The Rest Is Politics: Leading - 113. How likely is World War 3? (Ian Bremmer)

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

What does Musk’s de-facto role as ‘co president’ say about the impact of Big Tech on the disintegration of the international order? How can we approach solving some of the world's biggest conflicts? Is there room for hope in an increasingly tense and fragmented world? Rory and Alastair are joined by American political scientist, Ian Bremmer, to answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [e-mail] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Alice Horrell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. Sign up to the Restis Politics Plus. To enjoy ad-free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolities.com. That's the restispolities. Welcome to the restis politics leading with me, Anastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. We have with us here a friend of mine called Ian Bremmer. Ian is very famous in the US. Maybe not necessarily everybody in Europe knows about him, but I think many people will, as probably the foremost. independent analyst of geopolitical risk and to some extent has kind of created the field. He's become the go-to person for companies, for individuals, for governments on defining this very, very strange

world. And we're going to get into it a bit, both what he thinks is happening in the world. We're recording this just after the election, Donald Trump, but also maybe a little bit reflecting on this extraordinary industry that he's been right at the heart of creating, which is trying to make sense of almost 200 countries in that enormous brain of his. So, Ian, thank you very much for joining us. That's good to be with both of you. Thanks. And very good to see you, even if not quite in person. Very good to see you too. Can I actually kick off with this? Your reports, you raised your group reports, you did a report at the start of 2024 listing the 10 big risks to the world. And number one was the United States versus

itself. I don't know how you feel that's gone on, but I just wanted if we could start with that, because if that was what you defined as the biggest geopolitical risk in 2024, and it's panned out with Trump winning, Trump making some pretty remarkable, I would argue, dangerous appointments to his cabinet, what are we to make so far of what we've seen of Trump 2.0? Well, the implications I think are twofold. One is that rule of law and the stability of U.S. political institutions open to question and under threat, under challenge in a way that is frankly hard to imagine in any other advanced industrial democracy today. But of course, will be felt for a very long time in the United States. So first, it's about what that means for the U.S.

But of course, more broadly, it's about what it means for the rest of the world. We don't have global leadership today, and we certainly don't have the United States aspiring to global leadership, the values that the U.S. had at least promoted as wanting the world to follow for decades now, like the promotion of free trade and collective. security and rule of law and democracy, which, of course, the U.S. itself only aligned to periodically and hypocritically and all the rest. But still, they were the values. That, I think, is right out the window. And of course, that's going to have huge implications for the rest of the world, especially at a time when so much of the geopolitics today is volatile,

uncertain in conflict at war. Those are the two things I think we would, the two big buckets that you have to look at in the aftermath of this election. And how do we get here? What's the way that you read the world since you graduated? I guess you're really in a way of product of the sort of 1989 moment, aren't you, in terms of your kind of intellectual development? You did a doctoral thesis on Russians and Ukraine. You very much came through the end of the Cold War. Take us from there to hear. How else did we end up here? I think three big ways, Rory. The first is that when the Soviet Union collapsed, and you're right, 1989, the wall came down as when I started my PhD work. And that was such a seminal moment. It felt like a very optimistic moment. It felt like everything that we were

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

Number two is China was integrated into an increasingly global order, especially economically. But they were integrated on the presumption that as they got wealthier, they would become Western, even American. They would become more democratic, support rule of law, and embrace the free market. They have gotten much more powerful. They have not done any of those things. Responsible stakeholdership, as the Americans defined it, was the Chinese will become a part of the American order, and they will accept all of those rules. And yet today, China is a much more

consolidated authoritarian regime without rule of law and with much less of a free market. I mean, in fact, over the last 10 years, you could easily argue that the United States has moved closer to Chinese values globally, more transactional, for example, less about rule of law than the Chinese have moved towards the American model. That's a very different question. Maybe it's worth discussing. But that's the second reason. And then the third reason is that on the back of those two things, tens of millions of people

living in the developed democracies increasingly did not feel that their own governments were legitimate, did not feel like they were representative, didn't believe in their own establishment, their own media, their own elites. And they got angry about that. And that was particularly true in the United States. And some of that was about the economy and inequality and lack of mobility. Some of it was about changing demographics and immigration. Some of it was algorithmic. and people, you know, sort of increasingly retreating into narrower and more competitive information bubbles. And some of it was all of that being taken advantage of by political entrepreneurs and those that supported them without the interests of the public in mind.

In any case, you had the United States increasingly not willing to play its role. So I think that if you, you know, you asked me, how did we get here? I think that those three factors are responsible for 95% of how we got here. Ian, you mentioned G7 slash G8 up to a point. And I was around with Tony Blair at that period when Yeltsin and then Putin were part of that G8 structure. And we sort of thought they were moving in that direction. But you coined this phrase that we're now in a G0 world, which is basically that back in

those days when the British economy was bigger than the Chinese and the French, She felt that they were more powerful than the Russians. Am I right that your definition of G0 is what you meant earlier when you said there is no such thing now as global leadership? I think that's right. There's lots of leadership, but it's not global. The most powerful countries are much more inward-looking, much more nationalist, and yet our challenges are increasingly global.

So there is a real mismatch between the governance we have and the opportunities and challenges that we face. And, you know, in that environment, you've got, you know, a few different things you can do. You can create new institutions, which we're doing. You know, you see that with climate. You see it with Belt and Road and the bricks. I mean, you know, Russia's being isolated by the G7, but everyone's coming to Kazan from the Global South to meet with them.

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

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

able to capture the levers of decision-making in ways that feel unprecedented right now. You know, again, if you've got video on, you see that I'm sitting in front of a bank vault. it was John Jacob Astor's bank vault back in the pre-depression era. And this was the center of American boom until it wasn't, until they stopped building and until everyone in the U.S. basically felt faced economic collapse. Now, I don't think we're facing economic collapse anytime soon, though I do think some of the decisions that might be being made in the United States in the coming year and, you're years, fiscal decisions, for example, deregulatory decisions, desires to break institutions that you

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

And I think one of the things that really makes this global order more resilient is the fact that the Americans and the Chinese have great limitations on what they can accomplish globally, what they want to accomplish globally and what they can accomplish globally. Other countries matter. They matter increasingly greatly. That, I think, is something to be celebrated. It is a stabilizing factor. Because let's face it, very few people around the world looking at the U.S. and looking at China right now, say, I am comfortable with what those worldviews represent. So you don't want those two countries running everything. Like, that would be a bad thing, right? Ian, you've mentioned tech a couple of times. You've mentioned the kind of breakdown of a clear global leadership. Would you argue that the musks and Zuckerbergs and the Bezos of this world are now more powerful than most.

elected leaders in the world. And given the power that you say they have, what on earth are we to make of the fact that Elon Musk looks to all intents and purposes? He's not just a sort of almost vice president. It feels a bit like co-president at the moment. And given the power that he already has outside politics and outside government, I noted that number four on your list of risks a year ago was ungovernable AI. What are we to make of that? And how would you define the the power that these tech guys have now? Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, well, first, in the digital space,

technologists with monopoly platforms are increasingly acting as sovereign. The governments don't know how to regulate them. They're worried about regulating them and undermining their own competitiveness, particularly in the U.S., but you see a fair amount of this, you know, even from France, for example,

and trying to slow down what's happening in Brussels. So, yes, there's no question. question, these individuals, even more than companies in many cases, have far more power than most elected leaders. I think that that is clearly true. And the trend is only increasing in that direction. I mean, I think about something like Starlink, which was essential to help the Ukrainian stay in power. And arguably, Elon Musk has done more to support Zelensky in the last three years than anyone on the planet as an individual, as an individual. Arguably, I think I would make that argument, even though he's more recently done things that feel as if they promote Kremlin talking points.

It's complicated, right? But if fiber optic connections with Taiwan were cut off by Chinese fishing vessels, for example, it's clear that Starlink would not be made available to Taiwan because Elon's investments in mainland China would be directly threatened by such a decision. Now, it should be patently clear that that is a problem from a national security perspective. Like, those are decisions we want to be made by governments, by elected officials who are in some way accountable and responsible to their populations. Elon is accountable to himself and precisely himself. And Mark Zuckerberg, same. So we clearly have an environment. I mean, the fact that Musk was on that call with Zelensky, that matters. And, you know, again, some of what he does may well be very positive. I don't think

there's any human being on the planet that has the ability to be an individual intermediary between Trump and Xi Jinping the way Elon does. Kissinger's dead. It wouldn't surprise me at all if on Trump's first call with Xi Jinping, Elon is on it. And Elon would be inclined to try to facilitate a stabilization of that relationship in a way that, frankly, all of Trump's cabinet members would not. So he could well play a very constructive role there, but it is a purely ungoverned and irresponsible role. And that, of course, again, it's not just Elon. We're going to see a whole bunch of people like that. That is a very different way of thinking about geopolitics. forward. In how much difference do you think that Elon Musk getting so enthusiastically behind Trump

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

Actually, the relevant question is, why did Kamala do so well? Because she was the incumbent that outperformed, right? It was the closer election. I mean, all the incumbents lost. For my view, and you and I talked about this a few months ago, Rory, I mean, I thought it was pretty clear that Trump was going to win for that reason, because this was an anti-incumbent way. People didn't trust their institutions. They weren't happy about inflation. They weren't happy about migration post-pandemic. And, you know, the polls, I mean, you get on average U.S. polls, you've got 0.5% response rating compared to 2%, you know, a couple decades ago. What does that mean? That means that people don't trust the institutions. Well, who are they voting for? Probably not the

person that represents the establishment. So I think the real question is why Kamala did so well. And I think there are three reasons for that in descending order of importance. The first is that the U.S. economy was performing and is performing better than all the other developed economies. so there was less of a hit to her from representing that economy. Two is that Trump was such an unfit and unpopular candidate in the opposition, and that hurt him with independence. And third is that Harris ran a very cautious campaign and didn't make any huge mistakes. So, I mean, if you're an alien looking down, that's the question you'd ask,

is why Kamala did so well. Of course, that's of very, very little consolation to all the people whose heads are exploding around the world saying, oh, my God, Trump is back. And Trump is back with the Senate and the House and with a cabinet that will be completely loyal. And in some cases, utterly unfit. I mean, Trump has actually appointed a few members of cabinet that are even more unfit for office than Trump is, which is a freaking high bar. Right. And yet that is where we are. And all that being said in, back in the day before he became president first time around, you were pretty confident that he would never win the Republican nomination, and he'd never become president.

So what did we all get wrong? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, I think the first time around, we were still looking at the United States in a pre-G-zero environment. It was, you know, still the political institutions felt much stronger at that point. Trump, you know, had a hard time securing the nomination. He was fighting against people like Ted Cruz. The Republican Party still felt like a normal party at that point. It didn't feel like a populist party. It was still mostly in bed with retrade. And it was mostly in bed with big corporations and felt aligned with those things and rich people. And the Democrats were the party of the working class and not the elites. And that was already changing, but it changed much more dramatically and much more quickly in the United States

eight years ago than at that time that I had anticipated that it would. Absolutely. But the trends have only got farther in that direction. There's only more political dysfunction and tribalism through four years of Trump and four years of Biden. And I expect that that is going to accelerate under four years of maximum Trump. And given the, given the, the three of us are in the business of commenting on political affairs and sometimes getting tempted into trying to predict the future. How do you reconcile yourself this? I mean, I've got things catastrophically wrong. For example, I thought that Kamala Harris would win comfortably, and she obviously didn't. I've got some things better. I think I was reasonably good on Afghanistan, and I

made a lucky guess that Brexit would go 5248, and it went 5248. But how do you reflect over... And that it would do nothing for the country. How do you, reflecting over a long career on this stuff, do you think about what to do when people ask you to predict the future in an obviously pretty uncertain world? And how do you reconcile yourself to the things you get right, things you get wrong? How do you deal with that as you go forward? The first point is that what you get right or wrong has nothing to do with what you want to have happen.

So I think it's very important that the fact that I am personally on record is saying that Trump is the most unfit candidate for the presidency that I have ever encountered. And I felt he was unfit when he was a Democrat. It had nothing to do with his political party. He doesn't have an ideological North star other than himself. I didn't want him to win in 2024, but that had nothing to do with my assessment of whether he would win. So the fact that I don't get, you know, sort of personally invested in analytic calls, emotionally invested, I think is a very, very important thing. thing, which is increasingly rare. 20, 30 years ago, it wasn't that rare. It's become much more rare, and therefore it's much more valuable to maintain. Secondly, it was very easy for you both to go

back to our top risks from 2024 and see what we said back in January because we keep it on our homepage all year. And the reason we do that is because we want people to do exactly what you just did. Let's go back and call balls and strikes. What did they say a year ago? You don't hide it, right? I mean, I noticed that we've got all of these people that supported Kamala that are going back and they're deleting their old tweet and world leaders and ambassadors to the U.S. and they're deleting their old tweets. I didn't delete anything. Go back and see what we said. Absolutely. Because I'm very comfortable that the first time around when Trump did things that were successful, like the first bilateral trade deal with an African country or chorus with South Korea or the U.S. Mexico-Canada agreement or the Abraham Accords, I was very happy.

to say, here are some great successes that we had under Trump. Just like when he made some big failures, I was prepared to call him out on that too, as I did with Biden, as I will with Trump again. And so, you know, when you go back at the end of the year and see how you did, you know. Yeah. And how do you cope with the times when you've got things wrong? I mean, what's the ways that you've dealt with the times you've miscalled it? As, for example, thinking Trump wouldn't get the nomination wouldn't win in 2016. I'll give you a recent big example. when Mille was elected president of Argentina, I believe that he was going to fail economically. Not because his suggestions were all so antithetical to what was necessary, but number one,

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

because he could do things and be blamed for them that they then wouldn't have to be responsible for us. It was one cycle. And secondly, that he was truly willing to be much more pragmatic than I expected. So I came out, I went back, I promoted what I wrote about him before, five months before, and I said, why did I get Millie so wrong? And I explained it. I went through and I said, let me talk about why. And by the way, I was happy to get him wrong because it's good for the Argentinian people. Well, here's the very funny thing is that he got in touch with me. He posted my piece and he said, I'm really happy that you were willing to come out and say that you got it wrong. And on the back of that, I said, well, why don't you do my show? The only show you've done in the

U.S. is Tucker Carlson, and he's a nutbag, and he's not making you look like a sane person, have a conversation with me. So we spent an hour having a conversation on my show. I think that if you are willing to consistently call balls and strikes on yourself and take your work seriously, but not yourself seriously, that that is something that it's authentic and it resonates with people around the world. I think it's really important to do. Well, if the Argentine ambassador to London is listening, Rory, should we say that we've got Millet-Rogg and on that basis he about photos up and come on, because we'd quite like to talk to him. We'd definitely love him on the show. By the way, there's plenty of time for it still to go wrong,

but we'll see. The other thing, Ian, sorry to take you back to some of your past triumphs, but I'm a great believer in the power of very, very blunt, short messaging. And I think we have you to blame for one of Trump's most successful short messages. Oh, Jesus. I'm sorry, which is America first. Yeah. To be fair to you, you did say the policies are clearly America first. That is not the same as make America great again, because this won't make America great again. You did say that. And then, of course, what happened to those listeners that don't know,

Trump was asked in an interview whether he liked this idea of America first that he basically loved it, and he's been using it ever since. So how do you feel to have given birth to one of his most important slogans? Well, the question that came to me is whether I thought Trump was isolationist or not, and I said, no, he's unilateralist, he's transactionalist. It's not like he's trying to hide America. America from other countries. He's trying to use American power in a very blunt way to get better

deals from other countries around the world one-on-one. So it felt very much like America first, that that was what the message was. And I didn't realize that one of my readers from the New York Times was then going to go and get the first interview with him and use that and basically say, here's your campaign slogan. Yeah, I don't feel great about that because I think it's done a lot of damage, frankly. I wish they hadn't asked him. In where do you think we're going to be with tariffs? So Trump's talked about 60% tariffs against China, but more from where we're talking with our European listener base, 20% tariffs against the rest of the world. Do you imagine that happening to Europe? And can you imagine Britain being

able to somehow negotiate its way out of it and exploit some special relationship independent to the EU? Where do you see that going? Well, I mean, I have a hard idea that the UK is going to have a better shot negotiating with the U.S. with its present government. I don't see that. It's very clear that Starrmer et al are being nice to trump through gridded teeth. It's going to be hard for them to maintain that position. We could be seeing a G7 next year where Starmer has the only center left government in the G7. That could easily be possible. Once Trudeau's out and with the new Germans coming in, which I'm sure not what he was expecting. So I think in many ways the UK is in a very difficult position here. And Brexit didn't help. But Trump will use tariffs. He sees foreign policy through a

very economic lens, through a tariff lens. The Chinese are the biggest challenge here. Other countries will also get a lot of focus because they are acting as conduits for Chinese manufacturing surplus through them to the United States. And Lighthizer, Bob Lighthizer, who will very likely play a dominant role on this, has been very focused on that. But even with the Europeans, 20%, what they say is always a headline number. So you assume that means it's really 10. But can you avoid another 10? I think it's hard to avoid another 10.

I think that Trump wants more jobs, more capital, more investment in the United States. I think the bigger impact in the near term will be on kicking illegal immigrants out. that's going to have more of an inflationary impact than the tariffs will, but I think he'll move on tariffs in short order as well. And you think he's serious about that too? You think he's going to attempt to do his mass deportations of millions for legal immigrants? Oh, absolutely. You see that with every appointee he has made that is relevant, with his borders are, with his Department of Homeland Security, with Stephen Miller as the deputy chief of staff in charge of policy, all of the appointees around the border, consider this a top priority. And Trump was very popular for pushing on this and very popular,

including in blue cities that used to support being sanctuaries in theory. But then once illegal immigrants start coming, actually arriving to their doorstep, including my own New York City, suddenly they become very much more hawkish on border security. And Trump has used that issue to his advantage. Okay. Ian Alastair, quick break and then back for more. Hey, this is Michael and Hannah from Gollhangers. The Rest is Science. This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK. We often think of beating cancer as treatment, but imagine stopping it before it begins.

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Cancer Research UK, their research breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancer researchukuk.org forward slash the rest is science. Hi everybody, it's Dominic Samark here from The Rest is History. Now, some of you may have heard me on your show, The Rest is Politics, when Rory was away and I was filling in and enjoying Alistair Campbell's tremendous banter. And I'm back to tell you about our new series on The Rest is History, which is all about Britain in the 1970s, a period with a lot of uncanny resemblances to our own. So right now we're living through a moment when oil shocks generated by war in the Middle East

are rippling through the world economy, when Britain feels like it's sunk in a bit of a malaise, people are arguing about Europe, the government has got a few issues with the trade unions, and we have a kind of, I suppose you'd say governing elite, a kind of political class that is really struggling to come to terms with all of these issues. And people are asking if Britain is governable at all. So there are a lot of parallels between that Britain that I'm describing, which is our Britain, and the Britain of the mid-1970s. So in this series that's coming out on the rest is history,

we'll be looking at these and other issues. We'll be talking about the rise of Margaret Thatcher, obviously a colossal figure in our political life even now, whether you love her or loathe her. And we'll be talking about the very first Brexit referendum of 1970s. a subject that I'm sure Rory and Alistair will have strong opinions about. We'll be talking about the fall of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson and we'll be talking about one of the grimmest moments in Britain's economic history,

the moment in 1976 when we had to go cap in hand, as people said at the time, to the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, for a then record bailout. Now, if that sounds good to you, how could it not sound good to you? Of course it sounds good to you. We have a clip for you to listen to at the end of this episode. And if you want to hear more, just search for The Rest is History wherever you get your podcasts. Ian, the two, we mentioned your number one geopolitical risk of 2024, which is the US election. Number four was tech and AI.

Just briefly mentioned two and three. Two was Middle East on the brink, getting worse, you said. And three was the threat of a partitioned Ukraine, where it's sort of. feels like we're moving in that direction. So almost a year on, do you still think the Middle East is going in the wrong direction? And likewise, are we closer to a partitioned Ukraine? And what are the geopolitical risks attached to that? Ukraine is easier. I see virtually no way to avoid a partitioned Ukraine at this point, at least de facto. That doesn't mean that the Ukrainians will accept and recognize Russian sovereignty over their territory, but they'll have

it and we're much closer to a ceasefire being forced upon them by Trump. And the bigger question is what are the terms that Putin will require for him to accept it and not keep fighting? Because the Ukrainians are clearly on their back foot in this environment, both politically, economically, and militarily. It's a real challenge for Ukraine right now. And Zelensky has gamely reached out to Trump and congratulated him for his great win. And what a wonderful meeting the two of them had in September in the United States and a whole bunch of other things that Zelensky doesn't actually believe. But he knows that this is going to be a real challenge for him. So yeah, I think partitioned Ukraine is, again, to go back to what Rory brought up, this is not something I want to

see very clearly. This is something that we are seeing. And so I would love to be wrong. I really, there's so many things out there analytically I want to be wrong about. This is pretty high on that list. And Ian, can I come in as a sort of subset on that, presumably not just part of. to Ukraine, but also a Ukraine bent more in Putin's favor. So a Ukraine which is not joining NATO, not joining the EU, and presumably Putin would also like to get rid of Zelensky and have somebody more pliant in Kiev. That's an interesting question, because of course the Americans don't get to make that decision by themselves. I said one of the things that is creating more resilience in the world is the fact that the U.S. isn't alone at these tables. And, you know, there are a lot of

Europeans that would take much more vigorous exception and whose personal and national interests are much more at stake if that was the outcome, Poland, the Baltic states, the Nordic states, Romania, others, France. So I have a hard time seeing as a result of a deal that the EU is off the table. And while NATO is off the table, at least for now, because Trump wouldn't support it, that doesn't mean that hard security guarantees for non-occupied Ukraine would be off the table for many European countries. I could see an environment where Poland and others decide to send troops after a ceasefire to Kiev, to Leviv in the West, to other places, with support of France and other countries. And I don't know what NATO would do in that environment. I don't know how the

Americans would react. Will the Europeans be together or divided? Very, very. interesting question in this environment. Now, you also asked me, Alistar, about the Middle East. Yeah. The Middle East, of course, has gotten a lot worse over the course of the year. The war expanded. The situation for the Palestinians has gotten unthinkably bad, but can always get worse and is set to. The Lebanon war appears to be close to an agreed ceasefire, and the Israelis do have escalation dominance in the region, which they have very clearly reestablish. over the past months of fighting on every front. So I think that plus Trump coming in with a cabinet that is the most pro-Israel of any cabinet of any government in history. I think that Notting Yahoo

and his government can do what they want in the region. And the question will be, do they decide that they want to use that support to go after Iran? Or do they accept their win? Do they have elections, return Bibi et al to power and work on increasing, improving their relations with the Gulf states. What do you make of the narrative which is popular amongst some Israeli opinion makers

that they've got to go after Iran, that that's the head of the hydra, that all these other things, Islam, Hamas, other groups in Iraq, Yemen are just products of Iran and that this is the best opportunity that they've been given in decades

to go after Iran. Of course, that's a new narrative. Three months ago, people were saying that about Hezbollahs, by far the most powerful, non-state military actor in the world and the principal lever of deterrence that the Iranians have with a direct border with Israel, which Iran does not have. So, I mean, Iran's ability to threaten a nuclear Israel with, you know, unique intelligence, surveillance, cyber, and other assets, not to mention air defense. I mean, it's not as if Iran represents. I mean, it's not as if Iran represents an existential threat to Israel. No one represents an existential threat to Israel except

possibly leaders inside Israel. So, you know, I don't accept that frame, but I think that many people do. And it is certainly true that Jared Kushner sent me and others a few weeks ago an essay that he wrote informally that was outlining that argument. And I think it is certainly plausible that the Israeli government, knowing that they will have the full support of the Trump administration, might well want to decapitate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, go after Iranian export capabilities for oil, and significantly degrade, though probably not be able to destroy, their nuclear capabilities. And what Iran could do in response to that to Israel is, it's an open question, but it's not existential. That, of course, is the

point. Do you agree with our former Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, that we're living in an era of impunity? I do. So if I look at, you know, Trump convicted felon becomes president. Putin invades a sovereign country, but as you say, likely then to be able to keep part of that country without any real punishment. Israel, you've just said, frankly, can do whatever it wants. And there are other examples around the world. North Korea. Correct. So what do we do about that? Is that because there is no world order? In a G-Zero world, you get an age of impunity.

Those things are connected. In fact, David and I are friends, and we email each other routinely and talk about this stuff. I completely agree with that problem. What we do about it goes back to the earlier question. You either build new institutions that better reflect a balance of power that is emerging, as opposed to institutions that reflect the balance of power that no longer exists and political realities inside countries that no longer resist, or you strengthen your existing institutions because you know you need them

and you're committed to them, or you go to war. That's what you do. And, you know, when impunity grows, you get more wars. I mean, the North Koreans sending troops to Russia, you know, a couple weeks ago, the United States got in touch with Russia directly through intelligence channels and said that if those North Korean troops

end up fighting in Ukraine, not in Kyrgyzkin Russia, but in Ukraine, then NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine would be the response. Not American troops, but NATO troops. And that's a massive escalation. So, I mean, this is a serious danger. And the more impunity

that the Russians and the North Koreans and others, I mean, heck, the more impunity the Americans feel, the greater the geopolitical danger of our fragmenting world order. Part of the story is a story about technology and war. And we've seen two very different stories in the last couple of years. In Afghanistan, the United States, you know, the wealthiest military in the world with incredible technological capacity, withdrew and handed the country back to the Taliban, whose greatest technology was an AK-47 and a donkey.

But in the Middle East, it looks as though the story's different. In the Middle East, it looks as though the complete destruction of Hezbollah, the inability of Iran to get its missiles through, the sense that these threats that people have been worried about for 20, 30 years, turned out not to be as significant as they were, is a story of incredible technological advantages from Israel. Pages blowing up, walkie-talkies, their ability. ability to detect people, the weapons they're able to fire, their iron dames, etc. Are we entering a

world in which impunity is partly connected to technology that if you're a very, very rich country with the right kind of technology, you have options which maybe would not have felt available to Israel in 1967 or 1974? I think we are, and there's a broader point here that disturbs me. So you asked me before how I deal with being wrong, but also there's a bigger question. which is a more important question, which is how do you deal with the world changing when you were right, but then the world makes you wrong because the world changes. And so technology, one of the biggest changes that I've seen since coming of age in 1989 is that back then technology largely supported democracies and undermined authoritarian regimes, the colored revolution, the Arab Spring.

This was all about access to communication tools. that was decentralized that human beings had. And that has changed completely on its head. Technology is now about data consolidation and surveillance in the hands of a small number of monopoly platforms and governments and it empowers authoritarian regimes and delegitimizes democracies. That's what we're seeing.

It's an exceptionally dangerous trend. It could easily change AI in three, years time could become more decentralized. And suddenly it could be about human capital once again undermining central power and kleptocracies and shining light on and distributed ledger could be part of that, for example. But it could also be that AI becomes so expensive with so much compute and so much money that needs an energy behind it, that it's only a very small number of government-affiliated companies or company-affiliated governments that have that, capacity and that would be a very dystopian, very bleak environment. And one of those two things is likely

to happen. I want to just throw back at you risk seven and risk nine. Risk seven was the fight for critical minerals, and risk nine was El Nino is back. And I just wondered if those two, you've talked quite a lot about, you know, sometimes in these circumstances, the world kind of ends up being at war. I wonder if those two are going to be factors which increase the likelihood of war. Well, they have also increased the ability to get global governance. I mean, you do now have countries all over the world recognizing that climate change is real. And investing at scale in new critical minerals and new technologies post-carbon. You know, you're talking to me about this while the COP 29.

summit is happening in Baku. And the Chinese are not only the leading carbon emitters on the planet, but they're also leading the post-carbon revolution on the planet. They're the ones at scale that are exploring critical minerals and exploiting them, that are developing, you know, the EVs that the Europeans can't compete with, and the Americans can't either, and wind and solar and nuclear. And it's bringing costs down. And that is ultimately part of the solution. So yes, it is certainly true that we're going to see more conflicts before we've seen less conflict because we've taken so long to address that. That's part of the G0. But it's also true that enormous sums of money are being mobilized addressing this challenge. And that ultimately makes me more optimistic.

You know, China's like Texas right now. They do everything. They're, you know, leading the world in fossil fuels. In the case of China, it's coal. In the case of Texas, it's oil and gas. And they're leading the world in post-carbon generation. Texas does the most in the United States and China does the most in the world. So interesting, right? And in part, it's because all solutions are required to get from here to there. That's kind of where we are. In Trump's appointments, give us a sense on how we're supposed to understand some of

these key appointments to the Trump cabinet and what it means for the world and what it means for America. Any particular ones you might want to focus on? Secretary of Defense, for example, Attorney General. I mean, the more eccentric ones. The more exceptional ones. See, I would call them the less exceptional ones in terms of their capacity. Defense is, you know, kind of a more traditional Trump pick. He's a TV guy.

He's a guy that Trump has appeared with. He's good looking. You know, he's tall. He feels like he could be a secretary defense. That's how Trump picked Rex Tillerson the first time around. Very different person, but same impact on Trump. I mean, Hegsef has no managerial expertise whatsoever, no reason to believe he'd be any good as Secretary of Defense.

Pretty ideological, but not completely out of character compared to someone I consider very capable, like Mike Walts for National Security Advisor, who you and I both know, Rory, or Marco Rubio. at state. I mean, Hegeseth is, I think, a particularly incapable appointee for defense, but not necessarily an enormously dangerous one to the U.S. Now, he has some ideas about, you know, he should have the right to remove the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and will be pressed on in confirmation and we'll see, you know, sort of how he responds to it. But I would be surprised if he was one of the people that is most involved in taking a wrecking ball to U.S. institutions.

Part of the problem is that Trump actually believes that his opponents, both in the DOJ, politicized and in the Democratic Party, have tried to illegally arrest him, send him to jail. They believe that they have been calling him, you know, names like the fascist and even Hitler, that, that, you know, led to the assassination attempts. And furthermore, when he requested, even demanded more security from the Secret Service, he didn't get it. So in other words, these people not only wanted him in jail, they wanted him dead. And so, you know, you know where I'm going with this. His feeling, this is, you know, again, it's him. It's not what I'm saying. It's what he believes is that he needs to address that. And the way to address that is going after the people that were trying to kill him,

trying to destroy the Republic. And you're going to break a lot of eggs to make that omelet. And absolutely the DOJ is a core component of that. So will the FBI be. So will the IRS. We've got a very serious fight. January 6 was not a serious fight. January 6th was Trump trying to do something to overturn an election that he had no capacity to do. And a bunch of of idiots that were very loyal to Trump getting unfortunately manipulated by him and having their own patriotism turned against them. This is a much more serious institutionalized fight. This is, as I described it back in January, the war between the U.S. and the U.S. That is what we're now at the beginning of. My last question, Ian, and thanks for all your time and your insight.

This is a great conversation, guys. I really enjoyed it. Have you already done the risks for 2025? No. Okay. When you do it, what do you think is number one going to be? Yeah, I mean, we never talk about that in advance for reasons that I'm sure you understand. But, I mean, there's no question that the global environment is becoming much more dangerous, given all of the trends we've just talked about. So, I mean, the U.S. is a big component of that.

and it is going to play an outsized role, given what has just happened in the U.S. elections and what is presently happening in cabinet. But the global environment is probably more dangerous right now than certainly at any point since 1962. And that I think that in some way that has to inform the way we frame top risk going forward. Final one for me then, which is an obvious one coming off the back of that, which gives a bit of hope just to finish off in. You know, I said earlier that we're not heading into a Cold War because every other country around the world that matters wants to work with everyone.

India didn't care of Harris or Trump won. They're going to have a good relationship with both. They just had their first meeting between Modi and Xi Jinping in five years, and they've reduced tensions on their contested border. India is increasingly seen as a country that is a leader of the global south. they have very strong relations with everyone in the West, with the exception of Canada. We are in an environment where almost everyone outside of the U.S. in China, not everyone, but almost everyone, a strong majority of the rest of countries, needs to have good relations with both.

And that is true both geopolitically. It's true in terms of trade. It's also critically true in terms of new technologies, the Americans dominating AI, the Chinese dominating post-colleget. carbon energy. These are the technologies that are going to affect every country, every sector in the world, and every country in the world needs to work with both. The Americans and the Chinese may be discomforted by that, but it's much more stabilizing for the world. In other words, you know, if you look at the world over the last 50 years, you'd say, we did pretty well because of globalization. We were able to create a global middle class because of globalization. We got like, you know, women into schools and we got people living longer and we had, you know, sort of improved diet and

health and all these things. Well, you know what? I don't think globalization's about to end. I think globalization is going to continue. I just don't think the Americans and the Chinese are going to be driving it the way they have been. That ultimately is an area of significant hope. Ian, thank you. Beautiful. Very, very grateful for your time. Well, thank you. Wonderful. Good talking to you guys. See you soon. Thanks again. Bye-bye. Well, that was fun, Rory. Yeah. Well, thank you. So Ian's a friend of mine and I'm a great admirer of his. And he moves in these very elevated circles. As I point out, last time I saw him, we were sitting down with Mike Waltz, who's just been nominated as the new national security advisor for the Trump administration. And I'm always sort of struck by the fact that he's able to talk so bluntly and openly when he knows all these people.

I mean, knows Elon Musk. He knows Trump. He's briefing all these people. And his business partly depends on being able to talk to a lot of people who profoundly disagree with him. But what I like about him is that he doesn't pull his punches. He doesn't make any secret of the fact that he doesn't approve of Trump, even if the people he's talking to maybe about a social. in his administration. Yeah, I guess that's because he's got a lot of what I call currency at the reputational bank. He's built up a very, very good business. He has made himself into a very well-informed

expert. He has interesting analysis and interesting views. I think he probably is a bit like you and me, very, very kind of defensive about that sort of liberal world order that we've felt has been sort of part of our lives, part of his life and what have you, and does feel that that is what's under threat at the moment. I was half expecting that a bit like, you know, some of the other people we've seen slightly pulling his punches on Trump, but not at all. And I think given your recent experience with Kamala, Rory, I thought some very good advice for you there about the ability to differentiate between what you want and what you think. what you want and what you think is really good advice.

The other thing I didn't tease him enough about it, but I would have liked to get into it, is he's doing something which you and I also do a little bit of, and we maybe sometimes should be more humble and self-reflective of, which is attempting to talk confidently about 200 different countries. And, you know, he talked about getting it wrong on Millet. And if I think about where I went on Millet, a lot of that is to do inevitably with what the people you're talking to

in the Argentine establishment are saying. And often that means that the tendency is to miss radical change. You know, if someone like Miele is coming in, what you'll get is Argentinian friends say, well, we've seen this before, it's going to be very difficult from to get anything done, the Peronists are not going to sign up. And then suddenly you find out that actually it turned out that all the assumptions you had about the way the world works can change quite quickly. The only reason I think about is it's a very funny business because you and I are involved

in this too. We spend a lot of time being asked for our advice about 200 countries around the world. And when is the moment where you say, okay, you've just asked me about the cabinet changes in Vietnam. But to be honest, I don't really have very much to say. The cabinet changes in Vietnam. Or what I have to say, I've taken from someone else. Well, it's a bit like, who was it we were talking to recently? Was it Petraeus?

Yeah. General Petraeus is another great example. I mean, he genuinely can, you know, name every world leader in 170 countries and has a view on all of them. No, but the point we're making is that we have this assumption that taking a load of Americans, a load of Brits and load of Aussies, and put them into a country. Was it you who said it was like taking people from Afghanistan and saying, go and run Glasgow? Exactly. So, yeah, maybe we do need a bit more humility about our knowledge and sometimes lack of knowledge.

I think we're not terrible. We don't talk about countries that we literally know nothing about. We both admitted to the main podcast recently that we had never been to Equatorial Giddy. We didn't know much about Equatorial Giddy, but we thought that that sex scandal was worth talking about. Yeah, well, anyway, I'm really struck. And I think the final thing to say is that it's difficult to think of an exact UK equivalent to someone like Ian Brama or indeed David Petraeus, that you still get a sense there in a quiet way that America is very, very global. I mean, I feel it every time I step off a plane in New York or Washington that people will talk so confidently about the world and be expected to have a view on Argentina and notice that Kirstama is going to be the only center-left politician potentially left in the G7 next year. and have that frame of reference.

I'd already clock that one, Rory. You'd already clock that. You should have gotten there first. We didn't really get into talking much about Britain, but I got the sense he was quite gloomy on our behalf about the politics here and how that relates to the world. But we shall see. We shall see.

Anyway, thanks for fixing that. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Thank you, Alistair very much. And speak soon. Bye-bye.