Ian Bremmer and the World After the World Order

By Matthew Parish

Tuesday 25 August 2026

There are political scientists who construct theories of international relations and there are political commentators who describe the events of the day. Ian Bremmer has spent much of his career occupying the unusually productive territory between the two. As founder and president of the Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, he has developed a vocabulary for describing the contemporary international system that is deliberately simpler than much academic international-relations theory but, for precisely that reason, has acquired considerable influence. His central contention is that the post-Cold War international order has not simply been replaced by another order. Rather, the world is passing through a period in which political power, economic power, military power and increasingly technological power have become distributed in fundamentally different ways. The result is not conventional multipolarity. It is something substantially more unstable.

Bremmer’s best-known expression for this condition is the “G-Zero world” — a world in which no single country, alliance or durable coalition possesses both the capacity and the willingness to provide international leadership. The expression is intended partly as a contrast with the G7 and G20, organisations constructed upon the assumption that sufficiently powerful states can collectively manage international problems. Bremmer argues that this assumption has increasingly ceased to correspond with political reality. In his analysis, international institutions no longer adequately reflect the actual distribution of power and the states possessing the greatest power increasingly disagree about the purposes for which those institutions should be used.

This is what Bremmer calls a “geopolitical recession”. The metaphor is instructive. Just as an economic recession represents a period in which established mechanisms for allocating resources cease to work effectively, a geopolitical recession occurs when the institutions and conventions governing international affairs cease to correspond with the underlying distribution of power. Unlike economic recessions, however, geopolitical recessions may last for decades. The institutions created after the Second World War — the United Nations, Bretton Woods institutions and eventually the broader architecture of globalised trade — were overwhelmingly products of American power exercised together with America’s allies. The Soviet collapse then produced an extraordinary period in which the institutional architecture and the distribution of global power temporarily coincided. American primacy underwrote both. That coincidence has disappeared.

Bremmer identifies three principal causes. The first was the failure after 1991 to incorporate Russia satisfactorily into the Western-led political and security architecture. Whatever allocation of historical blame one prefers — and Bremmer is generally more interested in consequences than in distributing moral culpability — Russia emerged as a declining former great power that regarded the international system as having been constructed against her interests. Her response has been increasingly revisionist and, in Bremmer’s terminology, that of a “chaos actor”. The invasion of Ukraine represents the most catastrophic manifestation of this estrangement, but it is part of a much longer process.

The second cause was almost the opposite mistake. Whereas Russia was insufficiently integrated into the Western order, China was integrated extraordinarily successfully into its economic components. Yet Western governments assumed that economic integration would produce political convergence. China entered the World Trade Organization, became indispensable to global manufacturing and accumulated extraordinary national wealth without becoming a Western liberal democracy. Instead she developed her own conception of state capitalism, political authority and international influence. The result is the peculiar circumstance in which the United States and China are simultaneously strategic competitors and indispensable economic partners. Bremmer therefore resists the superficially attractive analogy of a second Cold War. Washington and Beijing may be rivals but their economies, technologies and supply chains remain entangled to a degree wholly unlike the relationship between Washington and Moscow during the twentieth century.

The third cause lies within Western societies themselves. Globalisation created immense aggregate wealth but distributed its benefits unevenly. Bremmer argues that substantial numbers of citizens in advanced democracies came to believe — sometimes with considerable justification — that the internationalist policies promoted by their governing elites were not operating in their interests. Inequality, demographic change, technological disruption and declining trust in institutions consequently weakened domestic support for the very international leadership upon which the post-war order depended. The crisis of international order is therefore partly a crisis of domestic political legitimacy.

Donald Trump occupies a particularly important place in Bremmer’s analysis because Trump is simultaneously a consequence and an accelerant of this transformation. Bremmer does not treat Trump as the original cause of the collapse of the post-war order. The structural problems long pre-date him. Nevertheless Trump embodies an American political movement that questions whether the United States benefits from maintaining an international system whose costs she disproportionately bears. In Bremmer’s assessment of 2026, the paradox has become particularly stark: the country that constructed the post-war international order has itself become the greatest source of uncertainty about that order’s continued existence.

There is an important subtlety here. Bremmer does not believe that American power has simply disappeared. Indeed his analysis is in some respects precisely the reverse. The United States remains extraordinarily powerful. What has declined is the correspondence between American capabilities and America’s willingness to deploy those capabilities in support of a predictable set of international rules. Power without consistent institutional purpose may destabilise an international system almost as effectively as declining power.

This leads to perhaps the most interesting part of Bremmer’s account. He argues that asking whether today’s world is unipolar, bipolar or multipolar poses the wrong question. The contemporary international system consists instead of several overlapping orders in which power is distributed differently. In military and security affairs the system has remained substantially unipolar: the United States possesses global military capabilities unmatched by any other state. China is becoming a formidable military power in East Asia and Russia remains a nuclear superpower, but neither possesses anything comparable with America’s worldwide network of bases, alliances, naval capabilities and power projection.

Economically, however, the world is multipolar. The United States remains enormously important but China, the European Union, Japan, India and other significant economies possess independent sources of economic power. Brussels can establish regulatory standards that multinational corporations must observe. Beijing possesses enormous industrial capacity and commercial influence. India is becoming progressively more consequential. Middle powers can trade with China, obtain security cooperation from the United States and negotiate with Europe without choosing a single geopolitical camp. Economic multipolarity therefore sits uneasily alongside military unipolarity.

Then there is a third order — and this may ultimately prove the most consequential. Bremmer describes an emerging digital or “technopolar” order in which governments no longer exercise exclusive authority over some of the most important structures governing human life. Technology companies control social networks, artificial-intelligence systems, cloud infrastructure, communications platforms, enormous repositories of personal information and increasingly the informational environments within which political opinions themselves are formed. These corporations are not merely businesses operating within a political order. In certain respects they have become geopolitical actors.

This proposition becomes more persuasive as artificial intelligence develops. A nineteenth-century industrial corporation could become exceptionally rich but it could not readily determine what billions of people saw, read and believed. Contemporary technology platforms can. AI companies may acquire still more unusual forms of power because the systems they develop increasingly mediate education, employment, scientific research, military intelligence and even individual reasoning. Bremmer is strikingly optimistic about AI’s potential to transform education, health and science while simultaneously acknowledging severe tail risks.

Hence contemporary geopolitics may no longer be understood exclusively by drawing coloured territories upon maps. States still matter enormously — armies occupy territory and governments levy taxes — but sovereignty is becoming functionally fragmented. Washington may dominate military affairs, Beijing may dominate particular industrial supply chains, Brussels may exercise regulatory power and Silicon Valley companies may dominate parts of the digital environment. Different actors therefore possess different varieties of sovereignty.

For Ukraine this analysis has uncomfortable implications. The Russian invasion is simultaneously an old-fashioned imperial war and an expression of the disorder Bremmer describes. Russia is sufficiently powerful to destroy but insufficiently powerful to construct a stable alternative European order. The United States remains sufficiently powerful to determine much of the strategic environment but her commitment to traditional alliance structures has become politically contested. Europe possesses immense aggregate economic resources but continues to struggle to translate them into equivalent military capabilities. Ukraine therefore exists at the intersection of Bremmer’s competing orders — dependent upon American security power, European economic power and increasingly private technological power.

There are nevertheless reasons to question aspects of Bremmer’s framework. The concept of G-Zero risks exaggerating the novelty of international disorder. The supposed golden age of American-led multilateralism contained the Korean War, Vietnam, repeated Middle Eastern wars, military dictatorships, genocides and numerous occasions upon which great powers ignored international law. International order has always been selective. Smaller countries have frequently experienced something resembling Bremmer’s “law of the jungle”, even when Western policymakers believed themselves to be presiding over a stable rules-based system.

There is also a tension between the proposition that the world is G-Zero and the proposition that the United States remains overwhelmingly dominant in security affairs. If America possesses unrivalled military power, the problem may be less an absence of a hegemon than an increasingly unpredictable hegemon. That distinction matters. A genuinely multipolar world and a world dominated by an immensely powerful but politically inconsistent United States may generate quite different forms of instability.

Yet Bremmer’s framework remains valuable precisely because it refuses the easy proposition that China is simply replacing the United States. The evidence does not support so tidy a transition. China has neither America’s worldwide alliance network nor her global military reach. Russia plainly cannot construct an alternative world order. Europe has formidable economic and regulatory capabilities but remains strategically fragmented. India is increasingly powerful but jealously guards her freedom of manoeuvre. The so-called Global South does not constitute a coherent geopolitical bloc at all. What is emerging is consequently not a new hierarchy but a collection of overlapping hierarchies.

Bremmer’s darker conclusion is that this transitional period may become considerably more dangerous before a new equilibrium emerges. In 2025 he argued that the G-Zero leadership deficit was intensifying and by 2026 his analysis had hardened: the United States itself had become central to the destabilisation of institutions it once created. He sees three theoretical exits from a geopolitical recession — reforming existing institutions, constructing replacements that better correspond with contemporary power or destroying the existing arrangements and imposing new rules through force. The disturbing feature of the present era is the growing attraction of the third alternative.

Nevertheless there is a curiously optimistic element buried within Bremmer’s otherwise forbidding diagnosis. A geopolitical recession is, by definition, a transitional phenomenon. Orders collapse because their institutions cease to reflect reality. Eventually new arrangements emerge. The unanswered question is whether that adjustment occurs principally through institutional reform or through catastrophe.

That question is particularly important for Europeans. If Bremmer is right, nostalgia for the post-1991 international order is not a strategy. Europe cannot indefinitely assume that American military protection, Chinese trade, Russian containment and inexpensive energy can coexist without contradiction. European states must acquire greater capacity to defend themselves while preserving those features of the rules-based system that remain worth defending. Ukraine’s survival is intimately connected with that project because the war there is partly a contest over whether borders and sovereignty remain rules or merely preferences observed when convenient.

The enduring significance of Bremmer’s work therefore lies less in any individual prediction than in his description of the structure underneath contemporary crises. Ukraine, Taiwan, US-China competition, European rearmament, Russian revisionism, populism, artificial intelligence and the extraordinary political power of technology corporations can appear to be separate subjects. His framework suggests that they are manifestations of the same historical transition — the fragmentation of authority that followed the end of American-led unipolarity.

We are accustomed to imagining international orders as arrangements between states. Bremmer invites us to contemplate something stranger: a world in which there may be several orders simultaneously, each possessing different rulers and different rules. America may remain the military hegemon without being the political leader. China may become an economic superpower without becoming a universal ideological model. Europe may exercise regulatory power without equivalent military strength. Technology companies may govern important dimensions of human existence without possessing territory at all.

That is not yet a new world order. It is the interval between world orders.

And Bremmer’s essential warning is that such intervals are rarely peaceful.