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Officials attend the opening ceremony for the North Korean Embassy in Tehran, Iran in this undated photo released on August 5, 2017 by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) in Pyongyang.
If North Korea and Iran hook up, will China be jealous?
Pyongyang’s Minister of External Economic Relations Yun Jong Ho became the first North Korean official to visit Iran in half a decade on Tuesday. The trip is officially about economic ties, but the US State Department said it was “incredibly concerned” about possible missile and nuclear technology cooperation.
There’s precedent: Tehran has borrowed Pyongyang’s missile designs for its own weapons and admitted to using North Korean missiles during its 1980-1988 war with Iraq. Today, North Korea has intercontinental ballistic missiles that Tehran can’t yet field.
“Given Iran's preoccupation with its strategic position, searching for increased deterrence against both Israel and the United States, the fact that it would welcome a North Korean delegation right now is significant,” said Eurasia Group Iran analyst Greg Brew. “It's also significant that this visit is taking place while Iran's national security advisor is in Moscow,” he added, noting that Russia has been the glue in ties between all three countries.
Both Iran and North Korea have shipped Moscow weapons to use in Ukraine, which Eurasia Group labeled one of its Top Risks for 2024. There’s a political benefit for North Korea on top of the aid Moscow reciprocates: attention from China. Wary of losing influence over Pyongyang, China responded to the closer Russo-Korean ties by launching its own diplomatic press, including a visit to Pyongyang from politburo member Zhao Leji this month. Pyongyang may be trying to run the same play with Tehran.
“From North Korea’s perspective, if all they have to do is bat their eyelashes at another suitor for China to roll out the diplomatic red carpet, that seems like a well they can go back to with Iran,” says Eurasia Group North Korea expert Jeremy Chan.
AI regulation means adapting old laws for new tech: Marietje Schaake
Why did Eurasia Group list "Ungoverned AI" as one of the top risks for 2024 in its annual report? Schaake, International Policy Fellow, Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and former European Parliamentarian, discussed the challenges around developing effective AI regulation, emphasizing that politicians and policymakers must recognize that not every challenge posed by AI and other emerging technologies will be novel; many merely require proactive approaches for resolution. She spoke during GZERO's Top Risks of 2024 livestream conversation, focused on Eurasia Group's report outlining the biggest global threats for the coming year.
"We didn't need AI to understand that discrimination is illegal. We didn't need AI to know that antitrust rules matter in a fair economy. We didn't need AI to know that governments have a key responsibility to safeguard national security," Schaake argues. "And so, those responsibilities have not changed. It's just that the way in which these poor democratic principles are at stake has changed."
For more:- Watch the full livestream discussion, moderated by GZERO's publisher Evan Solomon and featuring the authors of the report, Eurasia Group & GZERO President Ian Bremmer and Eurasia Group Chairman Cliff Kupchan.
- Read the full report on The Top Risks of 2024.
- And don't miss Marietje Schaake's updates as co-host of our video series GZERO AI.
- A world of conflict: The top risks of 2024 ›
- UK AI Safety Summit brings government leaders and AI experts together ›
- Rishi Sunak's first-ever UK AI Safety Summit: What to expect ›
- AI's impact on jobs could lead to global unrest, warns AI expert Marietje Schaake ›
- Singapore sets an example on AI governance ›
- AI and Canada's proposed Online Harms Act - GZERO Media ›
- Yuval Noah Harari: AI is a “social weapon of mass destruction” to humanity - GZERO Media ›
- Should we regulate generative AI with open or closed models? - GZERO Media ›
An Iranian woman is walking under a billboard that is displaying an image of the Iranian Qased satellite carrier in a residential area in northwestern Tehran, Iran, on December 13, 2023.
An Axis of ... Rockets?
On Saturday, Iran launched the Soraya satellite about 750 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, its highest orbit so far. Iran’s civilian space program first successfully launched a satellite back in 2009 and then had some success with light, limited-lifespan satellites, but it struggled with more heavy-duty rockets, leading to multiple failed launches.
Today, space tech is a key priority for Tehran, and it kicked off 2023 with a 10-year plan to reach its goal of sending a human into the final frontier. It will have Moscow’s help along the way, thanks to an agreement signed in December 2022 formalizing cooperation between their space agencies. An Iranian imaging satellite had already caught a ride on a Russian rocket in August 2022, one month after Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iran. It was his first foreign trip following his invasion of Ukraine, for which Iran has supplied key drones.
Hermit Kingdom blasts off
North Korea’s space program managed only two successful satellite launches before last year. But in September 2023, after two embarrassing failures to launch a spy satellite, Putin hosted Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un at a spaceport near Vladivostok. Kim pledged to support Putin in Ukraine, while Putin told reporters he would help with North Korea’s space program.
Lo and behold, about two months later, Pyongyang finally got its spy satellite in orbit. Kim is aiming to launch three more this year.
What to watch
Western governments are worried that lessons learned from putting satellites in space could be applied to dropping nukes on cities.
It’s not an idle concern: The rockets Pyongyang used for its successful satellite launches are based on the Taepodong-2 and Hwaseong-17 ballistic missiles. The Qaem 100 that Iran used on Saturday was designed by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite branch of the Iranian military that controls the missile forces.
Greg Brew, an Iran analyst at Eurasia Group, says Iran is playing at a larger nuclear hedge strategy. Tehran, he says, focuses on developing civilian nuclear and rocket technology that will allow a “sprint” to build nuclear bombs and ICBMs if needed – without attracting international opprobrium from building and testing them in the meantime. But while Russia may be willing to help with the civilian side, Brew adds, nuclear tech is an ace Moscow holds close.
“The evidence would suggest Iran-Russia space cooperation is still focused on non-weapons aspects, but it all lays the foundation for potential further cooperation to develop,” he said.
Off to war again?
No matter how cold it is in your community, it is even colder in the deep winter of discontent that has hit the 2024 political world … aka Mordor.
The year ahead presents two kinds of challenges to the US and Canada: external ones from growing conflicts and internal ones, from US isolationism and what I call “Canadian insulationism.” At the moment, it’s a toss-up which ones are more dangerous.
Let’s look at the external challenges, including the raging conflicts in Israel-Gaza, the Red Sea, and Ukraine – all of which look to worsen in 2024.
Here at Eurasia Group, one of our Top Risks of 2024 is a Partitioned Ukraine — with Russia essentially ending up with about 18% of Ukraine, something once unimaginable. But is that the end? After two years and hundreds of thousands of casualties, will 18% of Ukraine satisfy Putin’s expansionist appetite, or simply whet it for more? The second option is more likely.
Putin has converted his country into a war economy, with over 6% of his GDP going to military spending, and, despite sanctions, there is enough growth there to fuel concern about inflation.
As he sees critical US military support for Ukraine fade and a potential Trump administration on the horizon, Putin is ready to ramp up his aggression. I was at a meeting with a group of ambassadors to the UN yesterday, and many expressed a strong view that Ukraine is still just the start of Russian aggression, not the end. So it is no surprise that next week NATO will start its largest military exercise in over 20 years, with more than 90,000 troops taking part in Steadfast Defender.
This means they are getting ready for a widening war, and that is sobering.
Meanwhile, in the Middle East and North Africa, the Israel-Hamas war churns on, and efforts to contain it are looking increasingly futile. Hamas has not been sufficiently degraded to give up fighting, it still holds hostages, and it has gained wide support around the world, something the once-isolated terrorist group never enjoyed. One of the group’s greatest victories has been the “Hamasification” of the entire Palestinian cause, meaning their radical, annihilationist cause, once a marginal part of the diplomatic conversation, is now THE cause, overtaking the voice of the Palestinian Authority. And because they remain a terror group whose goal is to eradicate Israel, it makes any two-state solution or prospects of a new governance partner in Gaza extremely thorny.
Meanwhile, Israel under the extremist and embattled leader Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, is gearing up for a much longer battle in Gaza — and the West Bank. He also does not want a two-state solution and never really has. Just today, in shocking remarks, Netanyahu said he does not want a Palestinian state and then said, “in the future the state of Israel has to control the from the river to the sea.” That was a provocative appropriation of a Palestinian rally cry that many Israelis regard as a call for genocide. The radical cycle is now in full spin.
Meantime, after 100 days of brutal bombings that have stunned even Israel’s closest allies, there is no real end in sight. The sophisticated tunnel systems that are discovered daily reveal the resilience of the Hamas military operation, and it is yet another aspect of the situation Bibi badly underestimated and miscalculated.
With the current Israeli and Hamas leadership, there is very little hope for anything but more war.
While most post-Oct. 7 efforts of containment centered on Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, a surprise player emerged: the Houthis. The Shiite militant group in Yemen, which fought a decade-long war against Sunni Saudi-backed forces, is launching ballistic missiles into the Red Sea near the critical Bab el-Mandeb Strait, aka Gate of Tears, which is living up to its name.
The Strait and the Suez Canal account for about 12% of total global trade, so naturally the US and a coalition of 20 countries steamed into the area to protect this critical supply line. This has a long precedent. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson sent the US Navy to fight the so-called Barbary Pirates in North Africa to protect US shipping. Today, the corsairs are Iranian-supplied ballistic missiles, but not much else has changed.
In any case, it has done no good. The Houthis flipped the Ballistic Bird at the US and launched over 30 missile attacks, driving much of the shipping business out of the Red Sea and having an immediate impact on the global economy.
The US and the UK, with the support of countries like Canada, counterattacked with a series of intensive bombing missions targeting Houthi military installations, and once again … nothing changed. This is the Houthi Trap. Red Sea shipping is a Red Line for the global economy, so as long as the Houthi attacks continue and shipping insurance rates go up, the US and its allies will have to respond. Maritime choke points like the Bab el-Mandep, the Strait of Hormuz, the Straits of Malacca, or the Panama Canal (which is too dry right now for some ships to use) – are the Achilles heels of the global economy. When any one of them is under threat, it means one thing: expanded conflict.
The internal threats in the US and Canada, however, make dealing with the external ones significantly harder. The US Republican Party is in the grip of a deep isolationism. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson told President Joe Biden yesterday that there will be no deal for tens of billions of dollars in aid to Ukraine unless he cracks down on the US border. Johnson’s job is on the line, and he knows that if he approves aid to Ukraine, far-right members of his party will make a motion to vacate and dump him, just as they did with the last speaker. And with Donald Trump in full ascension as the likely Republican nominee, US aid to Ukraine is likely coming to an end. America First means America Gone in many parts of the world, and that’s not a good sign when there are expanding wars everywhere.
Canada doesn’t have an isolationist problem. It has a long history of global involvement and is committed to multilateral originations. The problem it suffers from is an insulationist strain. It simply won’t put its money where its multilaterals are.
For example, Canada spends about 1.3% of its GDP on defense – a far cry from the 2% NATO guideline – and there has been deep concern about another CA$1 billion cut from the force this year.
Proximity to the US and being protected by three oceans have given Canadians a sense of insulation from a dangerous world, so there is no political urgency to keep up national defense. You might not buy home insurance if you don’t think your home will ever collapse, but it doesn’t work that way.
As the 2024 world tips toward widening wars, the isolationism of the US and the insulationism of Canada will make things much worse.
As my Dad used to say, the cheap man pays twice. Trying to save now by shirking responsibility in places like Ukraine and getting off easy on defense spending will only make the inevitable bill twice as expensive when it comes. And the security bill is coming.
A pinch of the Davos "secret sauce"?
The 54th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum will begin in Davos, Switzerland, tomorrow, bringing together 2,800 of the world’s most powerful people, including 60 or so heads of state and government.
This year’s theme, as declared by Klaus Schwab, is to “rebuild trust” in a fractured world. The WEF founder was talking about trust in a more certain and optimistic future for people around the globe. But the forum has its own credibility issues that have led many to question whether it is a malign, even malevolent, institution.
On the left, it is pilloried as a gathering of billionaires who have plundered the world and destabilized democracies. In his book “Davos Man: How Billionaires Devoured the World,” New York Times economics correspondent Peter S. Goodman depicted a group of rootless, self-interested internationalists, whose wealth and power are so vast that they believe they are entitled to write the rules for the rest of us.
On the right, Schwab’s idea of a “Great Reset” after the pandemic, which promoted the idea of “stakeholder capitalism,” has been viewed with increasing hysteria. On Fox News, right-wing commentator Ned Ryun said the WEF wants to “create feudalism 2.0, in which we are serfs and they are the lords ruling over us. You’ll have nothing and be happy,” he said, riffing off an essay written by Danish politician Ida Auken for the WEF in 2016, in which she suggested the forum has a goal of limiting ownership of private property.
Davos Man – the perception is that the summit is overwhelmingly attended by men over age 50 – needs a makeover, and the forum could do worse than point to its own history as a constructive force for peace and stability.
In 1988, Greece and Turkey were pulled back from the brink of war to sign the Davos Declaration; in 1989, North and South Korea held their first ministerial meeting in the Swiss Alps, while East German Prime Minister Hans Modrow and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl met to discuss reunification. In 1992, F.W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandela came together in Davos for the first time outside of South Africa, a visit Mandela later said changed his perception of the world.
The world is in dire need of more exchanges like that – more truth and reconciliation.
Before this year’s meeting, the WEF released its latest Global Risk Perception Study (more on this later). Spoiler alert: The outlook for the world is negative and is expected to get worse over the next decade. Two-thirds of the respondents to the study predict a multipolar world will dominate global affairs over the next 10 years, as the great powers set and enforce, but also contest, rules and norms.
But this is Davos’ secret sauce: Everyone is there (except the Russians, who were not invited). Attendees share meals and build personal relationships. Those behind-the-scenes conversations go unseen by the public but can pave the way for future compromises and agreements.
The formal themes of the forum revolve around four pillars: security and cooperation; growth and jobs; artificial intelligence; and, longer-term strategies for climate change.
But WEF President Børge Brende, a former Norwegian foreign minister, was clear that much of the focus will be on high-level diplomatic talks on wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, and Africa.
“We will make sure we bring together the right people … to see how we can solve this very challenging world,” he said.
This year, the Chinese are back with their biggest delegation since Xi Jinping addressed the forum in 2017, when he portrayed China as a responsible nation and a leader on environmental causes. Premier Li Qiang will lead a large delegation of government officials to send the message that China is open for business. (See Watching below).
Liming Chen, the WEF’s Greater China chairman, wrote in the China Daily this week that Davos acts as a window for Beijing to understand the world and the world to understand China.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will take part in talks on Gaza with Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Other attendees will be French President Emmanuel Macron; European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen; and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has invited representatives from more than 100 countries to a meeting on Sunday to increase support for Ukraine’s peace proposal.
In a world where transnational risks are increasing and global cooperation is eroding, Davos’ blend of bankers and businesspeople; journalists and academics; politicians and royalty (British princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are listed as delegates) is unique.
Follow this newsletter over the next couple of weeks and we’ll tell you how it unfolds.
Skyline view of Davos, Switz., with the St. Johann church in the foreground.
WEF’s worst global threats: Can we weather the storm?
This year’s survey suggests that AI-powered misinformation is the world’s biggest short-term threat. False and misleading information, powered by artificial intelligence, threatens to erode democracy and polarize populations, it says.
In a big election year in the United States, Britain, India, Mexico, and Indonesia, many of the 1,500 respondents from the worlds of business and government worried that fake information could be used to raise questions about the legitimacy of election results.
The WEF report says rapid advances in technology are creating new problems and making existing ones worse. There are concerns that AI chatbots like ChatGPT mean synthetic content could be created to misinform and disinform.
AI is one of the four central themes of the forum, with major industry players like Open AI’s Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, attending.
Extreme weather was the second most pressing short-term risk to the global economy, followed by societal polarization, cyber insecurity, and inter-state armed conflict.
Within 10 years, extreme weather is expected to become the biggest concern, followed by other environmental risks – changes to the Earth’s systems, biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapses, and national resource shortages.
The report’s authors point out that preparedness for global risk has never been more important but that it’s increasingly hindered by a lack of consensus and cooperation.
So we’ll be watching deliberations at Davos this week with the hope of seeing more signs of both.
Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up to supporters after filing the paperwork to put his name on the ballot for the primary election in Concord, New Hampshire, U.S., October 23, 2023.
Young, Angry, and Trumpy
Happy Top Risk Thursday, where we and our partner company Eurasia Group dive into the much-anticipated forecast of the biggest threats we all face this year. You can download the full report here and let us know if you agree or not (or if you now need a drink).
But let’s start with the Top Risk of the year, the US vs. itself. There was a small skirmish last night in the B-league, silver-medal debate between Republican candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis on CNN that was high on personal insult and low on political consequence. Meanwhile on Fox … he was back for Season 2! Donald Trump held a live town hall, ignoring the other candidates who stand little chance against him. It is Trump’s show now, and Fox is back on board. Here we go!
The Iowa caucus on Jan. 15 formally lights the election fuse on what could be the US electoral version of the film “Oppenheimer.” Bidenheimer? Trumpenheimer? Pick your potential destroyer of worlds, as per your partisan pallor. The rest of the globe is watching because what happens in the US impacts everything from trade to conflicts.
The US is at its most divisive point in generations, but the real story might be, well, generational.
GZERO Media has exclusive access to new polling from Abacus Data, which asked Canadians about the 2024 US presidential election, and the results are telling. Who wants Donald Trump to win? Apparently, young people do.
Overall, 34% of Canadians want Trump to win, and 66% want Biden, which is not a shocker. Neither is the party line breakdown. Preferences for Trump vs. Biden by political choice in Canada are as follows:
Conservatives: Trump 57%, Biden 43%
Liberals: Biden 86%, Trump 14%
New Democrats: Biden 83%, Trump 17%
But check out the breakdown by age: Canadians under 45 are much more likely to prefer Trump to Biden than those over the age of 45. Here’s how it breaks down:
Ages 18-29: 40% want Trump
Ages 30-44: 41% want Trump
45-59: 34% want Trump
60+: Only 23% want Trump
More than any other demographic, young people really want Trump to win. "The strength of Trump in Canada, especially among younger Canadians, reflects a shift in voting behavior and preferences among younger people as they react to a world they feel is deeply broken,” David Coletto, president of Abacus Data, told me (see his Substack here). “In Canada, 49% of men under 45 would prefer to see Trump win the presidency. But even one in three younger women would prefer Trump.”
By the way, this also reflects polling done in the US. A new Gallup survey shows that 42% of Americans between ages 18 and 34 are Trump supporters, and 44% of those aged 35-54 also favor the former president. Biden is losing support among young people and, interestingly, with people of color.
This upends all sorts of assumptions about how younger people vote and how Biden’s economic and social record is not resonating. In the Age vs Rage election, Rage is winning so far, and it’s starting to steal the younger demographic. It also likely reflects where younger people get their information, like TikTok, which recycles a lot of pissed-off voices shouting about why everything sucks (despite many facts to the contrary) and turns it into news.
What does this mean for elections outside of the United States? The conventional wisdom is that Trump might hurt the chances of other conservative or right-wing parties and boost the Left’s prospects, but that might not be the case. “For politicians in Canada who think they will be able to use the US election to their own political advantage – like the Liberals – these results suggest that may not be possible,” Coletto says.
This is consequential. We’ve seen the same story in polling around Israel and Hamas, where older people support Israel’s fight against Hamas, which is recognized as a terrorist group by both the US and Canadian governments. But many younger people feel very differently about the situation, and their support for the Hamas-led fight in Gaza is revealing. It’s not a stretch to forecast that political support for Israel from places like Canada and the US, as the next generation comes to power, might look different than it does today. “The shift in youth preferences may become the story of 2024 with big political implications in the US and in Canada,” Coletto says.
It is still very early in the US election cycle, but the biggest surprise so far? Trump connects with the kids. Everywhere.
________
As I finished writing my column today, news broke that former federal New Democrat leader Ed Broadbent has died at age 87. Broadbent was the very definition of a true public servant and embodied the best of what people expect from political leaders. He transformed and modernized the NDP from the left-wing political conscience of Parliament to a viable power player in government.
Broadbent, as my colleague Graeme Thompson, a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's Global Macro-Geopolitics practice, put it, “distinguished himself as a political thinker, a champion of working-class Canadians, and a politician who earned the respect of his peers across the House of Commons and of people throughout Canada."
- Evan Solomon, Publisher
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.