The Power of Crisis
When I was running for President, people would occasionally ask me questions about foreign policy. I confess, my natural focus tends to be more domestic, as I think we have plenty of problems of our own to wrestle with that will make accomplishing our goals abroad harder and harder unless we overcome them.
One of the people I turned to for guidance on foreign affairs was Ian Bremmer. This week on the podcast I interview Ian, one of the world’s foremost experts on geopolitics as the President of the Eurasia Group and GZero.
GZero refers to an idea Ian proposed 10 years ago, which is that there used to be 7 Major Democracies – the G-7 – that essentially ran the world. The G-7 consists of the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK with the EU as a ‘non-enumerated member.’ Ian posited that as the West’s dominance declined, no one country or group could project a unified global agenda, and that we were living in a GZero world of different countries pushing different interests. The relative rise of China, India, Russia, Brazil and other emerging powers led to a more fragmented world order.
Ian’s new book, “The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats – And Our Response –Will Change the World” catalogues some of the biggest problems facing us all and how different countries could collaborate to combat them. What are the three threats that Ian is most concerned about? Pandemics, climate change, and disruptive technology, including AI.
With each of them, Ian suggests international collaboration. COVAX is a global initiative to ensure access to Covid vaccines in developing countries led by the World Health Organization among others. The Green Marshall Plan is an initiative proposed by the G-7 last year to help developing countries transition to sustainability. And the World Data Organization would create rules of the road for AI and use of consumer data.
Ian reserves some of his strongest language for tech and AI: “We’ll turn to the greatest threat that faces our species: the unchecked introduction of profoundly disruptive technologies . . .We’re inventing new tools, new toys, and new weapons that are changing our lives and societies faster than we can track, study, and understand their effect on us . . . lethal autonomous drones, cyberwarfare, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence (AI) are no longer the stuff of science fiction . . . These technologies are shifting the relationship between the citizen and the state—and between us and our fellow humans—in ways difficult to predict. In the process, they’re changing what it means to be human.”
In our conversation, Ian said, “Look, if one country announces that it has successfully developed quantum computers, it could invite a pre-emptive attack.” He writes, “If governments don’t keep cyberweapons out of the hands of unstable states and terrorists, the economy and security damage they inflict could be unprecedented. If governments don’t share data on developments in quantum computing, one government will eventually gain the power to defeat encryption on a global scale, rendering every other country defenseless. Even the threat of such a breakthrough could trigger World War III, which would threaten the survival of the human race. That’s why this moment is much more dangerous than the 1930s. A next world war will be fought with weapons far more destructive than tanks and fighter planes—or even atomic bombs—and the conflict won’t be limited to ‘theaters of war.’ It will be universal.”
Ian is constructive but a realist. His book opens with the importance of improving America’s politics. “Domestic politics inside the United States, still the world’s sole superpower, is broken.” Indeed, Ian’s book opens with a passage called ‘Uncivil War.’ He writes: “Americans no longer look abroad for their most dangerous enemies. They find them across state lines, across the street, across the hall. They see members of the other political party, neighbors, and even relatives as hateful, ignorant enemies who must be checked . . . It’s difficult for citizens of other countries and their governments to see the United States as a source of solutions to global problems when tens of millions of Americans consider tens of millions of other Americans to be violent radicals or irredeemable fascists.”
Yet, he observes in our interview, we are seeing Finland and Sweden join NATO as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which would have been fairly unthinkable not that long ago. Sometimes a crisis can bring people together quickly. That is Ian’s hope; that we make the most of these crises by coming together and getting ahead of them.
Still, for us the work starts at home. The moral of the story may be that if we want to tackle the world’s most pressing problems, we need to get our own house in order first. Let’s do all we can to make it happen; the world needs us to succeed.
For my interview with Ian, click here. You can also click here for my talk on the Forward Tour on how we can overcome polarization.
