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Political scientist and consultant Ian Bremmer warned that the U.S. may be losing its stake as a global superpower as countries react to the Trump administration’s departure from foreign policy precedent at an Institute of Politics forum Tuesday night.
Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm, and its subsidiary digital publication GZERO Media. He discussed his “G-Zero” model, which he describes as a vacuum in global authority caused by waning U.S. influence and rising foreign powers, including China and Russia.
G-Zero refers to a shift in foreign relations where no single country or alliance is treated as the leading political power. The U.S. has been seen as a global superpower since the end of World War II, but Bremmer argued that Trump has been an “accelerant” towards G-Zero as the U.S. is seen as increasingly unpredictable.
Bremmer said that some nations have attempted to align themselves with the Trump administration to avoid potential political and economic repercussions, while some have found ways to work around tariffs by trading with other countries. But he argued that the U.S. still holds significant influence as these trade policies spark international uncertainty.
Bremmer said countries were approaching foreign policy by asking, “How can I position myself and my country to not get in a fight with the United States and to be as maximally aligned with whatever it is that Trump is putting forward right now?”
Trump’s “America First” agenda, which prioritizes U.S. interests in trade and foreign relations, creates a threat of abrupt policy changes, according to Bremmer, which have made it difficult for other countries to trust the U.S. as a trade or defense partner.
Bremmer coined “G-Zero” in 2012 to represent a prolonged decrease in the presence of global superpowers. He observed the trend after the financial crisis in 2008, when nations prioritized domestic issues over global relations.
“I’ve not mentioned Donald Trump, because I see Trump as the principal symptom of this — as clearly a beneficiary, also as an accelerant — but not as the cause,” Bremmer said.
But Bremmer argued that an absence of domestic resistance has enabled the Trump administration to continue imposing tariffs on foreign trade, especially as American corporations have willingly complied with Trump’s economic policies.
Many business leaders initially believed they would “be very strong in chopping MAGA down,” Bremmer said, but noted a clear lack of pushback to policies and tariffs so far.
“This is a political revolution, and it’s going farther in the United States precisely because there is relatively little powerful resistance to it,” Bremmer said.
“It’s a lot of people that are going along with the unwind of the administrative state, with the extraordinary consolidation of loyalty and power in the hands of an individual and the Executive, and a whole bunch of norms — and some laws — that are being broken in unprecedented ways,” he added.
