The Biggest Global Risks for 2025 with Ian Bremmer (Transcript)

Not at all, actually he’s the leading symptom and in many ways the top beneficiary of the GZERO world and it’s the global issue, it’s the fact that you have lots of global challenges, lots of global opportunities but no global leadership.

The United States is by far the most powerful country in the world and it is not interested in providing collective security or promoting global free trade architecture or promoting democracy or common values of rule of law. It’s much more transactional, much more “I’ll get a deal with you and by the way I’m more powerful than you are so you’re going to have to do much more of what I want.” In other words it’s increasingly a much more Chinese perspective on how one engages in global affairs or dare I say it’s a return to rule of the jungle, the law of the jungle and other countries are much weaker.

You already mentioned Justin Trudeau, you could have easily mentioned soon-to-be ex-president Yoon from South Korea working his way through impeachment getting confirmed by the Supreme Court constitutional court there, you could have mentioned the German government in disarray, the French government in disarray, go on and on. The countries around the world that are friends or adversaries of the United States are just in a weaker position and they are playing defense so they’re not trying to say “oh we’ll be global leaders since you’re not going to be, we’ll promote rule of law.” It’s mostly “can we stay out of the headlines and not get crosswise with either the Americans or the Chinese.”

And so that reality that a G–Zero world disorder, a lack of global leadership that we’ve seen coming for 10 years but this year really is the dominant theme for how geopolitics runs that is weaving its way through all of the risks that we see around the world whether it comes from the United States or from the US-China relationship, the US-Mexico relationship, it comes from ungoverned spaces, wars and power vacuums in the Middle East, in Eurasia, Europe, all of that ultimately is coming from the G-Zero, not a G7, not a G20 winning.

Trump and the Rule of Dawn

HELEN WALTERS: All right so let’s dive into the United States, let’s talk about what’s going to happen and what is to come in the year ahead. Trump is coming back into power, he is going to be a lot more organized, he knows a lot more this time around than he did last time around so he actually features as the “rule of dawn” on your list of risks.

Talk about that and talk about what we should be watching as we watch the new president come into office.

IAN BREMMER: Well as I said it’s a feature not a bug that President-elect Trump is unpredictable and his supporters will say that’s how he keeps everyone guessing and he gets things done as a consequence. He’s got much more consolidated power today not only because his allies and his adversaries are weaker but also because he controls the Republican Party, doesn’t need their coattails like they did in 2017, they need his. He’s got a much more consolidated administration around him, it doesn’t have you know Mike Pence and others like Mike Pompeo who were you know sort of adults from the Republican establishment, he has a group of people that have distinguished themselves with their complete loyalty to him.

So you know the founding fathers of the United States were worried about what would happen if you didn’t have proper checks and balances on the executive, if instead of rule of law you had rule of man. Well I mean increasingly what you have is Donald Trump and what he decides and what he wants is what you’re going to have to respond to. And that’s true domestically especially as he looks to politicize the power ministries in the U.S. like the FBI, the Department of Justice, the IRS in a way that he believes that they were weaponized against him by Democrats and the so-called “deep state” to investigate him, to arrest him, you know to throw him in jail as they wanted to.

He’s now going to take that and use that against his enemies but also internationally. So this “rule of dawn” which is going to lead to a lot of wins for the United States in the early days, it’s not that Trump is going to fail everywhere he tries to implement policy but that uncertainty, that unpredictability is of course an enormous risk for everyone else dealing with him around the world.

I mean just today you have the United Kingdom in crisis domestically, not because they’re trying to figure out how do we respond to Elon Musk, you know who is not only by far the wealthiest person in the world but also is the closest advisor spending the most time with Trump. And so you know he’s attacking the British government directly and in their view putting members of their cabinet in personal danger and they have no idea how to respond, because if they hit Elon, are they then hitting Trump too? Is that going to lead to blowback from the United States?

This is an immediate crisis for them in an unprecedented way since the United States has become the world’s superpower. That’s what we mean when we talk about the “rule of dawn”.

Democracy and Resilience

HELEN WALTERS: You said something really interesting in the report that I just want to get you to say more about which is that democracy itself will not be threatened. The U.S. is not Hungary. There has been a lot of talk over the last four, eight years about the state of democracy and about the imperiled state of democracy. So I’m really interested to hear that you don’t actually think that this is under threat. So let’s talk more about that.

IAN BREMMER: Well I don’t believe that the United States is on the precipice of dictatorship, and I also continue to see significant resilience in institutions that can push back against Trump’s successes. I mean we saw that you know with the effort to appoint Matt Gaetz as Attorney General running the DOJ and you know within two weeks Trump backed off and he hasn’t said anything about Gaetz since. Trump is by the way incredibly impressive about going really hard in favor of someone and then throwing them completely under the bus when he realizes that he’s lost that one. It just just bounces off of him right but it’s not just that.

It’s that you still have a professional military in the United States. You still have an independent judiciary. Yes, six three conservative appointees but independent from the president, from the executive and continues to act that way. You have a very very thin margin in for Republicans in the House.

You also have more adults that are institutionalists in the Senate and finally of course the U.S. is a federal system with governors that matter. An election system that is run state by state and then in two years time you’re going to have midterms and frankly it’s more likely than not that the Democrats will come back in the House of Representatives then.

So I take very seriously the fact that the United States is becoming more structurally corrupt, that the system is increasingly captured by a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful special interests, that that does not reflect a representative democracy, that that has been getting pretty bad since you and I have known each other Helen far worse than any other advanced industrial democracy. And it’s getting worse still in the incoming Trump administration. But that is very difficult from saying — very different from saying that the U.S. democracy is about to fall apart or that Trump is going to be able to ensure that he can stay in power.

He would change the constitution and be allowed to run at 82 for a third term. I think that there’s virtually no chance that that could happen for example. So there is a lot of uncertainty and instability coming from the institutional erosion that is affected by the incredible strength of one man and those around him as president. But that’s very different from saying the republic is facing existential danger. The latter is not true.

HELEN WALTERS: I’m very glad to hear you say that.

Trumponomics

HELEN WALTERS: Okay let’s talk about economics. Of course the state of the economy was a huge issue in the election and people really bought into the idea that Trump could bring about a healthy and strong American economy. You have Trumponomics on your list of risks so talk to us about whether you think people are buying it, are you buying it, what’s going to happen with the economy coming up?

IAN BREMMER: The Trump risk economically comes from the fact that his impact of his policies on the U.S. and global economy I believe is going to be significantly larger than what is presently priced in. There are a couple of points here.

One is on tariffs. To the extent that he has an ideological sort of poll, it’s really about the utility of tariffs as the principal policy tool for economic outcomes and national security outcomes that he wants. Again he has a team that believes that, supports him and is very aligned to him. We’re clearly going to see that with U.S. relations with China also appears on the list that that relationship which has been comparatively well managed in the last 12 months even though there’s no trust in it is likely to deteriorate significantly. But also tariffs against other countries, friends of the United States where the U.S. is running significant trade deficits, much larger than in 2017 when Trump was president.

You would have seen in the Washington Post earlier today there was a leak that said, oh he’s only thinking about tariffs on friends in a few national security areas. He’s going to back off. The markets went up and Trump immediately put out a social media post saying, “absolutely not true.” “I’m tariff man.” “I’m going to do this.” So that’s going to have a big impact on the global economy.

Secondly, he’s very serious about getting illegal immigrants out. He wants to deport them. There are 15 to 20 million in the United States right now. He’s not going to get rid of 15 to 20 million. But in his first year, can he get rid of a million? I think he can. And over four years, three to five million is very, very plausible. And he was voted in and Harris and Biden earlier were voted out because in large part of not handling illegal immigration, just as we’ve seen play out across all of Europe over the last decade, you’re seeing play out in the United States.

Now, I’m not saying that it’s wrong for him to try to remove illegal immigrants from the United States. I’m saying there’s going to be an impact. And the impact is labor costs are going up. These people are also consumers in the U.S. economy, not when they’re not there anymore. They’re taxpayers, Medicare, Social Security, not when they’re not there anymore. Right.

So there’s going to be a meaningful impact on inflation and a fiscal constraint that comes from Trump putting these policies in place. And legal workers are not going to fill that gap. So you’ve got two areas of extraordinary priority for the Trump administration that are not priced into the market, that are going to slow growth.

You also have, of course, market positive things he’ll do, like he’s going to continue to reduce regulation. And I’m sure that will be beneficial to the financial sector and crypto and fossil fuel companies and others. He’s also intending to roll over the 2017 tax reductions on high net worth individuals and on corporations.

But the regulatory rollback, most of that low hanging fruit was already picked in his first term. And it’s an extension of the tax cuts. It’s not a further reduction. Meanwhile, the macroeconomic environment is worse than it was before. Companies are trading at a much higher multiple. You’ve got higher inflation. You’ve got higher debt levels.

It’s much more challenging for Trump to move the needle. So what I’m saying is that Trumponomics actually is likely to be a much more significant downside risk this time around, precisely because he’s going to implement the policies he wants to. He will be successful politically. And people do not expect this right now.

Immigration and Mexico

HELEN WALTERS: I want to stick with immigration for a moment. I think one of the lasting images that came out of the last presidency was of separated families on the southern border of the United States. Do you think that we’re going to see this type of visual again? And how do you think he’ll deal with that if we do? And do you think that we’ll see the same type of response to that that we saw in that first term?

IAN BREMMER: In the first term, the Mexican president, Lopez Obrador, basically cried uncle. It was one of Trump’s successes. The Mexican government was told that if you don’t tighten the southern border of Mexico, because so many of the people that come to the United States over the southern border are coming from other countries across Central and Latin America, that they’re going to get hit by much harder tariffs.

And not only did the Mexican government actually take that seriously. And so the numbers came down. But they ultimately had a success in signing USMCA, replacing NAFTA. So Mexico, I would argue in Trump’s first term, was pretty positive.

This time around, Trump has bigger problems with Mexico than he did last time around. It’s not just about illegal immigrants. So that’s one big part of it. It’s also the fentanyl crisis. It’s a much bigger trade deficit. And it’s also Chinese goods that are coming through Mexico into the United States. He wants to address all four of those.

He does not have a single person, very strong, running point on the relationship like he did with Robert Lighthizer and Jared Kushner, facilitating the conversations behind the scenes. That’s not the case this time around. There’s a lot of cooks in that relationship.

Also, Trump had a good relationship with Lopez Obrador. Lopez Obrador is kind of a far left populist, ideologically very different from Trump, but kind of grandiose, charismatic, roughly similar age. And they liked each other. They got along really well.

Claudia Sheinbaum, I find very impressive. But Helen, she’s a woman. She’s a PhD environmental scientist who got her degree at Berkeley. I mean, you couldn’t find, you couldn’t dream up a demographic that would be more problematic in a personal relationship with Trump. And so it’s going to be hard for her to engage with him and get wins.

So I think that in the first year, and let’s also keep in mind, this is on the back of a Mexican government that has had their peso get hammered for some of the constitutional changes they’re making, like judicial reform in particular, some social reforms as well, the markets hate. So the peso has just gotten destroyed. They have very little margin for error in this first year of Trump in the relationship with the US.

So I think, you know, over four years, US-Mexico relations will be just fine. But I think that in the first months of Trump coming in, it’s going to be very, very choppy waters indeed.

HELEN WALTERS: What advice do you have for Claudia Sheinbaum, who clearly she can’t change the fact that she’s a woman. She can’t change her educational background or anything about her. She has a huge mandate from the Mexican population. What should she do to deal with Trump?

IAN BREMMER: Well, give Trump wins early. In Mexico, truly, the Europeans can work together. They’re a large marketplace. They do business with lots of people around the world. Mexico is only doing business with the United States. They are fully integrated into the US supply chain. They have no other place to go.

It would be like me advising the president of Laos how to deal with Xi Jinping. You don’t get to like hedge with the Americans or the Indians. You’ve got one bet. So they know that.

I think a couple of things I would advise first, and by the way, I have advised, and I think her cabinet is very confident. They’re very technocratic. As opposed to the broader Morena party, which is very popular, but they’re a new party and they’ve never lost. So they’re overconfident in what they think they can do. It’s going to be hard for her and she knows she needs to kind of get the party and get members of Congress under wraps and get her cabinet taking the lead on all of this.

The easiest thing for them to do is kick the Chinese out. There are a lot of places where you have Chinese parts that are actually passing through. By the way, Chinese investment into Mexico, it’s not creating Mexican jobs. It’s actually really angering.

In the textiles, for example, you’ve got a lot of small and medium enterprises. These are relatively poor and middle class Mexicans. They’re losing jobs because Chinese goods are coming in and undercutting them. BYD, China set up shop in electric vehicles. They’re doing assembly. They’re not doing full manufacturing. There are very few jobs working for BYD in Mexico. It’s not like Ford. It’s not like GM. So I think it would benefit her from hitting China harder and earlier before her first meeting one on one with Trump. She’s had a phone call. She hasn’t gone to Mar-a-Lago. That was wise. Get her ducks in a row first. That’s what I would do.

I would also work on getting a good relationship with the incoming prime minister of Canada, likely to be Pierre Poilievre, as soon as humanly possible, because the Canadians will throw Mexico under a bus. When USMCA starts having negotiations, Canadian leaders on the conservative side have made very clear, “hey, we can have a good relationship with Trump. We don’t need Mexico.”

NAFTA started off as a bilateral agreement between the US and Canada. It was only the US that said, “no, we want Mexico. Let’s make it trilateral.” They will try that again. The Mexicans need to nip that in the bud. And right now, they really don’t have a relationship with the Canadians and certainly not with the incoming conservatives. That is a high priority in my view. Again, that’s something I have. I have directly advised the leadership of Mexico.

Russia-Ukraine War and Ceasefire Prospects

HELEN WALTERS: All right. Let’s stay international. Let’s talk about Russia. Obviously, the war with Ukraine has occupied the headlines for a couple of years at this point. You seem to think that the ceasefire is coming, but Russia is obviously still rogue. So talk to us about what we should be watching, what we should be really paying attention to from Vladimir Putin and from Russia.

IAN BREMMER: Yeah, Helen, you and I first talked about this right after the invasion. And we’ve talked about it since. Back in January, last year’s top risks report, we had Russia, Ukraine as our number three risk.

And we said that Ukraine was going to be partitioned, which is not something I want at all. But it was inevitable. And now you’ve got just earlier today, French President Macron saying that Zelensky is going to have to be realistic about what he’s prepared to give up from a territorial perspective. Certainly, that is Trump’s perspective.

And the Ukrainians fully understand that they can’t continue to fight the war the way they have. Russia also, I mean, you know, they’ve got North Korean troops helping them. How much they’re helping them is open to question. A lot of them are getting killed.

But they could use a breather and a ceasefire. And Trump wants one. And Trump has made very clear that if the Ukrainians don’t accept his deal, he’s going to cut off support. And if the Russians don’t accept his deal, he’s going to increase sanctions dramatically.

So I do think that over the course of the year, we are likely to get a ceasefire. Now, two points around that. The first is before the ceasefire is actually inked, there’s a lot of risk, because the Ukrainians are desperate and they want to be in a better position with more leverage. So that’s why you’ve got a new offensive incursed inside Russia by the Ukrainians, which they can hardly afford right now militarily.

They also are continuing to use American rockets like ATACMS to hit Russian targets deeper into their territory, assassination attempts and the rest. Russia launching more missiles into Kyiv, into other cities, civilian targets, critical infrastructure, energy infrastructure, and, of course, all sorts of asymmetrical attacks against NATO allies. So that is going to get worse before we have a ceasefire. So there’s a lot of risk around that.

Even once we have a ceasefire, that ceasefire is not a negotiated settlement, which means the Ukrainians are still arming up and building up, and the Russians are too. And the Europeans feel like that is a big risk to them. So I fully expect that sanctions on Russia will stay in place. I fully expect that the freezing of hundreds of billions of Russian sovereign dollars, assets, euros and the rest will be used to rebuild Ukraine.

And that’s unacceptable to Russia. And they’ll still be engaged in a proxy war against frontline NATO states like Poland and the Balts and the Nordics. They’ll still use Telegram to pay off locals to engage in arson attacks and vandalism and even assassination attempts. So this is I mean, Russia is the most powerful rogue state in the world.

It is an ally of North Korea and Iran. These are chaos actors on the global stage and they are absolutely producing a lot of risk and instability. Ukraine, the war in Ukraine three years on should be heading towards a ceasefire. So I think there will be less Ukraine in the headlines once that ceasefire is in place.

US Power and the G-Zero World

HELEN WALTERS: So let me just make sure that I’m understanding something because in that you describe Trump basically saying, “I want a ceasefire. And so that’s what needs to happen.” Doesn’t that imply that America still does have the power and the sway and the influence that it once had? Or how does this how does that ladder back up to the idea of this being a G-Zero world?

IAN BREMMER: I think that the United States has an enormous amount of power. But the big difference is this is Trump saying this unilaterally, right? I mean, he’s the one that is deciding that there is going to be an outcome that he wants. And it’s not like he’s coordinating with NATO allies and saying we all have to sit down and make sure that we’re consolidated.

One of the interesting things, I mean, Biden did not do that well in getting the Ukrainians to the negotiating table. He failed at that. What Biden did well was ensuring that NATO was in lockstep on policy every step of the way on sanctions, on armaments for the Ukrainians, on intelligence sharing, the rest. Trump is not going to do that.

Trump wants to end wars. He wants to end wars in the Middle East. He wants to get the Americans out. He wants to end the war between Russia, Ukraine. He wants to get the Americans out, just like he did in Afghanistan. I mean, Afghanistan reflects the G-Zero.

Now, the United States, I support ending the war in Afghanistan. Not that we care about what I want or don’t want. I mean, the Americans had spent over a trillion dollars, enormous numbers of lives that were lost. Since the U.S. has left Afghanistan, that hasn’t happened.

But there’s a power vacuum in Afghanistan. It’s not like anyone else has come in to try to provide any level of stability in that country. And never mind just for the Afghans themselves, but also exporting drugs and instability and all the like. That is what we are going to see coming from all over the place as a consequence of the United States that is saying, “not it.”

“We’re focused on ourselves and we’re going to get unilateral deals. And the allies, you’re going to have to listen to us.”

HELEN WALTERS: I see. So it’s the unilateral nature of this and it’s the kind of self-absorbed, self-involved, self-facing nature of the power that is different from that kind of collaborative allies, allied axis that we used to know in years past.

IAN BREMMER: That’s right. The United States is not becoming isolationist. The United States is increasingly becoming transactional. So if you think about what American exceptionalism was, and frankly, what globalism was to a degree, it was the United States saying, “we support global rule of law, multilateralism, and all of these institutions that we built up.”

“And we want you to actually abide by those rules, all of us together. And by the way, China, your dictatorship and your not free market economy, we’re going to bring you into our institutions and we’re going to expect that you’re going to be behaving by those rules too. So we want you to be responsible stakeholders.”

Now, that last bet didn’t work. The Chinese got rich, but they didn’t become responsible stakeholders. They didn’t become democratic. They didn’t become free market. They didn’t support rule of law. What’s really interesting is that the United States has instead moved towards a more Chinese model. In other words, the United States is increasingly saying, “we don’t care about these multilateral institutions.” “We’re not going to support the United Nations.” The United States might well stop paying its dues to the UN.

I mean, certainly on the back of Elise Stefanik and the appointment of ambassador to the United Nations, that appears to be the trajectory that Trump has said he wants to pull out of the World Health Organization. He’s set to leave the Paris Climate Accord out again, right? I mean, the U.S. is not interested in that. The U.S. is interested in focusing on its own power, its own priorities, and other countries have to like it or lump it.

And so it’s a radically different environment than a U.S.-led global order. There’s no global order that’s being led by the U.S. It’s the U.S.-led U.S. and a China-led China and everybody else trying to hope they don’t have to play sides, you know, and just on defense, everyone playing defense.

Iran and the Gaza War

HELEN WALTERS: Okay, let’s talk about another geopolitical power that is hugely important always, and that is Iran, which in your view has gotten weaker over the last year or so. Obviously, we’ve been seeing the war playing out in Gaza. We’ve been seeing Hezbollah has been weakened considerably in Lebanon. But what do you make of what’s going on in Iran and what should we be watching for in terms of risk?

IAN BREMMER: I think Iran this year has become the most important Middle East risk as opposed to last year when we were focused on Gaza and the expansion of that war, West Bank, Lebanon, Hezbollah. Those wars are going to be winding down, and Trump wants them to wind down. And frankly, the Israelis have accomplished most of what they have wanted to accomplish in them, and they’re the ones that are determining, dictating how the war is being fought.

The wars are being fought because they have dominance in military escalation and capabilities. Iran is Israel’s principal adversary in the region, America’s principal adversary in the region, but they are at a historic weak point post-revolution. They’ve, as you say, lost their empire, their axis of resistance.

Yemen and the Houthis, which was the most autonomous of the groups, are still doing okay. But Assad is gone, which means they can’t get weapons to Lebanon. Hezbollah is basically gone, and their leadership has been destroyed. Hamas is gone. Islamic Jihad, Palestinian-Islamic Jihad is in a lot of trouble.

And so if you are Iran, you know that you can’t rely on your regional strategy anymore. They also have a lot of domestic problems. Their economy is doing horribly, and Trump coming in is going to increase the pressure to prevent all of these non-flag tankers from getting out and allowing the Iranians to sell their oil illegally.

So the economic situation, which is already in freefall with lots of energy shortages, and also some of the worst air pollution in the world because they have to burn anything they can find, is going to get much worse. This reminds me of the Soviet Union in about 1989, when they lost the East Bloc, and suddenly the people in the Soviet Union saw the emperor had no clothes, and that the system wasn’t working.

Now, the Iranians have the capacity to engage in a lot of domestic repression, but the Supreme Leader is 85 years old. He’s not well. He has not picked a clear successor. And there are also insurgencies, including with ethnic minorities in Iran, in places like Sistan and Baluchestan. So, I mean, frankly, I don’t think that Iran is on the precipice of implosion, but they are heading there. And the Americans and the Israelis may be interested in helping them get there. I mean, Israel certainly sees this as a unique opportunity to take care of their Iran business.

Now, they can do a lot. They can hit them with espionage, cyber, critical infrastructure. They could take out some of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. What they can’t do by themselves is take out the nuclear capabilities. They need American military capacity for that. And so the question is, will Trump help? And there are those in the incoming Trump administration that think that’s exactly what Trump should do.

Not clear. I suspect he doesn’t want to risk another war that could lead oil prices to get higher, impact the global marketplace. I suspect he’s going to hit the Iranians hard and see what kind of a deal might be cut by them. So there’s a possibility that, you know, a much tougher relationship with Iran creates more risk, but ultimately creates a deal and Trump gets a Nobel Peace Prize.

I wouldn’t bet on that. I think it’s unlikely the Iranians and a Trump administration will come to an agreement. It’s more likely that we’re heading towards direct confrontation.

AI Regulation Challenges

HELEN WALTERS: Let’s change tack just a little bit. So you and I have talked very directly about the need for regulation of artificial intelligence, and you actually have been working very directly and very specifically on just that topic. And yet you still have AI unbound on your list of risks. So does that mean the regulation is not coming for AI? Or where do you think we are with that? And what do you think we should be watching for?

IAN BREMMER: Yeah, Helen, that’s pretty much what it means. It means that the efforts at regulation have been going a lot slower than the technological bills. Not surprising given how extraordinary the technology is and just how much money is going into it.

And also that some of the regulation in place is actually going away or is eroding. The United Kingdom last year put their flag in the AI landscape by saying that they were going to host every year an AI safety summit. That’s how they really wanted to make sure that everyone was paying attention to the UK. They just rebranded it. This year’s is going to be called the “AI Action Summit.” Tells you a lot. They don’t want to be left behind. They want to make sure that they’re competitive and they’re building more capacity.

The EU feeling the same way, the French feeling the same way, really wanting to help their own nascent unicorns and not overregulate. Trump administration probably going to end, rescind the executive order by Biden with the heads of the seven systemically important US AI companies. He’ll probably also stop the nascent US-Chinese AI dialogue that was hoped over time would try to reduce the potential for an AI arms race of the kind that we had with the Soviets on nuclear weapons in the early Cold War. The US European Trade and Technology Council likely to be unwound under Trump.

So all of these early stage efforts that were not moving fast enough are probably not going to be with us effectively for long. In addition to that, we are already seeing that the advances in this technology and you know that I’m an enthusiast for AI. I believe that, you know, incredible human capital will be unlocked. Extraordinary industrial use cases in every sector around the world.

But I also see people, bad actors that are capable of using this AI in ways that are dangerous. I’ll give you an example. I mean, you look at Meta and their open source Llama chatbot and there are a lot of people out there that are basically re-engineering Llama so that it doesn’t adhere to the constraints, the, if you will, the ideology of Meta. But what some would also say would be the safety of Meta.

And some of my people have downloaded those on their laptops and started using it to see just what you can do. And they’ve gotten the AI bot to explain how to use arsenic to assassinate someone to help them figure out how you would target and kill a major CEO of a company. I mean, we’re not doing that, obviously, but lots of people are. And that is not sustainable.

So, I mean, the extraordinary capabilities of these technologies, the unfettered competition, which is driving so much compute and energy use and capital and entrepreneurship from the Americans, from the Chinese and from others, is not being met by anywhere close to an adequate regulatory environment. And that means that we’re only going to figure out, you know, where things break when they break. And we are heading in that direction.

HELEN WALTERS: Right. So it’s going to take some intense catastrophe for people to start to take that seriously. And as we know, with gun control, maybe not even take it seriously then.

IAN BREMMER: That’s probably right.

Signs of Hope

HELEN WALTERS: All right. Now, this is TED, Ian. We are not just about risks. We all appreciate that you came here and you have detailed the top risks. But I have to turn it on its head, if you don’t mind, just for the last question, because we love those who are looking for solutions, not just detailing the problems.

And I asked you this last time when we went through the risks of 2024. And so I have to ask you again, what or who or where are the bright spots? What gives you hope in 2025?

IAN BREMMER: Well, I mean, first of all, taking away the geopolitics, the technology is a bright spot. The technology for AI, the technology for sustainable energy. I mean, I don’t care if the U.S. pulls out of Paris Climate Accord and Trump says he’s not going to subsidize electric vehicles anymore and he wants to help fossil fuels.

All of that is not going to stop an extraordinary transition to post-carbon energies, which the Chinese are leading on globally and they may extend that lead. But I mean, they’re going to be carbon neutral a lot faster than 2030 and a lot faster than they expected. Now, some of that’s because their economy is not doing that well, but some of that is because the price of these technologies at scale has been going down, down, down, you know, I mean, following Moore’s law, basically. So that’s extraordinary.

I love the idea that in 20 to 30 years, we’re going to have sustainable, abundant, inexpensive energy for the world. That’s pretty exciting. I love the idea that the use cases for AI every day are becoming more and more earth changing and that will reduce waste, that will allow us to better measure things around the world. And when you measure them, you can manage them. When you manage them, you can improve upon them.

That’s, I mean, we haven’t had good real-time data on our world, on our economy, on our environment. AI will give us that and that will allow us to more efficiently use the resources, the scarce resources, that we’ve been blessed with. So I’m a big enthusiast about the technologies, as is TED.

But those aren’t geopolitical upsides. The geopolitical upsides, I’ll give you a couple. One is that Trump is not going to be a failure. The fact that Trump has such a strong position does mean that other countries will want to give him wins. And that is stabilizing where those wins occur.

So I mentioned that Claudia Sheinbaum is going to do everything possible to find a way to fix the relationship that Trump thinks is broken. It may take her longer than she wants. I think she will get there. The Europeans and the Americans may get into a tit-for-tat tariff war. But I also think they’re going to work more closely on coordinating some policies on China. I think they’ll work more closely. The Europeans will buy more natural gas from the United States.

There is a desire to get a deal done. That’s not going to work everywhere. I don’t think it’ll work on China. I don’t think it’ll work on Iran. I don’t think it’ll fix the Russia conflict. But where it does work, it will be meaningful. And you want the president of the United States to have some wins. I mean, at the end of the day, he’s the most powerful leader of any country in the world. That’s important.

Secondarily, one place I strongly disagree with Trump, Trump believes that a strong Europe is bad for the United States. In a GZERO world, I think a strong Europe is good for the United States. It’s good for global stability. And it’s also good long term for keeping American adversaries at bay.

Trump is supporting, and Elon Musk in particular, is supporting all of these Euro-skeptic movements, the Reform Party in the UK, the Alternatives for Deutschland in Germany. I suspect soon the National Rally in France, though he hasn’t spoken about it yet, now that Macron’s coming after me, probably will.

The good news is that I don’t think it matters. I think that Europe is going to continue to stand up in 2025. It might even get stronger, not economically, where they’re underperforming compared to the US, but politically, from a security perspective as well. They know they need to. And the leaders that I see in Europe, I see Mark Rutte as Secretary General of NATO, I see Ursula von der Leyen running the EU for a second term.

I see a very capable Roberta Metsola and Kaja Kallas underneath her, driving foreign policy, for example, in the European Parliament. The Germans are about to have an election. No, the AfD is not going to win, despite Elon saying that they’re going to. It’s going to be Friedrich Merz. And it’s going to be a center-right government that’s going to be quite close with all the European leaders at the EU level, and quite close to Macron.

Macron is in big trouble in 2027, but he runs foreign policy still until then, and he’s going to be quite cohesive with the Germans and with the Europeans in 2025. So, at least for this year, I think the Europeans stand strongly and are more cohesive and coordinated. It’s a very important thing for what still is the world’s largest common market.

HELEN WALTERS: Well, Ian, I, on behalf of our entire community, am an enthusiast of these conversations. We’re very grateful to you for coming and sharing your wisdom and your insight. And thank you for coming back for the next thing that we will need to discuss and that we will need you to explain. For now, thank you so much.

And if you want to take a look at all of the risks, you can see them online at EurasiaGroup.net. For now, Ian, signing off, thank you so very much.

IAN BREMMER: Thank you, Helen.

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