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Global politics in 2024: It’s not all doom and gloom
You might’ve come out of last week’s newsletter – and Eurasia Group’s 2024 Top Risks report – feeling a little scared about the year ahead. And sure enough, this will be an unprecedentedly challenging year from a political and geopolitical standpoint, marked by three ongoing and expanding wars: Russia vs. Ukraine, Israel vs. Hamas, and the United States vs. itself. But there are plenty of bright spots, too.
For starters, 2024 will be the biggest election year in history, with more than half of the world’s population in over 60 countries going to the polls between now and December. With so much at stake, people are understandably worried. Yet most of these elections, especially the big ones, aren’t troubled at all.
In the European Union, although far-right, populist, and euro-skeptic parties will make gains in June’s European Parliament election, the centrist coalition that has ruled the bloc for the last five years will keep its majority. Yes, Europe will face economic challenges in 2024, weakening incumbent governments across the continent. And there will be plenty of anger directed at Brussels bureaucrats and much resistance to more centralized EU decision-making. But a series of crises over the past decade – the pandemic, climate change, and the Russian invasion, made worse by the trauma of Brexit – has solidified the multinational political commitment to the world’s most ambitious experiment in supranational governance. As we enter 2024, the EU’s social contract has never been stronger, more resilient, or more necessary.
Then there’s India, which for all its many shortcomings is a politically stable democracy, an increasingly important contributor to the global economy, and the emerging leader of the Global South. The world’s most popular democratic leader with 77% approval, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party will easily win a third consecutive five-year term and single-party majority in next spring’s general elections. Reelection will allow Modi, who has privately indicated this will be his last term, to complete his ambitious economic reform program, strengthen India’s relationship with the US (regardless of whether President Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins in November), and assert the country’s role as a crucial geopolitical bridge between the Global South and the West.
We’ve also got Mexico, where the ruling Morena coalition of term-limited President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) – the second-most-popular world leader after Modi – is on track to secure a victory in June’s upcoming elections on the back of a solid economic performance. AMLO’s handpicked successor, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, is a committed technocrat with strong relations with the domestic and foreign business communities. She will surround herself with like-minded cabinet members, deliver a high degree of policy continuity, and drive even more growth and investment as Mexico continues to benefit from its robust trading relationship with the US and growing nearshoring trends.
And I could keep going …
To be sure, there are some places where the elections won’t go as well, but they’re not a surprise at all. Who are Russians going to vote for? Putin or Putin? Maybe Putin? The same goes for North Koreans and Venezuelans. In all these cases, we know who's going to “win,” and the outcome is not going to affect anything. The exception, of course, is the election taking place in the most powerful country in the world, which also happens to be the most politically divided and dysfunctional of any advanced industrial democracy. But putting the US aside, the biggest election year in history will be a big whoop.
The most surprising cause for optimism in 2024, however, may be the relative calm that will prevail between the US and China. There’s no question that the most strategically important bilateral relationship in the world is still fundamentally adversarial and marked by mistrust, and several conflict flashpoints (from Taiwan and the South China Sea to technology competition) will exacerbate tensions throughout the year. But with all the fighting going on in the world, neither country is looking for reasons to start another conflict – especially not when the Chinese economy and the US domestic polity are so troubled and all-consuming for Presidents Xi Jinping and Biden. The two largest economies will accordingly behave like geopolitical adults in 2024, preferring stability to chaos and engagement to major decoupling or conflict.
The wild card, more than ever, is technology – specifically, artificial intelligence. AI will disrupt our economies, societies, and geopolitics in ways we can’t yet predict, but it will also become the most powerful human development tool the world has ever seen, helping people live longer, healthier, and more productive lives than at any time in history. And this will happen much sooner than you think. With AI capabilities doubling roughly every six months, three times faster than Moore’s law, the upsides will start materializing more dramatically as new applications find their way into every major corporation across every economic sector. And as hundreds of millions of people begin to upskill themselves in their jobs, AI will become a copilot before it takes over their jobs. This will create a new globalization, one exponentially faster and more transformative than the globalization unleashed by free global trade and investment in recent decades.
The flip side is that the technology is also advancing far faster than the ability to govern it, and a technopolar world for artificial intelligence – i.e., tech companies rather than governments are in control of AI development and deployment – means crisis response and reaction will come only after things break … and then, it might be too late. Let’s just hope in 2024 those things aren’t that big.
***
We've entered a year of grave concern, but supported by the hope that tough times will bring out the best in us. This isn't going to be particularly enjoyable, especially for our fellow citizens here in the United States. It's personally painful to watch my country go through a tumultuous time, with those I care about affected by it. It's nothing compared to what we've been seeing in Ukraine, Gaza, or South Sudan … and yet for a nation that has spent too much time presuming “it can't happen here,” 2024 is a necessary wake-up call.
As you know, I spent the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 in the South Pole. Having the entire world on my shoulders – even if for just a moment – felt like the right thing to do to prepare for the year ahead. Antarctica is an entire continent that's been kept peaceful and pristine, for humanity and our animal friends, for generations now. Yeah, we're melting it. But otherwise, it turns out we can be capable global custodians when we set our minds to it. Let’s try to remember that.
Ian interviews Mitt Romney: US political divisions & tough foreign policy calls
Note: This interview appeared as part of an episode of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, "Sen. Mitt Romney on DC dysfunction, Russian attacks, and banning TikTok" on February 6, 2023.
On GZERO World, Utah Senator Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate sits down for an exclusive interview with Ian Bremmer to talk debt ceiling drama, Ukraine war fatigue, and pondering war with China. He also has thoughts on the "woke-ism" debate and whether the US should ban TikTok.
Back in 2012, as a presidential candidate, Romney was mocked by Barack Obama during a debate for claiming that Russia was America’s top geopolitical threat. Now, he shares his views about the risk that Russia poses today, where China stacks up in the mix, and much more.
António Guterres: Ukraine war united NATO, but further divided the world
Russia invaded Ukraine with impunity — and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres fears it may not be the last middle-sized power to pick a fight without consequence in the near future because global security governance is largely bankrupt.
"The capacity of deterrence that would exist if the whole powers, with the security council, will be able to say, 'This can't be done,' is not there," he tells Ian Bremmer on GZERO World.
Guterres worries that the war in Ukraine has shifted the trend in the balance of global power toward a divided world between the US and its allies vs. China and its friends.
Why? Because Moscow and Beijing don't have the same approach to fixing global problems.
Division is rising, he adds, no matter how much more united NATO is today than it was a year ago.
Watch the GZERO World episode: How a war-distracted world staves off irreversible damage
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Ian Bremmer: power of the "Goldilocks crisis"
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. I have a Quick Take to kick off your week. And this week, you know what's coming. It's my new book. It's called The Power of Crisis. It is right here and it's coming out tomorrow. I certainly hope you'll get a copy.
But I thought I'd tease you with some of the big arguments that I'm trying to make in this book, because it's no surprise, this is a target rich environment for global crises. We've gotten through this two plus year pandemic. Now, it's still a huge problem in China and North Korea. We've got a new Cold War with the Russians, the invasion of Ukraine and confrontation with NATO. We've got climate change and over a billion Indians suffering massive heat stress, and that's only going to get worse going forward.
We also have disruptive technologies, which are increasingly hard to contain and in the hands of rogue states and even non-state actors, and what are we going to do about that? This is a book that is not saying the wheels are coming off. It's not saying the sky is falling, but rather it's saying, how do we take advantage of these crises to deal with a world that has become more anxiety inducing? And indeed made a lot of people feel like we're stuck, and the outcomes are inevitable and governments are never going to work.
I think that there's a much more hopeful way of looking at the world today. It is that these crises are creating not only the opportunities, but in many cases already the reality, that we're seeing much more collaboration, much more action, to not only respond to the crises themselves, but also to rebuild and revitalize our political institutions, our architecture, the way the world works. And that absent these crises, we were going to continue to just see incremental erosion. So indeed, as painful as the crises are, there ends up being a very significant silver lining to them.
That's what the book is about. And the book ends with what I'm going to start with, which is Russia. Because I had to put this book to press on February 28th, which was four days after Russia invaded Ukraine. I could only write quickly about that, but it's so obvious that we are taking advantage of the Russia decision to invade Ukraine.
And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that pretty much everyone in the West, in the advanced industrial democracies, including the divided United States, agrees that this is a very serious crisis and we need to respond to it. And agrees on what kind of a crisis it is, that Putin is at fault, that he invaded an innocent Ukrainian country. He tried to take out that government and forcibly change their borders, and none of us are up for that.
So, there aren't two sides of this argument in NATO, for example. And furthermore, the farther the crisis goes, the longer it proceeds, the more we are nudged into recognizing that that was the right decision. And we need to do more, that our priors are being confirmed on the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
And what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, that the scale of the crisis increasingly isn't just about Ukraine, but it's Russia versus NATO. And the necessity of the Europeans spending more in defense, the necessity of NATO and other allies being more coordinated in their responses are very great. The fact that it is obvious that this isn't just about avoiding "genocide for the Russians in Southeast Ukraine", but the war crimes that are happening, the torture, the rape surrounding Kyiv, proving that this is a threat that needs an urgent response.
And the fact there is such a massive displacement, in terms of energy and food and fertilizer, means that the scale of the Russian crisis in Ukraine is actually much greater than crises in places like Sudan and Somalia and Yemen and Syria. And no, it's not because the Ukrainians are white and European. It's because there's economic interdependence and this is a massive global displacement and so more needs to be done.
For those reasons, the Russian invasion of Ukraine increasingly looks to me, what I call a "Goldilocks crisis". It's not so great that we want to curl into a ball and just wait for the end to come, but it's not so small that we aren't shaken out of our complacency. I think both of those things actually means that going forward on the back of the Russia crisis, our institutions and our leadership are going to be stronger and more robust than they were before the crisis came. That's Russia.
What about the pandemic? And it turns out that the lessons from the pandemic are actually much more challenging. Because at the beginning, and to be fair, in the United States, the first few weeks, once it became serious, there was a very strong consensus that everything needs to be done that can be done. Fauci was lionized and the CDC was paid attention to every day and Cuomo was on CNN. Everyone was talking to him, all this stuff.
But the reality is, it did not last long. And it didn't last long because in relatively short order, the Americans were the best in the world and led by the Trump administration, in terms of Operation Warp Speed, to develop and have access to vaccines at scale. And they were expensive and the US paid whatever was required, but they had them.
And in relatively short order, suddenly the Americans started feeling like, "Well, maybe this is mostly about older people and people with preexisting conditions and we have vaccines and we have therapeutics." And so the seriousness with which the Americans took the crisis over time, actually both reduced and became more divided.
The United States versus China, same thing. The Chinese response to the crisis initially was to lie about it and cover it up. They then completely shut down, locked down and were very effective as a consequence, tracking and tracing the virus. They were able to restart in 2020, when other countries that didn't follow the Chinese lead were having bigger problems and more waves. The Chinese then got complacent, said, "We've won. We don't have to worry about this." They didn't feel like they needed Western vaccines. They didn't even vaccinate their older populations well at all.
And so now two years on, the West has emerged with everybody, basically herd immunity, as well as lots of vaccines and therapeutics. While in China, nobody's gotten the disease and they also have refused to allow in Western vaccines. So the US-China relationship is more divided on the back of the pandemic. The United States, Democrats versus Republicans, more divided.
The Europeans are closer together. They used this crisis as an opportunity to do massive redistribution of wealth between the wealthy European countries and the poor countries. They also used it to bring together the EU and create new authority for everyone to get vaccines. To acquire those vaccines together, it took them longer than the Americans. Once they had it, everyone got them.
So there were some good stories and there was good stories and how the world, all the wealthy countries came together through the IMF to help ensure that the poorest countries in the world didn't have a financial crisis, but overall, this wasn't a "Goldilocks crisis". It was frankly too divided and too small to force global cooperation, that would have led to a better structural response.
That leads me to climate change. And if you look at climate change between Russia and the pandemic, it actually looks a lot more like the Russia crisis, which is first of all, that everyone in the world in this case actually agrees on what the crisis is. They didn't 20 years ago, 30 years ago, but now they do. Everyone agrees, it's anthropogenic. It comes from humanity, not cyclical, nature, changes in the climate.
And furthermore, that it's getting considerably worse over time. We know it's 1.2 degrees Centigrade of warming right now. We know the impact that has on countries around the world. We know that we have to get away from fossil fuels as fast as possible, if we want to address it.
So the fact that the world agrees, despite the fact that the United States and China aren't collaborating, despite the fact that the Democrats and Republicans hate each other inside the United States, is an extraordinary thing. And we're seeing that a combination of the Europeans and mayors and governors in the United States, and the private sector and banks and young people around the world, and particularly young people in the wealthy economies care immensely about this issue and are all rowing in the same direction.
And what that means is vastly more money into renewables. It means that things like solar and wind and nuclear, third generation nuclear plants, as well as electric vehicles and electric batteries and the infrastructure and supply chain to support that, are all getting vastly cheaper at scale. And within a generation, a majority of the world's power, not going to come from fossil fuels anymore.
Does that mean that this is all a win, that we don't have to talk about it? Of course not, because there's still enormous amount to play for between 1.5 and 2.5 degrees of warming. We're talking about trillions of dollars and hundreds of millions of lives in the balance. But nonetheless, it is the scale of this crisis that is leading to an extraordinary global reaction, that will create more global cooperation and new institutions that are desperately needed. That's a really positive thing.
Final point is disruptive technologies. And now we're talking about these new technologies that are not containable in the way that nuclear weapons were, because they're complicated, they're really expensive and they're dangerous and easy to track. But rather things like cyber weapons and disinformation weapons and artificial intelligence algorithms, lethal autonomous drones, even quantum computing, and all of these are increasingly going to be in the hands not just of the US and Russia and China, but also rogue actors and non-state actors.
And if we're unable to effectively contain them, then you're not going to have mutually assured destruction as you did with the nuclear balance. You're actually going to have democracies falling apart, massive dangers to the individual economies, the global economy, and potentially existential threats to humanity itself.
Ultimately, solutions are interesting in this space, because governments are not as powerful as actors. So the fact that the US and China don't work as well together and the US itself is so dysfunctional, may matter less than the question of what these technology companies themselves are going to do, and who's going to influence them, how they're going to be regulated globally by all sorts of different actors. And also who has power and what kind of models they follow.
It is the crisis that the governments are at least focused on. It's the global crisis that they're at least capable of responding to. It's the one that's least directly in front of us, but also the one that is most macro and most dangerous over the course of the next 10 years.
I don't know, I'm not confident to say it's a "Goldilocks crisis". But I will tell you that if it's not, we're not going to be here for that long. So we better act as if it isn't do our damnedest. Anyway, a little dark towards the end, but that's a little bit of what the book's about. There's a lot more under the hood. I hope you find it interesting. The Power of Crisis is in bookstores. You can grab it as of tomorrow, and appreciate you watching and a lot more from me coming up soon. Bye.
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Episode 6: Common prosperity, coal, and competitiveness: The US and China (part II)
Listen: The relationship between the US and China is rapidly evolving. Economic and political decisions made today will impact power dynamics in both the near and long term. We'll examine the Chinese government's plans to shape industries, continue its domestic growth, and deliver on commitments made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Plus, we'll explain what those decisions may mean for Chinese and US investors in the near future.
The latest episode of Living Beyond Borders, a special podcast series from GZERO and Citi Private Bank, is the second in a two-part series on the relationship between the US and China. Moderated by Caitlin Dean, Head of the Geostrategy Practice at Eurasia Group, this episode features David Bailin, Chief Investment Officer and Global Head of Investments for Citi Global Wealth, Steven Lo, Co-Head of Citi Global Wealth for Asia Pacific, and Ian Bremmer, President at Eurasia Group and GZERO Media.
David Bailin
Chief Investment Officer and Global Head of Investments, Citi Global Wealth
Steven Lo
Co-head of Citi Global Wealth, Asia Pacific
Ian Bremmer
President, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media
Caitlin Dean
Practice Head, Geostrategy, Eurasia Group
Episode 5: Tariffs, tutors, and tension: The US and China (part I)
Listen: Tensions have been building between the US and China for some time, and the Biden administration and President Xi's leadership team have not found much new common ground. We'll look at how Xi Jinping's latest actions to focus on "Common Prosperity" have changed China's priorities, what the crackdown on certain industries means for markets, and how the U.S. is responding to these policy shifts for better or for worse.
The latest episode of Living Beyond Borders, a special podcast series from GZERO and Citi Private Bank, is the first in a two-part series on the relationship between the US and China. Moderated by Caitlin Dean, Head of the Geostrategy Practice at Eurasia Group, this episode features David Bailin, Chief Investment Officer and Global Head of Investments for Citi Global Wealth, Steven Lo, Co-Head of Citi Global Wealth for Asia Pacific, and Ian Bremmer, President at Eurasia Group and GZERO Media.
David Bailin
Chief Investment Officer and Global Head of Investments, Citi Global Wealth
Steven Lo
Co-head of Citi Global Wealth, Asia Pacific
Ian Bremmer
President, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media
Caitlin Dean
Practice Head, Geostrategy, Eurasia Group