The Biggest Global Risks for 2026 — with Ian Bremmer

28:20And so this is part of the problem, too, is that people's hair is on fire all the time. And so orange man bad, everything he does is equally horrible. No, there's a filter too. And in his first term, almost none of his acts were inherently revolutionary. Increasingly they are. And, and watching that trajectory and that evolution is extremely important. And then see to what extent are they being checked? Are they being stopped? Like for example, when he puts those investigations against Letitia James and, Comey. And it turns out he fails. Right. So that was an effort. But there was pushback. You know, there were others like the the the what was it?

29:00The the Act Blue investigation investigation that that was successful. That's a completely chilling revolutionary act that will have an impact on the ability and willingness to donate to political opposition in the United States. So, I mean, you've got to look at all of that stuff to understand where they're going. Absolutely. There's I don't want to have Trump derangement syndrome, which I've been accused of many times in my life. But I do want to go to another Trump themed risk, which was number six on your list. State capitalism with American characteristics. What does that mean in the U.S.

29:36context and how is it different from traditional industrial policy or normal government intervention? Well, it's only number six. And so no big deal. Well, these risks are rated and rated on the basis of likelihood, imminence and impact. And since the U.S. is by far the most impactful thing on the global stage, if a U.S. risk is only number six. Right. then that implies that it's nowhere close to the stuff that we've been talking about so far, just to be clear. So, I mean, yes, we are seeing state capitalism and industrial policy play a much bigger role in certain aspects of the U.S. economy. So when Trump says there's going to be a golden share for U.S.

30:19steel and the American president will decide how that will be used or not. So, no, you're going to keep that factory open that actually, you know, you otherwise would have closed because it doesn't make any economic sense. And that's normally a private sector decision, but now it isn't. And we're going to allow NVIDIA to sell these chips to China because they just effectively lobbied me as the president. We're going to take a stake directly in Intel because we already bailed them out. But that's going to be retroactive. Now we're going to actually say that we're just going to take an equity share.

30:56And by the way, Japan, if you want access to the American market, you're going to have to invest$550 billion in a facility. And we're going to decide which those companies are going to be. All of those things are injecting Washington and the person of Trump into the investment process, into the capital process. And it's also there's also kleptocracy. There's also, well, Pakistan is investing in Trump's family's financial crypto company. And so the U.S. is going to give more access and more time to the Pakistanis and that'll damage the U.S.-India relationship. And there's a lot of that going on, too.

31:37Now, again, there's a political revolution underway in the U.S. that I think will fail. there's not an economic revolution going in the U.S. The U.S. has long been a system economically where the private sector captures the regulatory environment, where money speaks loudly in the political system, where the lobby is extraordinarily powerful and undermines competition. And it's a country that has had industrial policy before. But we have not seen this level of personalization of industrial policy well beyond strategic sectors that we're now seeing under Trump. It's not structurally changing the system, but it's adding a lot of incremental costs and uncertainty as you inject the politics.

32:24I think a lot of kind of normie lay people are wondering about the unraveling of a lot of these policies if that were to happen in twenty twenty nine. Trump's not a dictator. We're going to have a new president. It could be J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio. It could be a Democrat. I don't know. But do you think that this approach to capitalism will be part of the Republican economic policy going forward? Or is this something that is distinctly Trumpian? I think it'll be part of a Democratic Party, too. When you break norms and you put more power in the hands of the political system and the executive, they will use that for whatever political ends they want.

33:10So if today we have more state capitalism and it's used to support oil companies that are going to go into Venezuela tomorrow under a Democrat, it'll be used to promote renewable energy and their favorite companies. But it's not they're not going to willingly give that power up. Right. And we see so much of this norm erosion. The same thing will be true. I mean, if you have the attacks on corporate media, which right now are being directed against ABC News or CNN, you know, in the future, they can and will be used against Fox and Newsmax. And remember, Trump was a sitting president and he was actually deplatformed from Twitter and from Facebook and from the Apple store.

34:03I found that very disturbing as a decision that was being made against the sitting American president. But now, of course, Trump has control over Truth Social. Elon has control over X and they're trying to get control to political loyalists for TikTok. I have no doubt that if Democrats are in power in the future, those things will be shifted politically for their benefit. it. So, I mean, whether it's JD or whether it's the Democrats, you break these norms and it's a slippery slope. I mean, it's not like Trump suddenly is the cause of all these problems. Trump is not the cause. Trump is a symptom, right?

34:41Trump is he's a symptom. He's a beneficiary and he's an accelerant and he's a powerful accelerant. But these things have been have been coming for a long time. And part of the reason that we're seeing a political revolution in the United States right now is that of the people that said in 2024 that democracy was an important reason for them to vote, not the most important reason, but important reason, more of those people voted for Trump than voted for Kamala because they thought the political system was already so captured, so rigged that they wanted someone who was willing to break it. That is spiraling down.

35:20The United States today is by far the most powerful economy. It's by far the most powerful military. It's incredibly innovative. It's got the world's reserve currency. And yet it is by far the most dysfunctional political system among the advanced industrial economies. The U.S. political system is in deep decline. And that imbalance is causing a lot of uncertainty. Absolutely. And we're going to get to talking about Europe in a couple as well, because there are themes that certainly are aligned with what's going on here, though not as extreme, I guess. I want to talk about the energy race, AI.

35:58So risk number two, overpowered, and also risk number eight, AI eats its users, which I loved the name of, both touching on this energy race between the U.S. and China and the impact that AI will continue to have on society. You say that China has mastered the electric stack energy batteries grids manufacturing while the U.S. is betting that whoever builds the smartest models wins. Maybe my favorite line from the report was Washington is asking the world to buy 20th century energy while Beijing offers 21st century infrastructure. The floor is yours to talk about that. I want to bring this back to the Don Roe doctrine because the United States has all of this military influence and look at what they could do to Maduro.

36:42And yet in America's backyard, which Trump has said we will have dominance over, the the the most important trading partner of most of those countries is not the U.S. It's China. So the Americans have the military influence, but the Chinese have the economic influence. And there's no way for the Americans to become dominant again economically in their own backyard unless they are producing the most advanced technologies these countries need. And they need inexpensive energy to power AI, to feed their people, to keep their countries and their economies going. And the Americans have this staggering strength in oil and gas and coal.

37:2513.5 million barrels a day. And now the U.S. has just exercised some level of dominion over a country that has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, Venezuela, okay? That's a great, great story. If you are also going to build energy that's getting cheaper, which is the wind, the solar, the nuclear, the batteries, and the supply chain to support it. And yet the Americans have said, no, no, no, no, no. We're gonna keep fighting on oil and gas and coal. which is not getting cheaper over time. And we're going to tie our other hand, our stronger hand behind our backs, right? And we are not going to develop what the Chinese are becoming dominant in.

38:08Now, American AI is today more advanced than Chinese AI, but the energy that you need to power it is being developed at scale and cheaper and exportable by the world's first electrostate, China. And what really bothers me about U.S. strategy right now is it's so short term. You've got to invest for the long term, especially when you have a political system that doesn't work for the long term. It's a short term political system, which means you have to therefore put policies in place that can actually be consistent from one political cycle to the next. The Chinese don't need to worry about that.

38:46No, they don't. And Trump is jealous of them for it. Very jealous of that. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that this path that we're on, the short-term gain path, I guess, versus the long-term plan, that we can rectify that or we're just like it's a careening train car and it's not going to stop, especially with this leadership? Because some of the things that you're talking about, you know, that we want to fight this war with old tools, essentially, that links directly to the politics of MAGA, right, and the base that they are trying to speak to. So is there an off ramp for us where we can kind of meet China where they are?

39:28You know, I mean, the fact that the Americans were so surprised by China's dominance in critical minerals, which powers a lot of this stuff, you know, definitely led the U.S. to say we need to start prioritizing investments in those companies and aligning with other countries that have access to those critical minerals. The U.S. has belatedly said battery technology is something the U.S. should be taking a very serious look at and investing in. And hopefully that will pick up. Trump has decided that solar and wind are basically woke climate response and not the increasingly inexpensive energy of the future that the Americans need to dominate.

40:15and another president can make a change. But again, going in, going out of these decisions every few years, while you have another country at scale that is investing vastly more and bringing far more electricity onto the grid, just puts the Americans behind the eight ball. So we made this a risk and it's starting to really hit because AI is really important and you need to power it. in 2026, I don't think the Americans have lost the game, but they've made a really bad bet. And the longer that bet stays on the table and you ride with it, the more you're going to lose. We'll be right back.

41:09We're back with more from Ian Bremmer. if scott were here he would definitely want to talk to you about the ai bubble which he's obsessed with um what's your take on what these ai companies that are propping up our stock market um to absurd levels are going to do in 2026 so uh scott will have a better take than i will on how frothing the ai bubble is i don't i'm not a stock watcher i don't really have a sense of how overvalued they may or may not be. But I do think that it's very clear that what's driving AI right now is happening outside of the regulatory process, outside of governance, outside of coordination.

41:52It is, we believe in this. It is transformative. It's revolutionary and it's massive. And so we just need to win, win, win, accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. And as that's happening, you know, there are certainly going to be investors that are going to put more pressure on where's our return. And so I think that the nearer term risk, whether or not there's a bubble, is that these companies are going to start facing much more pressure to provide commercialized AI product. And what worries me there, and it's only some of the companies, because some of the companies are selling B2B, they're selling industrial product, national security product, data sets that are actually contained and known.

42:38So you don't have the hallucinations. The Chinese are also doing a lot of that. And I think there's going to be incredible gains in efficiency, productivity, huge inventions coming from that. Very excited about the biotech field, for example, very excited about reducing waste and increasing efficiency in traffic flows and, you know, sort of for airline travel, things like that. All of this is great. But for the companies that specifically are selling AI to consumers, the social media equivalent, the Google search equivalent, if they have to start making lots of money on really gaudy return expectations, what they will do will be very damaging to society.

43:24because they're already injecting AI into our body politic without testing it. And that's so much more dangerous than social media. You know, I mean, these AIs, which we already, they already effectively have made the Turing test obsolete. You know, most people, if they're online with the most advanced AIs, do not know if they are interacting with a person or with an AI. and yet those AIs are programmed, you know, to make sure that you are engaging with them and they want you to be happy with them. They want to give you what you want, more of what you want, even though they have no affect whatsoever.

44:10Now, by the way, there are people like this. We call them sociopaths and we absolutely try to spend as little time with them as possible. we keep our kids away from them because they're predators. And yet, when we apply that to the AI model, we say, it's okay to test that real time on our body politic and on our society. And my answer to that is, no, it's not. And that's going to cause a lot of damage in my view. I'm deeply concerned about that. Yeah. It's strange that we're kind of just like letting that one slide in the conversations about regulations or even like banning phones in schools. And then there's kind of lip service paid to how insane it is that people are having full on relationships with these chatbots, like you saying, that, you know, they don't know who they're talking to and no one seems to really care about finding out.

45:03And when you have a government that doesn't want to legislate about these things, and I'm not saying that the Democrats are perfect in terms of it, but it's a it's frightening stuff. I mean, the Europeans are turning away from regulation of AI because they know that they don't have any tech companies and they desperately need the competitiveness and the growth. The only country that's really doing it is China because their view is if our citizens are going to hallucinate, they're certainly not going to hallucinate from an AI. It's going to be chat CCP, right, not chat GPT. And so they are really throttling what they're allowing their AI companies to do with consumers while they're putting their foot on the gas on industrial and security, national security uses.

45:45But in the United States, in Europe and in the global south, it's basically the Wild West. Fascinating. I want to jump to Europe or back to Europe now to your risk number four, Europe under siege. France, Germany and the UK all enter 2026 with weak governments, rising populism and no margin for reform. Why is this moment uniquely dangerous for Europe's ability to govern itself? And you write that the center cannot hold, as the co-host of a podcast called Raging Moderates that stuck out to me. Just hearing that the center or the middle cannot hold is a bit scary. Well, the big change geopolitically in the world over the last 20 years has not been the U.S.

46:27in decline. It's been America's allies in decline. And we see that demographically. We see that economically in terms of productivity. We see that in the lack of defense spending. And and if the United States is now saying, OK, well, we don't really want to defend you anymore. We're not really interested in providing that support. In fact, we'd rather have a weaker Europe so that we can deal with individual European countries that will be more aligned with what we want. And the Russians on the other side are saying, we want Ukraine and we're going to cause all sorts of problems for you on your borders because you've expanded NATO in a way that is threatening to us.

47:06And so there's all this asymmetric warfare that's happening from Russia. Suddenly, the Europeans are getting it from both sides. They've got to spend much more on defense. They've got to spend much more on infrastructure. They have to build their competitiveness at a time that their social contract has been providing so much for people and they're demanding that spending continues. Interest rates are higher. Borrowing rates are higher and their indebtedness levels are high. So this is kind of a no win situation for Europe. They should have been making this bet 20, 30 years ago that they needed to focus more on growth and more on defense because the Americans wouldn't always be there to defend them.

47:47And because Russia was going to be a threat, they didn't. And so now when they really have to, when their backs are to the wall and it's urgent, they also have inside their own countries a whole bunch of people saying we don't we don't support this EU thing. We we we don't want immigration and we don't want to spend money on anybody else. and we want Euroscepticism, power for our own nations. And so in Germany, in France and in the UK, the three big countries, you have increasingly very, very weak centrist governments that are not likely to be effective and may not last, may fall. And the Americans are gonna help that process and the Russians are gonna help that process.

48:27Reform party in the UK, AFD in Germany, national rally in France. Why do you think that Washington prefers a fragmented Europe? So this is the big foreign policy difference between Trump and previous administrations. Certainly Biden, who was a noted Atlanticist. Trump, first of all, because Trump likes leaders that he likes. And and that means Orban and Bardella and Le Pen and Farage, all of whom have been like with Elon Musk as well, like with J.D. Vance, have been saying we want MAGA. We're Europe firsters. So that's one reason is that level of affinity with that specific, you know, more populist right movement across Europe.

49:16Second is that Trump understands that with weak countries, he can FAFO. With strong countries, he's got a taco. Right. So China is a taco situation. Venezuela is a FAFO situation. The EU together, if they're strong, is a lot more taco. If they're weak and they're vulnerable, it's FAFO. So he likes that. So he doesn't want to deal with the EU. He doesn't want to deal with Brussels. He doesn't want to deal with the world's largest common market that can engage in regulatory processes and trade processes that are going to be challenging and competitive with the United States. He wants to cut individual deals with leaders that he can bully around.

50:05And that is, again, from a short term perspective, if you don't think a strong EU matters for the promotion of rule of law, you don't think international law matters, you don't care about the promotion of democracy, about human rights, about those things, which the Americans have had a spotty record on, but has generally cared about more than not. But if you think those things don't matter, and if rather it's just about power and you're going to be the apex predator, then why would you want the EU? So that is really a very different worldview that you saw J.D. Vance put on display at the Munich Security Conference last February when he said, you guys are the enemy, not the Russians or the Chinese.

50:48And you saw it to a degree in the national security strategy document when the Trump administration was talking about the civilizational decay that was happening inside Europe, which, again, I think Europe has lots of problems. I think the Americans have lots of problems. They're different problems. But at the end of the day, there has been a level of trust because the values have been very simpatico because we all sort of care about rule of law, about individual rights, about democracy. We have some different priorities and how we want to spend our money and what matters most to us. And our laws are a little different.

51:26But ultimately, we've all wanted to have this United Nations, IMF, World Bank, NATO, all these institutions that came out of World War II that the Americans created. But now the United States is saying we're no longer committed to any of those institutions or rules. while our allies are saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we really need those things. And they do. They need them a lot more than the Americans do. But the lack of American commitment is creating a crisis for Europe. And that's even before we talk about this immediate Greenland problem. Yeah, well, I mean, the immediate Greenland problem, what you were just saying about how much more Europe needs a strong NATO in particular, links to your risk number five, Russia's second front, predicting the escalation this year will come from the hybrid war between Russia and NATO.

52:15What does that really mean? That means that at a time where the Europeans are doing all the spending to support Ukraine and the war is bleeding Russia a lot and their economy is taking strain, they understand that if they can just divide Europe off from the U.S. or if they can divide Europe internally, that's the way that they can win this war. You know, and what we've seen is an increase in asymmetric warfare from Russia into all of the frontline European states. We've seen the cyber attacks increase. We've seen the ships dragging anchor and destroying the fiber lines and attacking gas lines and the rest.

53:02We've seen what you call the drones going into Poland and Romania. We've seen weather balloons going into Lithuania. We've seen also all sorts of Russian money paying for people to engage in vandalism and destruction of property, critical infrastructure, even an attempt to assassinate the CEO of the largest defense company in Germany. And now we're seeing NATO frontline countries recognizing this is a real danger to them and they need to start collectively taking action against Russia. And maybe the Americans won't support that. But together, we're seeing talk of offensive cyber attacks against Russia.

53:43We're seeing talks of needing to take down those drones as they come and take countermeasures and to respond to jet fighters that are going into the territorial airspace of these frontline countries. And all of that is significantly escalating the nature of the risk because Russia isn't just at war in Ukraine. Russia is actually engaged in a shadow war in NATO. Uplifting stuff. Well, top risks is how we start the year. You know, what do you do? And then we'll evaluate at the end and hopefully it won't be as bleak as it could feel right now. OK, I want to wrap up by asking you at the end of the report, you say that you're not optimistic, but you're hopeful.

54:27So what is keeping you hopeful? You know, it's easy to say the technology is great and so exciting and all that. That's easy. And I think there are a couple of bigger things that make me hopeful. The first is that we're not heading to World War Three. This is the United States abdicating its own institutions and its own leadership and maybe its own values is leading other countries around the world to say, wait a second, we like a lot of these institutions. We like a lot of these values. and they're hedging and they're creating alternative trade agreements and alternative ways to make sure that they can defend themselves.

55:05And that is that they're not we're not just seeing a beggar thy neighbor policies everywhere. We are seeing the creation of more resilience. That's one thing that makes me feel more optimistic. Countries like India that are trying to reach out and build stronger relations with the rest of the G7 and with all the global south and even stabilize their relationship with China. India's got 1.5 billion people. That's a big thing for them to do. And they're growing at 8%, right? The Gulf states are saying, well, wait a second, we need to make sure that the region is stable. And if the Americans can't be counted on, we're going to have to do more.

55:39And they were the ones that drove that summit with Trump on the Gaza ceasefire. And we ended up getting a security council resolution, a security council where the Russians and the Chinese abstained and everyone else voted in favor after the United States was isolated completely on Israel just two weeks before. And why? Because the regional powers were actually saying, we care about our region. We care about our backyard. So that matters. And it was constructive. It's not all just Don Roe doctrine everywhere. But maybe the thing that makes me most hopeful is that the American political system needed a crisis.

56:15I mean, you know, people were getting angrier and they were getting less aligned with globalism. They didn't like the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fought on their backs that people lied about. And they didn't like the free trade when you're hollowing out U.S. labor and not taking care of your own workers. And they didn't like all of the immigration if you weren't going to ensure that the average American was getting a fair shot. And so there was going to be a breaking point. And that breaking point is not just driven by Trump. That breaking point is also driven by average Americans. And I think that when you, you know, when you create that level of disruption, there's the opportunity to do things differently.

56:55And, you know, most human beings that you and I know are people that we are happy spending time with. We're social animals. They're not all narcissists and sociopaths. And so, yeah, is that am I optimistic that we're going to get to the right place? No, because geopolitically, there are a lot of bad things going on. I think there'll be some really ugly surprise crises that aren't in the report as well. But I'm hopeful because when human beings get together, especially when it's hard and when suddenly we break things, that's when we all pay attention. So that makes me hope. I like it. And I also like to think that I don't spend that much time with sociopaths and psychopaths.

57:32Though some days, you know, we just all feel that way. Ian Bremmer, thank you so much for your time. The Risk Report is available. It's fantastic. It was awesome to talk to you. Thank you. Nice finally meeting you in person. Yeah, I know. Online friends become real. Well, we're still kind of online, but you know what I mean. Anyway, thank you.