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So I will not be at Davos. And if doctor Klaus Schwabz people came to me and said do a panel, this is the year where I would say, I want to do a panel, but I want it to be just one person, and it would be Ian Bremer. Every year he and his team, let John Lieber among others, put out a thing called the Top Risks, and it's not funny. It's a really serious look at where we are going into a given year. And it's remarkably Prussian. Some things he gets wrong, but huge amount of OMG,
how'd you do that? Like Miracle and Germany years ago. But he's really outdone himself this year. Hearkening back to his classic G zero of twenty twelve. Doctor Bremer joins us this morning, Ian, I'm just going to cut right to the chase. The summation of your top Risk twenty twenty five. It's a reversion to the nineteen thirties. How close are we to the nineteen thirty five of Hermanvoch's Winds of War?
Well, we're close to the thirties, and we're close to the fifties. So in other words, the trajectory is not sustainable. And the question is whether the crisis that's coming is big enough to make us pay attention, but not so big that we all end up fighting each other, right.
I mean, in the early Cold War, we.
Had this unfettered decoupling and arms race between the Americans and the Soviets culminated in the.
Cuban missile crisis.
We almost blew it ourselves up, and then we started recognizing we needed, like actually to have some institutions that would create more stability between the two countries, arms control, hotline and the rest. You see shades of that, and you also see shades of the thirties with a United States that's incredibly powerful but is unwinding its own global order,
its own institutions. I mean, you look things like the United Nations and the WTO, and these are organizations the Americans put in place to coordinate global governance, and that now Americans don't believe in you. It's it's not clear, but it's clearly as you say, Tom, this is a definitive moment ian what's.
So important here? And I lived this. My grandfather was a textbook Chicago Tribune isolationist of Middle America and you go back to Lindbergh and the rest of them. What is the character of President Trump's isolationism.
I don't think it's isolationist. I think it is strongly unilateralist.
And so it's not that the United States is saying we're only going to focus at home. I mean, you know, the Panama Canal and Greenland and Canada. Comments don't feel isolationists to me, but they're deeply transactional and in many ways, Tom, what we have is that the Americans are embracing the Chinese worldview that has served China so well over the last thirty five years.
It's transactional. It's not about rule of law.
They don't care what your political system or economic system is like. They will engage with you bilaterally with the intention of being more powerful than you, and therefore you have to play by their rules. And what the Americans are saying is, actually, China, we can do that, and we can do it a lot better than you can, because we're a lot stronger than you, by the way,
And that's really what Trump is saying. And it does come at a time when America's adversaries, Russia in deep decline, Iran having lost their empire by proxy the Chinese, and the worst economic condition since the nineties maybe the seventies are particularly weak, so an trusting moment to try this experiment, A lot of things are probably going to break as a consequence.
Doctor Bremer. Eurasia Group's Top ten Risks are required reading at the beginning of every year, and this year is is no different. US, China, Russia, around Mexico, I mean, you name it, They're all in there.
You know.
The one country that I didn't see in there, well, Syria. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what the fall of the Asad regime means for the Middle East and the rest of the world. More broadly, I mean, seriously, what role America play in restoring order to a nation where fourteen million refugees were fourth were forced to flee their homes in the last you know, call it fifteen years. I mean, a nation's geostrate, strategic position is so very important to health in Central Asia.
You know, what are your thoughts there? So Syria's there, but it's underneath the number nine risk, which is called ungoverned spaces, and we include Syria and Yemen and Libya and Haiti, and mean mar Western Sahara Dan by the way.
Which is a lot more important in terms of numbers of lives than what you just mentioned in Syria. And yet no journalists on the ground, and they're fleeing mostly to neighboring African countries as opposed to Syrians who go to Turkey and go to Europe, so we don't pay as much attention to them. And that's kind of the point,
right is that. I mean the danger in Syria, where the Americans had slightly more than two thousand troops on the ground and under Trump are likely to remove them and say, Turkey, you mop it up, is that if ats is incapable of running a unifying government in Syria, which is a reasonably plausible outcome, then you can easily have a big part of Syria that's ungoverned and would be fodder for a new Isis caliphate. And over time, not twenty twenty five, and this reports for the year.
Over time, of course, that's something that will wash up on our shores too.
Ian Bremmer with us here was thrilled to have it here to celebrate his top risk. It's a team effort from erase your group each and every year. It'll be with us for a good amount of time. Jim Grasso to join us here in a bit on this important Chinese social media thing which I don't understand, Doctor Bremer. One of the moments it stands in time for me is Ian Bremer and Robert T. Kaplan with me together talking about a zero world within Kaplan's Revenge of geography.
What is the most constructive path for moderates in America to get out four years or dare I say eight years out? What is the initiative that needs to be taken? Do we need to take kaplan realist policy?
Well, it's not about foreign policy so much. Although it is true that a lot of people that decided not to vote, that had voted for Biden last time around, report that Biden's position on Gaza slash Israel was a significant thing that turned them away from the polls.
And that's a place where Elon Musk and his targeting of you know, very specific and important districts that were swinging in the United States could have made a difference. But leaving that one piece aside, and it's not unimportant, of course, I would say most Americans are not going to the polls on the.
Basis of Biden or Trump's worldview.
It's more about what they're doing and what they're rejecting at home.
And the fact that Trump has become a leader that attracts more.
Working and middle class Americans because they feel like he's more interested in their well being.
The fact that he was.
Able to get a significant majority of labor union voters in the United States, while Harris was, you know, the candidate for are urban, well educated, elite and that's not a sustainable path for the Democrats in my view. So they clearly have to reassess a lot of their platform that did not appeal to the average American that did not feel taken care of. More billionaires put money into Harris's campaign than did Trumps.
That again, that tells you something, doctor Breber.
The US channel relationships at the forefront of geopolitical risk in the current beta regime. Yet, if we do see something like sixty percent tariffs, do you really think that China's going to allow the Uan to debase itself again? And if that does indeed occur, do we feel there's a I don't know, a clearing price and dollar you on where the market can go to that can still allow China to grow at five percent per year.
I don't expect China's going to grow at five percent per year over the coming several years. I think They've got deep structural problems that are being made worse by the fact that the only part of their economy that is overperforming is their manufacture during export, which feels like dumping. It's a trillion dollar surplus, and it's upsetting lots of countries around the world, not just the US. The US is leaning into hitting back, which will occur with tariffs,
though it won't be a sixty percent number. I mean, you know the top line election campaign numbers, and never the numbers we see.
But even if it's twenty five percent, which I think.
Is more plausible in the early weeks and months, you're not just.
Talking about US China.
You're also talking about the Americans squeezing other countries. We've already seen this with Mexico, we will see it with India, with Southeast Asian countries for acting as a pass through of Chinese exports to the United States. So it's very hard to imagine that US China relations are going to maintain a comparatively well managed, you know, sort of incremental decline that we've seen in the last year and a half under the Biden administration.
I want you to sit on this question, Ian, because I think it's so important to all of our listeners and the people that you enjoy so much your international relations. This hearkens back to the fear of the first week of August nineteen forty one, a bunch of boats sitting off eastern Canada, where Roosevelt and Churchill tried to begin to piece together the post World War two world. They
were humbled by two major wars. The thing out there, doctor Bremmer, is the only way this is going to get solved is a humility of a war discuss That is that what it takes to get away from the madness we're living in right now.
I think in the near term we're talking about damage control. We're talking about countries and companies on defense. So you know, a lot of them are hoping that they just don't
make headlines. Others are trying to figure out what they need to do proactively to kiss the ring, and geopolitically, you're going to see a whole bunch of countries acting the way Mark Zuckerberg has in the last week towards the commander in chief and towards his chief, his bomb thrower in chief, Elon Musk, by far the most powerful person around the administration, if I can call it that.
Look, I mean the way that you respond.
To a GI zero world is either you reform and strengthen your existing institutions so they are more fit for purpose. You build new institutions that better reflect the demands, the opportunities, and the concerns of the present age, or you go to war.
And I can give you examples of all three. All three are happening.
We are strengthening NATO right now, we are creating new institutions, you know, the Quad, the Chinese are building Belton Road and the bricks, and you know there are other examples. But the most energy is going into more conflict. The most energy is going into more war, and again that
is not geopolitically sustainable. So I think you know your advice to other countries right now, given the power and balances and Trump coming in and how consolidated his authority is inside the United States compared to twenty seventeen, where you know he was riding the Republican Party's co tails. His administration felt very different. Not this time around. He's
the guy. Is that they have to recognize their playing defense, and defense is more effective in depth, it's more effective if it's strategic, if you're not just you know, reacting to the latest headline, and it's more effective in numbers.
In other words, the EU is better off than say the Mexicans, because they can act collectively and to the extent that other countries are capable of doing that in defending the things that matter to them, both in their own countries but also in terms of international architecture.
We will all be better off by the way. Trump is going to get a lot of wins in the next year.
But unlike Shijin Ping promoting a Chinese worldview, Trump doesn't get to do this for twenty years. He gets to do it for four, assuming he's in good health, and then he doesn't anymore. So long term, the United States unwinding its own institutions does not strike me as strategically smart.
Okay, gotta leave it there. Ian Bremmer, congratulations on the impact the effect of your top risks for two thousand and twenty five of course doctor Bremmer with Eurasia Group, and I think it will be a source of great conversation here