Worst News of 2018 Probably Won’t Be Trump’s Tweets
New Year’s Eve, a new set of bizarre tweets from the President: This time, he and Kim Jong-un are bragging about the relative size of their nuclear buttons in a piss match, so it almost seems like a scenario at the top. And yet, according to Ian Bremmer, Twitter balancing isn’t even among the top 10 things we should be worried about globally.
Bremmer, who is president of Eurasia Group, a company engaged in a geopolitical risk analysis, yesterday joined Brian Lehrer on WNYC in their 10th annual segment “Global political risks.” Every year, the Eurasia Group publishes a report on the world’s most disturbing places, trends, institutions and issues, intended as a guide for investors, but also useful for the layperson who wants to know exactly what to fear in the next twelve months.
During the presentation, Bremmer outlined his assessment of ten major global risks the world will face in the coming year, some of which may surprise you: China is taller than North Korea or Syria; The United Kingdom – usually what Americans see as a stronghold of stability – comes in eighth.
What’s the number one concern?
China. According to Bremmer, “Trump has abandoned the US commitment to Washington-led multilateralism and has created great uncertainty about the future US role in Asia, creating a power vacuum that China can now begin to fill.” Until recently, China held back on leadership discussions, but this is no longer the case: Combine the rise of Trump, who is called one of the weakest presidents in US history, with the arrival of a strong Chinese president, and now China has become a leader in trade and investment, technology and values. … This means international business will have to adjust; that tensions will rise between China and US allies in the region, and that world business leaders may begin to view China as a viable alternative to “Western liberal democracies.”
Random, terrible things happen there too.
Watch “Accidents” at number two. As Bremmer says in the show, the markets are up, the economy is doing well, but most of us cannot shake off a sense of anxiety when we look at the news. Fraudsters and states, like terrorist organizations, pose a serious threat; cyberattacks loom; and Russia, Syria and North Korea remain weak guns. Number two is, in fact, “everything that we cannot foresee, what can go wrong with hostile powers and unstable states.”
Latin America is in the top ten.
Mexico is in fourth place. The NAFTA negotiations are still in limbo, and depending on how it ends, the end result could “[create] uncertainty about billions of dollars in economic activity in the world’s most prosperous region.” The presidential election is in July, anti-Americanism is likely to be a big topic of conversation, and there are no primaries in Mexico – which means a guy could get 23% of the vote and still win the presidency. Bremmer begins his assessment like this: “Mexico will be a difficult year.”
Want more cause for concern? It is worth listening to the entire WNYC segment and reading the full report of the Eurasia Group . But there is one bright spot: we don’t need to worry so much about Twitter.