The fabulous Ian Bremmer and what we all ought to be worrying about. It's Armstrong and Getty extra large.
Because four hours simply.
This is Armstrong and Getty extra large. So Ian, we're making this part of our podcast. The highlights will air on the radio show are.
The reason we've had to put you on the podcast is because of your merchant Marine foul mouth. I don't know if you remember this from years ago. Play the clip, Michael, Yes, you dropped an S bomb on our radio show, nearly causing us to lose their jobs.
You have no self control. So now we're on. Now we're on the podcast.
Wow I want.
Does that mean I can say whatever I want?
You can say shit shit shit? Yes, you're in good shape Mouth.
I think you're better than that. But feel free also, And before we get started in earnest, I don't know if you remember this, Ian, but we have a bit of unfinished business.
I remember one half of this.
Bet.
I bet you my thumbs that Joseph R. Biden would not be the cannon date in November. I can't remember if you put anything up, but I'm glad I get to keep my thumbs.
I'm glad you get to keep your thumbs.
It was such an embarrassment and so clear that he should have stepped down so much.
Earlier than he had.
And you know, the idea that he he somehow voluntarily, you know, sort of for the grace of the country abdicated, of course, is crazy. He was basically utterly forced and still was dragging his feet at the very last day.
It was not a great moment for the country.
Well about you, But as a fan of a history, I can't wait to read the books that are going to be written about a lot of that decision making and behind the scenes and people who knew and what they knew and what they saw and didn't say, And it's going to be unbelievable over the next twenty five years to read it.
Sure.
Yeah, George Clooney apparently had the inside information.
Yeah, no kidding, and was in charge.
So Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group also its founder political risk research and consulting firm, and every year they put up put out the list of global risks which agreed, disagree are both. Is just always such a great and interesting read and we look forward to chatting with you about it. Ian. Your first risk is funny because we get your newsletter, the G zero, the email every day or whatever you put it up. It hadn't occurred to me to ask, what does G zero mean? Well, your
risk number one is the G zero wins. What are we talking about.
We're talking about the law of the jungle, right, We're talking which which, by the way, the jungle is a great place for an apex predator, but it's not so great if you're weak and not and don't have a strong government.
And that's what we're seeing play out. We're seeing the.
United States embrace unilateralism, reject global rule of law, reject the idea of being the world's policeman or the architect of free trade or the promoter of democracy, and instead say we're going to.
Do things the way we want to.
You guys are weaker, and you better get along with that. And both America's adversaries and its allies are a lot weaker right now, economically, technologically, militarily, and also in terms of their governments just in trouble.
Right. Look at South.
Korea and Germany and France and Canada these days. I mean, this is a this is a really interesting time to be someone like Donald Trump coming into power and saying I'm going to use that power, and I'm going to use it in ways it's going to force you to acquiesce.
So ajzero world is a very volatile it's.
A very unstable world, and it's one that comes from the Americans and some allies no longer willing to play the role they had been.
Told to in the world over over decades.
It's come from Russia not being integrated with the West, being angry at the US about that, and alliging with chaos actors like North Korea. And it's come from China that was integrated into the global economy, but on the presumption that as that happened, they would become more westlike, you know, more political, open reforms, rule of law, free market. None of that happened, and now the US is angry
about it. So you put those things together and you get this geopolitical disorder, which is pretty unique, and it's pretty unique for a country that created a global order to start taking its own order apart.
And that's what we're living through in twenty twenty five.
Nice job not cursing during that answer, by the way, good self control. So even if Kamala Harris had won. Even before we go into the future, where do you rank the lack of world order compared to recent history. I remember I heard hearing Henry Is Kissinger talk about it back when he was alive. He thought we were at a pretty bad point. We are slash were.
I think that again, bad point depends on whose perspective you're taking the I think the United States is going to get a lot of wins in this environment. We say that this is the most dangerous period since the thirties, but you know, there was a lot of appeasement going on in the thirties. There's a lot of appeasement that's
going to happen in twenty twenty five. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg looked like he was appeasing yesterday, right, And if you think that he's in a weak position, you haven't been talking to the Canadians or the Danes in the last forty eight hours.
I think the United States is actually going to get a lot of wins in the early days.
But it's going to be unnerving for people that feel like they're being targeted. It's unnerving for countries that feel like they're on the wrong side of this, and that's going to lead to a lot of fragmentation and a lot of hedging around the world. But the funny thing is when we talked about this last year, you and I, you know, we were were about these big wars that were going on in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and even the growing fighting happening inside the United States.
And the interesting thing about twenty twenty five is that all of those wars are receding. Right.
It's a good chance that the Middle East wars are going to be fought less strongly than they were, in part because the Israelis don't have much more to hit when it comes to Hamas. Secondly, in the Middle in Russia, Ukraine, there's a good likelihood we're going to get a ceasefire over the course of the year. And in the US, despite all of the fighting over the elections, the fact is that nobody thinks that Trump stole it.
It was free, it was fair, it wasn't rigged.
And whether you like Trump or not, you recognize, yeah, he won the presidency, he's going to mandate. So those things that were bothering us so much in twenty twenty four and played out over twenty twenty four in ways that we're very damaging for twenty twenty five have actually started to started to hit the rear view mirror so well.
Not only am I one of the great prognosticators of our time or any other ian, I'm also willing to offer my services to go abroad and explain Trump's negotiating style, because I see on your list of risks several of them are related to Trump's governing style, whether the checks and balances of the American system will hold, whether alliances will hold. And you know, I look back to his first term and he has said some outrageous things about
NATO that bothered me. I don't particularly appreciate his negotiating style, but the threats to like disband NATO or let anybody attack him or whatever, I found wildly inappropriate. But the net result was a stronger, more responsible NATO in terms of self funding.
Absolutely and when he said that Mexico was going to build a wall and pay for it, they paid for absolutely nothing on the border, but they did strengthen their own border security in the South, which led to far fewer illegal immigrants going through Mexico into the United States under the Trump administration.
Couldn't agree with you more.
That is super interesting, And I would also cite China where Trump was maybe you know, more blunt and hard ass than he needed to be, but that relationship really need to be turned around. How do you see that progressing this year? The US China breakdown as you put it.
Let me say first broadly that Trump is because he's in a much stronger position internationally because power is relational this time around, and also because he's in a much stronger position domestically. He's got the House, he's got the Senate, but he also has the entire GOP that recognizes they need him and all of his appointees a loyalist that you don't see any Nicky Haley's or Mike Pompeo's or
mad Dog Matis's in this bunch. People are not going to be able to get around him to try to moderate his impulses.
So that's going to lead to Trump being able to do more of what he wants to do.
And what he wants to do is not make Canada the fifty first state, but he does want to change the nature of US trade deficits with countries all over the world. He wants to use tariffs to accomplish that. He also wants to get rid of a lot of illegal immigrants in the US deport them, and I think he's going to do that too with China.
That means that in.
The early weeks of this relationship, we are going to see more tariffs from the United States against China. We're going to see more export controls on semiconductors. And if you look at the people that Trump has appointed, like Mike Waltz and Marco Arrubio, who I think are quite capable, and I'm known for a while, they're very hawkish on China. They are people that are not trusted by the Chinese to engage the way that say Jake Sullivan and some
of his team have been. So I think that the relationship between the US and China, which has been comparatively well managed in the last year and and in a way that did not give away the store to the Chinese. So, I mean, Democrats and Republicans largely think that Biden's done a pretty good job on China. It's one of the few things they agree on when it comes to Biden's
foreign policy. I suspect that's not going to hold. It's going to break down and so we will start slipping into an active trade war between the US China, and we'll see more of an act of decoupling between the two economies than we've presently had.
Wow.
Do you think at some point like Apple can't make phones there anymore and that sort of thing.
I think that's already happening.
We already see Apple putting a lot more money into India and to Vietnam and to Indonesia.
Now some of that is not political.
Some of that is because the Chinese economy is really underperforming. Hijinping has made it tougher for the private sector. He's supported state owned enterprises, and consumer sentiment in China has fallen off a cliff, so people aren't buying as much. They're not they're they're keeping money in savings because they don't really trust the Chinese government to be able to perform the way they had. Some of that was the pandemic in zero COVID too, which they handled.
Really badly in my view.
And so when you talk to Western multinationals about China, they're saying, we're reducing our exposure, we're firing people, we're ending strategic partnerships. Then you add on top of that, Trump saying I'm going to come in and put a sixty percent tariff across the board, and even if you expect that is exaggerated, and I do, it is hitting China at a time that frankly, no one's super excited about spending more money there.
You know, anybody who predicts the imminent downfall of the Chinese Communist Party as a fool. But they do have unbelievable headwinds, including demographics. How bearish are you on China and xesiin Ping in the medium to long term?
Well, I mean in a sense.
The fact that chijin Ping reached out to India, had a two hour plus summit and and pulled back Chinese troops from their contested border shows that China knows they've got big headwinds and they don't want a big crisis with India.
They reached out to Japan and asked for a summit.
Usually it's the other way around, and they offered to start buying Japanese seafood, which just a few months ago they said you can't sell here because it's all radioactive because of Fukushima. I've seen them do a lot of this around the world, Now, some of this is because they're worried about Trump and the uncertainty coming from the
US that they don't think they can manage. But some of it is a recognition that they're in a bad position, and so frankly, it behooves them to stabilize these relations. And that comes from a deep concern that you just asked about.
Do I think they're about to fall? No, But I mean they're demographics.
They're at what one point four billion people right now, and expectations for twenty one hundred, when you know, you and I are going to be pretty pretty geezerly is that they're going to be down to five hundred million to seven hundred and fifty million. So I mean a significant I mean the biggest contraction of a population that you would ever see in an economy outside of like.
War or famine.
It's peacetime in China, and they're just saying, we just don't want to have any kids, and there's nothing the Chinese government can do about it. This is not a five year a ten year problem. Their retirement age for men is fifty five. They can extend that for five or ten years. They're not very urbanized. They can move more people into cities. They can make agriculture more efficient,
they can lean into AI. There's a lot of things they can do that can give them a ten year buffer, But they don't have a generational solution here, so long term, I think they're in very big trouble.
Yeah.
I don't know if you read David Sanger's book New Cold Wars, but he opened yeah, great book, but he opened with the quote, which I think is underappreciated. When it was hot on a hot mic or on purpose, I don't know when she was talking to Putin before he got in the car and said basically, you know, we're gonna change the world order. We're gonna drive, and
we are going to drive these big changes. Do you think he's still focused on that or are think he's gotten so tough internally that he can't be focused on that anymore.
I think that he at a very minimum recognizes that the timing for such a statement, for such policies is inopportunite.
I mean, when I was last in China two.
Months ago, two and a half months ago, they were telling me that they've pushed out their projections of when China would become the largest economy overtaking the US by five years, so they're not looking at being able to take over Taiwan by twenty twenty nine the way that many in the US included had expected was sort of coming.
Now.
Does that mean that she Ping actually believes that he no longer is going to have the ultimately the world's leading economy, that his plans for global domination and artificial intelligence are going away. I wouldn't go that far, but I mean, he's not getting any younger. I mean, and at some point kicking the can down the road does
become a strategic change of mind. I wouldn't dare to say how far in his personal mental processes he's traveled along that road, but I mean he certainly started the path.
He's no kid either, right, absolutely right. Risk number six Iran on the ropes. They are a cornered beast. Are they a dangerous cornered beast?
I think less so what we have seen over the last years, they've been hit pretty hard, particularly by Israel, and the response has been very little. You'll remember when the head of Hamasa's political division, their leader, was assassinated by Israel on the day of the Iranian president's inauguration, in Tehran, and the Iranian response was essentially nothing.
They didn't blow up Israel on the back of it.
They didn't blow up Israel on the back of taking out Hazbala, their most important proxy.
They didn't blow up.
Israel on the back of launching a series of missiles against Iran. So I mean, I think the Iranians recognize that they've lost their deterrent capability and they just don't have an effective way to hit the United States or Israel, which has made them very cautious and very risk averse. Now, the one thing, of course, they could do, and President Macron or France has been warning about this in the past couple of days, is they could significantly ramp up their dash to a nuclear bomb.
Okay, I was going to ask you about that. Is Trump Israel?
From what I read the other day in some publication, Israel can't do it on the realm, they'd need our help. Is Trump willing to help Israel take out their nuclear facilities their bomb making program?
Can we do it?
There are certainly people around Trump that are coming into the administration that believe that is what the US should do, that this is a historic opportunity to take out America and Israel's top enemy in the Middle East.
Is Trump personally willing to do that.
I mean, he's very reluctant to use military force. He doesn't want to get involved in new wars. He's proud of ending wars, not starting new ones. And he also knows that a war with Iran would lead to significantly high oil prices, though they're low right now and there's a lot of oil and reserve that's not being produced, but it would certainly impact the stock market, all things that he doesn't really like.
He took out Solem Mooney.
Look he did.
He did take out Solomoney, the head of the Iranian defense for but he did it after months of Iranian strikes against Saudi Arabia, including their largest refinery in the world, including the UAE, and including even American bases in the region. And then finally he hit Sulimani assassinated him.
So again, I think it is possible.
I think at a minimum, Trump is going to put much more pressure against Iran, including shutting down a lot of these illegal, non flaged tankers that are helping Iran get oil out illegally, which the Chinese will not be happy.
With because they're the ones buying most of it.
I think he'll do that, so he's gonna put Iran under a lot more economic pressure. Would he support nat YAHOO directly in strikes against the nuclear facilities?
I think in the early days the answer is no, But.
I suspect if Iran started to go towards the bomb, he probably would.
That's gonna be an interesting one to follow because I don't know what it's going to happen there. I've listened to a bunch of different policy podcasts where people talk about it. A round's never going to be in a weaker state than they are right now, if not now when, So.
That's right, that's a good one. Could happen, It could easily happen.
I think at the very least, US pressure economically much more meaningful. And the Israelis continuing to hit them with cyber espionage.
Hit the critical infrastructure assassinations.
All of that is putting more pressure on the Iranian regime. And they've lost their empire in the Middle East, they lost the axis of resistance, and now there's growing insurgency inside Iranian provinces too. So I mean, it's also plausible that we would see internal regime change. I mean, you know, these things happened.
Very slowly and then very quickly.
Yeah, no one expected Asad was going to suddenly fall after fifty years of dictatorship. And yet two weeks after the revolution started with some rebels, suddenly he was fleet being the Moscow where he awaited getting poisoned.
Hey, it was it last year of the year before you made some big AI predictions. Is AI further along then you thought it would be, or did you think it would be further along?
I think it's further along, And we've been pretty bullish on AI, and yet we continue to be pretty as staggered by just how many use cases there are for industrial innovation in every sector, every company around the world. We're pretty staggered by, you know, the fact that you know, the touring test has basically been shattered, and that human beings engaging with boughts can no longer tell if it's
a boud or human being. In fact, the only way you can really tell is because they're faster and smarter on a lot of on a lot of aspects.
Oh my god, Ian, I heard a story I was talking to some of yesterday, was in a meeting with a bunch of farmers who are single and they've gotten into chat GPT girlfriends and they and I mean this is like this is the last crowd in the world you'd think would in brak this sort of thing, but kind of like really like the companionship of So getting to your whole turning test, can you tell if it's a human being or not? I mean they are like getting comfort from talking to some chick on whose AI.
So yeah, that's where we're headed.
Yeah, I mean I do think I've never been a big one for pronouns, but I'd go gender neutral when it comes to AI.
Yeah.
Well, as the guy who predicted Biden dropping out, Ian, AI will be the undoing of mankind. It is the fruit of the true knowledge from the joke of Genesis. Soon it will be our end. A bit of a lightning round here. How screwed up and horrible is Africa.
They're they're slipping farther behind in terms of, you know, the the how their economy is going.
I think the the upside.
Of AI is that you can actually get access to world class knowledge, medicine, education, and the rest without having to build a lot of expensive infrastructure, which will create opportunities for Africans that they otherwise don't have. That's a really good thing. But they're getting hit harder by climate change than anybody else. That were hit just harder last year by El Nino than anybody else. I mean, there isn't the money to do a lot of the you know,
the big state building in nation building. Even China's Belton Road is you know, a fraction of what it used to be given China's economic challenges. So I'd like to say that there are some silver linings here, but generally speaking, Africa is not hitting where we want to go.
Horrifying, blood letting, violence, instability, starvation. There we know you're up against time. You have to drop out. So another very quick question, to what extent is this true? America's neighbor to the south, Mexico, is a highly unstable narco state.
False, It is not highly unstable.
In fact, it has one of the most popular governments of any democracy in the world that won on the back of the same a leader from the same party, so easy transition, and they have a pretty capable cabinet. They also are incredibly well integrated in terms of investment in supply chain with the largest, most robust economy in the world, which is a great place for them to be. But they are going to have to step up their
game on fentanyl. They're going to have to step up their game on border security, and they're going to step up the game on allowing China to pass through a whole bunch of goods from China through Mexico into the United States.
And that's going to be very hard for them. So this is going to be a tough year.
They'll get there, they'll get there with the Americans, they'll stabilize the relationship.
They'll do what they need to do because they have no choice. But I think this is going to be tough year from Mexico.
Bueno on that answer, Trump was going to send Persia down to fight Pancho Villa and now he doesn't have to.
Right that Excellent Ian Bremer of the Eurasia Group Global Risks. It's such a great read. We suggest you downloaded. Ian. It's all it's a pleasure. Thanks a million, gentlemen.
Good to talk to you.
Yeah, nice job of not cursing. Also great self control.
I did if I You guys always were like the biggest joke tellers when I was talking to you. You are like just having a party, and so I ipself loose.
You slipped into regular talk. But hey, thanks for the time. We appreciate it.
How long have I been How long have I been suspended for?
Well, obviously you're back, so.
That's good. I love it. OK, good to talk to you guys. All right extra large