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Podcast: Trouble ahead: The top global risks of 2024
Listen: In a special edition of the GZERO podcast, we're diving into our expectations for the topsy-turvy year ahead. The war in Ukraine is heading into a stalemate and possible partition. Israel's invasion of Gaza has amplified region-wide tensions that threaten to spill over into an even wider, even more disastrous, even ghastlier conflict. And in the United States, the presidential election threatens to rip apart the feeble tendrils holding together American democracy.
All those trends and more topped Eurasia Group's annual Top Risks project for 2024, which takes the view from 30,000 feet to summarize the most dangerous and looming unknowns in the coming year. Everything from out-of-control AI to China's slow-rolling economy made this year's list.
GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon sat down with Eurasia Group Founder and President Ian Bremmer and Chairman Cliff Kupchan to work through their list of Top Risks for 2024 alongside Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker and co-author of "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021"; Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, CEO & President of the International Peace Institute and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Marietje Schaake, International Policy Fellow, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. The big throughline this year? Events spiral out of control even against the wishes of major players. Whether it's possible escalation between Israel and Iranian proxies, Chinese retaliation to the result of the Taiwanese election, or central banks finding themselves squeezed into a corner by persistent inflation, the sheer number of moving parts presents a risk in and of itself.
Take a deep dive with the panel in our full discussion, recorded live on January 8.
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A world of conflict: The top risks of 2024
2024 is shaping up to be a turbulent year. The war in Ukraine is heading into a stalemate that puts the country on the road to partition. Israel's invasion of Gaza risks expanding to a region-wide war. And in the United States, the presidential election is pitting a divided country against itself with unprecedented risks for its democracy. Throw in AI growing faster than governments can keep up, China's rumbly grumbly economy, and El Nino weather, and you're starting to get the picture.
All those trends and more made it onto Eurasia Group's annual Top Risk project for 2024. As a political risk consultancy, Eurasia Group strives to keep clients informed of the global affairs that will impact their interests and bottom lines. The Top Risks project takes the view from 30,000 feet every year, summarizing the biggest and most dangerous unknowns that will affect everyone, political junkie or not.
GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon sat down with Eurasia Group Founder and President Ian Bremmer and Chairman Cliff Kupchan to work through their list of Top Risks for 2024 alongside Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker and co-author of "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021"; Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, CEO & President of the International Peace Institute and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Marietje Schaake, International Policy Fellow, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. The big throughline this year? Events spiral out of control even against the wishes of major players. Whether it's possible escalation between Israel and Iranian proxies, Chinese retaliation to the result of the Taiwanese election, or central banks finding themselves squeezed into a corner by persistent inflation, the sheer number of moving parts presents a risk in and of itself.
Take a deep dive with the panel in our full discussion, livestreamed on Jan. 8.
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Watch today's livestream: 2024's Top Risks
WATCH: Ian Bremmer and a panel of leading geopolitics experts discuss Eurasia Group's newly released annual Top Risks report, which forecasts the global political threats for 2024. Evan Solomon, GZERO Media's publisher, moderates the live discussion at gzeromedia.com/toprisks.
The lead authors of the report, Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, and Cliff Kupchan, Eurasia Group's chairman, will be joined by Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker and co-author of "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021"; Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, CEO & President of the International Peace Institute and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights; and Marietje Schaake, International Policy Fellow, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and former European Parliamentarian, in a GZERO Media live event moderated by GZERO's publisher, Evan Solomon.
Watch live today at 12 noon ET at gzeromedia.com/toprisks.
Top Risks 2024
Monday, January 8, 2024 | 12 pm ET
The rogue Russian risk: will war in Ukraine ever end?
Vladimir Putin definitely did not have a good 2022. Will he be in trouble this year?
Not in the short to medium term, says Eurasia Group Chairman Cliff Kupchan. But that doesn't mean he's completely off the hook.
Putin should watch his back from the siloviki, the men in the security services.
Meanwhile, Kupchan plays down the odds that Belarus will enter the war in Ukraine, which he doesn't see ending anytime soon.
Read Eurasia Group's Top Risks 2023 report here.
Watch the full live conversation: Top Risks 2023: A rogue Russia and autocrats threatening the world
Ian Bremmer: How AI may destroy democracy
More than 30 years ago, the US was the top exporter of democracy to the rest of the world. But now, America has become the main exporter of the tools that undermine democracy where it is weak, Ian Bremmer said in a GZERO Live conversation about Eurasia Group's Top Risks 2023 report.
Social media and tech companies based in the US have developed what he calls "Weapons of Mass Disruption" — Eurasia Group's #3 geopolitical risk for 2023.
And guess who wrote the title? An artificial intelligence bot from ChatGPT.
To be sure, Bremmer adds, AI can be great for many things. But "no one talks about the flip side, the dangers of these disruptive technologies, until the crisis hits, until it's too late."
Read Eurasia Group's Top Risks 2023 report here.
Watch the full live conversation: Top Risks 2023: A rogue Russia and autocrats threatening the world
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Top Risks 2023: A rogue Russia and autocrats threatening the world
What should the world fear more: an increasingly unhinged Vladimir Putin or an unbound Xi Jinping? Will most of the global economy enter a recession next year? And what happens when autocrats master the use of artificial intelligence to undermine democracy around the planet? Eurasia Group experts share their view on the top 10 geopolitical risks for 2023 in this livestream conversation.
Participants:
- Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media
- Cliff Kupchan, Chairman, Eurasia Group
- Anna Ashton, Director, China Corporate Affairs and US-China, Eurasia Group
- Franck Gbaguidi, Senior Analyst, Climate, Energy & Resources, Eurasia Group
- Rob Kahn, Managing Director, Global Macro-Geoeconomics , Eurasia Group
- Evan Solomon, Publisher, GZERO Media (moderator)
Eurasia Group’s Top Risks for 2023
Every January, Eurasia Group, our parent company, produces a report with its forecast for the Top 10 Risks for the world in the year ahead. Its authors are EG President Ian Bremmer and EG Chairman Cliff Kupchan.
Disclaimer: Your Signal author has contributed to these Top Risks reports for the past 18 years.
Here are (very) brief summaries of the 10 most important risks that will preoccupy world leaders, business decision-makers, and the rest of us in 2023, according to Bremmer and Kupchan. You can read the full report here.
1. Rogue Russia
A cornered Russia will turn from a global player into the world’s most dangerous rogue state, posing a serious and pervasive danger to Europe, the US, and beyond. Bogged down in Ukraine, with little to lose from further isolation and Western retaliation, and facing intense domestic pressure to show strength, Russia will turn to asymmetric warfare against the West to inflict damage through a thousand “paper cuts” rather than through overt aggression that requires military and economic power Russia no longer has.
Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling will escalate. Kremlin-affiliated hackers will ramp up increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks on Western firms, governments, and infrastructure. Russia will intensify its offensive against Western elections by systematically supporting and funding disinformation and extremism. Attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure will continue.
In short, Rogue Russia is a threat to global security, Western political systems, the cybersphere, and food security. Not to mention every Ukrainian civilian.
2. Maximum Xi
Xi Jinping now has a command of China’s political system unrivaled since Mao with (very) few limits on his ability to advance his statist and nationalist policy agenda. But with no dissenting voices to challenge his views, his ability to make big long-term mistakes is also unrivaled. That’s a massive global challenge given China’s outsized role in the world economy.
EG sees risks in three areas this year, all stemming from Maximum Xi. The ill effects of centralized decision-making on public health will continue with COVID’s spread. Xi’s drive for state control of China’s economy will produce arbitrary decisions, policy volatility, and heightened uncertainty for a country already weakened by two years of extreme Covid controls. Finally, Xi’s nationalist views and assertive foreign policy will increasingly provoke resistance from the West and China’s Asian neighbors.
3. Weapons of mass disruption
Recent advances represent a step change in the potential for artificial intelligence to manipulate people and disrupt society. 2023 will be a tipping point for this trend, helping autocrats undermine democracy abroad and stifle dissent at home, and enabling demagogues and populists within democracies to weaponize AI for narrow political gain at the expense of democracy and civil society.
4. Inflation shockwaves
The global inflation shock that began in the United States in 2021 and took hold worldwide in 2022 will have powerful economic and political ripple effects in 2023.
5. Iran in a corner
Facing convulsions at home while lashing out abroad, this year will feature new confrontations between the Islamic Republic and the West.
6. Energy crunch
A combination of geopolitics, economics, and production factors will create much tighter energy market conditions, particularly in the second half of 2023.
7. Arrested global development
Citizens of developing countries will become more vulnerable as the COVID fallout, the continuing Russia-Ukraine war, and global inflation push human development gains into reverse.
8. Divided States of America
The U.S. remains the most politically polarized and dysfunctional of the world’s advanced industrial democracies, and extreme policy divergences between red and blue states will make it harder for U.S. and foreign companies to treat the United States as a single coherent market.
9. Tik Tok boom
Larger numbers of Generation Z, the first generation with no experience of life without the internet, will organize online to reshape corporate and public policy, disrupting companies and politics.
10. Water stress
This year, water stress will become a global and systemic challenge.
Red Herrings: the risks that Eurasia Group believes are overrated.
- Western support for Ukraine will not fade in 2023.
- The EU will remain remarkably unified on priority challenges.
- There will be no security crisis over Taiwan in 2023.
- Domestic challenges in both countries will keep US-China tech war tensions in check.
Cliff Kupchan: We need a national dialogue to save US democracy
For Eurasia Group Chairman Cliff Kupchan, American politics has become like an internal Cuban Missile Crisis, with Democrats and Republicans coming at each other instead of the US and the Soviets.
The question is, what, if anything, can be done about it at this point.
Kupchan suggests that some kind of national dialogue is needed. It may be too late, but definitely worth a try.
In his view, we need to take the steering wheel away from the progressives in the Democratic Party and the base of the GOP, or rather the party of Donald Trump as it now exists.
Still, Kupchan thinks there is some hope out there — at the grassroots level.