If we encountered our planet as an alien species today, what would we see?
An extraterrestrial visitor would no doubt be awed by the remarkable speed and scale of human progress in recent decades. Today, more than half of the world’s population belongs to the global middle class, and over 100 million people continue to be lifted from poverty every year. Two-thirds of humanity can now go online, up from just 16 percent twenty years ago. International air travel keeps getting cheaper, allowing more people to work in and travel to more places. Global trade continues to grow despite facing all sorts of backlash, and new technologies like artificial intelligence will create unprecedented opportunities to connect the world in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.
But take a closer look, and we’ve got big problems.
The United States and China, the two most powerful countries in the world by a wide margin, assertively reject responsibility for the rest of the planet. They cast an eye at enemies first and foremost within their own borders and worry increasingly about threats to their stability. Both are informed by political and economic value systems focused on the short term, despite the increasingly obvious reality that they’re not working for most of their people — especially their increasingly disillusioned youth.
A “community of nations” is today the stuff of fairy tales, with governance that isn’t meeting the needs of citizens. Our challenges — from climate change and pandemics to technological disruption and security threats — are increasingly global. They demand far stronger international cooperation than is thought desirable or would be feasible with the institutions that exist today. And the political actors most essential to strengthening global institutions are moving in the opposite direction.
We are heading back to the law of the jungle – where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. This is the G-Zero world I’ve been writing about for over a decade now: an era when no one power or group of powers is both willing and able to drive a global agenda and maintain international order.
This leadership deficit will reach critical mass in 2025, creating a recipe for endemic geopolitical instability. The risk of a generational world crisis, even a new global war, is higher than at any point in most of our lifetimes.
The central problem facing the global order is that core international institutions — the United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and so on — no longer reflect the underlying balance of global power. This is a geopolitical recession, a “bust cycle” in international relations that can be traced back to three fundamental causes, in ascending order of importance.
First, the West failed to integrate Russia into the U.S.-led global order after the Soviet Union’s collapse, breeding deep resentment and antagonism. We can argue about who’s to blame, but the consequences are undeniable: Now a former great power in severe decline, Russia has transformed from a potential partner into the world’s most dangerous rogue state, bent on destabilizing the U.S.-led order and forging military-strategic partnerships with other chaos actors like North Korea and Iran.
Second, China was brought into the international order — crucially as a member of the World Trade Organization — on the presumption that global economic integration would encourage its leaders to liberalize their political system and become responsible global stakeholders as defined by the West. Instead, China grew far more powerful but no more democratic or supportive of the rule of law. Deepening tensions, and even confrontation, between China and the West, are the result.
Third, and perhaps most consequentially, tens of millions of citizens in advanced democracies concluded that the globalist values their leaders and elites had been promoting no longer worked in their favor. Rising inequality, demographic shifts, and technological disruption have eroded trust in democratic institutions and reduced these nations’ capacity for global leadership. Nowhere has this been more consequential than in the still-indispensable nation, the United States, where President Donald Trump has both fed and profited from this anti-globalist, anti-establishment surge.
There are three ways out of a geopolitical recession: reform existing institutions, build new ones better aligned with current power realities, or destroy the old system and impose new rules through force. While all three are happening to some extent, in 2025 the focus is on the third.
The United States is still the only nation powerful enough to lead – in fact, it’s in many ways more powerful than ever, at least compared to its allies and adversaries. But it is no longer willing to serve as world sheriff, architect of free trade, and promoter of common values. President Trump’s second term will definitively consolidate America’s retreat from global leadership. But Trump himself is a vessel and a symptom, rather than the cause, of the absence of U.S. leadership. Most concerning – and most structural – is the United States’ war against itself. A nation not at all in decline economically, militarily, or technologically nonetheless faces severe political polarization and dysfunction.
Most Americans agree that there are forces inside the United States intent on destroying democracy – they just disagree on the nature and identity of those forces. Nearly half of the country sees Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric and contempt for the rule of law as existential threats to the republic. But the president won the election on the back of the belief that Democrats, “deep state” bureaucrats, and mainstream media had already subverted democracy by persecuting Trump, lying to the public, committing large-scale voter fraud, and enabling widespread lawlessness and illegal immigration.
The information environment is particularly troubling. Americans don’t listen to the same news or read the same headlines, don’t agree on the basic terms of debate, and increasingly don’t engage with each other at all. A deeply polarized and increasingly nonfunctional information ecosystem delivers diametrically opposed visions of the country and the world to partisan voters entirely incurious about what is and isn’t true. The difference between the worldviews of the two roughly equivalent political sides in the United States has only grown as a consequence, making disagreement between Democrats and Republicans greater than the country has seen before.
Powerful interests have always controlled mass media, but algorithms coupled with unregulated social media platforms subject to top-down manipulation and control are making it increasingly hard to discern fact from fiction. Of course, the unprecedented increase in misinformation would not be as significant if there wasn’t a growing appetite for it among citizens whose trust in nearly all civic institutions has sunk to record lows.
When our leaders actively subvert the truth for political gain, they subjectivize our very reality. The advent of generative AI further fuels this trend, making it possible to create plausible evidence for any storyline and create uncertainty about what’s real. This “choose-your-own-reality” approach to information undermines the very foundations of democratic discourse. If everything from elections to disaster relief can generate a conspiracy theory, the other side can always be wrong. More importantly, you can always be right. Democracy can’t work if we aren’t even able to be wrong sometimes.
People of all political persuasions increasingly believe their democracy is broken. They are right. More worryingly, many now see the only possible solutions as outside the political system. Americans have been primed to view their fellow countrymen on opposite sides of the political spectrum as “enemies of the people,” and a growing number see violence as legitimate. To be clear, the United States is not on the precipice of civil war. But much of the country feels like it is. The U.S. is accordingly set to experience dramatically more political division, dysfunction, and even violence in coming years.
Insofar as Americans can’t agree on fundamental values or credibly and consistently commit to any policies, this political dysfunction will matter much more for the rest of the world than for the U.S. itself. A house divided may be able to stand for a long while, but it cannot be counted on to uphold global security, free trade, and the rule of law.
This needn’t be catastrophic if other countries were able and willing to fill the leadership void. But America’s traditional allies face unprecedented political weakness. Canada’s government has just collapsed. So has Germany’s, where populist parties are likely to make gains in the upcoming federal elections. France is in the throes of a protracted political crisis. The United Kingdom is led by an unpopular new government still finding its feet. Japan’s ruling party has lost its majority, with new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba unlikely to last long. South Korea’s political system is in disarray. Rather than stepping into the breach, these nations are focused on playing geopolitical defense – keeping their heads down and hoping to avoid becoming targets of disruption.
Meanwhile, the Global South, despite growing economic heft, lacks both the cohesion and capability to lead. India, the strongest and most plausible global leader among developing nations, remains a lower-income country, focused on building bridges mainly in support of its national interests. Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, despite their growing ambitions, lack the standing to drive global reforms.
For its part, China – the second most powerful country on Earth and only contender to fill America’s shoes – couldn’t replace the role of the United States if it wanted to. Not only does it lack the legitimacy and “soft power” needed to attract a stable following, but its ongoing economic woes, combined with President Xi Jinping’s prioritization of national security and political control, leave Beijing too preoccupied with domestic challenges.
In short, with no one willing and able to lead global reform and renewal efforts, what’s left is ever greater geopolitical instability, disruption, and conflict. Power vacuums will expand, global governance will languish, and rogue actors will proliferate. The world will grow more divided and more combustible. The most vulnerable will pay the biggest price. Without effective global leadership, these crises will feed on each other and become harder to solve.
We’re entering a uniquely dangerous period of world history on par with the 1930s and the early Cold War. This doesn’t mean we’re headed toward World War III or even a U.S.-China cold war, though both scenarios become more likely in a G-Zero world. The more immediate danger is the unraveling of the world’s security and economic architecture leaving many spaces – both countries and crucial domains like cyberspace, outer space, and the deep seas – ungoverned and under-governed, wide open for rogue actors to increasingly operate with impunity.
Nature abhors a vacuum.
These challenges are profound.
But I would still rather be alive now than at any other time – and not only because I was incredibly fortunate in the geopolitical lottery draw. I’ve never been so excited by the opportunities afforded by new technologies, especially the human capital and industrial breakthroughs that AI is about to unleash. And while that means even more concentration of wealth in the hands of an extremely privileged and unaccountable group, this new globalization also has the potential to extend prosperity to millions (and soon billions) of people who otherwise would have no such access.
Technological innovation, economic growth, and human progress are happening daily – but they’re happening despite, not because of, the politics. The question is how much damage the politics will do. And the answer increasingly appears to be “a great deal.” All we can do is try to bring more understanding to our political divisions and do more to work against them.
Ian Bremmer is president and founder of Eurasia Group, a leading global research and advisory firm, and GZERO Media, a digital media company providing news coverage of international affairs. Eurasia Group and GZERO Media are Carnegie Corporation of New York grantees. This article is an adaptation of What Happens When No One Is in Charge?, first published by GZERO Media in January 2025. Printed with permission.
