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A view shows graves of killed Ukrainian defenders, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at a cemetery in Kharkiv, Ukraine January 31, 2023.
Hard Numbers … after a year of war in Ukraine
300,000: Human losses on both sides of the conflict are mounting (and disputed), but there have been a whopping 300,000 military and civilian deaths on both sides, according to high-end estimates.
2.1 & 0.3: Russia’s economy contracted by just 2.1% last year, far less than predicted, due to continued sales of its discounted crude oil and adaptability. The IMF predicts a 0.3% growth rate for Russia this year thanks to high export prices.
51,000 vs. 40,600: Having seized roughly 51,000 square miles of Ukrainian land by late March last year, Russia has since lost roughly one-fifth of that. The Kremlin now controls about 40,600 square miles (17% of Ukraine), entirely in the south and east.
18 & 60: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has decimated the country economically, with roughly 60% of Ukrainians now living below the poverty line, compared to 18% before the war.
35 & 139 billion: Ukraine’s GDP has diminished by 35%, and Russian targeted attacks are slamming the country’s infrastructure, having caused US$139 billion worth of damage (so far). Well over a third of the country is now dependent on humanitarian aid to live.
Up to 1 million: A reported 8,087,952 Ukrainian refugees are now spread across Europe, with close to 5 million seeking temporary asylum. Millions more are displaced within Ukraine. An estimated 500,000 to 1 million Russians have fled their homeland, driven by economic unrest, politics, and military mobilization.
The high price of isolation
Think it’s good to be the king? Consider for a moment the predicaments facing the small group of men (virtually all of them are men) who rule Russia, China, and Iran. Vladimir Putin and his accomplices, Xi Jinping and his functionaries, and those who make rules in the Islamic Republic all contend with a basic set of problems that obstruct vital flows of information within their respective countries. That creates serious problems for them — and for the rest of us.
Rulers in Russia, China, and Iran can’t know what their people really think. There are no reliable polls to help them measure the frustrations and fears that led, for example, to hundreds of thousands of young men fleeing Russia to avoid military service in Ukraine. Likewise, Beijing couldn’t predict the large numbers of Chinese who took to the streets last autumn to directly challenge China’s zero-COVID policy, and Iranian leaders have been surprised by how many have challenged the right of police and the government to control their personal behavior and appearance.
These rulers can’t know whom to trust. In authoritarian systems, those hoping to earn and protect their privileges know that pleasing their betters is the shortest path to success. The good news that subordinates provide — we will win the war, everyone loves you, and the situation is fully under control — can never be fully trusted.
They can’t know whether their orders have been carried out. Powerful leaders often take actions that create new sets of winners and losers within the state bureaucracy. Losers within the chain of command may not pass along all of their superiors’ directives and may not invest all the money where it was intended to go (see the Russian military). They have no independent sources of information, whether from a free press or genuine opposition parties, to provide accurate information about what is and isn’t happening.
Their people don’t trust the information they receive. Many Russians, Chinese, and Iranians know their governments are not accurate sources of information. Putin says there is no new plan to conscript more soldiers, but he also said there would be no war and that the “special military operation” in Ukraine was going to plan. Many Chinese are aware that their government's actual COVID containment actions don’t match the official message. Many Iranians know that Israelis, Americans, and Europeans are not the source of their largest problems and that Iran’s government either doesn’t know or doesn’t care what the country’s young people want. In all three countries, dangerous rumors can fill the vacuum created by the state’s lack of credibility.
The rest of the world can’t trust these governments in a crisis. The daily barrage of transparently false information from Russia’s government makes it much harder to contemplate peace talks with Moscow. Why should Ukraine (or anyone else) believe any Kremlin pledge made during negotiations? Official Chinese secrecy over the impact of COVID inside China makes it much more difficult for scientists and other governments to correctly assess global risks from the virus.
Their problems can quickly become our problems. Putin’s total inability to accurately predict responses in Ukraine and the West began a war with impacts on food and fuel prices that are inflicting pain all over the world. The Chinese Communist Party’s compulsion to control flows of information within the country’s borders may well have triggered the entire pandemic and could allow for the emergence of new COVID variants that again cross borders. Iran’s rulers could spark conflict in the Middle East if secrecy around its nuclear program triggers confrontation with Israel, the US, or any of its neighbors.
The bottom line: Yes, democratic governments lie every day. Those who lead them have no monopoly on honesty and virtue. But the presence in these countries of independent media, of genuine opposition parties, and of laws that protect the rights of citizens to speak their mind all provide hope that the harm these governments and their lies can impose on others might be much more easily exposed and contained than in places where a few powerful people call almost all the shots.
Democracy is resilient - but so is authoritarianism around the world
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody. Ian Bremmer here and a happy Monday to you. Time for a Quick Take to kick off your week. I thought I would talk about the state of democracy.
Of course, over the course of the last 10 years, there's been so much discussion of the world becoming more illiberal, lower case that more people in the world are living under authoritarian regimes or mixed governments, hybrid governments than living under pure democracy. In part because authoritarian states are growing more powerful, in part because some democracies, including the United States, are watching their systems, their institutions erode and watching their political leaders become de-legitimized.
Is that now changing? Over the last few weeks, we've seen a United States midterm election that certainly did not appear to be a win for election deniers, and Donald Trump is doing worse than he has. But you also see demonstrations, major demonstrations, a lot of people that are angry on the streets in some of the most powerful authoritarian regimes around the world, Russia, Iran, and even China. I will say that all of those developments are welcome, but the importance that they have in terms of the political systems themselves are widely varied, and I wouldn't overstate them.
So starting with the authoritarian regimes, I think Russia is in very serious trouble, but I don't see a lot of instability internally at all. The trouble that Russia's in is that their military is being soundly defeated by a much smaller country with a lot of support from NATO and a lot of their people are going to be suffering economically very heavily, not just this year, but for the foreseeable future. The demonstrations in Russia have been very small, they've been sporadic, and they've largely been stopped. First round of demonstrations at the beginning when the war was announced, a couple thousand people arrested, most of them let go. Then a few hundred thousand people were called up on mobilization a few months ago. And you saw more demonstrations, another few thousand arrested, and all of them almost let go.
The interesting thing is that there were almost a million Russians that got out of the country when they announced that mobilization and the Russians kept the borders open. Why would they do that? Well, in part because a lot of those people are not so happy about the Russian regime, and I assume the Russian government was just as happy to see them out of the country, but there's really not a lot of instability politically inside Russia.
So Russia as a country's losing power, they're becoming much less influential on the global stage. Putin is getting humiliated and angry, but there's no proximate threat to the authoritarian regime. And Putin were removed, it's not like Russia's going to become a democracy. It would be run by another kleptocracy of military and national security elites that also hate the West. This is not Khodorkovsky suddenly coming back from his exile or Nemtsov coming back from the dead.
In the case of Iran, that's the one place that I would say has the greatest possibility of regime change. Though the most likely kind of regime change if it occurred would be for the theocrats to be forced out by the Revolutionary Guard Corp, the IGRC. And if that were to happen, there would be some liberalization of religious and social norms, absolutely. But it would still very much be an authoritarian state, kind of between Pakistan and North Korea, as opposed to an open democracy. Now, I mean, there's a tail possibility that the people are effective in rising up and they're able to overthrow the entire regime. That would be an enormously bloody thing, but it would ultimately be fantastic for the Iranian people. I wouldn't be betting on that outcome right now, even though I think we'd all like to see it.
And then there's China, and in the case of China, there's really no political instability. The demonstrations that were talked about widely in the West were very small in China, and there's been zero repeat of them despite the fact that there's still quite a bit of lockdown and quarantine going on across China, and that's because the ability of the Chinese government to assert control to fully surveil their population and to threaten and arrest anyone that is seen to fall afoul of that is incredibly high.
And the general support level for Xi Jinping in the Communist Party, given the economic capabilities they've displayed over the past years is also relatively high. You put those things together, and surely there are a lot of Chinese, especially in places like Shanghai, that are educated, wealthier, that would love to see more liberties for Chinese citizens. But the idea that the Chinese government is not long for this system, I think, is a canard. That's not going to happen.
So I'm very cautious about overstating the fact that there are people that are courageous, that are willing to express their anger at very deeply repressive and not always particularly well run regimes. But that doesn't mean that democracy suddenly is on the agenda for any of them, frankly.
I'm more optimistic about the United States, but in part that's because I've been more optimistic about the United States. Back in 2020, even in the heat of January 6th, my view was that the likelihood of a successful coup was zero. And the reason for that is because no one from the military would support it. No one from the judiciary would support it. And even when Trump called his own party supporters in charge of elections in states like Georgia and Arizona said, find me some votes, they didn't. And the reason they didn't is because it was against the law, and they weren't prepared to do that.
Now, of course, that's also why you got a majority of Republican legislators in the House on the evening of January 6th voting against certification of the election because they recognized there was no chance of a coup, so they didn't feel like they had a big enough problem they needed to deal with. Even after the events that day, they were focusing more on their jobs. Now, if the midterm elections in the US had returned a large number or even a small number of election deniers that could directly oversee key elections in states, in swing states, as governors and secretary of state, then I couldn't have said that 2024 would have no chance of a coup. Democracy would have been, even if it's only a low risk, in a more existential danger. That's no longer true. They all lost. Trump's also much weaker than he has been historically. I don't have confidence that Trump can't get a second nomination, but certainly it's looking more challenging.
A lot of people are going to be running against him. Even someone like Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who pledged that she would not run if Trump was running. Trump's now running. She's now thinking about it. Why? Because Trump looks vulnerable. And so as a consequence, everyone's stepping up to take a shot. It's true. A lot of people aren't willing to name his name when they're criticizing him. It's more oblique. But after January 6th, Kevin McCarthy was heading right down to Mar-a-Lago to stand with him and show his loyalty. He's not doing that this time around.
So for all of those reasons, I think that democracy is not particularly threatened existentially. It's not as weak as a lot of people have been presuming for very different reasons on the left and on the right. But nonetheless, I think ultimately the resilience American system remains very high. Unfortunately, the entrenchedness of authoritarian systems around the world that have been gaining over the past years also remains very high.
That's it for now. Talk to you all real soon.
- The two biggest threats for democracy in the 21st century ›
- US votes as democracy is under attack ›
- Is the war in Ukraine a fight for democracy itself? ›
- Authoritarians gone wild ›
- The politics of resentment & how authoritarian strongmen gain power ›
- Authoritarianism’s enduring appeal: Anne Applebaum discusses ›
Can there be capitalism without freedom? No, says Iván Duque
Should the US still try to engage with countries run by regimes antithetical to its own?
For former Colombian President Iván Duque, the democratic consensus in the Western Hemisphere means that "there's no space for autocracies or for dictatorships." That means not imposing democracy on everyone but defending democratic values everywhere, he tells Ian Bremmer in a GZERO World interview.
Meanwhile, capitalism is coming under pressure — including from authoritarian regimes like China, which is selling its own brand of state-led capitalism as opposed to the free-market capitalism prevalent in democracies.
Duque pushes back against the notion that there can truly be capitalism where people can't choose their leaders. His preferred solution is "conscious capitalism," which creates value but also seeks to close social gaps.
Authoritarian alliances & the future of the free world
Elliot Ackerman's new book about the US exit from Afghanistan is called The Fifth Act.
But what comes next for America in the region?
On GZERO World, the former US marine and CIA officer tells Ian Bremmer that the next big challenge will be how free nations of the world respond to the rise of authoritarian regimes.
Watch the GZERO World episode: The fallout from US Afghanistan withdrawal: a Marine's perspective
The self-identification trap: how populists exploit emotions to gain support
Soon after Russia attacked Ukraine, the West proclaimed: we've united the world against Russia.
Wrong. Countries representing more than half of the world's population — including China and India — have not condemned the invasion.
Why? For one thing, US hypocrisy after the war in Iraq, says Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs columnist at the Financial Times tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
For another, he tells Ian Bremmer, many countries "simply don't want to return to a unipolar world."
Watch the GZERO World episode: The politics of resentment & how authoritarian strongmen gain power.
The case against Trump's big lie
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. A Quick Take to start off your week, and I wanted to talk about the January 6th committee with its televised hearings starting last Thursday and proceeding throughout the week and showing just how incredibly divided and dysfunctional the American political system is.
It's very clear from the initial proceedings that former President Trump was indeed, is indeed responsible for pushing a lie around the big steal, the elections going against him, that he tried to use every lever of power available to him, legal and extralegal, in office to overturn. And when that did not happen, was central to the demonstrations that occurred on the 6th of January. And when they turned out to be violent and had the potential to be much more brutally dangerous to the Senate, to the House of Representatives, to Vice President Pence, rather than call for them to be over, he put fuel on the flames. So I think, from my perspective, it's very clear that Trump has accountability there.
It's also very clear to me that the impact of the January 6th committee politically in the United States will be next to zero, that the process is broken and is functionally partisan in a way that both of the impeachments of Trump, unprecedented two impeachments of President Trump, and of course, no convictions, have also become politically broken and polarized.
Now, when I say partisan, I want to be clear that there are liberals and conservatives, the entire political spectrum is represented in the committee. Liz Cheney is taking the lead in a lot of the public presentation, and she's a committed conservative who votes with the Republican Party, some 90% of the time. So, I mean, from a policy and an ideological perspective, you're covering the map, but of course that's not what drives partisanship in the United States today, it's more about orientation to President Trump, and this is a deeply partisan anti-Trump group. There is not an effort to defend Trump. There are no Republican participants that are trying to present a, "what he did wasn't that bad. It wasn't really about him. There were real things to worry about, to be concerned..." No, no, none of that is going forward, in part because it's a difficult argument to make, but in part, because the leadership of the Republican party sees that there is no political advantage to them and they care more about that than they do about the stability of American political institutions. And so that's what's really driving the outcome here.
And again, it's important for me, at least as someone who considers myself not to have much of an ideological lens. I mean, I'm sort of overall a centrist. I'm probably much more liberal on social issues. I'm more conservative on economic issues. But the specific issue matters. The American political spectrum is itself very narrow. I tend to have a more global perspective on some issues than a lot of people in the American political framework do. But most importantly, I mean, I think that my antipathy to Trump as a human being has nothing to do with him being a Republican. I mean, I was just as opposed to him as a human being when he was a Democrat. He doesn't have any ideological attachment to a political party. They're just vessels for him to exploit his narcissism. And he's now a Republican. He was a Democrat. He was equally unfit for political office with either affiliation, but this is a big problem for the United States, obviously. We are fortunate in that Trump's most important quality in the way he really differs from other political leaders is his incompetence.
Yes, he's authoritarian in the sense that he doesn't believe in democracy, but he didn't actually try to systematically undermine checks and balances that limited the president's power when he was president. I mean, remember he was president in the middle of a pandemic. Anyone that really was an authoritarian would use that to declare a state of emergency and try to gain an enormous amount of power as president. He wasn't interested in that. He didn't want to work. Instead he said, "No, it's all about the governors. It's all about the mayors. Those guys are in charge. I'm not in charge. I don't want to do that." And in fact, the one person that was most aligned towards building an authoritarian US and undermining checks and balances was his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who was the first senior official he fired when he became president. So it's obvious that his authoritarianism is kind of more of a flirtation than it is something that he's particularly committed to.
And his corruption is he wants to make a lot of money, but it wasn't structural or strategic corruption. It wasn't like let's use and exploit the position of the presidency to make hundreds of billions of dollars. It was more just continuing to find ways to skim a little here and skim a little there. The rules of taxation don't really apply to him, and "I just got a bunch of gifts from foreign governments and I'll keep them as opposed to giving them back even though that's the rule, because the rules don't apply to me. And Ivanka gets some licenses to sell shoes and purses in China, while she also has a political position in the White House, and I don't care if that's a conflict of interest. I'm just going to avoid and ignore it." I mean, yes, there's corruption, but this is not the kind of systemic and structural corruption that you see in a country like Russia or a country like China, or frankly, even many mid-level mid-tier emerging markets, Turkey, for example. No, this was small stuff.
No, the thing that Trump truly excelled at compared to any other former president is the level of incompetence. And that meant despite the fact that he was president and desperately wanted to continue to be president, he had very little willingness to build a strategy to align people around him that could support and implement that strategy to structurally undermine the institutions of the United States. And that ultimately is one of the reasons why January 6th, as ugly as it was, was not particularly effective and was more of a clown show than it was a real threat to the integrity of US elections going forward.
Now, I still believe that this is a huge problem for the US politically because the country is so divided. The fact that you have the Democrats and a couple of Republicans who can't stand Trump, working as hard as they can to make this the cause for the 2024 election, and meanwhile, Fox News doesn't even cover it. And Tucker Carlson doesn't run commercials because he doesn't want people channel surfing and flipping over. Meanwhile, the average American only cares if their priors were already committed to the cause of anti-Trump. Inflation matters a lot more to most Americans than the result of the January 6th committee.
And I've seen this, I've gotten so many comments from intelligent viewers and listeners of my show and of my posts on social media saying, "Why should I care about this spectacle in Congress, as opposed to the gas price, which I feel every day, which costs me out of my paycheck? And this notion of democracy, and the US doesn't have political leaders that I trust and they're all out for themselves anyway. They're just going to screw me. And if the US doesn't stand for anything but its rich and powerful people, why should I pay attention to yet more of that show?" And the very fact that President Biden today is that lower approval levels than President Trump was at this point in his presidency is a very, very stark reminder of just how dysfunctional, divided and broken the American representative political system today is.
Now there's upside, and the upside is that through all of this, I don't see Fox actively trying to defend Trump. They're just not focusing on the issue at all. And I do believe that there is a growing likelihood that both Biden and Trump face significant primary challenges in the 2024 election. And ultimately, that perhaps is the biggest silver lining because that would be profoundly good for the United States, frankly, to get rid of a Biden that would be 86 by the end of his second term if he were to run again and win, and Trump who is obviously unfit for the presidency of the United States.
I mean, if there were successful Democratic and Republican primary challenges to both of them, we would be in a much better position as a country. But for right now where we are left is a January 6th committee that obviously reflects accountability and responsibility for crimes in office of President Trump that will once again be ignored because the political system is being driven only by what's in the interest of one party versus the other party. And at the same time, we have, whether it's the Supreme Court that's behind, it feels like it's a fortress right now behind all of these fences, whether my friend, Chris Coons, who says that we're facing a season of political violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center that just came out with a nationwide survey that has almost a majority, some 35, 40% of Americans, slightly more Republicans, slightly less Democrats, but unprecedentedly high for both saying that they would support revolutionary movements even if they call for political violence if they align with their interests.
This is a very dangerous time for the Americans not to care about rule of law, not to care about fundamental precepts of what makes legitimate political institutions, to tune that out and say, "No, that's not what I'm going to spend my time focusing on." In part because we've let these institutions erode for 30, 40 years now, and it hasn't affected the average Americans very much, but of course that's true until it isn't anymore. So, I mean, I've been spending a lot more time focusing on Russia/Ukraine, because it has massive impact on the global economy and because it's a war in Europe, and because it's also a topic I know very well. But on the back of the January 6th committee and everything we've seen the last week and also being in DC a bit last week, I thought I'd spent a little bit of time talking about that with you today.
I hope everyone's well, I'll talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com- What We're Watching: Jan 6. hearings begin, Beijing's Zero bet ... ›
- Podcast: How the US survives deep divisions: Fiona Hill and the ... ›
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- Trump's 2024 outlook: impact of Jan. 6 hearings ›
- Trump's 2024 outlook: more vulnerable after Jan 6 hearings - GZERO Media ›
The politics of resentment & how authoritarian strongmen gain power
In recent years, part of the pushback against globalization has been led by autocrats who reject things like free trade and the liberal international order.
For them, globalization means losing control, which they don't like one bit. But the world today remains more interconnected than ever, particularly in cyberspace. So, do they want less globalization, or rather a version that fits their narrative?
On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer speaks to Gideon Rachman, the chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times who knows a thing or two about Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Donald Trump, and has just written a book about strongmen.
Rachman explains why resentment at minorities motivates both autocrats and their supporters, why strongmen use emotions to justify their nationalism and protectionism, and why Narendra Modi is the least bad of them right now.
Bonus: the global food crisis hits ... fish and chips.
- Authoritarianism's enduring appeal: Anne Applebaum discusses ... ›
- The “authoritarian honeymoon” is over, says John Kerry - GZERO ... ›
- What We'll Keep Watching in 2022: The authoritarian plague ... ›
- Podcast: How discontent with globalization has fueled authoritarian ... ›
- Democracy is resilient - but so is authoritarianism around the world - GZERO Media ›