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Charlie Kirk's assassination will make things worse in the US
In the latest episode of Quick Take, Ian Bremmer denounces the assassination of Charlie Kirk, cautioning that it will deepen America’s political dysfunction rather than unite the country.
Ian says this is a stress test for an already fragile political system and that political violence is not a solution.
“If you think freedom of speech and the provision of justice is for you and not those you disagree with, you need to change,” says Ian. “Americans must learn from people we disagree with, not demonize them.”
Warning about the trend of violence for attention, Ian also explains the US can still learn about representative democracy, civil society, respect, compassion, and leadership from its counterparts. And the “only people who benefit are the ones that want to destroy the American system, those that want to use the violence to create a one-party system.”
People celebrate the one year anniversary since student-led protests ousted Bangladesh's former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, August 5, 2025.
Bangladesh a year later: democracy is easier said than done
Earlier this week, thousands of people flooded the streets in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka to mark the one-year anniversary of a student-led protest movement that brought an end to 15 years of rule under former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her political party, the Awami League. Hasina, who fled to India last August, had been accused of increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian rule.
The anniversary celebrations culminated with a nationally televised address by Bangladesh’s current caretaker leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pledged to honor the spirit of the protests by working towards an orderly and inclusive democracy in the densely-populated country of 175 million.
But one year on, that path remains rocky.
“There are many that are disappointed, particularly students,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch, “The pledges for reform have taken much longer than we had earlier thought.”
While the climate of fear under Hasina has lifted, Bangladesh still faces challenges from security forces with a controversial human rights record, the rising influence of Islamist hardliners, and deeply entrenched political and communal divisions.
So why has reform stalled in Bangladesh? From the outset, Yunus faced an uphill battle. Under Hasina’s rule, Bangladesh’s key institutions – from the judiciary and civil service to the military and economy – were politicized and abused.
“[He’s] basically facing the challenges of putting a country back together after 15 years and increasingly autocratic rule,” says Jon F. Danilowicz, the former deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Dhaka. “The system is overwhelmed.”
And although Yunus set up no fewer than 11 commissions to propose legal and constitutional reforms, political infighting has stalled progress at nearly every turn.
“Whatever change they’re hoping for hasn’t really happened that much,” says Joshua Kurlantzick, senior fellow for South Asia and Southeast Asia at the Council of Foreign Relations. “Yunus tried to get all these reforms, but the political parties wouldn’t agree.”
Yunus, after all, is the unelected head of an interim government that lacks a popular mandate to push through difficult reforms or unify the country’s fractured political class.
While conditions have improved overall since the Awami League’s exit, the failure to bring needed reforms to the military and police has enabled Hasina-era abuses to resurface.
Mob violence, political unrest, and Islamist attacks targeting women, LGBT communities, and religious minorities have escalated sharply, while rights groups have accused the interim government of using arbitrary detentions to target its political opponents.
But experts stress that the current government still marks a significant departure from its predecessor.
“When there’s a charge that this government is acting just like its predecessor, I’d say that in this government, you have good people who sometimes do bad things,” says Danilowicz. “In the past government, you’ve had a lot of bad people who consistently did bad things.”
What’s next for Bangladesh’s fragile democracy? With national elections slated for February, Bangladesh stands at a crossroads. The incoming government will inherit the same hopes for change and challenges of reform as the interim one.
The Bangladesh Nationalist Party, the traditional rival of Hasina’s Awami League, is positioning itself for a comeback, but it faces challenges from the country’s largest Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, as well as the student-led National Citizen Party (NCP), which was born out of last year’s protests.
Still, Danilowicz maintains a positive outlook.
“I’m still hopefully optimistic that the Bangladeshi people may take advantage of this opportunity and not squander it as they have in the past,” he says. “The spirit [of the protests] still exists… there is a group of empowered young people who don’t want to see the country move backwards.”
People light candles outside Santa Fe Foundation hospital, where Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay of the opposition Democratic Center party was shifted to from another hospital, after he was shot during a campaign event, in Bogota, Colombia, on June 7, 2025.
A surge of political violence has revived Colombia’s worst fears
On Saturday, a Colombian presidential candidate was shot in the head at a rally in the country’s capital, Bogotá. Three days later, a series of bombs went off in and around the third largest city, Cali, leaving at least four dead. The sudden surge of violence has many Colombians wondering if the country is headed back to a darker time.
“It’s a painful memory of where we come from,” says Colombia Risk Analysis director Sergio Guzmán. “Back then, political candidates were falling like flies.”
What was “back then”? In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia suffered the worst of a decades-long internal conflict that left 220,000 dead, tens of thousands missing, and millions displaced. Initially a fight between Marxist rebels and the government, it rapidly expanded to include powerful drug cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. The violence was especially acute during the 1990 presidential campaign, when three candidates were assassinated, at least one of them by Pablo Escobar’s fearsome Medellín Cartel. In the early 2000s the state regained ground from the guerillas and the cartels, laying the groundwork for a 2016 peace accord with the main guerilla groups.
But amid rising violence generally, the assassination attempt on Senator Miguel Uribe has rattled a country on edge.
“The shooting is the most significant assault on a presidential hopeful in several years,” says Antonio Espinosa Calero, Eurasia Group’s Andean Region Researcher. “It has certainly fueled anxiety about instability and violence ahead of the upcoming election.”
The shooting isn’t the only reason for the country’s collective anxiety. President Gutavo Petro hasn’t been able to keep a lid on the drug cartels, crime is on the rise nationwide, and political violence has spread across nearby countries – like Ecuador and Mexico.
Wasn’t there a peace deal? Yes. Under the 2016 peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, members of the guerilla group agreed to hand over their weapons to the government, in exchange for amnesty and political participation.
This hasn’t fostered peace? It has not. Instead, the drug cartels – which were not part of the peace deal – have filled the void, along with other guerilla groups that refused the peace. From 2021 to 2024, the number of kidnappings jumped 72%, while the number of extortion cases more than doubled. Cocaine production has reportedly reached record levels. Killings of human rights activists and other social leaders have soared.
Has the president tried anything? Elected in 2022, Petro tried to implement a Total Peace (“Paz Total”) to rid the country of violence. The former guerrilla fighter, Colombia’s first leftist president, tried to reach accords with every major armed group in the country. The plan has failed to bear fruit, as talks with groups like ELN – a dissident rebel group – have repeatedly broken down. The kidnapping of a famous soccer player’s father in 2023 only underscored the sense of chaos.
Politicians’ use of violent rhetoric hasn’t helped the situation, Colombia experts say. Petro is renowned for using provocative language in his social media posts, and he has already hinted at a conspiracy behind the shooting of Uribe.
“The presence of President Petro on social media,” Atlantic Council’s Colombia expert Enrique Millán-Mejía, has contributed to “an environment of political violence.”
Petro’s opponents – Uribe among them – have often responded in kind. The senator himself posted on X in May, “Every day Petro is in power, Colombia bleeds.”
Where does Colombian politics go from here? It’s a boost for the tough-on-crime candidates who seek to replace the term-limited Petro next year. A poll last year found 85% of adults believe the security situation is getting worse, and this assassination attempt will likely increase those numbers.
“The shooting will amplify public demand for change and concerns over safety in Colombia,” says Espinosa Calero, “likely benefiting conservative and tough-on-crime candidates in the lead-up to next year’s general elections.”
Heavily armed police officers secure the scene. A car has crashed into a Christmas market in Magdeburg. Several people are killed and many injured.
Germany grapples with extremism after Christmas market attack
The Saudi doctor accused of killing 5 people in the Magdeburg Christmas market on Friday appeared in a German court on Saturday. Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, 50, was charged with five counts of murder, multiple attempted murder and multiple counts of dangerous bodily harm in an attack which also wounded over 200 people. One of those killed was 9-year old André Gleißner, described by his mother in a social media post as “my little teddy bear”. A GoFundMe for the family has raised tens of thousands of dollars.
Anger is growing over missed opportunities to prevent the attack. Riyadh had flagged the suspect to German authorities last summer, citing a post where he threatened that Germany would “pay a price” for its treatment of Saudi refugees. At the same time, al-Abdulmohsen called himself a “Saudi atheist” and evinced sympathies for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
On Friday, the AfD held a 2000-person rally at a memorial site near the market, calling for “Remigration”, and chanting “Migration Kills.” The incident has put migration and national security front and center in Germany’s upcoming national election, anticipated for February 23. The AfD is currently polling at around 19%, second only to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) at around 33%, but all other parties have ruled out forming a coalition with them.
EXCLUSIVE: Iran VP denies plot to kill Trump
Donald Trump on Wednesday accused Iran of being behind plots to kill him.
Citing information reportedly given to him a day earlier by US intelligence, he said, “If I were the president, I would inform the threatening country, in this case, Iran, that if you do anything to harm this person, we are going to blow your largest cities and the country itself to smithereens. We're going to blow it to smithereens.”
There have, of course, been two known plots to kill Trump, one in July and one earlier this month.
But what do Iran’s leaders have to say about the matter?
“We don’t send people to assassinate people,” Iran’s Vice President for Strategic Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif told GZERO Media President Ian Bremmer on Wednesday during an interview for our nationally televised program GZERO World.
“I think that’s a campaign ploy in order to get former President Trump out of the not-so-favorable situation he’s in in the elections,” he said.
He also maintained that Iran doesn’t intervene in the internal affairs of other countries.
“It’s not for me to decide who is going to win in the American elections. That’s for the American people to decide. And Iran doesn’t have a preference in this election,” Zarif said.
Pressed by Bremmer about allegations that Iran was behind recent efforts to hack into US presidential campaigns, Zarif conceded that while the attacks may have originated from within the Islamic Republic, it was “hackers operating in Iran,” but “not on behalf of Iran.”
“We are ourselves victims of hacking,” he said.
Watch the clip here, and tune in next week for Ian Bremmer’s full interview with Zarif in the next episode of GZERO World, airing on PBS stations around the country. Check local listings.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Opinion: The lanternfly law of American politics
You have probably heard the news. New Yorkers of all ages have become gleeful, merciless killers.
On the streets. In the subways. In the parks. Even in their own homes. The massacres here continue, with no end in sight.
But it’s not what you think.
The tens of thousands of nameless dead are in fact Spotted Lanternflies, nickel-sized insects with kimono-like layers of spotted gray, black, and fiery-red wings. “A sexy cicada,” as my colleague Riley Callanan aptly describes them.
And the trouble with the Lanternflies around here is simple: they’re out-of-towners.
Native to Asia, they’re believed to have hitched a ride to the US on a shipping container about a decade ago. The population exploded across the Northeast, along with concerns about their impact on forests and farms.The Lanternflies, it turns out, secrete a gooey honeydew that foments deadly fungi.
Experts began warning of billions of dollars in damage. And so local governments urged us all to kill them on sight.
People listened.
Today, if you point out a lanternfly on any New York sidewalk, stoop, shirtsleeve, subway platform, or slide, people will spring into action: stomping, swatting, crushing, squashing. The bloodlust for this tiny creature is immense. As one popular science magazine put it, we must “destroy this useless garbage insect ... without mercy.”
Even the youth have been conditioned to kill. My 8-year-old son told me yesterday a girl in his class has declared herself head of “The Lanternfly Committee.” Her primary responsibility in this role is to scream that there are lanternflies around whenever there are lanternflies around. And when there are lanternflies around, all committee members (and present non-members) must stomp them into oblivion.
I will say this – it can be cathartic to stomp the shit out of lanternflies. Boss chewed you out at the office? Stomp a lantern fly. Mets blew a lead in the ninth? Die, lanternfly. Fed up with your kids asking you about lanternflies? Stomp more lanternflies.
No one is sure if all this killing is really controlling the lanternfly population, but so what? We aren’t just venting – we’re doing our part for society. This violence is virtuous. The killing must go on. And it will.
In that sense, I think there’s actually a little of the lanternfly in our politics more broadly these days. Call it the Lanternfly Law of Politics. It says: our opponents are no longer simply people we happen to disagree with, they are a threat that must be wiped out before they can do more harm.
You see this kind of thinking everywhere these days. Depending on what your views are, you might see liberals, or conservatives, or Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris, or the media, or the tech companies, or the police, or the federal government itself as a menace steadily devouring the foliage of our society.
As a result, in response, our political culture is becoming more extreme, more violent. People on the left will point to January 6th or the broader increase in threats of rightwing terrorism in recent years. People on the right will point to the not one but two plots to kill Donald Trump that occurred this summer.
We should all point to this as evidence that we are in a bad place.
Perhaps nowhere is the Lanternfly Law more obvious, or more dangerous, than in the language used to describe immigrants. When Donald Trump describes his political opponents as “vermin”, or immigrants as parasites who are “poisoning the bloodstream” of our country, he is tapping into a rich, vile history of demonizing foreigners as invasive species.
It’s powerful, of course, because it works. True vermin and invasive species are, by definition, threatening to our organisms, our communities, our ecosystems. So that kind of language taps deep into our lizard brains and provokes a primal emotional response.
But we aren’t … lizards, we are human beings. And immigrants or people you disagree with politically aren’t vermin, they are … also human beings.
We can argue about sensible rules for immigration, abortion, speech, guns, Lanternflies, whatever. But giving ourselves permission to dehumanize our neighbors and rivals like this is always dangerous.
The Lanternfly Law is, in the end, the root of all demagoguery: it’s a kind of political conjuring trick that gives people license to express their basest impulses under the cloak of civic virtue or community protection. You aren’t behaving like an ideologue, a loon, or a psychopath, the Law of the Lanternfly says, you are defending society as you know it.
So the next time a Lanternfly scuttles by or settles down, by all means stomp it to death if that makes you feel good.
But when it comes to the way we speak and think about our politics and society more broadly, be careful before you go chasing those sexy cicadas.
Ian Bremmer on Trump second assassination attempt
Now, it's not going to have much impact on the election, in part not just because so many unprecedented things get normalized these days in U.S. politics, but also because there's no video that suddenly... The last assassination attempt you had Trump literally escaping with his life less than a fraction of a second, and the blood on him and the rest. Here, the Secret Service did what they should have. They shot at the perpetrator well before Trump was in the sights of this would-be assassin. The U.S. did what it was supposed to, and he's in custody, so one assumes that we're going to learn a lot more about him as a consequence of the interrogations and the rest. Trump can and will fundraise on the back of it, but I'd be very surprised to see any movement in the polls as a consequence or any change in policy, so really not going to move the needle on the election itself.
And yet I think we have to ask ourselves, if Trump had actually been killed, can you imagine how much different the environment today would be? The political environment, the social environment, the violence, the reprisals. This is already considered to be an illegitimate election by a lot of Americans. Many, many Americans believe shouldn't be allowed to run because he's a convicted criminal. He was twice impeached, not convicted, but impeachment is broken as part of the political process. Many of Trump's supporters, a large majority, believe he should be president now, that he won the election in 2020, and that they're going to do everything possible–them, the deep state, the political opposition, the Democrats–to prevent him from becoming President again, to jail him, and even to call for violence against him. And that means that if we did have Trump assassinated, I think it would be much worse than January 6th in the U.S. It would be much worse, more saliently perhaps, than January 8th in Brazil, where you would have George Floyd-style riots, but larger and also much better armed.
A lot of people, including militias, but even Trump supporters in police forces in low-level positions in the military and National Guard that engage in protests that could easily become very violent, certainly in red states across the country. And I think that because it hasn't happened, even though it's been very close, we're not talking about it, we're not thinking about it. But the lack of resilience, the vulnerability, the frailty of U.S. political stability in this environment, I think is remarkable and deserves more focus, more attention because it would prioritize the steps that Americans need to take and political leaders need to take to rebuild that resilience, rebuild that trust, which is nowhere on the political agenda right now. I have to say, we have to give Trump and the GOP credit in the sense that they oppose all gun restrictions as a matter of policy, and that hasn't in any way changed even after both of these assassination attempts of Americans that are unhinged, that have access to these powerful weapons.
And that doesn't happen in other countries. That is a huge difference between the U.S. There's vastly more gun violence in America, not because there's so much more mental health issues, not because there's so much more economic inequality, but because there's so much less restrictions on assault-type weapons, on military-type weapons. The United States has more guns per capita than any country in the world except for Yemen, and Yemen is in the middle of a civil war. The United States is not, and yet there is no feasible capacity politically in the near term to do anything about that. No political will. Very relieved that this series of headlines does not include an actual assassination. Very relieved that former President Trump has survived this. Deeply concerned that it continues to happen. And of course, everything about U.S. politics promises you that you're going to see a lot more of it.
That's the state of play today and this election, and in the broader context that we talk about. So I hope everyone's well, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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Political violence is on the rise again, at home and abroad
In a small town out in coal country, a lone assassin shoots a controversial populous leader. The leader miraculously survives, and his supporters blame the press and his political opponents for fomenting violence. Does that sound familiar? Months before Donald Trump was shot in Pennsylvania in the first assassination attempt of its kind in America in 40 years, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico took a bullet to the stomach during a visit to Central Slovakia. But Fico is just one of many leaders or high-level candidates who have been attacked in democracies around the world in recent years.
Across the democratic world, political violence and violent political language are becoming more common again as polarization deepens, viewpoints harden, and political differences start to feel like existential battles. Here in the US last year, there were more than 8,000 threats of violence against federal lawmakers alone, a tenfold increase since 2016. And as we head into the most contentious and high-stakes election in America's modern history, people are bracing for more. A poll taken just after the attempt on Trump's life showed that two-thirds of Americans think the current environment makes political violence more likely. Who is responsible for stopping this slide into violence? Is it our leaders, our media outlets, or our social media platforms? Is it ourselves? Unless things change, we will be lucky if it's another 40 years before this happens again in the US.
Watch full episode: Trump, Biden & the US election: What could be next?
Season 7 of GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, launches nationwide on public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don''t miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).