As America hurtles toward its 250th birthday, the world is watching. Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group President and PBS host, gives his unvarnished read on the state of Brand America. He shares how he’s advising business and political leaders around the globe, why he believes the US is overdue for a revolution, and what the widening gap between American wealth and American opportunity means for the country’s standing in the world.
This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
Things like trust in the U.S. dollar, English as the default language, the primacy of U.S. entertainment and music and global culture, all of that is evidence that America’s impact and appeal remains predominant. But the U.S. brand, where it stands, is not quite as stable as it might look if you just talk about those things.
Other countries in the world don’t trust the United States. You talk to the Europeans and they’ll tell you how angry they are about the way the U.S. has treated them on trade, on Greenland, on Ukraine. I was with the Japanese recently, high-level officials, and they told me they felt like we’ve extorted them in their trade deal by demanding $550 billion of investment in the U.S. or else, and we get to decide where it goes. They don’t. It’s on and on and on. Countries around the world certainly understand American power, but the United States is not respected around the world and is not viewed as dependable.
You have talked about this for a while. This is not just what’s happened in the last year or so with the second Trump administration, but a trend that’s been ongoing.
You’re right, Bob, that this is something I’ve talked about for well over a decade now. And there are structural aspects that have nothing to do with the president. The idea that the United States would just be the architect of global free trade is something that now most Americans reject. And they want to see industrial policy support for manufacturing, insourcing at home. The United States no longer supports the kind of leadership and burden-sharing militarily with other allies around the world. They want those countries to spend vastly more on their own defense. The U.S. does not want to have the kind of comparatively open borders and immigration regime that many from around the world benefited from, certainly when my grandmother came over here at the beginning of the 20th century. So all of those things are different. And they are different for Democrats and Republicans across the political spectrum.
Having said that, there has been an acceleration with a second Trump administration in the way that he has prioritized the actions of the executive over the last year. The Iranian war has been a staggering mistake, the biggest of his administration. And yet he ran on ending these wars, on being a peacemaker. It’s important to recognize that, as we think about the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, there’s a difference between these structural changes that will persist and these issues that are unique to Trump’s unfitness as a leader.
The limited pushback against some of these things that Trump has been doing, both within his party and from other institutions, is that historically significant?
I think it’s significant, but it’s also significant that we do have real checks and balances, which persist from a market perspective. CEOs have been pretty quiet.
Right.
But when Trump does things that are clearly illegal, an independent judiciary eventually stops him. We’ve seen that with the tariffs, for example, used for ostensible national emergency concerns on countries around the world. The Supreme Court took its time to hear the case and rule on it, but struck it all down. And now Trump is saying that they’re going to see if they can find a way not to have to pay the money back that they’ve already collected, which, of course, again, was illegal. So they will appeal it and they’ll fight it, but they’ll lose. And I consider that pushback. It’s pushback from an independent judiciary that still exists in the United States.
There’s pushback when ICE engages in brutal excesses on the ground in Minnesota and is forced out by CEOs across the board and by local politicians left, right and center. And I can give you so many more examples of this. Courage is contagious. Trump’s clearly engaging in a lot of politically revolutionary activities in that he wants to end checks and balances on the executive, and he will fail. That doesn’t mean that’s the end of political revolution in the United States. We had one with FDR. FDR failed at some things that were excesses, like packing the Supreme Court, but he succeeded in other things, like creating an administrative state that helped allow for the creation of infrastructure in the country that built a working and middle class.
The reality is most Americans today believe some form of political revolution is necessary. That is why you got Trump, and it is why you will have, in the future, more and more political leaders like Trump in their anti-establishment sentiment, though not, hopefully, in their excessive authoritarian impulses, in their excessive kleptocracy personally, and in their policy incompetence. Those are things that are more unique to Trump, but they do not reflect or represent the anger, the anxiety, the demand for change, the revolutionary impulse that, let’s remember, Bob, actually made the United States an independent country to begin with 250 years ago.
Are there things that give you hope? Are there things that you’re optimistic about? Do you have a vision for how this all might come together in a way that is positive or hopeful?
Well, of course. The worst thing would be if you had all of this systemic change and Americans feeling like the system is inadequate, and no political revolution in response. That would be horrible.
What’s happening is obvious, both domestically and globally. You have a set of institutions, an architecture, values, priorities, and leaders, and they are created to address a certain balance of power that exists at a particular period of time. The balance of power changes. The world changes, the country changes, but the institutions are sticky. As that gap becomes too great, you end up in a recession—not an economic recession, but a political recession.
So we are now facing that in the United States. We’re in a political recession, and the American people are reacting to that, demanding more radical change. What I want to see is people fighting for what they believe in. We got an American Pope, Pope Leo, and his first encyclical came out on AI. One of the most important human beings on this planet, with enormous impact and influence, is actually talking about what we need to make society function. Some of that is pretty revolutionary, but this needs to be a time of great change. What has gotten us here will not get us another 250 years. It won’t even get us another 25. Patriotism in this country is having the courage not just to say, “I love my country,” but having the courage to publicly say when your country is (beep) up. That’s what patriotism is. And we need patriotic Americans to do precisely that now, because it matters.
The idea of revolution scares some people because it sounds like dramatic change. What you’re saying is this country needs revolution, and revolution has always been part of the country.
Yeah. We had a revolution to start the country. It was successful beyond our wildest dreams, and we revere that. Then with FDR, after the Gilded Age, with the New Deal and the creation of an administrative state that allowed generations of Americans to have a better shot, that was a successful political revolution. So third time’s the charm. But Trump isn’t the right guy. A lot of people believed in him. He was able to build himself up, and he has some genius. He’s not the political revolution we need, but we still need a political revolution.