Ian Bremmer is president and founder of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm, as well as GZERO Media, a company dedicated to helping a broad, global audience make sense of international affairs. You may follow him on X @ianbremmer.

This 32nd issue of Horizons is dedicated to what some have come to describe as the “Asia-Pacific Century,” a concept that captures the profound shift in global dynamics as the epicenter of geopolitical and geo-economic gravity steadily moves eastward. Scholars, policymakers, and some of the most distinguished thinkers of our time increasingly recognize that the Asia-Pacific region will serve as the decisive arena for developments in politics, security, economics, finance, and technology over the coming decades. This transformation is not merely regional, but global in its impact, reshaping institutions, alliances, and the very architecture of international order. Against this backdrop, Horizons is honored to feature an exclusive interview with Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media. In an interview with our Editor-in-Chief Vuk Jeremić, Bremmer dissects the nature of global power shifts with great urgency and insight. His participation in this edition underscores the significance of the theme: few voices are better equipped to unpack the challenges and opportunities of what looks increasingly poised to become an Asia-Pacific centered world.

You coined and popularized the term “geopolitical recession” to describe a long-term phase in which global leadership and institutions erode. Can you tell me a little bit more about geopolitical recession, and in particular, why do you think we are in a geopolitical recession, decades after the triumph of the United States in the Cold War?

We are in a geopolitical recession. When you have the rules of the road of a global order that are set by a dominant power or a group of powers, and then over time that balance of power changes but the institutions and the rules of the road don’t, once that gap grows significantly large, you end up with a geopolitical recession.

In this case, three things have been driving it in increasing order of importance. First, the fact that when the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia was not integrated into the West, and the Russians are angry about it and they blame the United States. Russia has become a revisionist power trying to undermine the global order.

Secondly, China was brought into the global order on the presumption that as it became more powerful, it would align with Western political and economic systems and values. China has become much more powerful but has not aligned. It is still very authoritarian and state capitalist, with power consolidated in the hands of Xi Jinping, and the West is upset about that.

Finally, and most importantly, as those two things were happening, in the West and particularly in the United States, tens and tens of millions of citizens increasingly started believing that their own leaders did not represent them. Therefore, they did no longer continue to support the idea of a U.S.-led collective security order, free trade order, foreign aid, or certainly promotion of democracy. For those reasons you are in a geopolitical recession today.

And what do you think is the main driver of its continuation?

The latter. Those three reasons were in increasing order of importance. What is very interesting is that a lot of people thought that a major conflict geopolitically would come because China was rising and the United States was declining. Actually, China is rising, the U.S. is not declining, and America’s allies are declining. If you look at percentage of GDP, productivity, efficiency, and if you look at military spending, capacity, and technological capabilities, it’s really America’s allies that have become much weaker as China has become stronger—this goes for Europe, the UK, Canada, Japan, or South Korea, for example. The United States has roughly maintained its relative position in terms of global power, and certainly in terms of the dollar as a reserve currency. But the Americans have chosen to no longer provide the global leadership that they have historically provided. They are not being forced or pressured by the Chinese, but are actively and unilaterally choosing to drive a GZERO. That is historically unprecedented and quite unusual.

If you go back to our friend Fareed Zakaria and his talk about the rise of the rest—which was the accurate part of his analysis—he argued that the West had already globalized and now the rest was coming. The knock-on presumption that a lot of analysts made was that the West was going to fight to maintain its position and these other countries were going to say “no, we want a new global order where we are in charge.” While there is certainly some of that happening, the big thing that is driving the GZERO is that the United States is singularly saying “we don’t want to do that anymore.”

As you look into the future, what will it take to end the geopolitical recession we live in? Can it be anything short of a major power conflict, after which what remains of the world decides that they want to start anew?

There are three ways to get out of a geopolitical recession in this GZERO world:

One is to reform your existing institutions to better align with this new balance of power. The second is to build new institutions that better reflect the priorities, challenges, and opportunities that you have today. The third is to go to war. Today, all three things are happening. NATO, as you know, for example, is getting stronger today. You’ve got new architecture being created, certainly in terms of climate and increasingly in terms of artificial intelligence. I have personally been involved in some of it. You also have moves towards great power confrontation. The latter seems to have the most momentum right now. It’s therefore hard for me to say that I am optimistic, but I certainly am hopeful that the first two can prove to be more successful.

Following up on the first two, on reforming, or building new, what does this mean for the existing international organizations, particularly the United Nations? Under the current circumstances of the GZERO world, do you see a realistic chance for this organization to be reinvigorated? Should the world’s countries look for alternatives and seek the number two option you mentioned?

First of all, when we talk about the rules of the road, we don’t want to over-index on the international institutions. Those institutions are important and I support them. I wouldn’t want them to collapse, but I also recognize that a lot of why the world works the way it does is because of the commitment to operating principles that underpin those institutions. In other words, these principles come down to the idea of territorial integrity and sovereignty as something that the world’s nations stand for and oppose when someone breaks it. The same goes for the idea of rule of law and human rights.

Secondly, even though Trump’s speech at the 2025 General Assembly criticized the UN for being wasteful and ineffective—and the United States is not very interested in supporting the UN and is not paying its dues—part of his speech focused on a new biotechnology and biosecurity initiative that would indeed call on the UN to be a part of it. So even Trump does not seem to be saying that he wants to destroy this organization. What’s interesting is that as the United States becomes less committed to the UN and to other pieces of architecture, other countries around the world are not all saying “these aren’t any good, we want to just build new stuff.” Instead, they are trying to keep these institutions in place. It is thus very hard to have a world war when nobody wants to fight it. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard.

In this case, President Trump is not particularly interested in fighting wars. He’s more interested in focusing on affairs at home and improving his own position. Other countries want more resilience. They want more hedging. I don’t think that we are seeing a wholesale effort to destroy the UN.

The title of this issue of Horizons is the Asia-Pacific Century. Are we on the money when we say that: is the Asia-Pacific region really going to be the geopolitical and the geoeconomic center of gravity in our lifetimes?

We don’t do centuries anymore, because the world moves way too fast for that. I am not sure we’re even going to have nation states as the principal geopolitical actors within 20 years. Certainly, if I think about how fast AI is moving, there is going to be a lot more people in Asia. But then again, how relevant is labor going to be for capital in 10 or 20 years? There is just a lot of presumptions about slower moving tectonic shifts when you talk about centuries than the way that technology is presently moving.

I certainly agree that most of the increase in power right now is happening in the Pacific. Of course, the Pacific includes the United States. Right now, we are talking about a dominant United States, a dominant China, and everybody else being pretty weak. That feels very different from the transatlantic dominance that we’ve had throughout the post-World War II period, and I accept that. But when people talk about the Asia-Pacific Century, they’re not just talking about the next 75 years but normally more about China and India than the United States. To me, that seems to be a mistake, given that we just don’t know who is going to be dominant in the core disruptive technology that is going to change how society works and what human beings are. These disruptors are principally AI algorithms that engage with people, the agents that people and AI itself are able to direct, and the physical AI architecture that is developed from harder data sets. We are just at the beginning of that revolution. When one talks about geopolitical centuries, it’s really as if that revolution wasn’t happening.

Since you mentioned revolution, I do want to focus on the United States for a second, which I very much count as part of the Asia-Pacific.

The United States is the most powerful country in the world by almost every measure and the main driver of the global locomotion and uncertainty at this moment—both geopolitically and geoeconomically. You said publicly on several occasions that there is a revolution currently being attempted in the United States. I also found it very interesting that Russian professor Alexander Dugin also believes that there is a revolution going on in the United States. I can’t really think of too many topics where I’d see a convergence of opinion between you and Dugin. But on this one, there seems to be a convergence.

I am not happy about it and he is, right? That’s a fundamental difference.

Still, revolution is a pretty strong word. What is the revolution, in your opinion, that could be going on in America right now?

In our lifetimes, there have been three revolutions that have had global impact.

The first, under Deng Xiaoping in China, was an economic but not political revolution that succeeded and led to 50 years of extraordinary, unprecedented growth for China that changed the world.

Second, a political and economic revolution attempted simultaneously by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. It failed and the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed as a consequence, which in turn changed the world.

And third, a political but not economic revolution by Trump right now. We don’t know whether it’s going to be successful or not. I think Dugin wants it to be successful, which I don’t. I want it to fail. But it’s happening.

What Trump believes is that the Democrats have weaponized the system against him. He believes that he was almost assassinated twice—of which he was once wounded—because of the Democrats saying that he is a fascist and worse. He believes that this is the reason he was (in his mind) wrongfully convicted in New York City. He was deplatformed from social media as sitting president, and he believes that if he allows the Democrats to come back to power, he and his family will be arrested or worse. For him, it’s become a winner-take-all environment. He believes that the principal adversary to the United States is not Russia or China. It’s inside the house. It’s domestic political adversaries.

First of all, he’s far more capable of pursuing that agenda because he has more power, and he has consolidated much more power. He has much more loyalty from the Republican Party today than he did in his first term. Secondly, he is much more incentivized to weaponize the system because of how he presently feels about those opponents. You see this playing out in his success in making the U.S. attorney general directly politically loyal to him and going after his political adversaries in the process of trying to ensure the same loyalty from the Department of Defense and ICE. You see it in using the military and domestic capacity to go after enemies and declare a national emergency, perhaps even the Insurrection Act. You see that with his removal of independent capacity for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and Homeland Security, and putting in a bunch of election deniers who would be in charge of helping to ensure the sanctity of the election.

But you have checks and balances in America, right?

I’m saying all of these examples because people focus on one area as opposed to the other because it’s a very big elephant. You can look at just the trunk, the ears, or the tail, yet the reality is that this is happening everywhere. The checks and balances against the U.S. executive are becoming significantly eroded. I think that means a couple of things:

First, it means that the United States is on a path to having a less free and certainly less fair election in the 2026 midterms and the presidential and general election in 2028. This also implies that the country is heading towards one or many constitutional crises.

I think there are reasons to believe that Trump might be unsuccessful. There are certainly parts of the U.S. political system—checks and balances—that still exist. Some are formal, some are informal.

But after more than nine months into his presidency, Trump’s capacity to drive this revolution—and the lack of effective response countering him—has far exceeded what anyone believed to be possible back in January when he became president. It is important to understand that all the people saying that this was going to be like the first term have thus far been proven wrong.

The last thing that I am going to ask you about America before I move on to China reflects on something you said: what does this thing mean for America’s allies? You said that America’s allies better try to stay out of Trump’s crosshairs and build resilience, competitiveness, and capacities for independence.

What then would be your strategic advice for countries that are not American allies—countries that are not adversaries of America but are among the vast majority of countries of the Global South in various stages of economic development—given what you just described?

It’s still very similar advice because if the United States is focusing on you, it is much more powerful and can cause a lot of trouble. It’s really defense first, hedge second. When Trump imposed tariffs—the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century—on more than 90 countries around the world on Liberation Day, the vast majority of those countries needed to find a way to avoid that fight because it was going to hurt them a lot. That was true if you were Denmark, Lesotho, or Brazil. Some countries have been successful in avoiding that fight and some markedly less so.

But after you’ve done what you can to avoid a knockdown fight and limit the potential for escalation, then it really becomes about hedging. It’s really about what you can do to help ensure that you will never be in such a vulnerable position to a unilateral change in action by the United States going forward. That implies different responses for different countries. For some, that’s about domestic decisions that they should have taken decades ago. For others, it’s about international strategies. Sometimes it’s a mix of the two.

Let’s talk about the U.S.-China relationship—the most consequential relationship of our times. Earlier this year, you made a bet with Graham Allison in Davos about where the U.S.-China relationship is going to be in 12 months. Graham thought that it was going to be better than most people expected. You said that it was going to be materially worse. There are about two months left before you meet again in Davos. Given everything that is going on, including the Busan meetings and other developments, who do you think will be closer to winning the bet in two months from now?

Clearly, I am. But I will also be willing to bet you that Graham will say that he’s winning. So, I’ll make an additional bet.

It is very clear that the last meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping in November was positive. The trajectory has improved. But that’s not the bet. The bet is where will the overall relationship be at the end of 2025 compared to where it was at the beginning? Of course, the answer there is that it’s worse.

Why is it worse? First, because tariffs are meaningfully higher. There is less trade between the two countries.

Secondly, because the United States has engaged in efforts to ensure that other countries take China out of their supply chains—with Mexico, India, or countries of Southeast Asia—taking the trans shipments out and penalizing them heavily if they don’t. Then, you have the Americans doing everything they can to invest in their own critical minerals and supply chain and decoupling from their dependence on China. In turn, the Chinese are doing everything they can to lean on their own semiconductors and software design, while pushing the U.S. and others out of any public-sector activity involving chips. So, there is a greater level of decoupling.

If one looks at where the relationship was back in April, it is obvious that it deteriorated dramatically. It has since improved and stabilized to a degree, but it is in a meaningfully worse place than it was back then.

When it comes to China, it continues to rise, although not at the pace it used to five or 10 years ago. What is your take on China’s trajectory in this century—not in the “Asia-Pacific Century,” which seems too far a time horizon—starting with the next five to 10 years?

When you said that America is the most powerful country and in the strongest position globally, there is one massive exception we haven’t yet talked about: its political system. For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. had the strongest political system. Today, it certainly has the most dysfunctional political system of the major advanced industrial economies. No one else is close. It is possible that many countries believe that the Chinese political system is more functional than that of the United States.

Imagine if you were asked to either take the American political system as it is right now or the Chinese political system. Thirty years ago, everyone would have said, “I want the U.S. system.” Today, it’s really tough, and that is extraordinary. That is a horrible deterioration on the part of the United States. The fact is that China has a political system that is very consolidated. It’s very closed, top-down, hierarchical, and controlled by the Communist Party. I do not prefer it, but I have to recognize that it’s much more stable than the U.S. political system today, even though the Chinese economy is weaker than the U.S. and China doesn’t have a convertible currency.

Part of this equation is technology, which 20 years ago facilitated more open systems and the communications revolution. Today, the data and surveillance revolutions actually undermine open systems, penalize them, and promote authoritarian systems and top-down corporations and hyperscalers. This is the advantage the Chinese will have over the next five to 10 years. The other advantage they have is that they are investing massively and holistically into new technologies. They’re investing big in AI and post-carbon energy. That includes supply chain, infrastructure, and education.

If you look at the post-carbon environment, the United States is a petrostate, the most powerful petrostate in the world. China imports a lot of fossil fuels, but they are becoming the world’s first “electrostate.” They’re producing unprecedented amounts of electricity, whereas the United States is building all these data centers, and yet it’s nowhere near the level of investment it needs for electricity. As a result, you’re increasingly going to have a fight between the AI companies and the citizens who want that electricity. The prices are going to go up, and Trump will lose popularity on that. You just had a New Jersey election for governor that was partly focused on this very issue. So, this is becoming really important.

Jensen Huang, who runs NVIDIA, the largest company in the world with a $5 trillion market cap, just came out and said that he thinks that the Chinese are probably going to win the AI race. It’s an open question right now, but China is certainly winning, becoming the dominant country in global energy in the next 10 years and possibly in AI.

I know you spend a lot of time thinking about AI, and on that front, there are basically two shows in town, the U.S. and China, and it’s probably going to stay that way for a while.

When it comes to the countries of the Asia-Pacific, do you think that they’ll be forced to choose one of the two camps because the U.S. and Chinese AI ecosystems are increasingly going to be diverging to the point of incompatibility with each other?

Probably. I think that in AI, you’re going to have two completely different systems, so it will be a question of which architecture you want and who you’re betting on. We’ve already seen that in terms of Huawei, or whose 4G and 5G system you are using in the context of the U.S. vs China. AI is much closer to the national security environment and is also much more holistic in terms of what it does in relationship to an economy and a society. Countries are probably going to make choices. Those choices may not be 100 percent for the U.S. or China, but they’re not going to be 50-50 either. We will increasingly see them leaning heavily towards either China or the U.S. in AI, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be an ally of that country, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they won’t trade (perhaps even more) with the other country. I can see some countries that are working on AI with the U.S. that may end up trading much more with the Chinese, and I think this is sustainable.

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