113. How likely is World War 3? (Ian Bremmer)

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1:42Welcome to The Restless Policies Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And we have with us here a friend of mine called Ian Bremmer. Ian is very famous in the U.S. Maybe not necessarily everybody in Europe knows about him, but I think many people will, as probably the foremost independent analyst of geopolitical risk. And to some extent has kind of created the field. He's become the go-to person for companies, for individuals, for governments on defining this very, very strange world. And we're going to get into it a bit, both what he thinks is happening in the world. We're recording this just after the election of Donald Trump, but also maybe a little bit reflecting on this extraordinary industry that he's been right at the heart of creating, which is trying to make sense of almost 200 countries in that enormous brain of his.

2:34So, Ian, thank you very much for joining us. Ian, it's good to be with both of you. Thanks. And Rory, good to see you, even if not quite in person. Very good to see you too. Can I actually kick off with this? Your reports, Eurasia Group reports, you did a report at the start of 2024 listing the 10 big risks to the world. And number one was the United States versus itself. I don't know how you feel that's gone on, but I just wondered if we could start with that, because if that was what you defined as the biggest geopolitical risk in 2024, and it's panned out with Trump winning, Trump making some pretty remarkable, I would argue, dangerous appointments to his cabinet.

3:16What are we to make so far of what we've seen of Trump 2.0? Well, the implications, I think, are twofold. One is that rule of law and the stability of US political institutions are open to question and under threat, under challenge in a way that is, frankly, hard to imagine in any other advanced industrial democracy today, but of course will be felt for a very long time in the United States. So first, it's about what that means for the U.S., but of course, more broadly, it's about what it means for the rest of the world. We don't have global leadership today, and we certainly don't have the United States aspiring to global leadership.

4:05The values that the U.S. had at least promoted as wanting the world to follow for decades now, like the promotion of free trade and collective security and rule of law and democracy, which of course the U.S. itself only aligned to periodically and hypocritically and all the rest, but still they were the values. That I think is right out the window. And of course, that's going to have huge implications for the rest of the world, especially at a time when so much of the geopolitics today is volatile, uncertain, in conflict at war. Those are the two things I think we would, the two big buckets that you have to look at in the aftermath of this election.

5:00And how did we get here? What's the way that you read the world since you graduated? I guess you're really in a way a product of the sort of 1989 moment, aren't you, in terms of your kind of intellectual development. You did a doctoral thesis on Russians in Ukraine. You very much came through the end of the Cold War. Take us from there to here. How on earth did we end up here? I think three big ways, Rory. The first is that when the Soviet Union collapsed, and you're right, 1989, the wall came down is when I started my PhD work. And that was such a seminal moment. It felt like a very optimistic moment.

5:40It felt like everything that we were taught to believe in as children was correct. That was the world that we were going to achieve, that we were heading towards. Well, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was not integrated into the West, not NATO. The NATO-Russia Council was never that, not the EU, certainly not the G7. I mean, you'll remember the G7 plus one and the Russians were mostly kept in an antirum for key meetings. And they were very, very angry about that. And they knew that this was a club that they were not really being asked to join. So the first point is that the Russians weren't integrated while others among former Soviet satellites and even republics were.

6:25And they're angry about that and they blame the West. Number two is China was integrated into an increasingly global order, especially economically, but they were integrated on the presumption that as they got wealthier, they would become Western, even American. They would become more democratic, support rule of law, and embrace the free market. They have gotten much more powerful. They have not done any of those things. Responsible stakeholdership, as the Americans defined it, was the Chinese will become a part of the American order and they will accept all of those rules. And yet today, China is a much more consolidated authoritarian regime without rule of law and with much less of a free market.

7:14I mean, in fact, over the last 10 years, you could easily argue that the United States has moved closer to Chinese values globally, more transactional, for example, less about rule of law than the Chinese have moved towards the American model. That's a very different question. Maybe it's worth discussing, but that's the second reason. And then the third reason is that on the back of those two things, tens of millions of people living in the developed democracies increasingly did not feel that their own governments were legitimate, did not feel like they were representative, didn't believe in their own establishment, their own media, their own elites.

7:55And they got angry about that. And that was particularly true in the United States. And some of that was about the economy and inequality and lack of mobility. Some of it was about changing demographics and immigration. some of it was algorithmic and people, you know, sort of increasingly retreating into narrower and more competitive information bubbles. And some of it was all of that being taken advantage of by political entrepreneurs and those that supported them without the interests of the public in mind. In any case, you had the United States increasingly not willing to play its role. So I think that if you ask me, how did we get here?

8:38I think that those three factors are responsible for 95 % of how we got here. Ian, you mentioned G7 slash G8 up to a point. And I was around with Tony Blair at that period when Yeltsin and then Putin were part of that G8 structure. And we sort of thought they were moving in that direction. but you coined this phrase that we're now in a G0 world, which is basically that back in those days when the British economy was bigger than the Chinese and the French felt that they were more powerful than the Russians. Am I right that your definition of G0 is what you meant earlier when you said there is no such thing now as global leadership?

9:20I think that's right. There's lots of leadership, but it's not global. The most powerful countries are much more inward-looking, much more nationalist, and yet our challenges are increasingly global. So there is a real mismatch between the governance we have and the opportunities and challenges that we face. And in that environment, you've got a few different things you can do. You can create new institutions, which we're doing. You see that with climate. You see it with Belt and Road and the BRICS. I mean, Russia's being isolated by the G7, but everyone's coming to Kazan from the global South to meet with them.

9:54And of course, the U.S. is also creating new institutions like we have in Asia with AUKUS and the Quad and the new South Korea-Japan-U.S. triad. You could also reform existing institutions. We are doing some of that too. NATO, which was falling into disrepair, now expanded, much more money going into defense among Western allies in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Or you can go to war. And I would argue that we're doing all three. in response to the GZERO. We're creating new institutions, we're reforming existing institutions, and we're going to war. Now, unfortunately, going to war does seem to be the priority right now.

10:34I'd like that to not be the priority. I'd like us to put more effort into the reforming and the building of institutions than the fighting other countries, but it may take a bit. In my friend and colleague at Yale, Arnie Vestad has drawn parallels with the buildup to the First World War. And obviously, there are many other people out there seeing similarities to build up to the Second World War. Do you see elements of that going on? And how would you assess the risks and likelihoods around moving towards a bigger global conflict? I do, insofar as the Gilded Age does feel a lot like the run-up to what we're seeing right now, An incredible amount of wealth in a small number of people who have access to extraordinary power and are able to capture the levers of decision making in ways that feel unprecedented right now.

11:31Now, again, if you've got video on, you see that I'm sitting in front of a bank vault. It was John Jacob Astor's bank vault back in the pre-Depression era. And this was the center of American boom until it wasn't, until they stopped building and until everyone in the U.S. basically faced economic collapse. Now, I don't think we're facing economic collapse anytime soon, though I do think some of the decisions that might be being made in the United States in the coming year and years, fiscal decisions, for example, deregulatory decisions, desires to break institutions that you need for basic functioning of your governance, that does feel to me like we could speed up a pre-global war.

12:25environment, sure. In other words, if this is pre-World War I, it's early pre-World War I, it does not feel like the beginning of a new Cold War to me. I know that Neil Ferguson has been trying really hard to make that happen in his statements recently. But you can't really have a Cold War. I mean, the Americans haven't wanted one. Trump might feel differently. the Chinese certainly don't want one, but more importantly, no other country in the world wants one, right? They all really want to work with both the Americans and the Chinese. And it's just hard to have a Cold War if only two countries want to fight it.

13:04And I think one of the things that really makes this global order more resilient is the fact that the Americans and the Chinese have great limitations on what they can accomplish globally, what they want to accomplish globally, what they can accomplish globally. Other countries matter. They matter increasingly greatly. That, I think, is something to be celebrated. It is a stabilizing factor. Because let's face it, very few people around the world looking at the US and looking at China right now say, I am comfortable with what those worldviews represent. So you don't want those two countries running everything.

13:43That would be a bad fit. Ian, you've mentioned tech a couple of times. You've mentioned the breakdown of a clear global leadership. Would you argue that the Musks and Zuckerbergs and the Bezos of this world are now more powerful than most elected leaders in the world? Given the power that you say they have, what on earth are we to make of the fact that Elon Musk looks, to all intents and purposes, he's not just sort of almost vice president. It feels a bit like co-president at the moment. And given the power that he already has outside politics and outside government, I noted that number four on your list of risks a year ago was ungovernable AI.

14:30What are we to make of that? And how would you define the power that these tech guys have now? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, well, first, in the digital space, technologists with monopoly platforms are increasingly acting as sovereign. The governments don't know how to regulate them. They're worried about regulating them and undermining their own competitiveness, particularly in the U.S., but you see a fair amount of this, you know, even from France, for example, and trying to slow down what's happening in Brussels. So yes, there's no question these individuals, even more than companies in many cases, have far more power than most elected leaders.

15:12I think that that is clearly true. And the trend is only increasing in that direction. I mean, I think about something like Starlink, which was essential to help the Ukrainians stay in power. And arguably, Elon Musk has done more to support Zelensky in the last three years than anyone on the planet as an individual, as an individual. Arguably, I think I would make that argument, even though he's more recently done things that feel as if they promote Kremlin talking points. It's complicated, right? But if fiber optic connections with Taiwan were cut off by Chinese fishing vessels, for example, it's clear that Starlink would not be made available to Taiwan because Elon's investments in mainland China would be directly threatened by such a decision.

16:05Now, it should be patently clear that that is a problem from a national security perspective. Those are decisions we want to be made by governments, by elected officials who are in some way accountable and responsible to their populations. Elon is accountable to himself and precisely himself. And Mark Zuckerberg, same. So we clearly have an environment. I mean, the fact that Musk was on that call with Zelensky, that matters. And again, some of what he does may well be very positive. I don't think there's any human being on the planet that has the ability to be an individual intermediary between Trump and Xi Jinping the way Elon does.

16:53Kissinger's dead. It wouldn't surprise me at all if on Trump's first call with Xi Jinping, Elon is on it. And Elon would be inclined to try to facilitate a stabilization of that relationship in a way that, frankly, all of Trump's cabinet members would not. So he could well play a very constructive role there, but it is a purely ungoverned and irresponsible role. And that, of course, again, it's not just Elon. We're going to see a whole bunch of people like that. That is a very different way of thinking about geopolitics going forward. How much difference do you think that Elon Musk getting so enthusiastically behind Trump made to Trump's electoral victory?

17:35I think TikTok probably mattered more than Twitter acts in terms of turning votes out. Not among TikToks under 18s, but even if you look at just the over 18s, far more people, far more engaged on it than engaged on Twitter acts. The money matters, but does it matter as much as what Kamala had? Frankly, she got a lot more from billionaires than Trump did from Elon and his billionaires. And of course, the U.S. election is two years long and cost$10 billion and is an obscenity from a representative democracy perspective. Look, I think that if you compare the United States election to the elections you had in your country or to France or to Japan or South Korea, or what we're going to see in Germany and Canada in short order, Actually, the relevant question is, why did Kamala do so well?

18:30Because she was the incumbent that outperformed, right? It was the closer election. I mean, all the incumbents lost. From my view, and you and I talked about this a few months ago, Rory, I mean, I thought it was pretty clear that Trump was going to win for that reason, because this was an anti-incumbent wave. People didn't trust their institutions. They weren't happy about inflation. They weren't happy about migration post-pandemic. and you know the polls i mean you get on average u.s polls you got 0.5 percent response rating compared to two percent you know a couple decades ago what does that mean that means that people don't trust the institutions well who are they voting for probably not the person that represents the establishment so i think the real question is why kamala did so well and i think there are three reasons for that in descending order of importance the first is that the u.s economy was performing and is performing better than all the other developed economies so there was less of a hit to her from representing that economy.

19:27Two is that Trump was such an unfit and unpopular candidate in the opposition, and that hurt him with independence. And third is that Harris ran a very cautious campaign and didn't make any huge mistakes. So, I mean, if you're an alien looking down, that's the question you'd ask is why Kamala did so well. Of course, that's a very, very little consolation to all the people whose heads are exploding around the world saying, oh my God, Trump is back. And Trump is back with the Senate and the House and with a cabinet that will be completely loyal and in some cases utterly unfit. I mean, Trump has actually appointed a few members of cabinet that are even more unfit for office than Trump is, which is a freaking high bar, right?

20:15And yet that is where we are. And all that being said, Ian, back in the day before he became president first time around, you were pretty confident he would never win the Republican nomination and he'd never become president. So what did we all get wrong? Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the first time around, we were still looking at the United States in a pre-G0 environment. It was still the political institutions felt much stronger at that point. Trump had a hard time securing the nomination. He was fighting against people like Ted Cruz. The Republican Party still felt like a normal party at that point.

20:56It didn't feel like a populist party. It was still mostly in bed with free trade. And it was mostly in bed with big corporations and felt aligned with those things and rich people. And the Democrats were the party of the working class and not the elites. And that was already changing, but it changed much more dramatically and much more quickly in the United States eight years ago than at that time that I had anticipated that it would. Absolutely. But the trends have only got farther in that direction. There's only more political dysfunction and tribalism through four years of Trump and four years of Biden.

21:37And I expect that that is going to accelerate under four years of maximum Trump. And given that the three of us are in the business of commenting on political affairs, and sometimes getting tempted into trying to predict the future, how do you reconcile yourself to this? I mean, I've got things catastrophically wrong. For example, I thought that Kamala Harris would win comfortably, and she obviously didn't. I've got some things better. I think I was reasonably good on Afghanistan, and I made a lucky guess that Brexit would go 52-48, and it went 52-48. But how do you reflect over - And that it would do nothing for the country.

22:15How do you, reflecting over a long career on this stuff, do you think about what to do when people ask you to predict the future in an obviously pretty uncertain world? And how do you reconcile yourself to the things you get right, the things you get wrong? How do you deal with that as you go forward? The first point is that what you get right or wrong has nothing to do with what you want to have happen. So I think it's very important that the fact that I am personally on record as saying that Trump is the most unfit candidate for the presidency that I have ever encountered, and I felt he was unfit when he was a Democrat.

22:50It had nothing to do with his political party. He doesn't have an ideological North Star other than himself. I didn't want him to win in 2024, but that had nothing to do with my assessment of whether he would win. So the fact that I don't get, you know, sort of personally invested in analytic calls, emotionally invested, I think is a very, very important thing, which is increasingly rare. 20, 30 years ago, it wasn't that rare. It's become much more rare and therefore it's much more valuable to maintain. Secondly is, you know, it was very easy for you both to go back to our top risks from 2024 and see what we said back in January because we keep it on our homepage.

23:33all year. And the reason we do that is because we want people to do exactly what you just did. Let's go back and call balls and strikes. What did they say a year ago? You don't hide it, right? You're like, I mean, I noticed that we've got all of these people that supported Kamala that are going back and they're deleting their old tweet and world leaders and ambassadors to the US and they're deleting their old tweets. I didn't delete anything. Go back and see what we said. Absolutely. Because I'm very comfortable that the first time around when Trump did things that were successful, like the first bilateral trade deal with an African country or chorus with South Korea or the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement or the Abraham Accords, I was very happy to say, here are some great successes that we had under Trump.

24:17Just like when he made some big failures, I was prepared to call him out on that too. And as I did with Biden, as I will with Trump again. And so, you know, when you go back at the end of the year and see how you did, you know. Yeah. And how do you cope with the times when you've got things wrong? I mean, what's the ways that you've dealt with the times you've miscalled it as, for example, thinking Trump wouldn't get the nomination, wouldn't win in 2016? I'll give you a recent big example. So when Millet was elected president of Argentina, I believed that he was going to fail economically, not because his suggestions were all so antithetical to what was necessary.

24:57But number one, I thought the Peronists would prevent him from having successes. And they were still very entrenched in labor, in the governor positions, that sort of thing. And secondly, because I saw a lot of what his election rhetoric was, and he was such an outsider. He had nothing to do with the traditional conservative right in Argentina. I thought he was really going to try to dollarize the economy. I didn't think he'd back away from that. I didn't think he was going to be a pragmatic compromiser. And so I thought between those two things, Argentina was going to fail even worse than it has been over the Kirchner years, the Fernandez years, for example.

25:37So he came in and it was very clear, number one, that the Peronists, as he started compromising, they were willing to give him some rope because he could do things and be blamed for them that they then wouldn't have to be responsible for. So it was one cycle. And secondly, that he was truly willing to be much more pragmatic than I expected. So I came out, I went back, I promoted what I wrote about him the four or five months before. And I said, why did I get Millie so wrong? And I explained it. I went through and I said, let me talk about why. And by the way, I was happy to get him wrong because it's good for the Argentinian people.

26:16Well, here's the very funny thing is that he got in touch with me. He posted my piece and he said, I'm really happy that you were willing to come out and say that you got it wrong. And on the back of that, I said, well, why don't you do my show? The only show you've done in the US is Tucker Carlson and he's a nutbag and he's not making you look like a sane person. Have a conversation with me. So we spent an hour having a conversation on my show. I think that if you are willing to consistently call balls and strikes on yourself and take your work seriously, but not yourself seriously, that that is something that it's authentic and it resonates with people around the world.

26:54I think it's really important to do. Well, if the Argentine ambassador to London is listening, Rory, should we say that we've got Millet Rog and on that basis, he might fold us up and come on, because we'd quite like to talk to him. We'd definitely love him on the show. By the way, there's plenty of time for it still to go wrong, but we'll see. The other thing, Ian, sorry to take you back to some of your past triumphs, but I'm a great believer in the power of very, very blunt, short messaging. And I think we have you to blame for one of Trump's most successful short messages. Oh, Jesus. I'm sorry, which is America first.

27:31Yeah. To be fair to you, you did say the policies are clearly America first. That is not the same as make America great again because this won't make America great again. You did say that. And then, of course, what happened to those listeners that don't know? Trump was asked in an interview whether he liked this idea of America first, that he basically loved it. And he's been using it ever since. So how do you feel to have given birth to one of his most important slogans? Well, the question that came to me is whether I thought Trump was isolationist or not. And I said, no, he's unilateralist. He's transactionalist.

28:07It's not like he's trying to hide America from other countries. He's trying to use American power in a very blunt way to get better deals from other countries around the world one-on-one. So it felt very much like America first, that that was what the message was. And I didn't realize that one of my readers from the New York Times was then going to go and get the first interview with them and use that and basically say, here's your campaign slogan. Yeah, I don't feel great about that because I think it's done a lot of damage, frankly. I wish they hadn't asked him. Ian, where do you think we're going to be with tariffs?

28:41So Trump's talked about 60 % tariffs against China, but more from where we're talking with our European listener base, 20 % tariffs against the rest of the world. Do you imagine that happening to Europe? And can you imagine Britain being able to somehow negotiate its way out of it and exploit some special relationship independent to the EU? Where do you see that going? Well, I mean, I have a hard idea that the UK is going to have a better shot negotiating with the US with its present government. I don't see that. It's very clear that Starmer et al are being nice to Trump through gritted teeth.