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Live on Jan. 6: the Top Risks of 2025
What will be the #1 concern for the year ahead? Join us January 6 at 12 pm ET for a livestream with Ian Bremmer and global experts to discuss the Top Risks of 2025 report from Eurasia Group. The much-anticipated annual forecast of the biggest geopolitical risks to watch in 2025 will be released that morning. Evan Solomon, GZERO Media's publisher, will moderate the conversation with Ian Bremmer and Cliff Kupchan of Eurasia Group, along with special guests.
Watch live at https://www.gzeromedia.com/toprisks
The Top Risks of 2025 with Ian Bremmer & Eurasia Group
Monday, January 6, 2025 | 12:00 PM ET | https://www.gzeromedia.com/toprisks
Sign up for GZERO's newsletters to get a reminder about this and other GZERO events.
Crisis time for the politically homeless
It is decision time for the politically homeless.
With 18 days left in the coin-toss US election campaign, both Republicans and Democrats are engaged in a form of political fracking, desperately trying to extract pockets of votes in hard-to-reach places. That’s why you saw Kamala Harris take on Bret Baier on Fox News on Wednesday night.
On the surface, it seemed like a waste of time. Most people who watch Fox News are not going to vote for Harris, but she’s betting that Donald Trump has alienated many long-standing Republicans, like Mitt Romney or Dick Cheney, and she wants to offer them a temporary political home. In an election where a few thousand voters in the key seven swing states may change everything, Harris believes polls telling her that disaffected Republicans are a growing, available group.
A recent New York Times/Siena College survey found that 9% of self-identified Republican voters nationally are voting for Harris, a number nearly twice what it was just five months ago. When Dick Cheney no longer feels at home in the big Republican tent, that’s not a Cheney problem, it’s a tent problem.
Democrats have their own tent problems. Some young people disaffected by the situation in Gaza are opting out of the Democratic Party, while some Jewish voters, traditionally Democrats, are backing Trump because of his overt support for Israel and his tough stance on Iran. And let’s not forget that about 20% of Black and Latino voters — especially men — see Trump as a better leader on the economy. As I have written about before, these men idolize the entrepreneurial genius and give-no-F’s aura of Trump hype man Elon Musk, who is consolidating that support. It is no surprise that former President Barack Obama is frantically out on the stumps chastising Black men for their lack of support for Harris.
This is the age of the politically homeless. Don’t like the MAGA Republicans because of their embrace of extreme voices like Marjorie Taylor Greene, or the rejection of free trade in favor of high tariffs and protectionism? Where do you go? The left has also embraced tariffs, and it too has an extreme side, with protest groups calling President Biden “genocide Joe” for supporting Israel’s fight against the terrorist group Hamas.
The right and left have drifted away from the political center in response to pressure from extreme positions on the fringes of their movements.
“There are a lot of politically homeless folks out there, which is a function of the political realignment we’re seeing to a large degree across the Western world,” my colleague Graeme Thompson, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told me. “Some former Republicans can’t stand Trump, some former Democrats don’t like left-wing campus politics, but neither have a comfortable place to land.”
In Canada, a country that could face a federal election at any time given the precarious nature of Justin Trudeau’s minority government, it’s not so different.
“More than 4 in 10 people likely consider themselves homeless in Canada,” Nik Nanos, chief data scientist and founderof Nanos Research, told me. “Major swaths of voters are not voting FOR anything — they are voting against things — in many cases someone they dislike. The enthusiasm is directed against someone.”
What this means is that the center cannot hold. “The Liberals’ move to the economic and cultural left under Trudeau has forced out a lot of fiscally conservative, socially moderate ‘blue Liberals’ who might end up voting for the Tories but don’t feel it’s a natural fit. Similarly — although to a lesser degree — this is true for so-called ‘red Tories,’” says Thompson.
One consistent error the bleeding center makes is to blame the extremes for the polarization. There is a relentless focus on the “weird” or “crazy” things that happen on the edges. But all this misses the larger point. It’s not that the fringes are inherently attractive — most voters live in the center — but the center has failed to make its case for relevance. There is precious little self-reflection on why the center is suddenly so soft and why it has failed to deliver for so many voters.
“Small ‘l’ liberals seem to have forgotten that liberalism isn’t self-evident, revealed truth — its case has to be made in the political arena,” says Thompson. “Moderates are on the back foot, in part, because “the other guys are worse” isn’t compelling enough in difficult times when voters are demanding answers.”
In his book “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy,” David Frum, maybe the most famous politically homeless Republican, does a superb job of outlining how the Burkean conservatives he championed squandered their arguments, especially on issues like the Middle East, the economy, and climate change. “In the twenty-first [century],” he writes, “that movement has delivered much more harm than good, from the Iraq War to the financial crisis to the Trump presidency.”
So while Republicans are trying to pick off small groups of politically homeless Democrats, like Black men and Jewish Americans, and Democrats are going after disaffected Republicans who believe Trump is bad for the country, the larger question remains: What can be done about it? Is the political center doomed, or can a new center emerge?
In the UK, Keir Starmer tacked to the political center to lead the once-more leftist Labour Party to a huge majority just a few months ago — a majority he now seems to be squandering.
But merely mouthing centrist words is just political lip-synching to cover up the fact that small “l” liberals no longer know how to play the instrument of government in a way that will solve the problems. Genuinely alienated voters have bolted to the fringes because they no longer believe government can actually solve the problems it promises it will solve. What to do about the cost of living, housing costs, and a feeling of powerlessness? These are deep problems that small “l” liberals have to solve to earn trust. That requires more than blame-game slogans.
“Being moderate isn’t a political program. You have to stand for something,” Thompson argues. “If there’s going to be a liberal, centrist, moderate political revival, it has to speak to the concerns of people.”
The paternalism of a government that spends money and gets involved in solving every problem for people not only fails to live up to its promises — it can’t solve everything — but it also creates a passive dependency, sending an implicit message that citizens can’t solve their own problems, only the government can. “When liberalism was successful in the past, it was about empowering people,” Thompson says. It doesn’t just rely on technocratic solutions from on high.
This doesn’t mean a new centrist party will emerge in the US or Canada. There is no real pattern for that, while the mainstream parties in both countries have a long history of changing and self-renovating, going from the extremes to the center and back again.
But for now, the fringes are ascendent, leaving behind wandering, zombie-like groups of politically homeless folks who can’t stand either side. These people are looking for reasons to vote Republican or Democrat without betraying their core principles, excusing crude mendacity, ignoring pressing problems, or ending up on the wrong side of history.
“With the advent of social media, voting against candidates or parties has been on the increase, which supercharges a negative political discourse,” says Nanos. “This has corresponded with increased anti-establishment sentiment. The impact is short-termism. Who can we punish today? Where can we vent our anger? The casualty is that discussions about long-term decisions are punted in favor of immediacy.”
That immediacy will likely mean most voters will ignore things they can’t stand and pick one salient issue — tax rates, climate, abortion, Israel, or Gaza — and cast a reluctant ballot.
“It’s hard to see the politically homeless being decisive this time around, either in the US or Canada,” says Thompson. “Except to the extent that they’ll hold their noses and pick a side.”
Second annual US-Canada Summit focuses on security and trade
Toronto was the place to be this Tuesday for the second annual US-Canada Summit, co-hosted by Eurasia Group and BMO. The event featured a cross-border who’s who of speakers, including former Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson, Under Secretary for Policy at the US Department of Homeland Security Robert Silvers, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, and Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Canadian political heavyweights included the premiers of Ontario and Saskatchewan, Doug Ford and Scott Moe, as well as federal cabinet ministers Mélanie Joly and Anita Anand. UN Climate Envoy and former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney gave the closing keynote, and both the US and Canadian Ambassadors, David Cohen and Kirsten Hillman, shared the stage. A full list of speakers can be viewedhere.
This year’s themes were the economy and security north and south of the 49th parallel. A major focus was the shift from global to regional blocs in international trade. While Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer reassured the crowd that “Globalization is not falling apart. We are not heading to a Cold War here,” the Chairman of Cynosure Group and former Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve Randal Quarles took a more skeptical view. “If you’re a 55-year-old furniture maker from Hickory, North Carolina, globalization is never going to be better for you,” he said. The hollowing out of the working class and its impact on politics featured prominently, from the possibility of a second Trump administration to the recent right-wing victories in European Parliamentary elections.
Geopolitical tensions were also on the menu. Speakers touched on the wars in Ukraine and Israel, with Joly underscoring that US President Joe Biden’s proposal is “fundamental” to resolving the latter conflict. China loomed large in the conversation, with Silvers discussing how the US Department of Homeland Security is securing America’s ports by engaging Japanese firm Mitsui to replace Chinese cranes currently dominating port infrastructure. Ford emphasized that “China has the nickel market cornered. You know where the last safe haven is? Here in Ontario.” The Ontario premier concluded his presentation in his trademark style by giving the crowd his phone number (and no, we’re not going to publish it here).
Several speakers emphasized the need for energy security, including securing the supply chain for critical minerals necessary to build EVs. According to Dunleavy, as the world order shifts from a globalist to a regionalist perspective, North America can prosper by securing both its domestic supply and transformation. Moe emphasized that “If we get our energy security, we’ll have our food security, we’ll have our national security. But it starts with energy security.”
Finally, speakers discussed the post-COVID employment landscape and the impact of AI. Jonas Prising, chairman and CEO of ManpowerGroup, said that remote work is here to stay for the world’s knowledge workers. Eurasia Group released a new survey, which found that when asked about job automation, 17% of respondents believe almost all or most of their work could be done by machines, 28% say some of it, and 31% think not very much or almost none. The remaining 24% reported that they do not have a job.
Carney concluded the conference by underscoring the need for an inclusive economy and the importance of a growth mindset, particularly in Canada. “We need to build an economy for all Canadians. We can’t redistribute what we don’t have. We have less to spend because we’ve become less productive.”
Keeping the trains running on time was GZERO Publisher Evan Solomon, who served as event MC while Eurasia Group Advisors Gerald Butts and John Baird and Director Shari Freidman moderated several panels. And in true Canadian form, hockey was a running theme for the day, starting with BMO CEO Darryl White citing the Gordie Howe Bridge as a testament to the strength of the Canada-US trade relationship, and finishing up with Carney wishing the Oilers good luck in the Stanley Cup finals. Based on the way they played last night, they’ll be needing it.
Tracking anti-Navalny bot armies
In an exclusive investigation into online disinformation surrounding online reaction to Alexei Navalny's death, GZERO asks whether it is possible to track the birth of a bot army. Was Navalny's tragic death accompanied by a massive online propaganda campaign? We investigated, with the help of a company called Cyabra.
Alexei Navalny knew he was a dead man the moment he returned to Moscow in January 2021. Vladimir Putin had already tried to kill him with the nerve agent Novichok, and he was sent to Germany for treatment. The poison is one of Putin’s signatures, like pushing opponents out of windows or shooting them in the street. Navalny knew Putin would try again.
Still, he came home.
“If your beliefs are worth something,” Navalny wrote on Facebook, “you must be willing to stand up for them. And if necessary, make some sacrifices.”
He made the ultimate sacrifice on Feb. 16, when Russian authorities announced, with Arctic banality, that he had “died” at the IK-3 penal colony more than 1,200 miles north of Moscow. A frozen gulag. “Convict Navalny A.A. felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness,” they announced as if quoting a passage from Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.” Later, deploying the pitch-black doublespeak of all dictators, they decided to call it, “sudden death syndrome.”
Worth noting: Navalny was filmed the day before, looking well. There is no body for his wife and two kids to see. No autopsy.
As we wrote this morning, Putin is winning on all fronts. Sensing NATO support for the war in Ukraine is wavering – over to you, US Congress – Putin is acting with confident impunity. His army is gaining ground in Ukraine. He scored a propaganda coup when he toyed with dictator-fanboy Tucker Carlson during his two-hour PR session thinly camouflaged as an “interview.” And just days after Navalny was declared dead, the Russian pilot Maksim Kuzminov, who defected to Ukraine with his helicopter last August, was gunned down in Spain.
And then, of course, there is the disinformation war, another Putin battleground. Navalny’s death got me wondering if there would be an orchestrated disinformation campaign around the event, and if so, whether there was any way to track it? Would there be, say, an online release of shock bot troops to combat Western condemnation of Navalny’s death and blunt the blowback?
It turns out there was.
To investigate, GZERO asked the “social threat information company” Cyabra, which specializes in tracking bots, to look for disinformation surrounding the online reactions to the news about Navalny. The Israeli company says its job is to uncover “threats” on social platforms. It has built AI-driven software to track “attacks such as impersonation, data leakage, and online executive perils as they occur.”
Cyabra’s team focused on the tweets President Joe Bidenand Prime Minister Justin Trudeau posted condemning Navalny’s death. Their software analyzed the number of bots that targeted these official accounts. And what they found was fascinating.
According to Cyabra, “29% of the Twitter profiles interacting with Biden’s post about Navalny on X were identified as inauthentic.” For Trudeau, the number was 25%.
Courtesy of Cyabra
So, according to Cyabra, more than a quarter of the reaction you saw on X related to Navalny’s death and these two leaders’ reactions came from bots, not humans. In other words, a bullshit campaign of misinformation.
This finding raises a lot of questions. What’s the baseline of corruption to get a good sense of comparison? For example, is 27% bot traffic on Biden’s tweet about Navalny’s death a lot, or is everything on social media flooded with the same amount of crap? How does Cyabra's team actually track bots, and how accurate is their data? Are they missing bots that are well-disguised, or, on the other side, are some humans being labeled as “inauthentic”? In short, what does this really tell us?
In the year of elections, with multiple wars festering and AI galloping ahead of regulation, the battle against disinformation and bots is more consequential than ever. The bot armies of the night are marching. We need to find a torch to see where they are and if there are any tools that can help us separate fact from fiction.
Tracking bot armies is a job that often happens in the shadows, and it comes with a lot of challenges. Can this be done without violating people’s privacy? How hard is this to combat? I spoke with the CEO of Cyabra, Dan Brahmy, to get his view.
Solomon: When Cyabra tracked the reactions to the tweets from President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau about the “death” of Navalny, you found more than 25% of the accounts were inauthentic. What does this tell us about social media and what people can actually trust is real?
Brahmy: From elections to sporting events to other significant international headline events, social media is often the destination for millions of people to follow the news and share their opinion. Consequently, it is also the venue of choice for malicious actors to manipulate the narrative.
This was also the case when Cyabra looked into President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau’s X post directly blaming Putin for Navalny’s death. These posts turned out to be the ideal playing ground for narrative-manipulating bots. Inauthentic accounts on a large scale attacked Biden and Trudeau and blamed them for their foreign and domestic policies while attempting to divert attention from Putin and the negative narrative surrounding him.
The high number of fake accounts detected by Cyabra, together with the speed at which those accounts engaged in the conversation to divert and distract following the announcement of Navalny’s death, shows the capabilities of malicious actors and their intentions to conduct sophisticated influence operations.
Solomon: Can you tell where these are from and who is doing it?
Brahmy: Cyabra monitors for publicly available information on social media and does not track IP addresses or any private information. The publicly shared location of the account is collected by Cyabra. When analyzing the Navalny conversation, Cyabra saw that the majority of the accounts claimed themselves as coming from the US.
Solomon: There is always the benchmark question: How much “bot” traffic or inauthentic traffic do you expect at any time, for any online event? Put the numbers we see here for Trudeau and Biden in perspective.
Brahmy: The average percentage of fake accounts participating in an everyday conversation online typically varies between 4 and 8%. Cyabra’s discovery of 25-29% fake accounts related to this conversation is alarming, significant, and should give us cause for concern.
Solomon: Ok, then there is the accuracy question. How do you actually identify a bot and how do you know, given the sophistication of AI and new bots, that you are not missing a lot of them? Is it easier to find “obvious bots”— i.e., something that tweets every two minutes 24 hours a day, then say, a series of bots that look and act very human?
Brahmy: Using advanced AI and machine learning, Cyabra analyzes a profile’s activity and interactions to determine if it demonstrates non-human behaviors. Cyabra’s proprietary algorithm consists of over 500 behavioral parameters. Some parameters are more intuitive, like the use of multiple languages, while others require in-depth expertise and advanced machine learning. Cyabra’s technology works at scale and in almost real-time.
Solomon: There is so much disinformation anyway – actual people who lie, mislead, falsify, scam – how much does this matter?
Brahmy: The creation and activities of fake accounts on social media (whether it be a bot, sock puppet, troll, or otherwise) should be treated with the utmost seriousness. Fake accounts are almost exclusively created for nefarious purposes. By identifying inauthentic profiles and then analyzing their behaviors and the false narratives they are spreading, we can understand the intentions of malicious actors and remedy them as a society.
While we all understand that the challenge of disinformation is pervasive and a threat to society, being able to conduct the equivalent of an online CT scan reveals the areas that most urgently need our attention.
Solomon: Why does it matter in a big election year?
Brahmy: More than 4 billion people globally are eligible to vote in 2024, with over 50 countries holding elections. That’s 40% of the world’s population. Particularly during an election year, tracking disinformation is important – from protecting the democratic process, ensuring informed decision-making, preventing foreign interference, and promoting transparency, to protecting national security. By tracking and educating the public on the prevalence of inauthentic accounts, we slowly move closer to creating a digital environment that fosters informed, constructive, and authentic discourse.
You can check out part of the Cybara report here.
- Understanding Navalny’s legacy inside Russia ›
- Navalny’s widow continues his fight for freedom ›
- “A film is a weapon on time delay” — an interview with “Navalny” director Daniel Roher ›
- Navalny's death is a huge loss for democracy - NATO's Mircea Geona ›
- Alexei Navalny's death: A deep tragedy for Russia ›
- Navalny's death is a message to the West ›
- Navalny’s death: Five things to know ›
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.
Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.
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.
- Will China end Russia’s war? ›
- The AI power paradox: Rules for AI's power ›
- Accelerating Sustainability with AI: A Playbook ›
- Top Risks 2023: A rogue Russia and autocrats threatening the world ›
- Eurasia Group’s Top Global Risks 2024 ›
- 2024's top global risks: The trifecta of wars threatening global peace - GZERO Media ›
- What would a second Trump term mean? Think Jurassic Park - GZERO Media ›
- Trump's immunity claim: US democracy in crisis - GZERO Media ›
- Pakistan-Iran attacks: Another Middle East conflict heats up - GZERO Media ›
- AI regulation means adapting old laws for new tech: Marietje Schaake - GZERO Media ›
- 2024 is the ‘Voldemort’ of election years, says Ian Bremmer - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Trouble ahead: The top global risks of 2024 - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Bremmer's 2024 State of the World speech: Watch live Tuesday at 8:30 pm ET - GZERO Media ›
- The challenges of peacekeeping amid rising global conflicts - GZERO Media ›
- Live on Jan. 6: the Top Risks of 2025 - GZERO Media ›
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
Negotiating with Henry Kissinger and his legacy
I was writing my column today about the Israel-Hamas cease-fire when I heard the news that Henry Kissinger had died at the age of 100. For a media company like ours, which focuses on geopolitics, Kissinger is one of the most defining, controversial, and complicated figures of the last century.
It is hard to find anyone who has worked seriously on politics or studied foreign affairs who has not had an encounter with or held a view of Henry Kissinger. Statesman. War criminal. Genius. Failure. You name it, the allegations have been thrown at him. Kissinger embodied the possibilities and the perils of power. You will hear the debate over his legacy play out – as it has been playing out for decades – in the days and weeks to come. But the first thing you have to know about him is this: Everything and every moment with Kissinger was a negotiation. Including his legacy.
I experienced this the first time I met him.
It was April 2003, and I was in New York at Dr. Kissinger’s office to interview him for the weekly CBC TV show I hosted at the time, “Hot Type.” I would do hour-long, sit-down interviews with thinkers, writers, and leaders. Our team had tried to get the interview with Kissinger for two years, first because he had much to say about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were then raging, but also to get him to respond to the best-selling, eviscerating critique of his life written by Christopher Hitchens in the book, “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.” It demanded a response.
Hitchens, a brilliant writer who marshaled language as a weapon to combat Kissinger’s bombs, was a regular on my show who argued strenuously that Kissinger should be tried as a war criminal. “I have never been more serious,” he said, as he took a drink. We always had a drink handy during Hitchens interviews because he insisted on having a Scotch and an ashtray before deploying his thoughts. “We have the evidence.” Hitch went on to present it all, from the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia to what he said was one of Kissinger’s worst but almost ignored alleged crimes. “In his capacity as national security adviser, Henry Kissinger arranged for the murder of a military officer in Chile, Raul Schneider, head of the Chilean armed forces general staff.” Hitch took a puff of smoke and went on: “You may have heard this expression lately in America, that there should be a proper, orderly transition of power. Well, because of Nixon, people didn’t want an orderly transition of power, and it fell to Kissinger to have Schneider removed, so he commissioned a hit on him.”
The events Hitch described bear repeating. On Oct. 22, 1970, CIA-backed militants shot Schneider point blank as he traveled to work. They didn’t kill him immediately, but Schneider died three days later. Declassified documents from the National Security Archive make it impossible to overestimate how involved Kissinger and the CIA were in this assassination and the subsequent coup that overthrew the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende. It was part of the secret CIA plan called “Operation FUBELT,” which irrefutably laid out everything Hitch argued (read more about it here, if you want). In 2001, Schneider’s family actually brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Kissinger, but it was tossed out of court because the Official Act protected Kissinger from legal liability.
In any case, you can see why Kissinger was not keen on a sit-down. His legacy was, even then, so long and so vast that both supporters and detractors like Hitchens had much to put on display. Supporters often pointed to his ending the Vietnam War and the Nobel Peace Prize he won in 1973, or the “shuttle diplomacy” he did in the Middle East, or the critical role he played in bringing China into the global community. They argue – as did Kissinger in his memoirs – that he was a man of his time, a time when the fight against Communism was the dominant threat to democracy. Add in the existential threat of nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and Kissinger believed that the US had a critical, if sometimes bloody, role to play that it could not ignore. That is the very essence of realpolitik, as he defined it. Maybe. But even his most ardent supporters – and there were many – knew that the US role in Cambodia, Chile, and Indonesia left behind hard-to-remove immoral tattoos.
Still, this was the world in which Kissinger lived, and eventually, he agreed to talk to us, and we went to his office. As we were setting up, Kissinger walked by and popped his head into the room.
He looked at me in that languorous, predatory manner of his and said, “You will have 20 minutes.”
I knew immediately that he was testing me, seeing how I would react, and I was prepared. That was his way with everyone. “Dr. Kissinger,” I said, “you like to negotiate, and I think you can do a lot better than that.”
He paused, but I could not discern any reaction. “You have 20 minutes,” he repeated, his deep, bouldery voice falling another impossible octave as he trundled off.
When he finally sat down, he stayed for an hour.
We went through as much of his career as we could – he would not talk much about the Schneider case as it was in court, but he focused a fair bit on Hitchens’ critique, trying to bat it away.
“I’m not going to go through my life answering charges that are always, almost always out of context,” he said. “I have written three volumes of memoirs which people can read, and which I think will stand the test of documents becoming available. And if there is an important discussion of an issue, I may participate in it, but I’m not going to spend my life answering Hitchens.”
I pressed him on the illegal bombing of Cambodia, which was a stain he would never erase. How did he justify the bombings? His response is something that has stayed with me ever since. Remember, from 1969 to 1973, Kissinger worked with President Richard Nixon as both national security adviser and secretary of state, and to contain the Vietcong, Kissinger orchestrated the illegal bombing of Cambodia. In those years, the US dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs on Cambodia, causing what scholars have estimated to be 150,000 deaths or more. As the Washington Post wrote today, “The scale of this bombing campaign, internally called Operation Menu, was kept secret from the American public for many decades, though leaked and declassified records have revealed that Kissinger personally 'approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids.'” Not only that, the bombing eventually led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the genocide that took place there.
But when I asked Kissinger about it, he simply said, “There were no people in those villages.”
No people?
The line haunts me. Of course, there were people there. What did he mean – that his end-justifies-the-means calculator didn’t count numbers below 150,000? Or worse, that Communist sympathizers were not considered people?
We debated the US invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan – he was 80 then and an adviser to George W. Bush – and we talked about his opening up of China and many other more celebrated aspects of his career, until I finally asked him a more fundamental question: Do you have any regrets? I wanted to turn back to the terrible costs of war.
“You know, on the question of regret,” he said, “I – one of these days I’m going to learn a good answer to that because …”
“You don’t have any regrets?” I interrupted, still a bit incredulous. And now, he smiled.
“No, I have many,” he admitted. “But what you mean by that is moral regret. You don’t mean tactical regrets. So, we tried to think through, my associates and I, where America was back then. We wrote annual, long, reports, we spent much time, I think, on the basic strategies we developed, and … I have no…I have no regrets.”
The last time I saw Kissinger was a few months ago in New York. I was at the launch of a new book on artificial intelligence by Mustafa Suleyman, and the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was giving the opening remarks. Schmidt had co-written a book with Kissinger in 2021 called “The Age of AI: And Our Human Future” and suddenly, as I was walking in, out walked Dr. Kissinger.
“Dr. Kissinger,” I said, but he passed silently, surrounded by people.
He was 100 and still attending book launches, writing about AI and politics and the future, advising politicians from both sides of the aisle, and right up to the very end, trundling forward, pushing ideas, and flexing his influence … with no regrets.