What is a "G-Zero world", and who are the winners and losers in it? In this video, Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, sits down with Diplomatic Courier Video Correspondent Monica Gray to explain the implications—both at home and abroad—of living in a leaderless world.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
[Diplomatic Courier:] You are the author of the highly acclaimed book Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. What is a “G-Zero World”, and who are the winners and losers in it?
[Ian Bremmer:] A G-Zero World is one where we have an absence of global leadership. And I think there are a lot of reasons for it. The United States is less willing, as we’ve seen, to provide the guidance of the global economy and global security—it doesn’t want to be the global policeman. We’ve heard that very clearly from President Obama. It doesn’t want to be the lender of last resort. It doesn’t want to bail out the Europeans. Doesn’t want to lead globalization. It’s just not popular.
At the same time a lot of America’s allies are really distracted with their own domestic issues, particularly in Europe. And the leader of Europe today is not Britain, which has a very active geopolitical perspective, but Germany, which does not. Some of the countries that are becoming most important, including China—which will soon be the biggest economy in the world—have preferences and values that are not bad necessarily, but they’re different from that of the United States and American allies among the advanced industrial democracies.
If you put those things together, what you get is not a G-7 or a G-8 or a G-20, I mean you can have those meetings, you can put people in chairs around nice circular tables, but they don’t accomplish anything globally.
And so leadership breaks down. It either doesn’t happen at all, or it has to happen at a local level or a sub local level, a regional level. That’s what we’re seeing on issues as diverse as trade and climate and the Internet and all the rest.
And winners are countries that are either really resilient and so look safe and stable in an environment of great volatility.
So even with the U.S. government shut down, the United States looks stable. And that’s why the markets are doing well and people are piling to treasuries.
But also countries that look good are flexible—countries that I call “pivot states.” If you don’t have one system and one leader that creates global standards you have to be able to be flexible between many different sorts of systems. Singapore is really good at this.
[DC:] Where else is a “pivot state?”
[IB:] Brazil is actually a pivot state. Turkey is a pivot state. Now some of those states have domestic governance problems which are different, but geopolitically this is a time where you either want to be big and stable or you want to be small and nimble, and if you’re in between those two places, you have serious problems.
[DC:] Following up on that, in a G-Zero world, do you think existing international organizations like the UN become more or less important for solving problems and resolving international disputes?
[IB:] I think that the United Nations, and the Security Council in particular, is very clearly part of the problem. The G-20 should have learned from the Security Council that it wasn’t a great idea to put this organization together.
You put a bunch of countries around a table and say you need consensus to get something done. And there are too many of them and they’re all focused internally and they don’t agree on stuff. That’s not herding cats, which his hard. That’s herding cats together with animals that don’t like cats, which is not herding.
I love the United Nations as an organization. I think it’s important to have countries get together and talk. And I think there are many thing the UN engages in which are incredibly important around the world. The World Health Organization and its role in China has gotten them to be more accountable and transparent in the way they talk about infectious disease, for example, sort of post-SARS type epidemiological incidents.
That’s great. But that’s not the Security Council. When we talk about the UN, we usually talk about how ineffectual the Security Council is because they talk about all these things and they don’t do anything.
You have countries all around the world saying “We must resolve Syria through the Security Council!”
The number of times that Ban Ki-moon stands up and denounces things, he deplores things, I think he must have an app on his iPhone that must come up with synonyms for the ways he can express his incredible distaste ineffectually for different things happening around the world. I’d really want to hurt myself if I was in that position because it’s so depressing to formulaically continue blabber on about stuff that you know is not going to happen. The problem is that when you do enough of that, the international community tunes out.
See the rest of the Ian Bremmer series:
- The International Impact of the U.S. Government Shutdown
- Obama’s Second Term Foreign Policy Advisors Are the B-Team
- Advice to Obama on Syria and Iran—Syria is a "Disaster"
- The Problem with Global Leadership Today
- If Only This World Leader Could Run for High Office in the U.S.
Check out all of our other videos here or on YouTube.
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Ian Bremmer: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World
October 8, 2013
What is a "G-Zero world", and who are the winners and losers in it? In this video, Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, sits down with Diplomatic Courier Video Correspondent Monica Gray to explain the implications—both at home and abroad—of living in a leaderless world.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT:
[Diplomatic Courier:] You are the author of the highly acclaimed book Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World. What is a “G-Zero World”, and who are the winners and losers in it?
[Ian Bremmer:] A G-Zero World is one where we have an absence of global leadership. And I think there are a lot of reasons for it. The United States is less willing, as we’ve seen, to provide the guidance of the global economy and global security—it doesn’t want to be the global policeman. We’ve heard that very clearly from President Obama. It doesn’t want to be the lender of last resort. It doesn’t want to bail out the Europeans. Doesn’t want to lead globalization. It’s just not popular.
At the same time a lot of America’s allies are really distracted with their own domestic issues, particularly in Europe. And the leader of Europe today is not Britain, which has a very active geopolitical perspective, but Germany, which does not. Some of the countries that are becoming most important, including China—which will soon be the biggest economy in the world—have preferences and values that are not bad necessarily, but they’re different from that of the United States and American allies among the advanced industrial democracies.
If you put those things together, what you get is not a G-7 or a G-8 or a G-20, I mean you can have those meetings, you can put people in chairs around nice circular tables, but they don’t accomplish anything globally.
And so leadership breaks down. It either doesn’t happen at all, or it has to happen at a local level or a sub local level, a regional level. That’s what we’re seeing on issues as diverse as trade and climate and the Internet and all the rest.
And winners are countries that are either really resilient and so look safe and stable in an environment of great volatility.
So even with the U.S. government shut down, the United States looks stable. And that’s why the markets are doing well and people are piling to treasuries.
But also countries that look good are flexible—countries that I call “pivot states.” If you don’t have one system and one leader that creates global standards you have to be able to be flexible between many different sorts of systems. Singapore is really good at this.
[DC:] Where else is a “pivot state?”
[IB:] Brazil is actually a pivot state. Turkey is a pivot state. Now some of those states have domestic governance problems which are different, but geopolitically this is a time where you either want to be big and stable or you want to be small and nimble, and if you’re in between those two places, you have serious problems.
[DC:] Following up on that, in a G-Zero world, do you think existing international organizations like the UN become more or less important for solving problems and resolving international disputes?
[IB:] I think that the United Nations, and the Security Council in particular, is very clearly part of the problem. The G-20 should have learned from the Security Council that it wasn’t a great idea to put this organization together.
You put a bunch of countries around a table and say you need consensus to get something done. And there are too many of them and they’re all focused internally and they don’t agree on stuff. That’s not herding cats, which his hard. That’s herding cats together with animals that don’t like cats, which is not herding.
I love the United Nations as an organization. I think it’s important to have countries get together and talk. And I think there are many thing the UN engages in which are incredibly important around the world. The World Health Organization and its role in China has gotten them to be more accountable and transparent in the way they talk about infectious disease, for example, sort of post-SARS type epidemiological incidents.
That’s great. But that’s not the Security Council. When we talk about the UN, we usually talk about how ineffectual the Security Council is because they talk about all these things and they don’t do anything.
You have countries all around the world saying “We must resolve Syria through the Security Council!”
The number of times that Ban Ki-moon stands up and denounces things, he deplores things, I think he must have an app on his iPhone that must come up with synonyms for the ways he can express his incredible distaste ineffectually for different things happening around the world. I’d really want to hurt myself if I was in that position because it’s so depressing to formulaically continue blabber on about stuff that you know is not going to happen. The problem is that when you do enough of that, the international community tunes out.
See the rest of the Ian Bremmer series:
- The International Impact of the U.S. Government Shutdown
- Obama’s Second Term Foreign Policy Advisors Are the B-Team
- Advice to Obama on Syria and Iran—Syria is a "Disaster"
- The Problem with Global Leadership Today
- If Only This World Leader Could Run for High Office in the U.S.
