Ian Bremmer, Cliff Kupchan
Publisher Eurasia Group
Overview: We’ve lived with growing levels of geopolitical risk for nearly a decade, but without a true international crisis. Outside of geopolitics, global trends have been strongly favorable. That’s now changing.
Globalization is key. The most important feature of the post-war era landscape—people, ideas, goods, and capital moving faster and faster across borders around the planet has created extraordinary wealth and opportunity. It’s increased global equality (even as it’s created more inequality within many countries), reduced poverty, extended lifespans, and supported peace and prosperity.
But with China and the United States decoupling from one another on technology, a critical piece of the 21st-century economy is now fragmenting in two. Countries across the developed world have become more polarized, increasing the power of tribalism. Add the shrinking of supply chains with changes in the politics, economics, and technology of manufactured goods and services, and suddenly globalization has a split personality.
Then there are the economic and geopolitical trends. Both are now cycling downward. The global economy, after emerging from the great recession of 2008 with the longest expansion of the post-war period, is now softening. More economists expect a recession in 2020 or 2021. And the world is now entering a deepening geopolitical recession, with a lack of global leadership as a result of American unilateralism, an erosion of US-led alliances, a Russia in decline that wants to undermine the stability and cohesion of both the US and its allies, and an increasingly empowered China under consolidated leadership that’s building a competitive alternative on the global stage.
Lastly, climate change is beginning to constrain economic growth and to matter on the global political stage as never before. That’s only going to increase over time (unlike the cyclical economic and geopolitical trends, which sooner or later will become more favorable). In 2020, we have a combination of negative trend lines that we’ve not experienced in generations.
