Indian democracy and economy ‘stable’, US-China relation ‘better managed’ now: Ian Bremmer

Bremmer on India: Geopolitics, the intricate dance of power and strategy on the global stage, shapes the destiny of nations and the course of history. And the geopolitics currently has turned more complex and is quickly changing. To discuss the current dynamics of geopolitics, Republic Business sat with Ian Bremmer, world’s renowned political scientist and the president of Eurasia group.  Bremmer shed light on the range of subjects from US elections to trade war, from current superpower to Indian economy. 

Edited Excerpts:  

On  geopolitical recession and 2024

What I see is an absence of global leadership making the major challenges that we have geopolitical around the world getting worse. you look at the war, Russia, Ukraine, and the trajectory so far this year has gone against Ukraine. The war is not coming to a close. It's becoming more challenging for the west and for the world. I look at the war in the Middle east and I see it getting worse on the ground in Gaza and more broadly in the Middle east. It's not getting better in the region or for the world. I also look at the US China relationship, and it is being better managed than it has been.

But still, conflict and tensions between the US and China, on trade, certainly, as well as on technology, and in the broader confrontation and escalation in the South China Sea and Taiwan, are getting worse. And then finally, in my own country, US elections, where we have a crisis in democracy right now, the level of confrontation between those that support Biden and those that support Trump, is also growing. 

So, unfortunately, I fear that 2024 is largely playing out the way we had expected.

On Trade War  

And so you're right, these $18 billion in tariffs, including 100 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles, to the US, will not be matched by the Europeans, but they will move in that direction in the coming days and weeks. That is a hit to the US China relationship. The move against TikTok and the demand that Bytedance the best.

The Chinese ownership, that is a hit. The 2 billion in military aid to Taiwan, that's a hit to the relationship. The new tariffs on steel, the new investigation on chinese shipbuilding, all of those things are making the relationship more troubled. Now, that is not a cold war. It's not even a trade war. The Americans refer to this as de-risking.

That's the term of art that's being used. But more broadly, it is an effort to avoid a crisis, because the Americans see that the crises in the Middle East and Europe, Ukraine are more than sufficient, and the Americans don't want a third. And the Chinese, their economy, of course, is performing badly. That is moving them towards a charm offensive to try to limit capital flight and attract more foreign direct investment. And also geopolitically. China's position in Asia has been deteriorating for years now in Southeast Asia as well as in Northeast Asia, the Japan-South Korea relationship and the greater alignment of the Philippines, Vietnam, even Indonesia towards the United States and its allies.

For all of these reasons, the US-China relationship continues to be better managed than many other confrontational relationships around the world. 

On decoupling to de-risking

Well, two things. The first is that most of the American private sector doesn't want to decouple. And they are powerful. They have regulatory influence, their special interests that give a lot of money to their local congressmen. They lobby effectively, the financial industry, certainly the insurance industry, certainly a lot of entertainment, the sports industry, Hollywood. I mean, you talk to big CEO's in the United States, they're making more trips to China in the last six months, not fewer. So that matters. And also, when you look at other countries around the world, there's almost nobody that wants to decouple. There are members of Congress that might talk about decoupling, but America's allies around the world, whether in Europe or in Asia or certainly in the developing world, do not want to decouple.

And the Indians were well ahead of the United States in cutting off Chinese apps. But the trade between India and China is, of course, incredibly robust, and nobody's trying to end that. It's very hard to have a cold war if nobody else wants to fight it. And that is the environment we're presently in. The global economy is not a bilateral order. It's not a unilateral order. It's actually a multipolar order with the United States, China, the European common market, and then Japan becoming a little less important, India becoming more important. That's a multipolar order. The Americans and the Chinese by themselves are not going to determine the outcome of that order.

On US Elections

Well, ideally, it would be someone a lot younger, a lot more in touch with the population, a lot more capable of running the country for four years, a lot more fit, a lot less indicted, a lot less corrupt, a lot less authoritarian leaning. There's almost no one in the United States that really is happy about the quality of these two candidates this time around. They're very different candidates. Biden's problem is largely about his age. Trump's problem is largely about his unfitness. But there's no agreement in the US about that. Both political parties think of the other party as trying to destroy American democracy. There's two pieces of good news. One is that most of the rest of the world goes into the polls this year.
 

Your country, India, Indonesia, is a very populist democracy. Mexico. On June 2, the European Union for their parliament, the largest common market in the world. None of those elections are going to be unstable. They will all be seen as free and fair and have legitimate transitions, unlike my own country. So the US is kind of a unique challenge among major democracies in the world today. Unfortunately, it's also, of course, the most powerful. So it causes a lot of uncertainty. But the second piece of good news is that even though the US is a democracy in crisis, it is not a democracy facing civil war.

It is not a democracy in danger of becoming a dictatorship. It is eroding. It is losing legitimacy. It is becoming more of a hybrid system. It is less representative than you used to be, and that will likely continue to be the case after people go to the polls in November, in this year. But for those that are concerned, I saw Ray Dalio, the American billionaire, who said there was a one in three chance that America was going to become a civil war.

That's also fake news. That someone who's trying to generate clicks for excitement and titillation, but doesn't actually reflect the situation on the ground in the United States. 

On Current Superpower of the world 

As of now, there are no superpowers in the world today. A superpower is a country that can project its influence around the world in every area of power, militarily, economically, technologically. The United States is the only country that can do that in terms of global security. But in the global economic order, it's a multipolar order. With the United States, Europe and China also, Japan receding somewhat, India rising somewhat. That's a multipolar order. But when we talk about the digital world and new technologies, it's largely private sector technology companies that are acting as sovereigns in that space. So it's a much more complicated world than it was ten years ago, 20 years ago. Geopolitically, the most powerful person in the world.

I mean, someone like Xi Jinping, who controls the second largest economy globally, much less powerful than the United States, but much fewer checks and balances on his power and his ability to rule for a long time with the kind of decisions that he prefers. You'll remember, zero Covid-19 was extended with great damage to the Chinese economy and great irritation to the Chinese people, because Xi Jinping wanted it to be. And when he decided he wanted to change that policy.

He was able to do that overwhelmingly in a week. There's no other person in the world that could do that. So I'm not sure whether you consider it a good thing or a bad thing that he has that much individual power in his hands, but it certainly, I think, is a thing that we are contending with geopolitically.

One word for India

Stable