- The problem, I think, is that we're not as powerful as we were.

We are politically extremely divided.

We don't have a strong bipartisan consensus on what role we want to play as a country in the world, and therefore we may not be able to simply use our might to get our way in the way that we were used to, you know, thinking we could.

(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and a very happy New Year to you and yours.

This week we are kicking off 2025 by looking at some of the biggest geopolitical risks coming down the pike from Trump's return to the White House, the tariff wars, to our worsening US-China relationship to conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East.

What will end up being the biggest risk of 2025?

Here's my hot take: It won't be Trump.

No, the biggest risk of 2025 is that this becomes the year the G-Zero wins.

Wait, "GZERO," that's the name of the show.

Good catch!

As longtime fans surely know, the G-Zero world is when no one power or group of powers is both willing and able to drive a global agenda to maintain international order.

And we have been living with this lack of international leadership for nearly a decade.

But in 2025, the problem will get a lot worse.

Unless of course you don't see it as a problem to begin with.

Here's Speaker of the House Mike Johnson moments after securing the gavel for his second term.

- We have a mandate, and that was shown in the election cycle that people want an America First agenda, they do.

(audience applauding) - And that's because America First and the G-Zero world are really two sides to the same coin.

When America truly puts itself first, it abdicates its role as a global leader.

So in the year to come, America will get a lot of what it wants, not because of diplomacy, not because of NATO or some kind of soft power, but because it's got the biggest stick.

In 2025, we should expect to see expanding power vacuums and bold and rogue actors and a heightened risk of dangerous accidents, miscalculations, and conflict.

The risk of geopolitical crisis is higher than at any point in our lifetimes, and yet, I'm optimistic about at least a few things this year.

The major wars that dominated the past year from Ukraine to the Middle East are receding.

And in the United States, a hotly contested presidential election led to an undisputed winner with a mandate and almost nobody claiming it was unfree or unfair or stolen.

Here to help me break down all of these bold prognostications, renowned Stanford political scientist, not me, Frank Fukuyama.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- Oh, hi!

I just wanted to wish you Happy New Year.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... - [Narrator] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York and... (bright music) - Frank Fukuyama, it's really good to see you, my friend.

- Good to see you too, Ian.

- I've been talking a lot about how we're reverting to the law of the jungle, that it feels more like what I call a G-Zero world.

And I'm wondering, as someone who's been thinking about this for a lot longer than I have, how do you think about where the world order is going right now and why?

- Well, I think that it's actually a much more confusing world order than we've seen in my lifetime because it's not organized really ideologically, although ideology still plays a role.

One of the most uncertain factors has been the United States because the United States for many decades has been basically an exporter of stability.

Not everyone believed that, but, you know, there was a larger world order that had been established by the United States, and it was very powerful, particularly in that 20-year period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and let's say the financial crisis in 2008.

But now the United States is in the process, it looks like, of checking out, and so it's going to be, you know, I think, very turbulent.

- Is the United States checking out, or is it deciding that it wants to create its own rules for its own benefit?

- Well, it's complicated because the liberal world order that we seem to be moving away from was actually created by the US in its own self-interest because, you know, we were the biggest trading power, and it benefited us to have open markets and free trade and so forth, and we've suddenly decided that we don't really like that.

And actually the model that seems to be in the back of Trump's mind is, you know, a much narrower one where all the great powers basically try to maximize their own, you know, welfare not according to any particular principle, and they don't invest in anything like a, you know, general global public good.

I mean, that is kind of the definition of the jungle, isn't it?

- It feels that way, and I mean, the jungle obviously is a more dangerous place if you're at the bottom of the food chain.

The jungle works out pretty well sometimes if you're at the top.

Is Trump getting some of this right from his perspective?

- I guess it's a kind of question of long-term and short-term self-interest, because you know, I think most of us recognize that having this liberal world order and not trying to gain immediate advantage was probably in our long-term interest.

You know, for example, he suggested that we should've hung onto the oil fields, you know, after we liberated Kuwait or Iraq in 2003.

That would be something that would be to our short-term advantage.

But if you think about the precedent that would set for other big powers that wanted to do something similar, I'm not sure that that would be such a great thing for the US.

So maybe the real contrast is between short-termism and you know, investing in a longer-term stable system, and that's what we seem to be moving away from.

- I want you to be right.

That feels like the sort of thing that gets you a more stable, long-term international order.

I'm wondering if from the perspective of a country that feels like it's the most powerful and will be the most powerful for a long period of time, and that seems to be Trump's perspective, if he's right about it, if he were right about that, would it then be true that America deciding to set the rules the way it wants to would actually have long-term advantages for the Americans, if not for other countries?

- Well, yeah, I think that's generally the case.

I think that the people that really support international legal orders and rules and so forth are always smaller, weaker countries because they don't have the military, economic, you know, cultural power to look after themselves.

The problem, I think, is that we're not as powerful as we were.

I mean, I think that, you know, in terms of GDP and this sort of thing, we're still doing okay.

But we are politically extremely divided.

We don't have a strong bipartisan consensus on what role we want to play as a country in the world, and therefore we may not be able to, you know, simply use our might to get our way in the way that we were used to, you know, thinking we could.

- So on the one hand, the United States right now is kinda entering this weird period where the US has a more consolidated leadership, and so many of its allies seem to be weaker.

Their governments are weaker.

They're fragmented.

You saw what just happened with Trudeau, South Korea, Germany, France.

I could see how that might make Trump feel like actually this is exactly the time to implement that sort of policy.

Tell me why you think that's not true.

- One of the dangerous things about this present moment is that Trump and the Republicans may be overestimating the degree of unity.

You know, he did not win a huge mandate in the November election.

Congress is still, I mean, the Republican majority in both houses, but especially in the House of Representatives is very, very narrow.

So they do not have, you know, the kind of mandate that let's say Franklin Roosevelt had after 1932 or Lyndon Johnson had after 1964.

It's much more tenuous, and the polarization of the country means that the first misstep that Trump takes is going to probably trigger a lot of internal turmoil.

So we may not be as strong, but you know, the danger is that Trump will think we're as strong, and he will try something, I don't know, invading Panama or Greenland, that, you know, he actually thinks that will be easy but will turn into quagmires.

- I think he can beat the Danes.

I'm less worried about that one, but I- - (laughs) No, but- - I take your point.

No, but I take your point.

- Even Denmark, even Denmark, you know, if he actually does this without the consent of Denmark or the people in Greenland, that's gonna set a pretty difficult precedent, you know, for other countries to start following.

So again, it's this long-term vision that seems to be lacking right now in this incoming administration.

- I'm wondering if you were Trump, if you were trying to implement the policy that he is stating and knowing where China is right now, economically not doing as well, but absolutely over the past decades catching up on the US, investing massive amounts in nuclear capabilities, if you were Trump, is the right thing to do to hit China as hard as possible now when they're comparatively weak and before they can pose as much of a threat to the US?

- Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by hit them.

If you mean, you know, raise tariffs and wage economic warfare, I'm assuming that he's gonna do some version of that.

I think that, you know, he'll find in that realm that he actually doesn't have the kind of clout in that China has been preparing responses that he may not be anticipating.

So it may not be so easy for him to get away with, you know, trying to exploit this moment, as you say.

The much more worrisome thing is in the strategic realm because I have no confidence that he knows what he's doing in that respect.

I don't think that he takes overt military threats all that seriously.

I don't think he spent much of his life thinking about defense policy or military preparedness.

I think he's tried to run away from conflicts, and I don't think he was very willing to use American force in his first term.

And I think that's really a danger because all of those factors that you talked about, you know, instability in South Korea, uncertainty with NATO allies, I think, you know, might actually tempt China or Russia to take advantage of the situation.

And there, I'm not sure what, you know, what the response is gonna be.

- Do you think right now we are heading towards a new Cold War, but this time between the Americans and the Chinese?

- Are we going to continue decoupling so that it's not simply in these areas like semiconductors and strategic materials but you know, across the board so that we, our farmers are no longer so dependent on Chinese markets, we're not so dependent on, you know, TVs and consumer goods and that sort of thing, and that would make the situation much more similar to the economic relationship we had with the former Soviet Union.

And I think that we probably are heading for something like that because I would be very surprised if Trump simply stayed with a kind of Biden-level decoupling, you know, that was limited to these particular strategic sectors, 'cause I think he's much more ambitious about that and thinks that China's, you know, a much bigger economic threat, and the Chinese, you know, have a lot of ways of responding to that.

- If that happens, what do you think happens to other countries?

Do you think the Europeans will end up becoming essentially a bloc with the US against China or as they did with the Soviets, or much less so?

Do you think that there will be the Gulf States, for example, ditto, or much less so?

How do you think, because a Cold War, of course, is not just about the relations between the two superpowers but also about the broader geopolitical landscape.

- Well, I think that the Europeans up until the last three years had illusions that they could be vaguely on the side of the United States, you know, when it came to human rights and democracy, but they could still trade with China.

I mean, the critical country here is Germany, who has such large investments in China and also depends on the Chinese market to sell their automobiles to such an extent that they were trying to hold on to that economic relationship.

I think they've given up on that, and I think that that means that they will increasingly realize that they have to be pulled into a, you know, North American economic bloc.

The thing I think that the Russia invasion of Ukraine demonstrated, however, is that there are all these new alignments, and there's a very large part of the Global South, most important India, that isn't gonna be in the American camp.

They do want a counterweight against China, but they also don't wanna give up on any of their economic ties with, you know, with that whole bloc.

And so I do think that in that respect there is gonna be this, you know, Cold War-like realignment.

- And China is, of course, India's most important trade partner.

I wanna ask you about Russia next.

How are you thinking about the threat that Russia today and its allies pose to the global order, and how should America respond to it?

- Well, I think the critical phrase you added was "and its allies," because the thing, you know, I think that Russia right now is actually quite weak, and we could be surprised by Putin, you know, falling, I think the way, you know, we were.

We've been surprised with other dictatorships, but I think what's really new and very troubling is that there's a genuine alliance.

I mean, back in the days when we were talking about the "axis of evil" at the time of the Iraq invasion, that was a very loose kind of paranoid phrase because you know, Iran and North Korea had nothing really to do with one another.

But today it's a real alliance where they're actively collaborating.

They're selling each other weapons.

They're sending troops from one country to another.

China has not been fully involved because it does wanna protect its trade relations with other democracies, but I think they're doing everything they can quietly to support the Russian war effort, and that may be, you know, that may become more visible over time.

- So Frank, I wanna take a step back, because everything that you and I are discussing so far, not really the direction we would want the world to be heading.

Where did we get it wrong?

I don't mean you and me, but I mean, you know, leaders and the dynamics we've had in this evolving post-Cold War environment.

How did we end up on this trajectory?

- Well, if I could refer to the last book I wrote on liberalism, you know, I think that there I pointed to two what I believe are distortions of liberalism that then produced a big backlash.

So the first one is, you know, what we call neoliberalism.

It was this period of, you know, kind of uncritical worship of markets that really destabilized things.

I mean, we didn't have financial crises up until the early 1990s because, you know, we'd had a lot of constraints on the way that banks and financial flows move through the world, but all of a sudden we got, you know, periodic really big crises and rising inequality, you know, the de-industrialization of the American heartland.

We thought, you know, Americans were gonna tolerate that up until the middle of the next decade when it turned out that that was fueling a big, you know, domestic backlash.

So that was one part of it.

And then I think, you know, the left has gone off in a different direction culturally where it, you know, has bought into a form of identity politics that in the end, you know, can be just as polarized.

I think that liberals today underestimate the degree to which some of the identity-based politics that was practiced, you know, by Democrats was one of the reasons that people ended up, you know, a lot of these working-class people ended up voting for Donald Trump.

And so I think both of these contributed to the deterioration of the common belief and the legitimacy of, you know, liberal principles, and the authority of established sources of credible information have really deteriorated.

So you put all that together, and I think you get the kind of world we're entering into right now.

- How much of a representative democracy is the United States today?

- You know, I guess that I'm not that worried about the future of democracy.

I think that what the real threat is is the erosion of the liberal part of liberal democracy.

So the liberal part really is the rule of law, constitutional checks and balances, all these constraints on executive power.

And I think that that's what Trump is gonna threaten in the first instance.

You know, appointing Kash Patel to run the FBI is not a vote in favor of a neutral enforcement of a, you know, impartial rule of law.

But I do think that there are probably limits to how far he can push that, and I suspect there will be some backlash if he really tries to misuse that part.

The democracy part, I think, is not nearly as threatened as the liberal part because (chuckles) Republicans just won, you know, pretty decisively the last election.

But once you start eroding the liberal respect for law and rules, you will start eroding democracy eventually.

That's what's happened in Hungary and a lot of these other authoritarian places.

The one other thing that I have been particularly concerned about is that in addition to those two misinterpretations of liberalism, there's a third one which really has to do with what I would call excessive proceduralism.

You can't build anything in the United States right now because there are way too many rules.

And this is something that Nick Bagley at Michigan has written about, that you know, liberals wanna use government for their own, you know, social justice and other purposes, but they believe that legitimacy springs from procedures.

And I think that, you know, what's happened is that we've lost sight of the need of governments to actually deliver concrete results.

And you know, that's particularly a bad problem in my state of California where it's really, really hard to even build things that liberals want, like transmission lines and solar farms and offshore wind.

And I think that part of the impulse towards more authoritarian government is that people are just fed up with, you know, all the rule of law constraints on doing stuff.

I mean, the one really worrisome country right now is El Salvador where you had a really impossibly high murder rate.

- Murder rate.

- And then, you know, Nayib Bukele gets elected.

He basically jails most of the young male population of El Salvador, and then the crime rate drops by 90%, and- - He's the most popular democratically elected leader in the world today.

- Yeah, yeah.

You know, I think we think about this wrong.

It's not like some of these leaders wake up in the morning and say, "Well, I'm an authoritarian.

That's my framework, and I'm gonna be an authoritarian when I come to power."

They think, you know, "I wanna do something, and here are all these judges and courts and you know, bureaucrats that are standing in my way, and I can't get done what the people elected me to do."

And that's what leads to this authoritarian impulse to go around the rule of law, and I think that's one of the big challenges that liberal democracies are facing today.

- Frank Fukuyama, wonderful to see you again on "GZERO World."

- Thank you for having me.

(bright music) - And now the Puppet Regime where Putin delivers the kind of New Year's greeting that comes only once in a quarter century.

Roll that tape.

(stately music) ♪ Little bit of Masha by my side ♪ ♪ Little bit of Ksenia in my ♪ Oh, hi!

I just wanted to wish you Happy New Year again and again because as my most devoted friends and foes know, this is 25th consecutive time that I greet new year as ruler of Russia.

That's only like five times less than Stalin!

(chuckles) Oh, Stalin.

You know, first time I did this, world was very different place.

Phones were not yet smart.

"Mambo No.

5" was still on Billboard chart.

And most feared hacking group in world was called Napster.

But now five US presidents, three Russian invasions, and two term-limit fixes later, I am still standing.

Sorry, haters, you thought 1990s was end of history, but actually it was beginning of Putin.

Consider when I first stepped on scene, being disillusioned with democracy and truth was like super niche.

Only college kids did that back then.

Well, what can I say?

I was ahead of my time, and boy, has my time been long.

So here's to another 25 happy, happy New Years.

And remember, nothing is true, and everything is possible.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't but you've got your own risk list for 2025, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com.

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) (bright music) - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... - [Narrator] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO."

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... (calm music) (bright music)