Top 10 Global Political Risks in 2023

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, SENIOR GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: Well, Putin’s war in Ukraine is not the only global political risk set to loom over 2023. A series of international challenges lie ahead as China U-turns on its zero COVID policy. And protests in Iran continue. President of Eurasia Group, Ian Bremmer, talks to Walter Isaacson about what to expect on the world stage this year.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Bianna. And, Ian Bremmer, welcome to the show.

IAN BREMMER, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, EURASIA GROUP: Great to be back with you, Walter.

ISAACSON: Hey, until I read your latest thing, I was having a happy new year. I wasn’t thinking things were going pretty well. COVID receding, NATO is gathered together pretty well. Russia is not doing that well in Ukraine and we had a midterm election that weren’t as disruptive to democracy as we thought. And yet, in week 11 (ph), you say it’s the worst crisis we have face in 25 years. Tell me about that.

BREMMER: Well, there’s no question that there are a lot of things to be thankful for. The fact that U.S. democracy, and indeed, the world’s major democracies are not at our top risk list is a very important thing. This is a very strong flashing don’t panic sign, because there is resilience in these institutions. And even when leaders try to do things that are truly disruptive and break the system, plenty of checks and balances that prevent them from doing that. The problem, Walter, is that we are facing a global environment where a small number of individual actors, some of which are aging dictators, some of which are tech pros, there’s a little bit of overlap between those two groups, have an extraordinary amount of power. They have no checks and balances. They can make really bad decisions and they don’t get a lot of great expertise in helping them formulate those decisions. Putin, of course, is the one who’s made the worst decision of them. Literally the worst misjudgment of any leader on the global stage in decades, and he’s going to be paying the consequences for that, and the world is a lot more unstable as a consequence. But it is not just that, it is also Xi Jinping, it’s also Iran’s supreme leader and it’s also a small number of techno of billionaires who also have the ability to make decisions that are deeply disruptive for global democracies without a lot of ability to prevent them from doing that. So, that is really where the risks are. A very different from the kind of conversations we were having, say, on January 6th a couple of years ago. And, yet, in many ways, much more problematic for the world economy, for geopolitics, that what was happening in the nation’s capital.

ISAACSON: You said we’re resilient and that the disruptions are going to happen with people like Putin and all. And yet, this week, we have seen what really is a weird show in the House of Representatives trying to elect a speaker, even if it ends up that the dust all settling, doesn’t this put him badly for some things like having to raise the debt ceiling or having to do normal things that would keep our economy afloat?

BREMMER: It is largely performative. I mean, it is certainly true, Walter, that we haven’t had a speaker of the house vote go beyond the first vote in literally 100 years. So, I mean, congratulations to the GOP for making some history. But we don’t need the House in any urgent way to make legislation or pass rules or anything else that requires a speaker. It is very exciting for cable news, don’t get me wrong. But for a longer- term conversation about the United States and how it is able to act as a leader on the global stage, ensure that its democracy functions, what is happening in the House right now doesn’t matter all that much. And there are plenty of ways that you will get through a debt ceiling in the second half of the year, irrespective of who the speaker of the House turns out to be.

ISAACSON: This week, Vladimir Putin said, maybe we’ll have that 36-hour cease-fire. Why is it not in everybody’s interest to say, let’s just have a sustained cease-fire, perhaps guarantee right international force, and calm this down?

BREMMER: Well, one, the Ukrainians do not want to cease-fire because so much of their land is illegally occupied by Russia. And we are not just talking about Crimea, which was autonomous under independent Ukraine, we are talking about large amounts of territory that is majority Ukrainian or at least was until the Russians came in and killed them and forced them to leave. And that is unacceptable. Not just to Ukraine but pretty much everybody in NATO. So, number one, you can’t get Zelenskyy there after all of the war crimes, after, you know, 40 percent economy contraction over the last 12 months, after millions of refugees. But, leaving that aside there’s a much bigger problem, Walter, and that is, it is impossible to get Russia back to the status quo ante on February 23rd, even if you were to have a cease-fire you are going to have Ukraine, which is massively more armed and capable right there on Russia’s borders. You are going to have an expanded NATO with forward deployments, thousands and thousands of troops, much more threatening to Russia than before.

ISAACSON: You’re right. Couldn’t we offer some security guarantees as part of a cease-fire?

BREMMER: Oh, sure. But not as part of a cease-fire. The security guarantees, if they were to come, would have to come on the basis of a settlement, not a cease-fire. And we are very, very far from that. So, the point is, you can — I can imagine through exhaustion, through an inability to continue to fight, that at some point you could actually get much reduced fighting on the front lines. But Russia will be defeated and humiliated on the global stage. Their life will be so much. Well, I mean, after the Cuban Missile Crisis when both decided said, OK, this is stupid. Let’s take a step back. The Soviets were in the same position they were before the Cuban Missile Crisis. That is what is not possible here. I mean, Russia has made itself into a rogue state where they’re never going to be providing gas to the Europeans anymore. Nord Stream 1 and 2 have been sabotage. We don’t know actually by who. But we know that the Europeans have spent massive amounts of money to ensure they will never have to buy gas from Russia again.

ISAACSON: So, wait. What does it have need to have a rogue Russia?

BREMMER: Well, that’s a good question, Walter. What it means, think about a rogue Iran, right? I mean, Iran is the country we think of as a rogue state that’s not a lot of our minds. It’s a country that doesn’t have nuclear weapons, unlike Russia, but they are the principal threat to stability in the Middle East. And that — what’s that about? It is about proxy war and terrorist attacks and cyberattacks and espionage and drone attacks and ballistic missile attacks. So, a Russia as a rogue state for NATO would be a country that is a perpetual threat for those countries the way that Iran is a threat to Israel, to Saudi Arabia, the UAE. That is a very serious problem. That’s what happened when the peace dividend is over in Europe and you have a war. Remember, the war that is going on right now with Ukraine is a proxy war with NATO. NATO is fighting Russia. Now, they are fighting Russia using Western intelligence, Western weapons. They don’t have soldiers on the ground in Ukraine. They are not doing a no- fly zone. So, you don’t have American fighter jets knocking Russian jets out of the sky. But from the Russian perspective, this is a war. And it is a war that they are losing. A temporary cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine does nothing to improve Putin’s strategic position as a consequence of that, Walter.

ISAACSON: One of your present reductions last year, and I give you credit for it, was that President Xi Jinping’s zero COVID policy, it wasn’t going to work, that there would be protests against it. Well, now, tell me, what is next now that he has changed that policy?

BREMMER: Well, first of all, what’s next is that Xi Jinping increasingly is running his country the way Putin runs his country. One of the things that we could count on in China, even though it is an authoritarian state, is that they were very thoughtful about long-term strategic policy. They were getting all sorts of expert inputs from technocrats, from hard-liners, from pragmatic, you know, people that wanted a more market-oriented economy. Xi Jinping, in his last 10 years, has consolidated authority in historic ways. And he now has more power inside China than any leader since Mao. But in the days of Mao, China didn’t have that much impact for the global economy or for global political institutions or for national security, for that matter. Now, they do. And the fact that Xi Jinping decided, literally on a dime, to go from the most locked down COVID policy to the least and isn’t providing any data, any transparency on the numbers of cases, the numbers of deaths, or any new variants that might be popping up from what is right now the global epicenter of the COVID pandemic in China means that there are also acts of dangers that emanate from China on the pandemic front. I wish it was only that. But of course, when you have a leader with that much power that can make that kind of a decision on COVID, you are going to see decisions like that made on the global economy as well, in technology issues, on national security. And as much as the U.S.-China relationship is vastly more stable than the U.S.-Russia relationship, and both leaders wanted to remain so, there is going to be a greater level of decoupling by Western multinationals away from China because of that extraordinary uncertainty, because they are not getting the data out of China’s economy because they don’t understand what might happen in a week, a month, three months’ time.

ISAACSON: Do you mean that American corporations, whether it be Apple or Tesla and others, are going to have to pull out of China?

BREMMER: I don’t think they’re going to have to pull out of China at all. I think there are very few corporations that will be required to pull out of China. There are, of course, expert controls that the United States has started levying in China back last October on advanced semiconductors that are seen as dual use for both the economy and for military purposes. If you were doing business in that sector, you can’t do that business in China anymore. Fair enough. And if you or Google, or Facebook, and you wanted to do business with all of your data acquisition and search and social media, China won’t let you in. Most corporations can still do any business they want to do in China. The point is that, increasingly, that business looks more dangerous. It looks more risky. So, they don’t want to have to pay so much for it. That is why Apple is increasingly moving a lot of its production away from China. They are not being forced to do it legally by the United States, they are just concerned about what the future portends inside the Chinese economy with Xi Jinping that they don’t have a very good read on. They could make sudden very different decisions about the technology sector or others. And so, Apple is moving more to Vietnam and to other places around the world. I think a lot of major U.S. corporations are increasingly going to look to (INAUDIBLE), to ensure as opposed to have so much of their global production inside China.

ISAACSON: Why is there such a lack of global leadership these days?

BREMMER: I think there are a lot of reasons for that. One is because there is a feeling in many populations that their leaders ignored their own working in middle classes. That has led to a my country first perspective. It is not just America first under Trump. Biden’s U.S. foreign policy for an American middle class, it is also a functional understanding that, if we are not getting that message through to main street in the United States, we don’t want to be involved in wars around the world. Now, Ukraine has been the exception, and Walter, we have seen a lot of leadership from that United States on Ukraine, not just militarily, but diplomatically and economically. It has made the G7 stronger. It’s made NATO stronger. But, your question, even fits there because the developing world looks at the West and says, you only care about Ukraine because it is a bunch of white people in Europe. If that was happening in Ethiopia, or the DRC, or Yemen, you wouldn’t say boo. So, why are we going to take the food prices, fertilizer, and energy prices on the chin? Why should we support your sanctions and your votes when you don’t care about us? And that also makes it harder to have global leadership when majority of the world’s 8 billion people don’t trust that the United States, Japan, Germany, other wealthy countries, are going to lift a finger for them. We are called donor countries. The wealthy democracies in the world. And yet, if you are sitting in a country like India or Sub-Saharan African countries, you think that you are the ones that are doing the donating. It is your human capital and labor, it is your resources that are getting exploited, and yet, you are the charity cases in the world? It really angers them. And that’s another reason why we have a harder time a global leadership right now.

ISAACSON: How do you see the protests in Iran playing out?

BREMMER: The protests in Iran are clearly — there is no useful response by the Iranian government. It is months now. The only thing they’ve set is more repression. They are not going to, in any way, take their demands on board. You are not looking at regime change in the near future. The numbers of people that are demonstrating are still comparatively small, even though it’s all over the country, and they are no particular leaders of this opposition. It has been really grassroots from the young people, particularly women all over the country. But it comes at the same time that the Iranians are nearing breakout nuclear capability and there is no possibility of going back to a nuclear deal. The Americans would never provide that given what they are doing to their people on the ground and the Iranians won’t take that risk to compromise. And then, as we mentioned before, the Iranians are doing the most to provide support for Russia in this war. So, you put all that together, with a new Israeli right-wing government led by Netanyahu, the potential for military confrontation in the Middle East is actually gone up quite a bit.

ISAACSON: Let me go back to that. The fact that Iran will get some form of nuclear weaponry soon. What does that mean? What do we do? what should we do?

BREMMER: Well, you know, it’s not — it’s certainly not guaranteed that they will acquire nuclear weapons. There are major risks to Iran’s own national security if they were to either make those moves and it was found out or announced that they were going to make those moves. But part of the problem is that where they are stockpiling and doing their advanced, you know, high-grade uranium enrichment right now is buried deep under a mountain. And Israeli National Security advisers will tell you that they don’t have credible military options to disrupt or destroy that nuclear capability. It’s not like 10 or 20 years ago. So, you want to put pressure on them, yes. You want to get prevent them from going nuclear, yes. But at the same time, the Americans wanted to prevent Pakistan from going nuclear, India from going nuclear. We had sanctions on those countries for years as a consequence.

ISAACSON: Well, wait. Are you saying that Iran might go nuclear and we would just let it happen?

BREMMER: I am saying Iran might go nuclear, we would be extremely angry about it. I am sure we’d put more sanctions on. And ultimately, I suspect we’d learn to live with it. And I’m not happy about that at all but we have done that with North Korea. I mean, our policy is denuclearization. It is unacceptable for North Korea to have nuclear weapons. But it’s a little like the princess bride, unacceptable may not mean what we think it means.

ISAACSON: We’re now at the second anniversary of the January 6th insurrection. And in a weird way, we have seen its echoes in the dysfunction in the House of Representatives this week. To what extent do you think we have recovered or can recovered from that threat to our democracy?

BREMMER: I think that we have recovered from that specific threat to our democracy. I think that after January 6th, there was a tail risk. Small but real and growing that the U.S. could be heading for a constitutional crisis in the presidential election in 2024. So, Trump, for example, becomes the Republican nominee. It’s a close election. Say he loses. But you have people in positions of power overseeing state elections, secretaries of state, governors that decide that they’re going to help him try to steal the election. He can’t overturn it, but he can break it. I think that the potential of that happening in 2024 is now virtually zero. Because — not because Democrats, you know, were able to hold the Senate, or because there wasn’t a red wave, no. Rather because truly incompetent people running for some core positions that would oversee state elections, those people lost. And so, you just don’t have people in positions of power that are prepared to try to steal or break the election. Remember, when Trump tried to do that after January 6th, and in the run up to January 6th, when he was calling Republican Party members in Georgia and Arizona, find me some votes. I want to steal this election. That is basically what he did. We found that in the January 6th Committee investigations. Republican Party members, rank and file, said, no. And they said no because fundamentally, they may be conservative, they may be Republican, it doesn’t matter, they are American. And first and foremost, they believe in the rule of law, just like the police do, just like the military does. And it turns out that that really matters in a country like the United States. The U.S. was tested and the U.S. responded. And I think, at least, in the near term, plenty of deep structural challenges with democracy in the United States that we could address it on many, many shows in the future. But specifically, to answer your question on January 6th, we do not face approximate crisis of democracy in this country.

ISAACSON: Ian Bremmer, as always, thank you for joining us.

BREMMER: Thank you so much, Walter.