Jews, social cohesion on national defense is famously strong.
All of this helps us understand why one important country is NOT having a conversation about a draft.
Less than 20% of Americans support the idea of bringing one back. That’s hardly surprising. The US is a deeply polarized place, where trust in the government is low. Its wars of choice, fought largely by marginalized communities, have (rightly) soured the public on foreign military adventurism.
It’s comical, in fact, to imagine what would happen if a president of either party announced a military draft: We can barely agree on who won the last election, let alone a solid reason to put our kids in combat boots.
But a draft of some kind might, paradoxically, be good for the US. For one thing, it would widen the circle of people directly affected by US foreign policy choices, which is no bad thing. One reason Iraq and Afghanistan became “forever wars” is that they were “working class” conflicts. The casualties were borne overwhelmingly by lower-income families, far from the centers of power.
A draft might also do something else that rarely happens in America these days: pull together people of different parties and incomes for a common, and in some ways extreme, shared experience.
Americans, in fact, seem to like that idea, at least if it doesn’t involve boot camp: Polls show that as many as two-thirds would support some form of mandatory national service – a kind of domestic Peace Corps.
It’s worth considering. It wouldn’t leave anyone with dog tags for their kids to find in a messy drawer decades later, but if there’s a kind of draft that can help to address America’s internal conflicts, wouldn't you be for it?.
Write to us with your thoughts on a draft in America! If you include your name and location, we might run your comment in an upcoming Daily.
How Ukrainians learn to pilot kamikaze drones that destroy tanks
First-person view (FPV) drones are cheap and effective on the battlefield in Ukraine, but the army urgently needs to train pilots how to fly them.
Over two years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with ammo running low and ongoing military aid from the West at risk of drying up completely, the Ukrainian army is turning to a small piece of technology that’s having a surprisingly big impact on the battlefield: first person view (FPV drones), Alex Kliment reports for GZERO World with Ian Bremmer.
Originally invented for drone racing, FPVs have cameras that transmit what they “see” in real time to a pilot wearing goggles on the ground. FPVs are fast, hard to track and target, fit into spaces traditional artillery can’t, and can be fitted with explosives to use in kamaze-style attacks. Most importantly, they only cost around $500.
The biggest hurdle to scaling up Ukraine’s use of FPV drones is that they’re really hard to fly. So schools are opening nationwide to teach soldiers how to fly and incorporate them into battlefield tactics. Last fall, Adnan “Audi” Rana, a former marine who runs a non-profit called Aerial Relief Group, visited a drone school on the outskirts of Kyiv to check out the training program and see first-hand how well Ukraine’s efforts to incorporate the technology into its military is going. He found a DIY, ad-hoc effort run entirely by volunteers representing Ukraine’s best chance of holding back Russian troops until fresh military aid arrives from the West.
Watch full episode: Solving Europe's energy crisis with Norway's power
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week online and on US public television. Check local listings.
Understanding Navalny’s legacy inside Russia
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was a uniquely charismatic, fearless, and media-savvy critic of Putin’s regime who will be extremely hard to replace, says GZERO’s Alex Kliment. But as beloved as he was internationally for his fearless stance against the country’s strongman leader within Russia, his appeal was somewhat limited to educated elites.
“There was a poll last year that only about 10% of Russians saw Navalny as someone whose activities they approved of about 40 or 50% said they disapproved him Navalny” Kliment says. “And a quarter of Russians had never even heard of him.”In 2020, recall, he was poisoned with a nerve agent in an attack that he blamed on the Kremlin. He later, on camera, tricked a Russian security official into appearing to admit responsibility for the hit.
That may be hard to believe for Western observers who have grown accustomed to grainy videos of Navalny defiantly smiling from behind bars. But it’s a function, Kliment says, of the fact that the Kremlin controls the media. The Kremlin has cracked down on opposition movements like Navalny’s, and many Russians who would be most likely to support him have left Russia since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
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- Putin critic Alexei Navalny dies in prison ›
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The Parthenon Marbles dispute and the debate over cultural repatriation
Who gets to claim art as their own? It’s a complicated issue, and elite art institutions are undergoing a reckoning over their Indiana Jones-style acquisition tactics of the past. GZERO’s Alex Kliment explores the complex debate of art repatriation and the controversy surrounding ancient artifacts displayed in Western museums. One of the most infamous cases involves the Parthenon Marbles (sometimes called the Elgin Marbles) at the British Museum, which the British took during Ottoman rule. The Greeks have been demanding the Marbles be returned for almost 200 years.
“I think this is really a moral or ethical case,” says Leila Amineddoleh, an art repatriation expert, “Should museums hold onto objects that were taken under either violent circumstances or were taken during a time of looting, theft or when a country was colonized?”
This question of who owns art has become more intensely political in recent years. On one side are the defenders of the “Universal Museum” idea, who say it’s important to have places where everyone can come see art from all over the world in one place. However, critics argue it’s a form of cultural imperialism that denies rightful ownership to the people who created the artifacts in the first place. Ultimately, the debate raises broader questions about museums' responsibility to address historical injustices, balance cultural preservation with global accessibility, and navigate the complex dynamics of ownership and cultural heritage.
Watch the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer episode: The identity politics trap
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
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The pro-Palestine Japanese militants who once attacked Israel
Why had militants from halfway around the world come to Israel to carry out a terrorist attack like this? And what did a young woman from Tokyo known as “The Empress of Terror” have to do with it? This is the story of the Lod Airport Massacre, one of the most bizarre chapters in the long history of violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Watch the GZERO World with Ian Bremmer episode: Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah: Fears of escalation grow
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- Shinzo Abe’s goal of militarization & PM Kishida’s “golden opportunity” to reform Japan ›
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