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What does Big Tech want from Donald Trump? Trump had a contentious relationship with the industry in his first administration. But in 2025, Silicon Valley is recalibrating. On Ian Explains, Ian Bremmer looks at the parade of tech leaders who have visited with Trump since his election win, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and moves like Meta’s recent announcement it would scrap its fact-checking program, all to get on President-elect Trump’s good side as he prepares to return to office. So what does the industry stand to gain—or lose—from a second Trump term? Loosening AI and crypto regulation and a business-friendly White House are high on the wish list. However, blanket tariffs on China and Trump's grudge against Section 230 could mean that, despite the optimism, Trump 2.0 may not lead to the big windfall Big Tech hopes for.
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Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: A Quick Take for you today. I want to talk to you about the geopolitical recession that we, the world, are now in. What is a geopolitical recession you ask?
Well, economic recessions you kind of understand. We have boom cycles and bust cycles. They happen frequently. So frequently that we even have solid measurements for when an advanced industrial economy is in a technical recession. That's two quarters in a row of negative growth. Or when the world is experiencing a recessionary year. They happen frequently in the United States since World War II, every seven to 10 years on average. And that means that we have been through many of those cycles, and we can recognize them and we know that we don't like them. We want to respond to them.
And whether you are an advanced industrial economy, a free market economy, or whether you are an authoritarian state and a state capitalist system, either way, you've got central bankers and finance ministers or treasury secretaries that are using monetary and fiscal tools to try to minimize the impact of a recession and get back towards effective more sustainable growth.
Okay, so that's the economic side. But I'm not an economist. I'm a political scientist. Are there cycles in geopolitics? And the answer is yes. But they're a lot longer. And because the cycles are longer, playing out over several generations, we don't live through a lot of them individually. And so, we don't recognize them as a pattern. But we are right now in a geopolitical recession.
What causes a geopolitical recession? Well, basically it's when the balance of power becomes misaligned, out of whack, with the rules of the road geopolitically. With how the world order is structured, the institutions, the architecture. So, for example, the global order that we have been living through both after World War II through the Cold War, and then through Soviet collapse, was all about a number of global institutions and architecture that the United States created with its allies, its friends, after World War II was over.
So, the world has just gone through this horrible cataclysm, a geopolitical depression, and now we've got a boom cycle. And the United States is creating the United Nations and the WTO and the IMF and all of these other global institutions with the idea being support for collective security, support for a multilateral free trade architecture, support for rule of law, promotion of human rights, promotion of democracy all over the world. Generally speaking, the United States created a whole bunch of global institutions that reflected what the United States thought about how the world should be run.
Then over time, the balance of power changes, but the institutions don't. At least not as much because they're sticky, because it takes a lot of political capital to change them. People kick the can down the road. Let somebody else do it. And when that gap grows too wide, then the geopolitical order starts to shake. It becomes much more unstable.
So, what happened here? Three big reasons why we are now in a geopolitical recession. Number one, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was not integrated into the West, not into the EU, not into NATO. They're angry about it. They blame the United States. They are now a chaos actor on the global stage, at least insofar as the advanced industrial economies. The G7 are concerned, and their top allies are fellow chaos actors: North Korea and Iran. That's reason number one.
Reason number two, China was integrated into the global order, particularly the global economy on the notion that as they got wealthier, as they benefited from that, they would become responsible stakeholders. And what that means for Americans is that they're going to align with these US led global institutions and values and norms. They'll support rule of law. They'll become more politically liberalized. They'll become more economically free market in orientation. The Chinese have gotten much wealthier. They're now a technological peer to the United States, no one else is close, ahead in some areas, behind in others. But they absolutely have not aligned with the United States. And that is making a lot of Americans and a lot of American allies very concerned, and it's leading to confrontation between the two most powerful countries.
Number three, while those first two things were going on, lots of people in the West, and especially the United States, increasingly felt like their own leaders, their political leaders, their business leaders, their corporate leaders, their media leaders, their elites, were promoting globalism, were promoting a bunch of things for a global order that didn't help them. So, all of those ideas about collective security and promotion of democracy and promoting free trade, not interested, because the average American doesn't feel like they're benefiting from it.
And certainly that is a big reason why Trump won, not just once, but twice, and more decisively the second time around. And so now, not only do you have the Russians acting like rogues with allies, and the Chinese much more powerful, but not aligned with the US-led global system. But you have the Americans saying, "We're not very interested in promoting that global system anymore. In fact, we're more interested in the law of the jungle."
It's a worldview that's closer to the Chinese. Not multilateralism but just one-on-one relations where you are stronger and you tell the other country what you want to have done. It's very transactional, it's very pragmatic. Doesn't really matter what kind of values that country holds. If you're Trump, you'll do a deal with Russia or China or an ally, and you'll criticize and pressure anybody if they're not behaving the way you want to. The fact that there are common values doesn't really matter. The fact that you're part of the same infrastructure and architecture doesn't really matter. It's, "What are you doing for me now?"
So given all of that, we are now in a serious geopolitical recession. What I call a G-Zero world. Not a G7, not a G20, where there's an absence of global leadership. Now, what's very interesting about that G-Zero world, what's very interesting about this geopolitical recession that I believe that we're in is that the United States is in a particularly strong position right now. Particularly strong compared to its adversaries like China facing the worst economic conditions since the 90s, maybe even the 70s. Like Russia in a period of severe economic decline, and other decline, national security, political. And Iran, which has basically just lost their empire, their empire by proxy, the Axis of Resistance in the Middle East. The US is also much stronger relationally to its allies. America's technology capabilities becoming so dominant compared to what the Europeans, the Japanese, the South Koreans, the Canadians don't have. America's military capabilities. The strength of the US economy coming out of the pandemic compared to every other G7 democracy shows that the United States can get a lot more done in a geopolitical recession. Can ensure that its will is followed.
Also, the fact that Trump is consolidated so much more power this time around compared to 2017 when he was first president. Last time, he had all of these establishment Republicans that didn't really support him, all the way from Mike Pence, his vice president, to Mad Dog Mattis, to Mike Pompeo, to Nikki Haley, to Gary Cohn, and on and on and on. This time around, not at all. Everyone is aligned with Trump.
Also last time, the GOP, the Republican Party, didn't feel like they had to ride Trump's coattails. He wasn't as popular as a lot of they were in their own individual campaigns. This time around not at all. Trump's much more popular than them, they need him much more. And that's happening at a time when so many allied governments are very, very weak. And that's a problem, right? For them. If you're Canada and your government's imploding, or you're South Korea and your government's imploding, or you're Germany, your government's imploding, or France and your government's imploding. Or even countries like the United Kingdom and Japan where the establishment is very, very vulnerable, and very unpopular, Trump's ability to tell you, "This is what we want. And by the way, we are a lot more effective at playing the law of the jungle than either our allies or our adversaries."
It's going to be very hard for them not to kiss the ring, not to provide big wins for the Americans. So, lots of wins for Trump, and that's what we're going to see over the course of the coming year, and a lot of defense being played by a lot of those other countries around the world. But is that sustainable?
Because to get out of a geopolitical recession, you ultimately need to create new rules of the road. You need new global architecture, especially because our challenges, whether it's climate change or an arms race, nuclear weapons, whether it's AI and new disruptive technologies, for good and for bad, they all are global challenges and global opportunities. But we are increasingly fragmenting our responses to national and even local levels.
So, this is not a sustainable trajectory, and that is what we're going to spend an awful lot of time looking at over the coming year, over the coming administration, and going beyond. Because, of course, this is the first time that any of us have experienced a country, the United States, essentially unwinding, undoing its own order. These global institutions that Trump and others are saying are globalist and not useful for the Americans to align with are institutions the United States initially created to help run the world in America's own image, but the US no longer believes that that works for it. And that is a fantastically interesting, but also unnerving, unsettling, and unstable time for us all geopolitically.
So, that's what a geopolitical recession is. I hope you found this worthwhile, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
As global leaders gather at the Munich Security Conference from February 13-15, 2025, we'll focus on three critical topics at the Energy Security Hub @BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt Pavilion:
- New Technologies for Energy & Decarbonization
Discover innovative solutions for renewable energy generation, storage, and efficiency aimed at driving the energy transition.
- Economic Prosperity & European Policies
Explore Europe's economic dynamics, balancing competitiveness, and climate protection while discussing investment needs and new policy frameworks.
- Innovative Collaboration & Global Partnerships
Delve into the importance of international collaboration across sectors for sustainable innovation and trade security.
We see the energy transition as a catalyst for economic opportunity and future resilience. At our Pavilion, we facilitate solution-oriented dialogues among business, policy, science, and civil society. Find the latest on speakers and the program here.
Putin doesn’t like that Trump is copying his style. So he does what anyone would do ... invade Canada. #PUPPETREGIME
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Donald Trump’s economic agenda blends deregulation, anti-immigration policies, higher tariffs, and loose fiscal policy—an approach that "cuts in multiple different directions," says Jon Lieber during a GZERO livestream to discuss the 2025 Top Risks report. Lieber says deregulation could boost productivity, while measures like deportations and trade barriers risk straining industries reliant on foreign labor and open markets. With markets pricing in optimism but key sectors facing uncertainty, the impact of Trumponomics will hinge on how far the administration goes in implementing its campaign promises in 2025 and beyond.
Take a deep dive with the panel in our full discussion, livestreamed on Jan. 6 here.
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from Stockholm, Sweden.
Why has NATO launched a new operation in the Baltic Sea?
Well the reason is to have better safety and security for the undersea infrastructure of different cables that we have in the Baltic Sea. There have been a number of incidents in the last few months when these cables have been damaged or cut by ships that have passed by dragging their anchors. They've often been associated with the part of what you call the 'shadow fleet' of earlier old rusty tankers transporting oil from Russia in violation of sanctions. So, the NATO operation is supposed to keep that under watch, prevent it, and secure the undersea infrastructure.
Are the sanctions against Russia by the EU and US really working?
Yes, they are. But of course it's a long-term effect. No question about that. They are degrading the strength of the Russian economy in a number of areas. Critical is the ability, which is a difficult one, to try to limit the gains in the profits that Russia is making off the oil exports, primarily to India and Russia. And I think the latest round of US sanctions and EU sanctions against the shadow of fleets of rusty old tankers, I think that will have an even more important effect than what we've seen so far.
In a political environment plagued by instability and polarization, who is poised to benefit? 2025 has kicked the G-Zero world into high gear: a world characterized by a growing vacuum in global governance. The anti-establishment wave and anti-incumbency trend that swept major democracies this past year underscore the dramatic shift. President-elect Donald Trump is the leading symptom, in many ways, the most powerful beneficiary of the G-Zero, argues Eurasia Group founder and president Ian Bremmer during a GZERO livestream to discuss the 2025 Top Risks report. He says that America’s embrace of a more “transactional worldview,” indifference to rule of law, and focus on rule of jungle will play to Trump’s hand and agenda. Bremmer adds that a G-Zero world and “a consolidated America First are the same thing, but jut from different perspectives. G-Zero is what happens with everybody else, and America First is what happens with the Americans.” With a tipsy-turvy year ahead, the world will be watching how Trump will navigate this moment in time.
Take a deep dive with the panel in our full discussion, livestreamed on Jan. 6 here.
- Three reasons for optimism in a leaderless world ›
- The rise of a leaderless world: Why 2025 marks a turning point, with Francis Fukuyama ›
- How Trump 2.0 could reshape US foreign policy, with the New York Times' David Sanger ›
- How will Trump 2.0 approach foreign policy? ›
- Quick Take: Trump's foreign policy legacy - the wins ›
China is in for an unprecedentedly tough time. Donald Trump’s cabinet of China hawks signals a potentially more confrontational stance with Beijing, a foreign policy approach that will function not unlike the first Trump administration's over Russia, says The New Yorker's Susan Glasser during a GZERO livestream to discuss the 2025 Top Risks report. Glasser argues that it will be a kind of push-pull relationship between more establishment, old-fashioned conservative types and “Trump’s own impulses and instincts." She adds that “he’s going to want to keep American business tycoons happy. He’s got Elon Musk whispering in his ear at all times.” So, to what extent will the China hawks be able to impose their agenda in a Trump 2.0 administration?
Take a deep dive with the panel in our full discussion, livestreamed on Jan. 6 here.