Gzero Ian Bremmer Speech 20th October 2025

1. Trump is leading a political revolution. Will he succeed?
Ian Bremmer- State of the World Speech, 20th October 2025, Tokyo Japan.
For 20 years now, we've been warned about China's rise, America's decline, and the
inevitable collision between the two superpowers.
That’s not what's happening today.
The bigger story of our G-Zero world, which I laid out during my “State of the World”
speech in Tokyo on Monday, is that the United States – still the world’s most powerful
nation – has chosen to walk away from the international system it built and led for
three-quarters of a century. Not because it's weak. Not because it has to. But because it
wants to.
From unpredictable to unreliable
There’s no historical precedent for this choice. Since the end of World War II, America's
elected leaders have upheld a commitment to US leadership in a troubled world. In
service of that goal, they’ve bolstered allies to make them stronger, more competitive,
and more secure.
But American willingness to lead is now buckling under a politics of grievance. Citizens
increasingly feel US institutions – and many of the nation's elected leaders – have failed
to deliver on their promises and no longer represent them. For millions of voters, the
social contract – the implicit promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, the
system will reward you – has been broken. Trump is a symptom, a beneficiary, and an
accelerant of this breakdown, but he didn’t cause it.
As Americans have lost faith in their own system, so they have turned inward: away
from allies, collective security, free trade, global institutions, and international rule of law.
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2. This is the G-Zero world I’ve been writing about for years, a vacuum of global leadership
that no one else is willing and able to fill.
It doesn’t help that America's allies have brought less to the table in recent decades.
Europe, the UK, Canada, and Japan are lagging in productivity and growth, face weak
demographics, and have chronically underinvested in defense and technological
innovation. They're more dependent on Washington precisely when Americans want
their government to do less globally.
Winston Churchill said you can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after
they've exhausted all other options. The United States has always been unpredictable:
in elections, in trade agreements, even in matters of war and peace. But it was rarely
unreliable.
Today it is both. The United States remains committed to existing international norms,
treaties, and agreements only insofar as they serve the interests of President Trump
and his political allies. Governments sign deals only to have Washington unilaterally
change the terms. Suspend intelligence-sharing overnight. Cut lifesaving foreign aid.
Intervene in the domestic politics of friendly democracies. Threaten the territorial
integrity of allies like Canada and Denmark. Impose the highest tariffs in nearly a
century. Abandon countless global institutional commitments. The list goes on.
America's unreliability has become the central driver of geopolitical uncertainty and
instability in today's G-Zero world.
But unreliability is only half the story. To understand the scale of the problem – how
deep it runs, how long it lasts, what can be done about it – you need to understand
what’s currently happening inside the United States: a political revolution.
As a political scientist, I don't use the word "revolution" lightly. It implies a fundamental
change in a country's governance – an attempt to overthrow what exists and replace it
with something new. Whether motivated by ideology, identity, or wealth, a true revolution
always depends on the ability and willingness of powerful actors to seize an opportunity
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3. created by a belief across society that the existing system is broken and therefore
illegitimate. In this sense, revolutions are made, not born.
There have been two state revolutions with truly global impact in my lifetime.
The first was Mikhail Gorbachev's socialist revolution. The Soviet Union had long been
losing ground in its Cold War competition with the United States. An out-of-touch party
elite and sclerotic economic system struggled to sustain the state and fund an arms
race Moscow looked destined to lose. To reverse Soviet stagnation, Gorbachev
unleashed radical internal reforms: political openness (glasnost) to encourage
competing ideas, economic restructuring (perestroika) to inject competitive market
elements into the centrally planned economy, and self-accounting (khozraschyot) to
devolve power from Moscow to the Soviet republics.
These reforms quickly undermined the foundations of the Soviet system. They enabled
citizens, oligarchs, and nationalists to question the regime's legitimacy, creating
widespread internal opposition and social dissent. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the
Eastern Bloc accelerated the Kremlin's loss of control, and a nationalities revolution led
to Soviet disintegration shortly after. Gorbachev's revolution failed, taking the Soviet
Union with it.
The second revolution was Deng Xiaoping's economic modernization of China. In the
late 1970s, the Chinese Communist Party leader responded to China’s underproductive,
inefficient, and technologically stagnant socialist economy by transforming it from
central planning to state capitalism: open to private enterprise, foreign investment, and
trade.
Western governments eventually embraced Deng’s reforms, culminating in China's
WTO admission in 2001. But the events in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the collapse of
Eastern European communism, and the Soviet implosion all persuaded China's leaders
that political reform was too dangerous. The Party's monopoly on power became
non-negotiable, and it remains so to this day.
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4. Still, Deng's economic revolution was a spectacular success. China lifted hundreds of
millions out of poverty, sustained nearly 10% annual growth for two generations, and
became a middle-income economy of 1.4 billion that currently leads the world in many
frontier technologies.
Trump's political revolution
And now we turn to Washington. Is it right to call what's happening inside the United
States a revolution? It's early to say for sure, but increasingly I believe the answer is
yes.
The president of the United States says the greatest threat to America is posed not by
Beijing or Moscow or terrorists. The true enemies, he warns, are members of the
opposite political party: its supporters, its fundraisers, and even its voters. President
Trump believes his return to power allows – demands! – the end of political checks and
balances on his executive authority.
There's not much economic revolution here. Yes, Trump has imposed the highest tariffs
since the 1930s. Yes, he's trying to undermine the Federal Reserve's independence.
And yes, he's dabbling in state capitalism – golden shares in US Steel, a 10% stake in
Intel, a 15% cut of certain Nvidia and AMD chip sales. But these are ad hoc moves,
marginal decisions in the context of the broader US economy. They’re not doctrine.
Trump picks winners and losers to demonstrate power, to reward loyalty, to extract
rents. There's no structural transformation of how markets operate or the way the
private sector engages with (and often captures) the regulatory system. There’s no
strategic restructuring of capital. In fact, President Trump has abandoned his signature
promise from 2016: "drain the swamp." Corruption and self-dealing aren't an economic
revolution. They're business as usual in America's increasingly broken capitalist system
… just more permitted now.
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5. But a political revolution is another matter. President Trump is consolidating executive
authority by pushing the boundaries of the law. He’s usurping powers traditionally left to
Congress, the courts, and the states. He’s tried to undermine his political opposition to
ensure they no longer pose a challenge to him and his allies. In part, this is Donald
Trump's transactional approach to power. But it's also political retribution – a form of
revenge on those whom Trump believes did, or tried to do, the same to him.
President Trump has accused the Biden administration of weaponizing the Department
of Justice to imprison him and of promoting a "cancel culture" approach to right-wing
speech, including by deplatforming Trump himself from social media after the January 6
Capitol riots.
Trump says the left in America has demonized him and his allies as "fascists" in ways
that promote political violence, and he can point to two attempts to assassinate him
during last year's election campaign as well as the recent murder of conservative
activist Charlie Kirk to make his point.
The president's choices have wide-ranging and lasting implications. Inside the United
States, the president has won the total loyalty of the Republican Party and the reliable
support of Republican lawmakers for his revisionist legislative and executive agendas.
He has begun a sweeping purge of America's professional bureaucracy – which Trump
and his supporters call the "Administrative State" – and replaced career civil servants
with political appointees who are personally loyal to the president. He has weaponized
the "power ministries" – the FBI, the Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service,
and many regulatory agencies – against his domestic political adversaries. And he has
secured executive impunity from the rulings of an independent but no longer coequal
judiciary.
In short, President Trump is replacing the rule of law with the rule of Don at home, much
like he’s embracing the law of the jungle – where the strong do what they can and the
weak suffer what they must – internationally.
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6. Unlike the Gorbachev and Deng revolutions, Trump's revolution follows no grand
strategic plan. Instead, it's a relentless pressure campaign to test the limits of what can
be done on every political front – a commitment to act opportunistically as the crises
these policies create open new possibilities to consolidate ever more power. This plan
was launched by targeting those of Trump’s opponents who are most vulnerable and
least organized, such as undocumented immigrants, green card holders, transgender
people, and elite universities. The administration has since moved into the broader
political categories of funders, supporters, and enablers of his political opponents. All of
this is being undertaken with the intention of normalizing behaviors that have long been
politically taboo.
Will Trump’s revolution succeed?
How much more can President Trump accomplish before next year's midterms or by
Election Day 2028?
Partially, it's a matter of degree. The United States already has a structural bias toward
Republicans because of the Electoral College system through which presidents are
elected. A candidate can win the popular vote but lose the presidency thanks to the
demographic and geographic distribution of electors, which confers a roughly
2-percentage-point advantage to Republican candidates. Add aggressive
gerrymandering – with both parties rigging district maps – and elections become even
less representative, less competitive, less legitimate.
More concerning is the possibility of President Trump deploying the National Guard in
Democratic cities under the guise of a declared "national emergency" to suppress voter
turnout. Federal probes into Democratic fundraising and organizations already
underway add to these pressures, making these tactics increasingly plausible – and the
election is still more than a year away.
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7. To be clear, I'm not suggesting Trump runs for a third term or suspends elections. The
Supreme Court would block both moves. But uncompetitive elections? Elections that
look more like a single-party system than a competitive representative democracy? With
the broader checks on presidential power now in question, that's increasingly plausible.
Trump's grip on the Republican Party and the Democratic Party's current divisions mean
the legislature functions less independently from the executive. Even if Democrats
retake majority control of the House of Representatives (a Senate flip is very unlikely),
they’ll have no power to enforce subpoenas or force a defiant executive branch to
cooperate with their oversight efforts.
America's judiciary remains independent, but its power now pales in comparison to that
of the executive. The Supreme Court, aware that Trump could refuse to comply with
decisions he dislikes, regularly limits the scope of its rulings to preserve its own
institutional legitimacy. Though lower courts aren't as restrained, their decisions can be
and often are overturned, giving Trump more leeway to consolidate authority.
The media, constrained by profit-driven corporate owners, faces pressure from above to
avoid antagonizing the White House. Social media is increasingly controlled by Trump's
political allies (more so when the TikTok sale goes through) and, in the case of Truth
Social, by Trump himself.
There are still US institutions that can check the president's power. The military stands
as a bastion of professionalism – Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's blind loyalty to
the president notwithstanding – because its culture continues to prioritize service to the
nation over loyalty to any individual. The Pentagon's purges of some high-level military
officers have made headlines, but not like China's last week – and they don't undermine
the military's core operational integrity.
The devolution of political power to states and cities also offers a buffer. Many US
governors and mayors are competent technocrats who govern independently of
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8. Washington. Trump's attempts to weaken Democratic national powers don't threaten
state and city-level governance.
Corporate and financial leaders, uncomfortable with political upheaval, tend to avoid
political confrontation that could jeopardize their interests and those of their
shareholders. Most will focus on regulatory influence instead.
And then there are the American people themselves. More than five million Americans
turned out in thousands of "No Kings Day" protests across the country this weekend,
the largest demonstrations since the Vietnam War. President Trump is a historically
polarizing and unpopular president. But then again, so is the 2025 Democratic Party.
Remember: Trump was freely and fairly elected in large part because he embodied the
political and cultural disruption that a plurality of voters craved. Most Americans who
said they cared about democracy in 2024 voted for, not against, Trump, precisely
because they were convinced the system was already broken and only he offered hope
for change.
The fate of Trump's political revolution is uncertain, but on current trends, a
constitutional crisis before the next elections looks increasingly likely. Possible
outcomes range from a Republican break with Trump to a sustained political shift
toward single-party rule in the United States. Nor can we rule out the kind of political
chaos, realignment, and violence that America saw in the decades after the Civil War.
One thing I know for sure: the United States is not going back to the political culture that
held sway a decade ago, before Donald Trump descended the Trump Tower escalator.
The sooner the world accepts that, the sooner it can figure out how to respond and
adapt to a post-American order. More on this next week.
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