Ian Bremmer

Ian Arthur Bremmer (born November 12, 1969) is an American political scientist, author, and entrepreneur focused on global political risk.

He is the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm.

He is also a founder of GZERO Media, a digital media firm.

Bremmer is of Armenian, Syrian (from his maternal grandmother), Italian, and German descent, the son of Maria J. (née Scrivano) and Arthur Bremmer.

His father served in the Korean War.

He died at the age of 46 when Bremmer was four.

He grew up in housing projects in Chelsea, Massachusetts, near Boston.

Bremmer enrolled in St. Dominic Savio High School in East Boston at age 11.

At 15, he enrolled in university and went on to earn a BA degree in international relations, magna cum laude, from Tulane University in 1989.

Bremmer subsequently obtained an MA degree in 1991 and a PhD in 1994, both in political science from Stanford University.

His doctoral dissertation was "The politics of ethnicity: Russians in the Ukraine".

Bremmer founded the political risk research and consulting firm Eurasia Group in 1998 in the offices of the World Policy Institute in New York City.

The firm opened a London office in 2000; a Washington, DC office (2005); a Tokyo office (2015); San Francisco and São Paulo offices (2016); and Brasilia and Singapore offices (2017).

Initially focused on emerging markets, Eurasia Group expanded to include frontier and developed economies and established practices focused on geo-technology and energy issues.

Bremmer has co-authored Eurasia Group’s annual Top Risks report, a forecast of 10 geopolitical risks for the year ahead.

Bremmer has published 11 books on global affairs, including the New York Times best-sellers, Us vs Them: The Failure of Globalism and The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats—And Our Response—Will Change the World.

In addition, he is the foreign-affairs columnist and editor-at-large for Time and a contributor for the Financial Times A-List.

The book was listed as a top 10 pick by The Economist in 2006.

Bremmer said the 2007-2008 global financial crisis had made it "harder for westerners to champion a free-market system and easier for China and Russia to argue that only governments can save economies on the brink".

The crisis provided evidence that "enlightened state management will offer protection from the natural excesses of free markets".

The term G-Zero world refers to a breakdown in global leadership brought about by a decline of Western influence and the inability of other nations to fill the void.

It is a reference to a perceived shift away from the pre-eminence of the ["G7"] ("Group of Seven") industrialized countries and the expanded Group of Twenty, which includes major emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, Turkey, and others.

In 2010 Bremmer published the book The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations.

In his book, Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World (New York: Portfolio, 2012), Bremmer explains that, in the G-Zero, no country or group of countries has the political and economic leverage to drive an international agenda or provide global public goods.

The term weaponization of finance refers to the foreign policy strategy of using incentives (access to capital markets) and penalties (varied types of sanctions) as tools of coercive diplomacy.

In 2013, he was named Global Research Professor at New York University.

In his Eurasia Group Top Risks 2015 report.

Bremmer coins the term weaponization of finance to describe the ways in which the United States is using its influence to affect global outcomes.

Rather than rely on traditional elements of America's security advantage – including US-led alliances such as NATO and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – Bremmer argues that the US is now "weaponizing finance" by limiting access to the American marketplace and to US banks as an instrument of its foreign and security policy.

Bremmer uses pivot state to describe a nation that is able to build profitable relationships with multiple other major powers without becoming overly reliant on any one of them.

This ability to hedge allows a pivot state to avoid capture—in terms of security or economy—at the hands of a single country.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are shadow states, frozen within the influence of a single power.

Canada is an example of a pivot state: with significant trade ties with both the United States and Asia, and formal security ties with NATO, it is hedged against conflict with any single major power.

Mexico, on the other hand, is a shadow state due to its overwhelming reliance on the US economy.

In Every Nation for Itself, Bremmer says that in a volatile G-Zero world, the ability to pivot will take on increased importance.

and in 2019, Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs announced that Bremmer would teach an Applied Geopolitics course at the school.

Bremmer's book, The J Curve, outlines the link between a country's openness and its stability.

While many countries are stable because they are open (the United States, France, Japan), others are stable because they are closed (North Korea, Cuba, Iraq under Saddam Hussein).

States can travel both forward (right) and backward (left) along this J curve, so stability and openness are never secure.

The J is steeper on the left-hand side, as it is easier for a leader in a failed state to create stability by closing the country than to build a civil society and establish accountable institutions; the curve is higher on the far right because states that prevail in opening their societies (Eastern Europe, for example) ultimately become more stable than authoritarian regimes.