Ian Bremmer: America, Iran, and a World in Turmoil
The war in Iran may have come to an end, but both the course and the conclusion of that war have brought into sharp relief the forces that increasingly define a world of weaponized power and systemic risk: unconstrained leaders willing to gamble with military force; the search for, and use of, economic leverage; technologies destabilizing both decision-making and development models; and old alliances fracturing and new alignments forming.
Summary
Ian Bremmer on Iran’s Fallout, the G-Zero World, and AI’s Governance Gap
In this Foreign Affairs Interview, host Daniel Kurtz-Phelan talks with Eurasia Group founder Ian Bremmer about the aftermath of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran and what it reveals about a fracturing global order.
Bremmer argues the war amounts to Trump’s biggest foreign policy failure, since none of the administration’s stated goals — regime change, dismantling Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, crippling its regional proxies — were achieved. Iran absorbed serious damage but avoided collapse, and the resulting memorandum of understanding reads as a concession to Tehran rather than a win for Washington. He expects the ceasefire itself to hold, but is far more skeptical that it leads anywhere close to a durable nuclear agreement.
A major thread of the conversation is how the war accelerates the “G-Zero” dynamic Bremmer has long written about — a world with no single dominant power setting the rules. He describes two competing Middle East coalitions forming in its wake: a Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey-Egypt axis hedging toward China, and an Abrahamic bloc (UAE and Israel) leaning harder into the U.S.-Israel relationship. He also argues the conflict, by exposing chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz, is inadvertently pushing global investment toward green energy and alternatives to fossil fuels faster than policy ever could — with China currently best positioned to benefit from that shift, even as Bremmer gives Beijing only middling marks for capitalizing on the broader opportunity, calling its overall approach to the moment cautious and risk-averse.
The discussion broadens into Bremmer’s concerns about “technopolar” power — the growing influence of AI and tech companies that increasingly set their own rules absent effective government oversight. He flags AI-enabled risks (bioweapons, autonomous drone swarms, attacks on financial systems and infrastructure) as concerns on par with a potentially cornered, nuclear-armed Putin facing battlefield losses in Ukraine, and argues that, unlike with traditional state actors, there’s essentially no governance framework or guardrail in place for AI risk today.
The conversation closes on Bremmer’s read of corruption and institutional erosion inside the U.S. itself — what he calls a “coin-operated democracy” — and his view that Trump’s policy incompetence, more than his authoritarian instincts or tolerance for self-dealing, has been the most consequential of his traits in shaping events like the Iran war.
