???????? The great decoupling

I recently spoke to Ian Bremmer, the CEO of Eurasia Group, and one of the leading thinkers in the field of geopolitics. Ian has been working in and around geopolitics for close to thirty years and has written ten books, explaining and uncovering shifts in global politics. His wide-ranging expertise certainly made for an interesting discussion, and I’ll definitely be waiting to see which of his predictions do come to pass in the future.

Not too long ago, I also wrote on the fracturing world, and you can read my piece here: The World is Spiky.

My full conversation with Ian is here.

Azeem Azhar: One of your key risk factors for 2020 is the decoupling between America and China. How does technology play a role in that?

Ian Bremmer: "The Chinese have become a tech superpower in the last five years, and some of that is a massive amount of state-directed money, aimed at building the infrastructure, and improving the scientists, and also grabbing a bunch of scientists from other countries with better contracts. Ten years ago, advances in technology were largely about the communications revolution, empowering individuals, increasing transparency, making corruption harder, undermining authoritarian regimes, and that’s just not true anymore. 

China’s model is strengthened by the fact that authoritarian regimes are empowered by data top-down and the surveillance capacity that comes with marshalling big data. Using it to understand what your population is doing, nudging their behaviours in ways that are politically constructive to stability, economically constructive to consumption, punishing them if they don’t do that – that really helps China."

Azeem Azhar: We’re potentially unwinding a world with a lot of forces which have served us very well - where does that take us? 

Ian Bremmer: "Clearly, we’re heading towards a world with a lot more inequality, especially inside wealthy countries. I think there's a very big question as to whether or not technology facilitates the creation of virtual walls that are suitably strong that you can tolerate that level of inequality. Now, I see a lot of that happening inside Europe and the United States where we can tolerate larger amounts of inequality, not being driven by apartheid, walling off of folks, but instead being driven by lack of investment in infrastructure in places that aren't doing as well. You don't get the social mobility anymore, and yet there's not a lot of instability. I think that has a lot to do with the ability to more effectively divide people and keep them divided."

My full discussion with Ian is available here.

Azeem Azhar: A lot of your job includes forecasting. Do you ever get thrown aside by events?

Ian Bremmer: "There’s no question that for the UK, Brexit was a significant fork in the road, much greater than we’ve seen in any advanced industrial economy in the last ten years. The fact is that that’s the one that you focus on because it’s so unusual, it’s such an outlier – actually, this tells you that most of the time, your ability to forecast through the constraints on these countries serves you very well. So you’re right, you’re going to get the occasional, very unusual outcome. Most of the times, the things that are going to surprise you, are not the self-inflicted political decisions that come in advanced industrial democracies, but rather will be the externalities like 9/11, like coronavirus. There, what you’re doing is not forecasting the likelihood of them occurring, but rather the likelihood of endogenous shocks being driven by a certain type of system, much more likely when that system is weak and unstable and lacks resilience."

Listen to our full conversation here.