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Trump is leading a political revolution. Will he succeed?
For 20 years now, we've been warned about China's rise, America's decline, and the inevitable collision between the two superpowers.
That’s not what's happening today.
The bigger story of our G-Zero world, which I laid out during my “State of the World” speech in Tokyo on Monday, is that the United States – still the world’s most powerful nation – has chosen to walk away from the international system it built and led for three-quarters of a century. Not because it's weak. Not because it has to. But because it wants to.
From unpredictable to unreliable
There’s no historical precedent for this choice. Since the end of World War II, America's elected leaders have upheld a commitment to US leadership in a troubled world. In service of that goal, they’ve bolstered allies to make them stronger, more competitive, and more secure.
But American willingness to lead is now buckling under a politics of grievance. Citizens increasingly feel US institutions – and many of the nation's elected leaders – have failed to deliver on their promises and no longer represent them. For millions of voters, the social contract – the implicit promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, the system will reward you – has been broken. Trump is a symptom, a beneficiary, and an accelerant of this breakdown, but he didn’t cause it.
As Americans have lost faith in their own system, so they have turned inward: away from allies, collective security, free trade, global institutions, and international rule of law. This is the G-Zero world I’ve been writing about for years, a vacuum of global leadership that no one else is willing and able to fill.
It doesn’t help that America's allies have brought less to the table in recent decades. Europe, the UK, Canada, and Japan are lagging in productivity and growth, face weak demographics, and have chronically underinvested in defense and technological innovation. They're more dependent on Washington precisely when Americans want their government to do less globally.
Winston Churchill said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they've exhausted all other options. The United States has always been unpredictable: in elections, in trade agreements, even in matters of war and peace. But it was rarely unreliable.
Today it is both. The United States remains committed to existing international norms, treaties, and agreements only insofar as they serve the interests of President Trump and his political allies. Governments sign deals only to have Washington unilaterally change the terms. Suspend intelligence-sharing overnight. Cut lifesaving foreign aid. Intervene in the domestic politics of friendly democracies. Threaten the territorial integrity of allies like Canada and Denmark. Impose the highest tariffs in nearly a century. Abandon countless global institutional commitments. The list goes on. America's unreliability has become the central driver of geopolitical uncertainty and instability in today's G-Zero world.
But unreliability is only half the story. To understand the scale of the problem – how deep it runs, how long it lasts, what can be done about it – you need to understand what’s currently happening inside the United States: a political revolution.
As a political scientist, I don't use the word "revolution" lightly. It implies a fundamental change in a country's governance – an attempt to overthrow what exists and replace it with something new. Whether motivated by ideology, identity, or wealth, a true revolution always depends on the ability and willingness of powerful actors to seize an opportunity created by a belief across society that the existing system is broken and therefore illegitimate. In this sense, revolutions are made, not born.
There have been two state revolutions with truly global impact in my lifetime.
The first was Mikhail Gorbachev's socialist revolution. The Soviet Union had long been losing ground in its Cold War competition with the United States. An out-of-touch party elite and sclerotic economic system struggled to sustain the state and fund an arms race Moscow looked destined to lose. To reverse Soviet stagnation, Gorbachev unleashed radical internal reforms: political openness (glasnost) to encourage competing ideas, economic restructuring (perestroika) to inject competitive market elements into the centrally planned economy, and self-accounting (khozraschyot) to devolve power from Moscow to the Soviet republics.
These reforms quickly undermined the foundations of the Soviet system. They enabled citizens, oligarchs, and nationalists to question the regime's legitimacy, creating widespread internal opposition and social dissent. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc accelerated the Kremlin's loss of control, and a nationalities revolution led to Soviet disintegration shortly after. Gorbachev's revolution failed, taking the Soviet Union with it.
The second revolution was Deng Xiaoping's economic modernization of China. In the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party leader responded to China’s underproductive, inefficient, and technologically stagnant socialist economy by transforming it from central planning to state capitalism: open to private enterprise, foreign investment, and trade.
Western governments eventually embraced Deng’s reforms, culminating in China's WTO admission in 2001. But the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the collapse of Eastern European communism, and the Soviet implosion all persuaded China's leaders that political reform was too dangerous. The Party's monopoly on power became non-negotiable, and it remains so to this day.
Still, Deng's economic revolution was a spectacular success. China lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, sustained nearly 10% annual growth for two generations, and became a middle-income economy of 1.4 billion that currently leads the world in many frontier technologies.
Trump's political revolution
And now we turn to Washington. Is it right to call what's happening inside the United States a revolution? It's early to say for sure, but increasingly I believe the answer is yes.
The president of the United States says the greatest threat to America is posed not by Beijing or Moscow or terrorists. The true enemies, he warns, are members of the opposite political party: its supporters, its fundraisers, and even its voters. President Trump believes his return to power allows – demands! – the end of political checks and balances on his executive authority.
There's not much economic revolution here. Yes, Trump has imposed the highest tariffs since the 1930s. Yes, he's trying to undermine the Federal Reserve's independence. And yes, he's dabbling in state capitalism – golden shares in US Steel, a 10% stake in Intel, a 15% cut of certain Nvidia and AMD chip sales. But these are ad hoc moves, marginal decisions in the context of the broader US economy. They’re not doctrine.
Trump picks winners and losers to demonstrate power, to reward loyalty, to extract rents. There's no structural transformation of how markets operate or the way the private sector engages with (and often captures) the regulatory system. There’s no strategic restructuring of capital. In fact, President Trump has abandoned his signature promise from 2016: "drain the swamp." Corruption and self-dealing aren't an economic revolution. They're business as usual in America's increasingly broken capitalist system … just more permitted now.
But a political revolution is another matter. President Trump is consolidating executive authority by pushing the boundaries of the law. He’s usurping powers traditionally left to Congress, the courts, and the states. He’s tried to undermine his political opposition to ensure they no longer pose a challenge to him and his allies. In part, this is Donald Trump's transactional approach to power. But it's also political retribution – a form of revenge on those whom Trump believes did, or tried to do, the same to him.
President Trump has accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department of Justice to imprison him and of promoting a "cancel culture" approach to right-wing speech, including by deplatforming Trump himself from social media after the January 6 Capitol riots.
Trump says the left in America has demonized him and his allies as "fascists" in ways that promote political violence, and he can point to two attempts to assassinate him during last year's election campaign as well as the recent murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to make his point.
The president's choices have wide-ranging and lasting implications. Inside the United States, the president has won the total loyalty of the Republican Party and the reliable support of Republican lawmakers for his revisionist legislative and executive agendas.
He has begun a sweeping purge of America's professional bureaucracy – which Trump and his supporters call the "Administrative State" – and replaced career civil servants with political appointees who are personally loyal to the president. He has weaponized the "power ministries" – the FBI, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, and many regulatory agencies – against his domestic political adversaries. And he has secured executive impunity from the rulings of an independent but no longer coequal judiciary.
In short, President Trump is replacing the rule of law with the rule of Don at home, much like he’s embracing the law of the jungle – where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must – internationally.
Unlike the Gorbachev and Deng revolutions, Trump's revolution follows no grand strategic plan. Instead, it's a relentless pressure campaign to test the limits of what can be done on every political front – a commitment to act opportunistically as the crises these policies create open new possibilities to consolidate ever more power. This plan was launched by targeting those of Trump’s opponents who are most vulnerable and least organized, such as undocumented immigrants, green card holders, transgender people, and elite universities. The administration has since moved into the broader political categories of funders, supporters, and enablers of his political opponents. All of this is being undertaken with the intention of normalizing behaviors that have long been politically taboo.
Will Trump’s revolution succeed?
How much more can President Trump accomplish before next year's midterms or by Election Day 2028?
Partially, it's a matter of degree. The United States already has a structural bias toward Republicans because of the Electoral College system through which presidents are elected. A candidate can win the popular vote but lose the presidency thanks to the demographic and geographic distribution of electors, which confers a roughly 2-percentage-point advantage to Republican candidates. Add aggressive gerrymandering – with both parties rigging district maps – and elections become even less representative, less competitive, less legitimate.
More concerning is the possibility of President Trump deploying the National Guard in Democratic cities under the guise of a declared "national emergency" to suppress voter turnout. Federal probes into Democratic fundraising and organizations already underway add to these pressures, making these tactics increasingly plausible – and the election is still more than a year away.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting Trump runs for a third term or suspends elections. The Supreme Court would block both moves. But uncompetitive elections? Elections that look more like a single-party system than a competitive representative democracy? With the broader checks on presidential power now in question, that's increasingly plausible.
Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the Democratic Party's current divisions mean the legislature functions less independently from the executive. Even if Democrats retake majority control of the House of Representatives (a Senate flip is very unlikely), they’ll have no power to enforce subpoenas or force a defiant executive branch to cooperate with their oversight efforts.
America's judiciary remains independent, but its power now pales in comparison to that of the executive. The Supreme Court, aware that Trump could refuse to comply with decisions he dislikes, regularly limits the scope of its rulings to preserve its own institutional legitimacy. Though lower courts aren't as restrained, their decisions can be and often are overturned, giving Trump more leeway to consolidate authority.
The media, constrained by profit-driven corporate owners, faces pressure from above to avoid antagonizing the White House. Social media is increasingly controlled by Trump's political allies (more so when the TikTok sale goes through) and, in the case of Truth Social, by Trump himself.
There are still US institutions that can check the president's power. The military stands as a bastion of professionalism – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's blind loyalty to the president notwithstanding – because its culture continues to prioritize service to the nation over loyalty to any individual. The Pentagon's purges of some high-level military officers have made headlines, but not like China's last week – and they don't undermine the military's core operational integrity.
The devolution of political power to states and cities also offers a buffer. Many US governors and mayors are competent technocrats who govern independently of Washington. Trump's attempts to weaken Democratic national powers don't threaten state and city-level governance.
Corporate and financial leaders, uncomfortable with political upheaval, tend to avoid political confrontation that could jeopardize their interests and those of their shareholders. Most will focus on regulatory influence instead.
And then there are the American people themselves. More than five million Americans turned out in thousands of "No Kings Day" protests across the country this weekend, the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam War. President Trump is a historically polarizing and unpopular president. But then again, so is the 2025 Democratic Party.
Remember: Trump was freely and fairly elected in large part because he embodied the political and cultural disruption that a plurality of voters craved. Most Americans who said they cared about democracy in 2024 voted for, not against, Trump, precisely because they were convinced the system was already broken and only he offered hope for change.
The fate of Trump's political revolution is uncertain, but on current trends, a constitutional crisis before the next elections looks increasingly likely. Possible outcomes range from a Republican break with Trump to a sustained political shift toward single-party rule in the United States. Nor can we rule out the kind of political chaos, realignment, and violence that America saw in the decades after the Civil War.
One thing I know for sure: the United States is not going back to the political culture that held sway a decade ago, before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator. The sooner the world accepts that, the sooner it can figure out how to respond and adapt to a post-American order. More on this next week.
Ian Bremmer's State of the World 2025 speech
Ian Bremmer took the stage in Tokyo for his annual “State of the World” address on October 21, outlining the major geopolitical turns of 2025 and previewing what comes next. In a year defined by a deepening G‑Zero world, Ian discusses global uncertainty driven by the unpredictable and increasingly unreliable United States, the dynamic emerging in US‑China relations, the nascent American “political revolution,” and the “defense first, hedge second” strategies adopted by US allies.
Ian delivered this year’s State of the World address at the GZERO Summit Japan, hosted by Eurasia Group—the world’s leading political risk research and consulting firm. Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, dedicated to intelligent, engaging coverage of international affairs. The speech was streamed live on GZERO’s website and social channels.
Watch the speech in the video above and read Ian's full remarks below.
State of the World 2025 Speech: Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media (Delivered on October 21, 2025 at Eurasia Group’s GZERO Summit Japan in Tokyo)
Thank you very much. A packed house today, a lot of friends in the audience, and a truly historic day to be hosting a GZERO Summit here in Tokyo with the new government coming in. There's plenty to talk about and yes, the reality of a G-zero world that Japan is now not preparing for but is in the middle of.
For 20 years now, 20 years, we have been warned about China's rise, we've been warned about America's decline, and we've been warned about the inevitable collision between the two superpowers. And I want to say in front of you today, that is absolutely not what's happening.
China's influence does continue to expand. That's true. And America no longer commands the global stage the way it did at the end of the Cold War. That's also true. But the bigger story of our G-zero world is that the United States, still today, the world's most powerful nation, has chosen to walk away from the international system that the United States built and led for three quarters of a century. Not because it's weak, not because it has to, because it wants to. There is no historic precedent for this. It's never happened before. And today, I want to talk with all of you about what that choice means, about how America got here, about how others are responding and what comes next.
Since the end of World War II, America's elected leaders, presidents and legislators, have kept a commitment to US leadership in a troubled world. And in service of that goal, they have bolstered allies to make them stronger, more competitive, and more secure. Japan, coming out of World War II, experienced this as no other. But American willingness to lead is now buckling under a politics of grievance that has taken hold inside the United States. Voters increasingly feel that US institutions and many of the nation's elected leaders no longer represent them. And as a result, the United States is no longer as committed to international rule of law, to global institutions, or to American allies.
Now, this is partly the result of deep political conflict inside the United States. Trump himself is a symptom and a principal beneficiary of this conflict, not the cause. He's also, to be sure, an accelerant. He's making it faster. And much attention has been paid to the Trump administration's reluctance to commit to its allies’ defense, and rightly so. That also is in part a response to the painful reality, and we need to admit this, that in recent decades, America's allies have brought less to the table than they used to.
The European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, and yes, Japan are lagging in productivity. They're lagging in investment. They've underspent on their own defense. They're producing fewer genuine technological breakthroughs. And this makes their security and their prosperity more dependent on the United States precisely at the moment that Americans want their government to do less, not more. Let's all admit that as table stakes right now.
Winston Churchill once said, "You can count on the Americans to always do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other available options." Now, the United States has always been unpredictable; Elections, trade deals, even war and peace, but the United States has rarely been unreliable, and Winston Churchill knew that. But today, most leaders that I know outside the United States, including right here in Japan, both in government and in business, see the United States as both unpredictable and unreliable. Governments sign trade deals and Washington unilaterally changes the terms. The US suspends intelligence sharing, cuts foreign aid, intervenes in the domestic politics of friendly democracies, threatens the territorial integrity of allies like Canada and Denmark, even if the threats come with a smile and a wink.
At the global level, the United States has backed away from countless institutional commitments. A decade ago, Barack Obama forged an Iranian nuclear deal, which Donald Trump later renounced. In 2016, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton abandoned Democratic Party support for the Transpacific Partnership despite years of diplomatic effort when she was Obama's top diplomat. President Obama brought the US into the Paris Climate Accord. Trump reversed that decision. President Joe Biden then reaffirmed US climate commitments and then Trump renounced them all over again. Washington has washed its hands of the World Health Organization and UNESCO. I do not have time to go through the full list. You all can come up and talk to me after.
Unreliability does not imply that there is an absence of American leadership. The Trump administration can claim genuine foreign policy victories. The ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, for example, still tenuous, but shows that Washington can provide leadership for the benefit of other countries and other people. And I expect that Trump is going to stay focused on trying to keep that deal together.
But what is the president's strategy for ending the war in Ukraine? Or for getting a trade deal with China? And those questions are hard to answer, not because Trump doesn't have ideas, but because his tactical approaches often contradict one another, and they shift in real time, and because Trump frequently doesn't follow through on his threats when he believes he lacks leverage to get what he wants. American unreliability has become the central driver of geopolitical uncertainty and instability in today's G-zero world.
Now, there is a silver lining in this dark cloud and it's an important one. I just came back from Beijing this last week, and the United States and China continue to lurch from mini-crisis to mini-crisis on trade and export controls, but the big picture is that they are moving towards a more stable place. And this has happened because Beijing has forced Trump to climb down from threats of a full trade war by using its own dominance of the global market and supply chain for critical minerals and rare earths. They've also used a healthy dose of Chinese strategic patience, and they've persuaded Trump that China has real bargaining power. In response, President Trump has made clear to trade hawks in his own administration that until Washington has developed a hedging strategy for these all-important minerals, which will take longer than Trump imagines, that the Americans should try to avoid direct conflict with China.
As a result, earlier this year, Washington approved an easing in export controls on certain semiconductor chips, in exchange for a Chinese easing of new critical minerals licensing agreements. Don't underestimate the importance of that. Until recently, this move was an absolute no-go area for both President Trump and President Biden before him.
Now you've seen the headlines in recent days, the United States and China are at it again, drawing battle lines ahead of an expected Trump-Xi three-hour meeting at the upcoming Apex Summit in South Korea. But Xi's willingness to meet Trump at the end of the month, and then in China next year, without a clear path to a deal in place is a shift in the way Beijing thinks about dealing with the Americans. And it says that China sees that Trump is a man that they want to do business with. The bargaining process will stay contentious, but both leaders want a deal, and I think a deal will come.
But beyond stabilizing US-China relations, US unreliability is deepening the fears of other governments around the world.
At the end of July, the White House announced tariffs on over 90 countries accused of cheating the United States on trade. New duties on most of these states went into effect in early August. But it's the way that Trump went about announcing these penalties that caught other governments, and to be fair, American lawmakers, off guard. The implementation of duties, trade duties, is traditionally a power reserved for Congress. President Trump used a 50-year-old economic emergency law that doesn't explicitly even mention the word tariff to claim this right for himself, daring his critics to stop him in court. No previous American president has ever used this tactic. It's clearly not the intention of the law.
To demonstrate the arbitrary nature of decision-making on trade, decisions with economic and diplomatic implications all over the world, look at what the US president did on India. It's a country that Trump, like every US president, has courted as a counterweight to China. And then in August, Trump slapped 25% tariffs on him. A few weeks later, he doubled them. Why? Because Prime Minister Modi wouldn't give Trump credit for mediating a ceasefire with Pakistan. For now, the White House has struck agreements with Japan, the EU, the UK, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, though in this last case, Trump changed the terms of the agreement with Hanoi after the officials had already signed it. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last week that US and South Korea are in the final stages of negotiations on their deal.
But high tariffs stay in place. We are at the highest we have seen from the United States since the 1930s. They cover a range of economic sectors and products that the Trump administration has defined as essential for US national security. You've seen them: steel, aluminum, semiconductors, aircraft, pharmaceuticals. Oh, and don't let me forget upholstered furniture, cabinets, bathroom vanities. Because nothing says national security vulnerability like an insufficiently domestic supply of bathroom cabinetry.
And lest I forget, President Trump is using tariffs and other tools of economic leverage to directly interfere in the domestic politics of friendly democracies. He pledged the $20 billion bailout for Argentina's struggling economy, but only if voters reward President Milei's party in this Sunday's legislative elections. He slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil, which is a country that the United States runs a trade surplus with, to punish the Brazilian supreme court for prosecuting and convicting former president, and Trump's friend, Jair Bolsonaro, over his role in a coup attempt. Never mind that Brazil's President Lula has zero control over the supreme court's rulings or even over Brazil's tariff rates, which require consensus from Mercosur. Trump does not care. Brazil's election is less than a year away, and US influence might backfire just like it did in Canada earlier this year, benefiting Lula. But either way, Brazil is going to hedge against American unreliability by expanding and deepening its ties with China, with Europe, and elsewhere.
In all these ways, the American president is deglobalizing the world's still most powerful economy and with it, the global economy.
Now, if only that were the largest dilemma that the United States now poses for itself and the rest of the world. I could stop right now, but we haven't talked about politics yet. The unreliability problem is now compounded by a political revolution underway in the United States.
I'm a political scientist and I would never use the word revolution lightly. It implies a fundamental change in a country's governance, an attempt to overthrow what exists and replace it with something new. Now, those motives can be some combination of ideological difference of ethnic and tribal identities, maybe access to wealth, but a true revolution always believes on the ability and willingness of powerful actors in a system to seize opportunity, created by a belief across society that the existing system is broken and therefore illegitimate. And in this sense, revolutions are made, they're not born.
Now in my lifetime, we have seen two state revolutions with global impact.
The first was Mikhail Gorbachev's socialist revolution. The Soviet Union was long losing ground in the Cold War. They were an out-of-touch party elite and a sclerotic economic system; they struggled to sustain the state and to fund an arms race that Moscow was destined to lose. And to reverse that, Gorbachev unleashed radical internal reforms: political openness to encourage opposing political ideas, economic restructuring to inject competitiveness of the free market into the centrally planned economy, and self-accounting to devolve political power from Moscow into the Soviet republics. They failed. These reforms undermined the foundations of the Soviet system. They let citizens, and oligarchs, and nationalists question the regime's legitimacy and generate internal opposition, widespread social descent. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the Eastern Bloc accelerated that, and then a nationalities revolution forced Soviet disintegration. The Gorbachev revolution failed, and it took the Soviet Union with it.
The second revolution was in China, authored by Deng Xiaoping. In the late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party leader responded to China's underproductive, inefficient, and stagnant socialist economy by transforming it from central planning to state capitalism, open to private enterprise, open to foreign investment, open to trade. Western governments embraced these reforms and that led to China's admission to the World Trade Organization in 2001. The events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, all persuaded Chinese leaders that political reform was too dangerous. The party's monopoly on power was non-negotiable, and it remains so to this day. But the economic revolution succeeded. China lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. They sustained 10% average growth for nearly two generations, and they became a middle-income economy of 1.4 billion, leading the world in many cutting-edge technologies today.
And now we turn to Washington. Is it right to call what's happening inside the United States a political revolution? It's early to say, but increasingly I believe the answer is yes.
The president of the United States says the greatest threat to his country is posed not by Beijing or Moscow, not by terrorists, the true enemies he warns are members of the opposite political party, their supporters, their fundraisers, and even their voters. President Trump believes his return to power allows, even demands, the end of political checks and balances on his executive authority. There's not much economic revolution here. We've talked about the tariffs already. It's true. And yes, he's trying to undermine the Fed's independence. And he has dabbled at the margins in state capitalism, golden shares in US Steel. You've all seen that: a 10% stake in Intel, a 15% cut of Nvidia, and AMD chip sales, but these are ad hoc moves. They're not doctrine. Trump picks winners and losers to demonstrate power, to reward loyalty, but there's no structural transformation of how markets operate in the US, or how the private sector engages with and often captures the regulatory system. There's no strategic restructuring of capital.
In fact, President Trump abandoned one of his signature promises from 2016, "Drain the Swamp." He's not talking about that. And corruption and self-dealing are not economic revolution. They're just business as usual in America's increasingly broken capitalist system. They're just more permitted now.
But a political revolution is another matter. President Trump is consolidating executive power by pushing the boundaries of the law. He's usurping powers traditionally left to Congress, the courts, and the states. He has tried to undermine his political opposition to ensure they no longer represent a challenge to him and his allies. Now in part, that's Donald Trump's transactional approach to power, but it's also political retribution. It is a form of revenge on those that President Trump believes did and tried to do the same to him.
Trump has accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department of Justice to imprison him, of promoting a cancel culture approach to right-wing dissent, including by deplatforming President Trump himself from social media after the January 6th insurrection in the Capitol. President Trump says that the left in America has demonized Trump and his allies as fascists, which they also did with 7 million people demonstrating in the "No Kings" rallies across the country this weekend, the largest social descent that the US has seen since 1969 in Vietnam. And he believes that promotes political violence against him.
He can point to two attempts to assassinate him during last year's election campaign. One that missed by this much. Every person in this room would be affected by that for every day of their lives if that happened to you, if that happened to me. He's got the recent murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as well, helping him make that point.
Now, the president's choices, he's focusing on retribution, have wide ranging and lasting implications. Inside the United States, the president has taken and won total loyalty of the Republican Party and the reliable and consistent support of Republican lawmakers for legislative and executive agendas to undo checks and balances on the presidency.
President Trump has begun a sweeping purge of America's professional bureaucracy, which he and his supporters have labeled the "Administrative State," and replaced career civil servants with political appointees personally loyal to the president. He has weaponized the power ministries that he says were weaponized against him: the FBI, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, and many other regulatory agencies against his domestic political adversaries. He secured executive impunity from the rulings of an independent but no longer co-equal judiciary. And in foreign policy, the United States remains committed to existing norms, treaties, and agreements, only insofar as they serve the interests of President Trump and his political allies. In short, president Trump is replacing "rule of law" with "rule of the jungle," where the powerful, the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.
Unlike the Gorbachev and Deng revolutions, Trump's revolution follows no grand strategic plan. Instead, it's a relentless pressure campaign on every political front. It's meant to test the limits of what can be done. It's a commitment to act opportunistically as the crises that these policies create open new possibilities to consolidate more power. This plan was launched by targeting those of Trump's opponents who are most vulnerable and least organized, like undocumented immigrants, green card holders, transgender people, elite universities, and the Trump administration has since moved into the broader political categories of funders, supporters and enablers of his political opponents. All of this undertaken with the intention of normalizing behaviors that have long been politically taboo.
Will political revolution succeed? How much more can President Trump accomplish before next year's midterm elections or by election day in 2028? These are the most essential political questions to be answered in the world today.
Partially, it's a matter of degree. The United States already has a structural bias favoring Republicans because of the electoral college system by which presidents are elected. A candidate, as you know, can win the popular vote, but lose the presidency thanks to demographics and distribution of electors, which gives you a roughly 2% advantage to Republican candidates. If you add gerrymandering, the redistricting of districts in Congress, both parties rigging district maps, elections become even less representative, less competitive, less legitimate. More concerning is the possibility of President Trump deploying the National Guard in Democratic cities under the guise of a declared national emergency to suppress voter turnout. Federal probes that are starting into democratic fundraising and organizations add to these pressures, making these tactics increasingly plausible. And remember, the election is still more than a year away.
I am not suggesting that Trump runs for a third term or suspends elections. The Supreme Court would block both of those moves. But uncompetitive elections, elections that look more like a single-party system than a competitive representative democracy, that is becoming increasingly plausible. The broader checks on presidential power are now in question. Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the Democratic Party's weakness and division means that legislature functions now independently much less so from the executive. Even if Democrats retake majority control of the House of Representatives, and flipping the Senate looks very unlikely no matter what, they can impeach Trump, they can conduct oversight, they can appear partisan, but with no enforcement power, since the Department of Justice’s cooperation with any investigation is no longer plausible.
America's judiciary is still independent, but its power pales compared to the executive. The Supreme Court, aware that Trump could refuse to accept decisions he doesn't like, is limiting the scope of its rulings to preserve its own legitimacy. Lower courts aren't as restrained, but their decisions can and often are overturned, and that gives Trump more leeway to consolidate authority. The media constrained by profit driven corporate owners faces pressure from above to avoid antagonizing the White House. Social media is increasingly controlled by Trump's political allies, even more when TikTok becomes sold to the US, and in the case of Truth Social, Trump owns it himself.
There are still US institutions that can check the president's power. The military stands for professionalism. Its culture continues to prioritize service to the country over loyalty to any individual. The pentagon's purges of some high-level military officers have made headlines in the US but not like China's of the last week, and they don't undermine the military's core operational integrity.
Shifts in political power towards states and cities also offer a buffer. US governors and mayors are largely technocratic; they govern independently of Washington. And Trump's attempts to weaken Democratic national powers do not threaten state and city level governance. Corporate and financial leadership looks weak. They're uncomfortable with political upheaval. They want to avoid political debate while protecting their interests and their shareholders. Most are focusing on regulatory influence over any engagement that could generate political headlines.
And then there are the American people themselves. You've seen the 7 million Americans that turned out in thousands of "No Kings" protests all over the country this weekend, but remember, Trump was freely and fairly elected in large part because he personally embodied the political and cultural disruption that voters wanted. Most American voters who said they cared about democracy in 2024 voted for, not against Trump. Because they were convinced that the US political system was already broken and that only President Trump would create the disruption that they wanted.
In short, standing in front of you today, the fate of Trump's political revolution remains uncertain. A constitutional crisis before the next elections now looks likely. Possible outcomes of that crisis range from a break from Trump within the Republican Party and the conservative movement towards a sustained political shift towards single-party rule in the United States. Nor can we rule out enormous political chaos, realignment, and violence that the United States has seen historically, certainly in the decades after the Civil War.
What about the longer-term US outlook? And here, the answer is more complicated because historically, the structural advantages of the United States compared to other advanced industrial democracies are based on commitments to a few fundamentals that we should remember all here today: a better post-war infrastructure base on which to build, including public and private institutions; strong demographics supported by inflows of hardworking immigrants; greater public tolerance of an unequal distribution of society's economic gains; and greater tolerance of an ability to engage in deficit spending. All four of these fundamental advantages for the United States are now eroding.
There are certainly caveats. The US remains the world's most powerful country, and there's a lot of damage that can be done before America finds itself in structural decline, which it's not in now, even though America is seen as unreliable trade and security partners by its allies. And also, the accelerating development of artificial intelligence, the first time I've mentioned it, is changing the game. And the US is not the only game in town, but it's one of two. The other one being China. And if you have to make a choice between the US and China on the basis of unreliability, on the basis of lack of rule of law, on the basis of lack of an independent judiciary, the US is a much better bet than China.
But there is one prediction that I can offer today with the highest confidence, and that is that the United States is not going back to the political culture that held sway a decade ago before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator to take America's center stage.
So to close, how should other countries like Japan respond?
When you're dealing with a leader of the world's most powerful country, who ignores council and acts on impulse, most governments are wise to avoid making Trump-unfriendly headlines.
This is the logic that led Canada to surrender on its plan to impose a digital services tax earlier in the year, and it's why Japan was wise to make unilateral concessions on automotive tariffs. To safeguard their national interests, if you can avoid a fight, other governments should avoid it by whatever means necessary. Let the spotlight of Trump's anger fall on Brazil or anybody else, just not you.
Many US allies have moved to proactively limit damage from any future fight with the White House. The UK, the European Union, Southeast Asian countries have offered non-reciprocal trade deals. Other countries have thrown lots of money at the US, particularly Saudi Arabia, the UAE, some countries with like-minded governments like Argentina and El Salvador. Now from governments that have more bargaining leverage, like China and India, we've seen that standing up for yourself and a willingness to absorb punches can create needed space. By the way, Putin has benefited from that approach with Trump as well. But this strategy is not going to work for everyone. For Japan, the need to stay on a most positive track with Washington remains a fact of life.
All countries though, whatever your current relationship with the White House, have to invest in building your own long-term capacity and reinforcing your own stability. You just heard this from Governor Koike. You have to become much more economically dynamic and competitive for the future. That is China's current approach. Beijing has also doubled down on its support for existing international institutions, in part because it calculates that if the United States steps back from these institutions, China can have much more control over them. What's Japan doing to respond to that?
In short, when faced with the United States, that's become so unreliable a player on the global stage, one that can't be counted on to safeguard allies who have underinvested in their own security and competitiveness, the right strategy is defense first, hedge second. America's traditional allies must regain their competitive position. That demands a focus on growth, robust industrial policy, streamlined regulatory and bureaucratic authorities, and expansive investment in new technologies. Allies must extract and invest in entrepreneurship. You have to assert much more diplomatic leadership internationally and accept responsibilities in building multilateral architecture.
Models already exist. We see Mario Draghi's crucial competitiveness report for the European Union. There is Mark Carney's thoughtfully crafted "Canada's Strong" plan. And Japan's new prime minister will need to make a mark at least as ambitious as that. Most of us in this room are probably skeptical. That means it's not enough. The requirement is urgent. The near-term politics of making these transformations is daunting. The EU is far from a state and Europe needs consensus rulemaking. They get pushback from weak governments, makes it an enormous challenge. There's opposition from the fast-rising Reform Party in Britain, provincial governments in Canada, and this government coming in Japan, a coalition itself, is facing a more multi-party Japanese system. It's going to be hard. But once all of these economic, political, security and diplomatic investments are made, America's unreliability in the years well beyond Trump will matter less.
In short, the defense and hedging strategies are already well underway and they're likely to succeed in varying degrees in various places over time, even as I am for now at least, skeptical about a short-term turnaround for competitiveness.
So, what does all this mean for our future? We're now living in a post-American order, and no one is willing or able to fill the vacuum. China has its own problems and is not prepared to bite off more than it can chew, very cautious. All of this means a deeper G-zero world: more conflict, more impunity, causing more damage that lasts for longer. This geopolitical trajectory is not sustainable.
During the Cold War, it took the Cuban Missile Crisis to convince leaders that armed confrontation would be catastrophic and that new communication channels and agreements were essential. Now, we don't know what form the crisis that we need to build a new post-G-zero order will take this time. But we know that crisis is coming. And until then, all of us governments, businesses, individuals have to brace for growing turbulence, because the old rules don't apply anymore, and the new rules haven't been written yet. The next few years are going to be painful. But the good news is that history isn't deterministic. Our trajectories can shift, and they can shift because people keep the possibility of something better alive long enough for an opportunity to appear.
We need a lot more empathy, more leadership. We need more cooperation and trust. Not just from world leaders because too many refuse to see the danger or they hope to profit from it. I'm actually talking about us, the people in this room. We can't wait for politicians to act, everyone talking their own book. We can't rely on markets and everyone selling a product. We can't count on Washington to lead, or Beijing to step up, or multilateral institutions to fill the gap. We have to invent new communities that are grounded in truth, not spin, that are bolstered by action, not just talk, and cooperation, not division. That's hard, as I stand up here and I address you today, I understand that. But there's no secret lever to pull. There's no hidden strategy that makes this easier. I just know that we don't have a choice. And for that, I thank you.
Appreciate all of you being here today, and congrats to us. Cheers.
Be sure to subscribe to GZERO Daily to get our global politics newsletter every day along with Ian Bremmer's weekly edition.
US election: America is at war with itself
In a powerful and candid address, Ian Bremmer delivered a sobering reflection on the state of democracy in the United States during his annual "State of the World" speech at the 2024 GZERO Summit Japan in Tokyo.
"My country, the United States, is today at war with itself," said Bremmer.
With the November 5th election on the horizon, Bremmer highlighted the fractures within the US political system, emphasizing the growing chasm between political parties, voters, and the institutions meant to uphold democracy. He further painted a grim picture of the post-election period, saying, "We are about to have an election whose outcome will be perceived as illegitimate by nearly half of the country."
He noted that tens of millions of Americans are disillusioned and convinced that their political system is broken. The stakes are high, and the larger issue is the growing perception among voters that their democracy is being "stolen" or "subverted." The result is a deeply polarized nation, where even after a president is eventually declared, a significant portion of the population will reject the legitimacy of the outcome, leading to political and social instability.
Click to watch Ian Bremmer’s analysis and his full 2024 "State of the World" speech.
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Ian Bremmer on the US election & crisis of democracy
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Ian Bremmer's State of the World 2024
Ian Bremmer delivered his highly anticipated 2024 State of the World speech on October 23 in Tokyo. Each year, he takes a look at the biggest geopolitical moments of the year and shares an honest assessment of where we are and where we’re headed. He spoke at the 2024 GZERO Summit Japan, hosted by Eurasia Group, the world's leading political risk research and consulting firm. Bremmer is president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, a company dedicated to providing intelligent and engaging coverage of international affairs. The speech was streamed live on GZERO’s website and its social media channels.
Watch the speech in the video above and read Ian's full remarks below.
State of the World: GZERO Summit speech 2024
We all know that the institutions, the rules of the roads, are not aligned with the balance of power that we are experiencing today.
And when that happens, you have a few different options. You can reform your existing institutions, change them to more reflect present reality. You can build new institutions that make sense in a new environment. Or you can go to war. Now, we’re doing all three. But our priorities are focused more on the third. And that is not sustainable.
I want to talk a little bit about what happens as we head closer to unsustainability, but also talk about some of our opportunities. And I want to start with something that just happened. I don’t want to pass it over. It makes sense for today’s moment in history.
And it’s a moment of congratulations to the collective of Japanese atomic bomb survivors who have just received the Nobel Peace Prize. It is essential—and it’s badly overdue—for us to recognize the suffering and to honor the courageous work they have all done over many decades to try and rid our world of the one weapons that could destroy us.
That is the right place to begin, because today’s lack of global leadership—this G-Zero world order—is getting worse. And we see this over a real worry over the future of nuclear weapons. At a time of expanding war, the threat from these weapons that we created, that can never be used again, is dramatically on the rise.
Russia is today threatening the use of so-called tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, a warning that my own White House considers frighteningly plausible. North Korea, which has become an essential Russian ally, is sending thousands of troops to fight in Ukraine and they’re flexing their own nuclear muscles. When’s the last time you heard complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization? It’s gone. It’s gone. The expanding war in the Middle East and Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s winner take all approach to winning it creates the clearest possible incentive for Iran to race to the finish line in its nuclear weapons program (maybe with some help from Russian).
And if I’m South Korea and I’m Japan and I’m watching that, and I’m seeing the level of uncertainty of commitments from the United States in in the long term— am I talking about ridding the world of Nuclear Weapons? No, I’m talking about building my own program. It’s not where we want to go.
We have to recognize just how dangerous today’s conflicts are becoming. None of the major conflicts in the world today are presently heading towards a sustainable resolution. Ukraine is on a path to partition. Splitting it in two. The Palestinians are on a path to be removed from their territory and once again forgotten. US-China relations are heading toward confrontation. This is our present trajectory. Our geopolitical environment is not sustainable.
And yet, at the same time, today we also face the greatest opportunities in human history. The current wave of technological change offers humanity the best chance we have ever had to grow and teach and learn and imagine and create and build a more prosperous and a fairer world on an unprecedented scale.
A warning. And a hope.
Today, I want to focus first on the hope—because I want to end on disaster. And I want to talk about what I think we have to do to protect our chance to reinvent the world in years to come.
So first, despite what you may have heard and read, globalization is far from over. A visitor from another planet to the world today would be very impressed with the speed and scale of human progress in recent decades and the tools that we have created for a global middle class, which today is more than half the world’s population. The number of those lifted from poverty is growing by more than 100 million every year.
Twenty years ago, just one billion people, barely 16% of the world’s population, could even go online. Now, it’s two-thirds. International air travel is getting cheaper—more people can travel and go to work in more places. And global trade continues to increase despite headwinds that we can talk about. expect and demand, despite the headwinds that we can talk about.
This human progress is going to continue, because developed and developing countries continue are continuing to depend on it for the growth their citizens expect—and the and demand.
Even in the most advanced technology, where the United States and China are now taking a more zero-sum approach, globalization is stabilized by an effective balance of power between the two sides. Neither side is happy about it, but it creates a buffer.
American companies today are leading the way in the world on the shift from human to AI decision-making.
The United States has the venture capital, the cutting-edge thinkers, the culture of entrepreneurship, the access to large supplies of state-of-the-art semiconductors, and the cross-cutting development that comes from a business culture of competition and collaboration. US tech companies also have relationships across different sectors with some of the world’s best research universities. And that echo system has created world class leadership in Artificial Intelligence.
China, on the other hand, is leading the way toward our post-carbon energy future… investment at global scale in nuclear and wind and solar and electric vehicles and batteries and the supply chains for them, and access to the critical minerals that you need for production. And that is why by 2030, China will have far more renewable energy, both at home and for global export, than its leaders even expected just two years ago.
Now, the relationship today between the US and China today, we talk about as “managed decline.” Their stabilized relations which have actually gotten a little bit more comfortable of the last year, is not reversing that longer term trend anytime soon. That doesn't matter who wins the US election for that, doesn't matter what happens to China's economy. That long term trend is still in place.
But as with the security and commercial balance that most major countries seek between the two great powers, American leadership on AI and China's lead on post carbon energy, which are the two technologies that are truly game changers for every country in every sector, is keeping other countries from taking sides. If politicians and policy makers in Washington decide that Americans cannot buy Chinese made electric vehicles, 100% tariffs and instead that Americans have to buy expensive, poorly made electric vehicles, we are wealthy enough to make that decision, right? But the rest of the world is not going to follow America's lead on that. Other governments in Asia, Europe, the Global South, are going to work with the Chinese on electric vehicles. They're going to partner with China to move beyond hydrocarbon energy to develop solar and wind and next generation power. If we want to work with the Chinese on that, as Americans find, if we don't, it's not going to stop them.
Now the Chinese see risks that are created by the quickening development of artificial intelligence in similar ways. American companies are developing state of the art AI innovations that are making the world healthier and wealthier and more efficient, better informed. And these tools are unlocking potential in everyone who uses them on a scale we've never seen before. So what happens in China when the Chinese government decides that their own people can't be trusted with those tools? Right? Because Beijing doesn't want large language models to detail the histories of Taiwan or Hong Kong, or even of a Chinese Communist Party itself. For any Chinese system that has a smartphone, right? They don't want reams of Chinese data going to the mainly American companies that create the most powerful of these innovations.
Hallucinations are fine in China, but they have to be sponsored by the Communist Party. Okay? Chinese leaders do not want ChatGPT, they want Chat CCP, it's a very different story.
Now, just like Americans can refuse to have access to the best electric vehicles, Beijing can refuse to give their people access to the tools that are most important for improving human capital, just like they banned American social media companies and internet. They can keep doing that, but the rest of the world is not going to pay for less effective AI. They want access to the best AI they can have. And you see in the Gulf states, you see in Kenya, and increasingly across Sub Saharan Africa and in South America and Southeast Asia and India, those deals are going to happen.
So in other words, we are seeing a bilateral geopolitical structure, that would fatally compromise globalization, is becoming a near impossibility. Many in Washington and Beijing act like they fear global interdependence, but most of the world demands it.
And it’s not possible in 2025, for the next American president to blow that up. Can't do it. And that is why, despite all the media hype and all the political anger, we are going to continue to see globalization in the world today. The most important trend that has gotten us to where we are is not about to fail. If there's a single piece of good news that comes out of my speech today, that's it. But I have one more.
I want to talk specifically about the new AI tools that I think deserve our attention.
Large language models are changing how we create and interpret and access information and content. And large quantitative models used by industry are transforming how we manage the physical world. Machine learning algorithms are already revolutionizing patient care with early detection of disease, personalized treatment plans and drugs.
In education, students around the world are getting individualized assessment and instruction and feedback. They're helping industrial organizations, transportation fleets, anticipate maintenance and reduce downtime. It's helping farmers more sustainably tend to their crops. Adding AI processes to robotics can help self operating robots that revolutionize entire industries.
These are just a small number of the literally 1000s and 1000s of use cases that we are already seeing early stage in AI rolling out around the world. And that is why we are on track to build a new globalization. One that moves beyond the accomplishments of recent decades in lifting billions of people out of poverty.
When I think about the last 50 years, globalization has radically enriched a small percentage of really wealthy people, and it's created a global middle class. But a lot of people haven't had access to that information. AI is absolutely going to even further enrich the even smaller percentage of the world, and we can focus on that, and that will cause challenges, but the people that were left behind suddenly are going to have far more opportunities. Because they'll get access to the education and the medicine. They'll get access to the human capital improvement, even if they are off the grid.
If you're India, of 1.5 billion people, 50 million living like Europeans, 400 million living like Indonesians, a billion living like Sub Saharan Africans. That top 50 million is going to be squeezed with AI, but that bottom billion suddenly can join the rest. They can get literate. They can have lifespan. They can work in productive, global ways. And we're going to see that all around the world. That's not just progress. That is a revolution and one that extends the promise of global development from national statistics into the lives of individual human beings.
So if you put these two things together, I’ll quickly say, I think that everyone who talks about the new cold war: Overstated.
The United States and China are not capable in the near term, of fighting a new Cold War. Not only because their allies are not interested and it's very hard to fight one by yourselves, but also because the United States is massively politically distracted with its own internal challenges. And if you think that's bad—
Blinken is now in his eleventh trip in the Middle East. How many has he made to Asia? 2? No, you talk to American leaders, I go to the White house—how much time is actually spent on dealing with the long term when you’ve got these wars going on.
Now, think about what's going to happen after the US election, irrespective of wins, just to get through it, just to recreate a stable political environment. The United States does not need or want the kind of long term confrontation that a Cold War would require,. May happen long term, but it's not right now.
The Chinese may be looking at a Cold War long term from their perspective. They right now have the worst economy in decades, if you talk to China about Taiwan right now internally, and they say 2027 is no longer the date that they feel like they have to resolve it. Could be later. They don't talk about peak China anymore. They can't do that. But they do internally now push back the date that they believe that China will surpass the United States in GDP by five years.
So if the Americans are trying to put more time into just keeping China more stable, the Chinese are focusing on just getting the economy going again. These are not two sets of leaders that are bent on block building to create a Cold War.
Maybe it would be helpful if we had more leadership?
But the reality is that the things that we've been most worried about over the last, I don't know, 20-30, years. We sat down, whether it's here in Tokyo or Davos or the Munich Security Conference, everyone would say: The thing I am most worried about is the US, China relationship, are we going to war?
It turns out what we should be most worried about is an absence of leadership. What we should most be worried about is the Americans doing nothing in the Middle East despite their influence. We should most be worried about the Chinese doing nothing with Russia or North Korea despite their influence. It turns out, through the absence of leadership, that is our concern. It is not the muscular move toward global confrontation by the Americans and the Chinese. No, that's interesting. That's unsettling for Japan, but it's a different problem than the one you thought you had.
So if that’s the good news, if those are the things I wanted to spend some time talking about, that I think you have to worry less about, now I want to turn to the places that we need to worry about much more. And here, of course, I'm talking about the wars. In the Middle East. In Ukraine. And in the United States: The war between the Americans and the Americans, which is not a lot of fun.
We remain at serious risk of failing to realize the gains that come with stronger international governance, because we still lack global leadership.
My country, the United States, has abdicated its responsibility in the Middle East. It is by far the most important friend in the world of Israel, and it has used none of its political influence to bring that conflict to an end. Not sitting on the sidelines, but actively supporting Israel's capacity to wage a war that is destroying the Palestinians and now Lebanese people. I'm not talking about giving up on Israel. I'm not talking about stopping Israel from having the right to defend itself? No, we're talking about using any influence to try to create stability. I mean, the Americans say a lot of things. They want a two state solution. They want humanitarian aid. What have they done?
China has abdicated its responsibility. The Chinese say, we want a rules based order. You say we're friends of the Ukrainians. We support their territorial integrity. In Kazan today, Xi Jinping is on stage with Putin. What is he doing to try to maintain the international order? What's he doing with Putin? He's actively supporting Russia's capacity to expand an illegal invasion and to bring itself to the precipice of a war with NATO. And the rest of the world, well, we're just getting used to a higher level of instability.
So let me start with where I think Russia’s going.
It's really not hard to see where this conflict is heading. Ukraine lacks the manpower and firepower to take back their territory, and I don't believe that Vladimir Putin is going to give back the land voluntarily.
I don't see a magical third option, which means that without a peace deal, Ukraine is eventually going to be partitioned, even if Ukraine and the West never recognize the new borders that Russia claims. And the real question is whether a post war Ukraine can expect a brighter future with deeper integration into the rest of the world. And that's possible, but it's hard.
Ukraine can still bring the war to stable stalemate, even if the unwillingness of either Putin or Zelensky to offer genuine concessions means that a settlement that is negotiated is beyond reach. But the ability of Ukraine to achieve that depends on how much diplomatic, economic, and security support that Ukraine receives from its allies in the United States and Europe.
On diplomacy, will the Europeans integrate Ukraine into the European Union. Because even if the eventual answer is yes, and they voted to say yes, the effort will take many years, and the process will only get harder as populist and nationalist and Russia friendly political parties and politicians gain more ground across the EU. And Ukraine's bid in the EU will depend on changes to the union's membership – the budgeting rules – because otherwise the size and the poverty of Ukraine would immediately make every other European Union member a net contributor to the EU budget.
Now, then there's the economics, and that's another question. The damage that Russia has just inflicted on Ukraine's energy and critical infrastructure has dramatically increased their funding needs. That's making it much harder for Ukraine just to sustain an economy, never mind to fight the war. And this is happening at a time when the United States and Europe are less willing and less capable to continue financial support at their present levels.
You've seen Trump's already said he wants to end a war. If that means he has to stop the funding of Ukraine he will stop the funding of Ukraine. Even under Harris, we're going to see a lot more pressure. Given its own budgetary problems, even Germany has cut by half their funding for Ukraine for 2025. This all makes it more important for Ukraine to come to a deal, but it makes it less likely that Putin is going to negotiate.
Which brings back the security question, and that's been unresolved for two decades. Will Ukraine be invited to join NATO? That question has only become more important as it becomes clear that Ukraine will not have enough troops to fend off Russia or North Korea indefinitely. This is the area where Western support for Ukraine is most uncertain because Ukraine's membership in NATO is such a bright red line for Putin. So it's hard to imagine that you can make it happen without further escalating the Russia NATO conflict.
Now US and European leaders recognize that the high water mark for economic and defense support for Ukraine has already been passed. And that makes it more urgent to prod them to negotiate a cease fire. But the only way that acceptable to Zelensky is to give him hard security guarantees like Ukrainian membership in NATO in return for accepting that they're going to lose land. Even if that offer is made, Russia has a veto because if there's no cease fire and Russia is still launching missiles at Ukrainian cities, then if Ukraine is a member of NATO, NATO's at war with Russia. Even though it's still a constructive step, because the trade of membership for land can earn international support that could put more pressure on Russia and the war.
So I would say, over the next two to three years, continued diplomatic support, especially for EU membership: a strong bet. Continued economic support: likely, but it’s going to diminish. Formal security support: less likely, though not impossible.
And in the meantime, we should expect that Russian advances at great human cost, are going to continue, and we should expect more asymmetric warfare from Ukraine and real risks of military escalation. Russia's sovereign assets stay frozen and are going to be devoted to Ukrainian reconstruction over time, so they get seized. Western sanctions on Russia stay in place, and the G7 remains in an undeclared hybrid war against Russia. Putin gets older, gets more isolated, gets further removed from day to day decision making and more prone to impulsive mistakes. Russia's alliance with Iran and North Korea, both rogue states committed to chaos on the global order will grow stronger. But that's predictable.
So in other words, even if we can imagine that the Russia Ukraine war in the next one to two years might become more stable. Russia's broader struggle against the entire West is becoming more dangerous.
Now to the Middle East, which is exactly the opposite dynamic.
There's no outcome of the war in Gaza that is stabilizing for Israel and the Palestinians. I can't see one. But over the longer term, the regional and the global challenges are probably less escalatory than they are with Russia. Israeli airstrikes are continuing, but the Gaza war is almost over.
The Israelis are running out of targets. I mean, they've killed the leadership. They've blown up the tunnels, they've hit the caches. I mean, they've killed over 40,000 people. A lot of them are militants. A lot of them are kids, but the numbers have not gone up radically in the last couple months. The problem now is the humanitarian issue. The problem is these people can't live but the war at some point, whether or not there's a cease fire, Israel is going to announce an end unilaterally to major military operations. And they will still reserve the right to engage in strikes against targets as they see them.
But that's where we are. Most of the troops have been redeployed from Gaza. They're now focused on Lebanon, the new war. So it's true that a cease fire is probably beyond reach. I'd be stunned to see one before the election. Not that it matters at this point. And the plight of the Palestinians is beyond disastrous. But the fight in Gaza has close to ended.
Now it’s hard to foresee any outcome here that is acceptable for Palestinians or their leaders. The war has radicalized large numbers of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, who now have no economic prospects. And Israeli settlers in the West Bank have grabbed even more occupied territory in recent months.
So no matter what happens, Palestinians are more willing, than a year ago, to follow leaders who call for revolutionary action against Israel and the risk of deadly terrorist attacks in Israel, in the region and more broadly, has risen sharply, and I think that will be generations.
The war has also hardened Israeli attitudes towards the Palestinians. It's inconceivable to me that any Israeli government, Netanyahu or otherwise, would consider in the near future the creation of a Palestinian state. And there's no evidence that even the hundreds of 1000s of Israelis that took to the streets to call for Netanyahu’s ouster would back a two state solution.
But the outlook for the Middle East more broadly, is more positive.
Abraham Accords, breakthrough agreements, boosting stability among countries that once hated each other-- still in place, right? I mean, you go to the Emirates, you see Israelis, tourists having a great time, investing, doing business. Absolutely. They don't want to end that. They want to grow that relationship. Saudi Arabia is demanding publicly that Israel allows for the creation of a Palestinian state in order to normalize the relations.
But the Saudis are also continuing to engage behind the scenes to improve economic and security relations with the Israeli government. I think that after the war is over, that process will grow.
Iran and Saudi Arabia have normalized their diplomatic relations, not because of Trump, because of Xi Jinping. They've been incredibly cautious with the Iranians about retaliation against Israel, even as the Israelis killed Hezbollah's leaders. As they crippled Hezbollah's military. As they invaded southern Lebanon. I mean, Yemen's Houthis are going to continue to carry out strikes in the Red Sea, supported by Iran, but that is not enough to ignite a broader Middle East war, which none of the powers in the region want.
So I mean, if everyone in the region knows they can't win against Israel, the Israelis are the ones that will determine the level of escalation and when it's over, and that's why oil prices are only low 70s right now. It's about China's economic challenges, America's production, OPEC's spare capacity. It's not about war in the Middle East. So the most likely long term outcome of the war is that the long standing friends and allies in the West will keep Israel's government more and more at arm's length. That relationship will become more distant.
But Israel will remain a small, asymmetrically powerful country in economic terms, military terms, and technological terms. They will continue to be able to defend themselves effectively. And the Palestinians will gradually fall from the headline, just as the Russians and Ukrainians have over the last two years.
I think that the Middle East will stabilize, because the region's most powerful actors all know that they don't want and can't afford a broader war. Very different from the dynamic between Russia and NATO.
Okay, I haven't yet spoken about my own country, so I'm going to end with a few words on the United States,
The biggest problem that we are all facing for global leadership is the crisis of democracy back in the USA.
The US elections are now less than two weeks away. I'd say, thank God, but no one's looking forward to this. I have no idea who's going to win. I mean, if you made me bet, I think it's Trump. I'm saying that to you, not with a lot of conviction, but just because most elections this year are change elections. 70% of Americans say they're not happy with where the country is going. It is very hard to vote for the sitting Vice President when that many people say, I want something different. Trump is something different. Very different. But he's also incredibly unpopular and in unprecedented ways, unfit.
The problem is not just about who's going to win. The problem is that everyone in America agrees on one thing, which is that there are major forces inside the United States that are intent on destroying democracy. Everyone agrees on that. They just disagree on which forces. And that is a serious problem.
The left argues that Donald Trump has already used political pressure and the US courts and violence to try in every way possible to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Democrats show the wave of lawsuits making their way through America's judicial system. They say that every word that Trump utters is a genuine threat to the future of the Republic.
The right insists that American democracy has already been subverted because entrenched elites, the Deep State, has obstructed the will of the people at every turn. Trump regularly warns his supporters that if Harris wins, you won't have a country anymore. He claims that large scale voter fraud routinely occurs across the country, and that these people -- just like in 2016 when he said that Hillary Clinton should be locked up -- he now says that about Kamala Harris. He talks about calling for consequence free police brutality, and he pledges that he will use the US military to take care of internal enemies.
My country, the United States, is today at war with itself. Its political system is far from the envy of anyone else in the world. Deep pocketed interest groups are distorting law and policy making to create a system that represents dollars over its own citizens. And no matter who wins on November 5th, tens of millions of Americans will find evidence that their political system is broken. And they are not wrong about that.
The post election period is uniquely dangerous, as we are about to have an election whose outcome will be perceived as illegitimate by nearly half of the country. So what are we going to do about that. We will get a President in the United States. I mean, not on November 5th. We won't know on the day who's going to win. We might not know in a week.
It's most likely that it's going to be so close that both sides will say that they have won, and then there'll be lawsuits, and there'll be different lawsuits. Democrats will have lawsuits in some states where they say that there was voter harassment and intimidation they couldn't get to the polls. They'll say that there was a wrong certification by local elected officials who decided to go political. The Republicans will say that Democrats shouldn't have won in some states because illegals were allowed to vote because they had a win, and then it was overturned by vote stuffing, and it was rigged.
And the judicial system still works in the US, so those court cases will be thrown out, or they'll be overturned, but that will create an environment where the people, the voters, will say, you are stealing my election, you are subverting my democracy. And that will have effect on the political leaders. And when you finally get a president, the opponents to that President, not just the citizens, but a lot of the members of that party and the politically elected officials will say, This is not my president. We haven't dealt with that.
I say to you here in Japan, this is not such a concern for the US economy.
The dollar is still strong. Geopolitically, the American environment looks great, Mexico, Canada, couple big oceans, right? I mean, it's a good environment to be in. The dollar works. The research universities are great. The entrepreneurship is strong, the natural resources are wonderful. All of that is true. But if you think the United States has not been providing leadership over the last 20 years, you have seen nothing compared to the next five.
And Japan has to be prepared for an environment where the United States cannot be counted on for the values that it has historically stood for. What values are we talking about? Well, global security, free trade, promotion of democracy, rule of law. These are all fundamental values that the United States sometimes hypocritically, sometimes inconsistently, but nonetheless has been seen as a leader globally and has been relied on by its allies. And its adversaries have known that there's going to be a challenge there.
I mean, the uncertainty that Japan has been dealing with over the past decades has been more about the United States than other countries. JCPOA, Iranian nuclear deal, you in, you out? World Health Organization, you in, you out? Paris Climate Accord, you in, you out? Well, how about Russia-Ukraine? How about security umbrella in this part of the world? How much can you count on the United States?
Now that does not mean that Japan is no longer going to have a security relationship with the US, but it does mean that Japan has to take a greater leadership role. It does mean that Japan has to think more about how to build more inclusive architecture that the Americans by themselves won't do—which includes engaging, for example, even with the Chinese. Because if you don't engage with the Chinese in any architecture, then it looks like you're going to war with them. This is a uniquely challenging environment outside the US.
Final point I want to make is that if it were a uniquely challenging environment in the United States, the Americans would have fixed it by now.
Part of the reason why this keeps getting worse is because the US doesn't think it matters. Because they are so strong and so resilient. Because they've gotten through January 6 and there was no coup and there was no civil war, and they can get through all of these unprecedented, embarrassing political dysfunctions without feeling like their lives are changing all that much.
But that means this is going to get worse before it gets better. That's a G-ZERO world. So I go back to the beginning. Fantastic opportunities. Globalization continues. The technology is amazing. We're not on the precipice of a cold war. But we don't have leadership.
And the Japanese have quietly but nonetheless consistently relied most, not on the idea that we're going to have World War Three. You've relied most on the idea that there will be global leadership. It turns out you were wrong about that. And you know-- you do know that. I mean, the Americans were wrong about stuff too. The Americans thought that you bring in China, they're going to become Americans. Turns out, they're still Chinese. You can be wrong about things.
But being wrong about global leadership is going to require a lot of strength, a lot of courage, and a lot of hard work from Japan, from the Japanese government, from Japanese industry, from the thought leaders, from the young people. And I hope that we can count on that. I hope we can see more of it.
I know that by so many more people showing up today than we've seen in previous years, the interest is high, the engagement is high. We need to translate that into action, and we're obviously very privileged to be a part of that with you. So with all of that, my welcome, along with my friends and colleagues here to today's G-ZERO summit. I hope it's successful, and I look forward to spending some time with all of you later today. Thank you.
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Watch the replay of Ian Bremmer's State of the World speech
Ian Bremmer delivered his highly anticipated State of the World speech, providing a comprehensive overview of how the latest geopolitical events—from war in Ukraine to the crisis in the Middle East and more—are influencing elections, policy priorities, and economic trends.
Watch the replay at gzeromedia.com/stateoftheworld.
State of the World: On the verge of fragmentation?
In Tokyo this morning, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer kicked off this year’s GZERO Summit with his annual “State of the World” keynote speech. As usual, he gave his audience plenty to think about and debate.
He opened with a recap of the past year in international politics, focusing on Russia’s war in Ukraine and its international fallout. The big takeaway: Vladimir Putin has accomplished virtually the opposite of everything he intended. He has boosted Ukraine’s national pride and its determination to cut the ties that have long bound it to Russia. Instead of “demilitarizing” Ukraine, he has brought its soldiers the most modern and powerful weapons they’ve ever had. He united Europeans and Americans in opposition to his invasion. He has strengthened and expanded arch-nemesis NATO and inflicted decades-long damage on Russia’s economic strength, military capabilities, and political cohesion.
But it’s Bremmer’s vision of the future that will generate the most discussion. With a global system crippled by US domestic political dysfunction, intensifying US-China animosities, and growing tensions between the wealthy and developing worlds as fallout from COVID and the war widens gaps between global haves and have-nots, the global system itself is on the verge of fragmentation. Perhaps most startling of all, Bremmer argues that this might become a good news story.
The “global security order,” he argues, will remain American-led, and will be bolstered by both Russian aggression and rising anxiety in Asia over the expansion of China’s international influence.
The “global economic order,” Bremmer predicts, will depend mainly on China’s trajectory. If China becomes the world’s largest economy over the next 10 years and then extends its economic lead, Chinese investment abroad and international demand for access to the Chinese market, he says, “will ensure a more multilateral trade order, with America’s push for strategic competition tempered by the hedging of European and Asian allies and a Chinese alignment for most of the developing world.” But, if mounting debt, poor demographics, and other factors force China to turn inward, “dominant regional powers will become the most important players on trade.”
The “global climate order” has already become multipolar and multi-stakeholder in ways that should give us more resilient confidence in our future,” Bremmer argues. Europeans have “set the pace on rulemaking and model-setting for how a post-carbon world of governance and society can function,” he notes, but it’s China, India, and the developing world that will play the largest role in determining the level of carbon emissions in coming decades.
Finally, there is the “global digital order.” The world’s largest and most dynamic technology companies are nearly all headquartered in America and China, but it’s the tech companies themselves that wield “sovereignty and rule-making power in the virtual world … for commerce, for security, and even for civil society.” Perhaps these companies will align with their governments, setting conditions for a lasting tech Cold War. But, he says, “if the digital space itself becomes the most important arena of great power competition, and the power of governments erodes relative to the power of tech companies,” then these technology giants will become “the central players in 21st-century geopolitics.”
The United States, China, Europe, India, or the tech giants? Who do you believe will become tomorrow’s great powerbroker? Or are you placing your bets on chaos?
Tell us what you think.This article comes to you from the Signal newsletter team of GZERO Media. Sign up today.
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