You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Today we're bringing you another special episode of TED Explains the World with Ian Bremmer.
Ian is president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media.
He sits down with Helen Walters, TED's head of media and curation, to discuss the latest on the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
All of that and more is coming up right after a short break.
And now our TED conversation of the day.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Helen Walters.
I am head of media and curation at TED.
Welcome to another edition of TED Explains the World with political scientist Ian Bremmer.
Today we are going to explain the current and future states of the wars in Iran and Ukraine.
Ian, as always, thank you so much for being here to help us try to make sense of things.
Hi, Helen.
Good to be back with you.
All right.
Let's start in Iran, which is now entering its sixth month of conflict with the United States.
And in just the last two weeks, we've seen attacks.
We've seen counterattacks.
None of the major issues between the two nations seem to be coming anywhere close to being resolved.
So what is your read of what is going on and what should we actually be paying attention to?
So I guess there are two different components that we need to think about.
The first is why it is that the war is still going on, given the clear costs to everyone involved in the United States, around the world, and to the Iranians.
And the second is how might we think about the potential for a resolution?
So first, why is it happening?
Because we had a memorandum of understanding that was signed between the U.S. and the Iranians, and it was only a matter of weeks before that fell apart.
The issue here is that President Trump and the Iranian military leadership
Really fundamentally disagree about how much leverage they each have over the outcome.
This is very different from what we saw between Trump and Xi Jinping.
When he hit out really hard on the tariffs and created a functional boycott, and the Chinese hit back with their own tariffs, and then the critical minerals licensing regime.
And Trump realized, I do not wanna get into a tit-for-tat continued fight with the Chinese.
This is gonna hurt me too much.
I need to back away.
And I need to ensure stability.
The Iranians have hit Trump back pretty hard, hit the Americans back.
They've hit them back in blocking the straight, and they've hit them back in attacking targets across the Gulf, both infrastructure targets and American bases.
But the Iranians believe they can continue to do that until they have control over the Strait, until they're given that control by the United States, ceded by the United States, so that they are able to get a lot of money and determine who does and doesn't go through.
President Trump's perspective is, yeah, they may have been able to disrupt the straight, but I can continue to blow these guys up and ultimately they're gonna have to capitulate.
So I don't accept
That they can continue to wait me out.
I need to show them by continuing to hit them harder that they're going to be forced to back away from the deal that was signed in the memorandum, which Trump believes is the Iranians can sell oil, but they don't have control of the Strait.
The Iranians believe, no, we have control.
So that's why we are still seeing fighting.
You note that I'm mentioning fighting between Iran and the US and the blockade.
I am not talking about the Houthis.
There is a secondary fight going on between the Houthis and the Saudis.
The Houthis are an important proxy of Iran.
They see that they have more ability to get cash out of Saudi Arabia because the Strait of Hormuz is now shut down.
So they're demanding a whole bunch of money.
They want $10 billion upfront from the Saudis to ensure safe passage.
The Saudis don't wanna give them that, but the Americans have no part of that negotiation.
The Iranians are telling the Houthis to go, but the Iranians have no part of that negotiation.
And as long as the Saudis pay off the Houthis sufficiently, which I suspect they will do, and they have been paying for tens of thousands of salaries in the Houthi-controlled territories of Yemen for the last few months, as long as they up that rate sufficiently,
That's not likely to be an ongoing fight.
So we're talking about Iran versus the U.S.
The Israelis for the time being, not a direct part of that war, though obviously they did initially go to war with the Americans back in February.
That's why it's still going on.
Now, the other thing we need to talk about is the fact that despite the war still going on, the Americans and the Iranians continue to act with a lot of restraint.
Yes, the Strait is closed, but the Americans are not hitting out at the leadership of Iran or the military leadership of Iran.
They're not trying to kill the new Supreme Leader.
They're hitting very few.
Actual infrastructure targets.
They've hit a couple bridges, a power plant, a desalination plant, but there are thousands of those in Iran.
Most of the focus of the two weeks of strikes, 11 days of strikes, has been at military targets.
And the Iranians have hit back basically in a tit-for-tat way.
So they get one desalination plant hit, they hit one.
They get a bridge hit, they hit a bridge.
But there's been a great military.
They take military hits.
They aim at U.S. base in Jordan and they cause some casualties there.
But but this is very far from the kind of all out war that we had back at the end of February, the beginning of March.
And that is despite the fact that Trump continues to threaten that he's gonna destroy all their infrastructure and that he'll rain hell upon the Iranians.
And he has, of course, a very substantial military, the world's largest, which is positioned to do a lot more damage, but he's not doing that.
So why is there this level of restraint
From Trump?
And the answer is that even though Trump knows the midterms are lost, and even though he is prepared to accept higher oil prices for longer,
He knows that the damage that the Iranians can do in response to the United States actually following through on the big threats that he has made are unacceptable.
Unacceptable in terms of the casualties to American soldiers and military capabilities, and unacceptable to American allies in the region across the Gulf.
So if the first set of factors that I mentioned have prevented us from achieving stability and reopening the Strait, the second set of factors has prevented these resumption of hostilities
From returning to all-out war and the potential for broader conflagration.
And that uncomfortable, unsettled, unstable middle ground is where we have now been occupied in the Middle East for the last several weeks.
So how do you think or where do you think we go from this uncomfortable middle ground?
Do you see or do you think that there will be, even though, as you say, Trump has a sense of the ramifications of an escalation of war, do you think that we'll see that?
So Trump said that the Iranians wanted to talk after all these strikes from the US.
The Iranians said, not true.
Actually, the US reached out to us and they want to talk.
This is one where it's actually kind of impossible, absent direct evidence, to know who to believe.
President Trump or the Islamic Republic of Iran.
And that's kind of a crazy thing to say, but the wildness of the exaggeration from both sides over the course of this war means that really you need to verify before you're just going on the face value of what the statements are.
What we do know
Is that we have had now some back and forth conversations and a few days of the Americans holding fire, even after Trump said that these guys don't, it's useless to negotiate with them, there's no point, you can't trust them, all of this.
So showing a desire on the part of the US to see if there is an off ramp.
I don't believe that the Iranians have changed their negotiating position one iota since the memorandum.
They want control.
Now, privately,
What Trump has been discussing with his advisors have been three different options.
One is that the United States basically walks away
And that the Gulf States have to negotiate an outcome themselves.
And this is kind of when he says, maybe we do it without a deal, that's what he means.
And so, yes, the Gulf States will end up having to pay a lot of money directly to Iran, but that'll be negotiated by the Qataris, by the Emiratis, by the Saudis, not Trump's problem.
Second is that they continue to work in direct negotiations with the Iranians to see if they can achieve some kind of compromise where the first time around it didn't work because now they've caused more damage.
And they've shown that they're willing to tolerate higher price of oil for longer, willing to actually implement a blockade.
So even if they haven't caused much damage to Iran, they are showing a greater willingness to take pain, and that that means that the Iranians might not get paid off for a very long time, if ever.
So try that again.
And the third option
Is some level of military escalation.
And this could be slight increase in what infrastructure you hit or going after the nuclear facilities, pickaxe mountain, very, very deep underground hardened facility
Uranium enrichment capabilities.
Trump has said on many occasions, they're never gonna have nukes.
They'll never develop nukes.
So then he could say, at least in principle, see, I took away their capacity to do nukes.
And so that's a win for me.
Those are the options that he's presently looking at.
None of them are likely to reopen the Strait immediately.
Some risk greater damage and fighting.
But I think you're talking about probably something between a month or two of the Strait remaining closed and disrupted with no additional major military escalation to let's say six to 12 months,
Of major disruption with some significant military escalation, but still not the kind of all-out conflagration across the Gulf.
That's the bid-off or spread, if you will, between where we might be heading next.
In the coming months, all of this with significant economic costs to the United States and around the world.
And it is worth remembering
That, I mean, pretty much every world leader looks at this war and says President Trump and the Israeli prime minister, but they're basically blaming Trump because he's the superpower, causing damage to us and our economy through this war.
Having said that, the damage is lower than a lot of people thought.
The oil prices today
Are lower than a lot of people thought.
We're not in a global recession.
And so even though the Iranians, by closing the Strait, and the Americans with the blockade, have taken 13 million barrels a day off of the global market, and that's a lot,
The Chinese are actually importing 5 million barrels a day less.
And that is a massive reduction of strain and stress on the global energy market.
On top of that, there is a higher level of energy going through the east-west route from Saudi Arabia.
You've got a couple million barrels avoiding the strait going through overland UAE pipeline.
And you have some diversification and efficiency gains.
So there is a cost.
That cost is being paid even at the pump over $4 right now on average a gallon in the U.S.
It would have been about $3.30 if you take the Iran war out.
So that is a cost of, you know, about $4.
$600, $700 per family for every family in America because of this war.
And that's just the gas price.
That's not other inflation.
We're not looking at fertilizer.
We're not looking at helium.
We're not looking at long-term food, any of that.
We're not looking at the direct cost of the infrastructure damage that has to be rebuilt.
We're certainly not looking at the civilians that have been killed in Iran and the hundred plus billion dollars of damage to their economy.
All of that is destructive.
And yet.
If we went back to the end of February, the beginning of March, every market participant would have expected this would have been substantially worse.
And there has been more resilience in the global economy.
All right.
So I think you laid out really neatly the spread.
I have to ask you, where would you put your money?
I think Trump really does, look, his ego is preventing him from letting the Iranians say that they want.
And that is what brought us back to a blockade.
But he really wants to move on.
He wants to get to Cuba.
He wants to get to other parts of the world where it's easier for him to have wins.
And that is basically the Donro doctrine.
The Western hemisphere, Venezuela has gone very well.
The devastating earthquake in Venezuela only means the new Venezuelan government needs the Americans even more.
And so they're having to accept
A political transition that's moving more quickly than had been anticipated on top of the oil deals, the mining deals, the financial deals, all the rest.
You've got a whole bunch of governments that have come into play that are more aligned with President Trump, not just Millet in Argentina and Bukele in El Salvador, but also now Fujimori,
It just elected in Peru.
You've got cast in Chile.
You've got the new Colombian government, for example, having thrown Petro out.
I mean, all of these governments are folks that want to work closely with President Trump.
And so, I mean, he would be doing a lot better and the headlines would be a lot more favorable if he was moving on.
And so I do suspect that after maybe this round of talks, maybe more strikes and another round or two.
But I don't think we're going to see significant escalation.
I think it's more likely that Trump moves on.
And that move on probably means that the bulk of the lifting with the Iranians will be done by the Gulf states.
They will have to come to their own deal with Iran.
We broke it, but you guys can fix it.
It is not a pottery barn deal.
Solution for the Middle East, Colin Powell notwithstanding.
I think that makes sense.
Do you think that a president or President Trump has a responsibility to tell the American people what is really going on?
It seems like
As you say, there are kind of no straight stories here.
So how should the American people think about this?
We know that 18 U.S. service members have died.
We know that 1,700 civilians at least in Iran have died.
How can the average layperson understand what is going on, what the trajectory is in any kind of way that they can believe?
I do not believe that the commander in chief has an obligation to say things that will undermine America's negotiating position.
So if it is true that the United States is running desperately low on
Of critical Patriot interceptors or Tomahawk missiles, and that would give the Iranians an advantage to holding on.
I do not believe that the commander in chief should be straightforward with the American people about that at that time.
At that time, I think there needs to be a full reckoning and transparency afterwards.
But I would not want I would not expect the United States president to say that.
But I do expect that the American president needs to be clear and honest about what the purpose of the war is.
About what the war goals are and how one would know if one has achieved them.
And they should be consistent and there should be a reckoning
For that over time.
You go back and say, did you actually get it right or not?
There should be accountability, responsibility.
The buck needs to stop with the president of the United States.
That is not happening.
And that is not happening to such a great degree that many advisers of Trump who are frustrated that he is subverting the national interest of the United States because of his own ego are leaking a lot.
To members of the media, to allies, to others to say, we need to find a way out of this war and the president doesn't listen.
So clearly,
Irrespective of whether I believe the president has a responsibility to be straightforward on those issues with the American people.
He does not believe that.
And we have now seen
So many occasions where from one day to the other, the president says things that just are clearly not so.
And I'll give you one particularly obvious example that quite pained me, was a week ago on Monday,
When the president came out and announced all of a sudden, okay, we're charging 20% tolls on every ship that goes through the Strait, we're gonna collect.
I don't know if you remember, he said this a week ago, Monday, he made the announcement, right?
This was patently not true.
There was no way to implement it.
It was intolerable to allies.
There was no mechanism.
There was no execution.
There was no agreement.
Trump just made it up and he said it.
And obviously he never should have done that, but also his advisors should not allow him to do that.
And you can say, well, they're not powerful enough.
If they're his advisors, they have to have the ability and the willingness to stand up and say, sir, like you are damaging
Your own ability to run the country.
And I cannot stand by and watch you destroy your own credibility.
I can't stand by and watch you destroy your own ability to negotiate and come to a settlement in this war or to win.
Against your adversaries and with support of your allies.
And this kind of thing is happening all the time on Iran because Trump is angry.
He is embarrassed.
None of it can be his fault.
It has to be somebody else, but he doesn't have anyone to blame.
Because he was the one that chose to go to this war.
The only person he could potentially blame is the Israeli prime minister.
But then it makes it seem as if Trump wasn't in charge of his own policy.
He's getting jerked around by the Israeli leader, which he would never understand.
Which first of all, was not accurate.
Trump made the decision, but even if it was accurate, he would never admit that.
So he has no ability to really blame anybody else here.
And it's the fact that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, who twice ran and won
On a platform of I will not start new wars has like now wasted six months of his presidency in the run-up to the midterm elections, having started and failed in a new war.
It's kind of astonishing.
It kind of beggars belief.
It's astonishing.
It beggars belief.
It's also incredibly serious in every way, right?
I mean, if you just take the money side of this, this already cost, I think, $37.5 billion.
Pete Hegseth has just asked Congress for, I think, another $67 billion.
So it just feels like the cost to the American people, to the global public, is just so astronomical.
And how is it possible that one man's vanity is actually able to cost this much for the world?
Yeah, I mean, we're not talking about a trillion yet, but I mean, if you look at the cost to the Iranian infrastructure, if you look, which has to be rebuilt, if you look at the cost to the Gulf infrastructure, I mean, just that one facility, LNG facility in Qatar, it's $20 billion and a minimum of five years to fix.
You look at the inflation costs all over the world for fertilizer, food, helium, petrochem, plastics.
I mean, everything with oil in it.
You're already talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of cost.
And so, I mean, no, it's not Afghanistan.
It's not Iraq.
But frankly, it's clearly the biggest policy mistake that any US president has made since the Iraq war.
And that's astonishing.
Again, for a president who understands just how damaging these wars can be, have been, for a president who, when he was young,
Used his family connections to avoid the draft because he didn't want any part in Vietnam because he understood that that was a bad war.
He understood that that was a war.
He didn't want to sacrifice his own life
I mean, he gets the fact that wealthy people have been able to do that, poor people haven't.
And so he won in part by saying, I'm not gonna fight any wars on the back of unconnected, unwealthy people that can't get an exemption the way that I could.
And that was a compelling thing to vote for.
And now, not so much.
And the fact that he's, you know, the White House is posting, look at the Iran war compared to Iraq and Vietnam.
You're not winning when you're comparing the damage that you've done to Iraq and Vietnam, I assure you.
Indeed, you are not.
Okay, one final question, which may be a bit outlandish, but I've heard people asking it, so I have to ask you is, should we be worried about an escalation to the point of a tactical nuclear deployment?
In Iran?
Yeah.
No, that's stupid.
Okay, good.
Not by the Americans, not by the Israelis, who also have lots of nuclear weapons.
The issue is not...
About military dominance in the region.
The issue is that a very weak Iran has the ability, despite its weakness, to cause an immense amount of damage, can bring the global economy not to its knees, but certainly make it limp and hobble.
And that was not expected.
That was wildly unexpected by President Trump.
On the back of his success in Venezuela when he decided to launch this decapitation strike against the Islamic Republic.
And let us remember, before we close this conversation on Iran,
Let us remember that the people that are suffering by far the most are the 92 million people in Iran, the ones that were killed by the thousands by this Islamic Republic back in January, that the Americans have done nothing to improve their lives.
If anything, their lives have gotten worse.
The new Supreme Leader, the military that's in charge, they are different leaders.
They are just as brutal.
They are just as capable of repressing their population, and they will going forward.
Brutal, brutal.
So Trump is meeting with the Israeli president.
Prime Minister.
I'm sorry, Prime Minister Netanyahu today in Washington.
You talked about how, in fact, the U.S. really drove this, but obviously Israel is super kind of pro-Israel.
Anything that the U.S. can do that damages Iran in any way.
So what do you think that they're going to be talking about today and what should we be listening for in the reporting to come in the next few days?
Yeah, the Israelis would like to see the Americans step this up.
They would be willing certainly to join if the Americans wanted to go after the leaders of the Islamic Republic that are in place today.
And if they wanted to hit Pickaxe Mountain, this nuclear enrichment storage site, the Israelis would support that.
Certainly, Bibi is going to try to push for that.
But I note that J.D.
Vance was added to the meeting.
Recently, and he is very deeply skeptical about the Israeli prime minister and about Israel trying to push for more American engagement in a war that is more in Israel's interest than in that of the United States.
And I feel quite strongly that Trump is also mistrustful of what the Israelis are trying to get the Americans to do here.
So the relationship is solid.
The integration of intelligence defense forces, that's not changing under Trump at all.
But I think if Bibi's intention is to try to get the Americans to escalate, he is unlikely to be successful.
Do you feel like Vance is, like what's his role in this and what is his impact and effect on Trump?
Well, Vance, of course, wants to be president in 2029.
It's very hard to do that if you are Kamala Harris for Trump.
So he needs to find a way to differentiate himself from the Trump policies that are failing.
Without undermining Trump directly, because then Trump will put an ax to him.
One thing that's been very interesting is Tucker Carlson said he's no longer a Republican, he's leaving the party.
But he likes J.D.
Vance a lot.
And I suspect that that has been orchestrated by Vance directly or by Vance's people with Tucker, because it's quite useful to have someone like Tucker out there saying Trump bad, Epstein files, corruption, pro-Israel, all of that.
But we like J.D.,
Like that's allowing JD to be less Kamala-like without him having to say, here's what I disagree with on the Trump file.
Is that gonna be enough?
I don't know, especially because Trump's popularity right now, blended, is like 38%, and he's gonna get thumped in the midterms, and that's not gonna be easy to run on the back of.
So, I mean, I would rather be running right now as a Democrat for 2028 than as a Republican,
But that's a long way away and things can change.
We don't know where the economy is going to be.
We don't know what AI is going to look like.
We don't know what the geopolitical space is going to be.
But right now, certainly the Democrats are in stronger positions.
All right, so let's turn to Ukraine because another person that Trump is meeting with today is, of course, Zelensky.
Tell us, what is that conversation going to entail and where is that war?
Where are we at with that war right now?
So as of right now, I took a look right before we started talking, looked like the meeting was over.
The initial readouts from the president of Ukraine were very favorable.
I'm not surprised at all.
The last meeting that the two men had together was in Ankara at the NATO summit just a couple of weeks ago.
It was by far their best meeting historically.
So we've moved on from him being yelled at in the Oval Office.
Well, sure, because Ukraine is winning now.
And Trump loves a winner even more than he hates someone he's angry with.
And Trump was very angry with Zelensky when he refused to open an investigation into Hunter Biden and Joe Biden, which mattered a lot to Trump at the time.
But now he sees that the Ukrainians are able to fight effectively against Russia, that the Europeans are paying for all of it, the American taxpayers are not, and they're launching drones deep into Russian territory.
And Trump is helping them.
Trump is giving them the intelligence that's allowing them to target, just like the Russians are giving satellite intelligence to the Iranians, allowing them to target American bases in the Gulf, by the way, which is one reason why Trump isn't really complaining about that, because from his view, it's like, well, that's what happens in war.
Like, you know, it's the same stuff.
The Ukrainians are getting support from the US as we saw a couple of weeks ago and allowing them to have licenses to start producing Patriot missiles on their territory.
They wanna see that move forward.
Quickly, nobody's expecting that Trump is gonna start writing them checks, but you might see more significant sanctions against the Russians, which Lindsey Graham had been pushing for.
And now we have his funeral, his memorial services today.
A lot of people will be talking about that.
On balance, the Ukrainians are in a stronger position, but that does not mean that now than they were three months ago, that does not mean that Putin is going to accept a ceasefire.
And the danger is that as things go worse for Russia,
In the lack of personnel that he has available to fight, in the economy starting to grip at home because of the Ukrainian strikes more than the sanctions, and also as the Russian people start getting angry with the Kremlin, getting angry with Putin,
What might Putin do?
And that is a concern that I have.
I'm much more worried
That the Russia-Ukraine war might metastasize in the coming year than I am that that might happen with the Iran.
So what does that look like if that war does metastasize?
Well, they are already the Russians are already engaging in asymmetric warfare against NATO allies.
They are providing money for Russians and others on the ground in the Baltic states, in Poland, in Romania and the Nordics.
To engage in arson attacks, vandalism.
They've engaged in direct strikes against critical infrastructure, warehouses, railways, fiber optic cables in the sea.
So at the very least, I expect them to step up that fight with the intention of driving a wedge inside European NATO, having some NATO countries say, this is too much, this is too dangerous, we don't want to spend, we want to engage with the Russians.
Harder to do now that Viktor Orban is gone in Hungary
But still a useful strategy of your Putin.
I expect he'll do that.
I think he will continue to provide more support to the Iranians to go after the US.
It's very interesting that when you look at the Iranian strikes against US military bases,
Most of those drones are shot down, about 90% are shot down by American defenses.
But those that hit, they are hitting exactly the targets they wanna hit.
There are no,
Craters randomly in the ground in these bases.
They're going after radar, they're going after barracks, they're going after planes.
These are things that move around a lot.
They are clearly getting satellite data from the Russians.
So I find that very credible.
So there'll be more of that.
And then the big question, and they're also, they're now hitting the Black Sea, they're hitting all these Ukrainian ships because they're trying to create, again, a greater food shortage.
Where the Ukrainians are not able to export food and 90% of the ships are unwilling to travel out.
Even though Odessa is still functional, you can't get the insurance, you can't get the cruise if the Russian will hit you.
Now, the big question, and you asked me this about Iran,
Is might the Russians use a tactical nuke?
The answer there for me is still no, because I think the Chinese would strongly oppose it.
The Indians, Kazakhstan, I mean, countries that matter to Russia, I don't think they want to take that risk.
I don't think Putin feels that desperate, but I do recognize
That at the end of the day, there are no checks and balances on Putin.
He does not get great information.
He is getting much older.
He looks more infirm.
And his situation feels like he's circling the drain.
He's caused, I mean, you look at the mistakes Trump has made in Iran, that's rookie numbers compared to what Putin is doing
In Ukraine and what Putin is doing to his own country, to his own people, to his own economy.
And I do worry a lot that in another year or two years of this, if Putin refuses to accept the pushing and the nudging from friends,
That he really should engage in a ceasefire, that we could end up in a situation where Putin could take some calamitous decisions, that he'd be willing to go down with the ship the way that a US or a Chinese leader would not, but the head of ISIS would.
The head of Hamas would.
I worry that Putin right now is in between those two sorts of leaders and he's trending towards the latter.
Yikes.
What do you think, if anything, could nudge him towards accepting a ceasefire?
Or does he have to win this war outright?
Does he have that kind of Trump thing of having to look like he won?
I think it will help.
That the Chinese are starting to make that case.
I thought it was good that President Tokayev from Kazakhstan met with him earlier this week and said directly, I really think you should do a ceasefire here.
This war is not helping anyone.
He wasn't saying give back any territory.
He said, just the ceasefire.
You know, like Zelensky already said that he would accept a ceasefire without preconditions.
You do the same thing.
Be willing to sit down and talk.
Tokayev would not have said that six months ago.
He's saying that now.
I think that's interesting.
I think that's important.
He may be throwing his hat in the ring to be the next UN secretary general, by the way.
So there might be an agenda there.
But nonetheless, that would have been particularly unwelcome news for Putin.
So I think that will help.
And again, it's not like Putin, I mean, yes, he has a war economy.
He needs to keep going.
He can't like, he has nothing to do with these people if they come back home.
So there will be other stresses, but ultimately Putin's in charge.
Putin has a security mechanism around him that he runs.
But Putin's also isolated.
So, I mean, one other way that this ends is if Putin's done for, if there is a limited palace coup that takes him out.
Or if the Ukrainians were able to target and take him out.
And believe me, if they had an open shot at him, they probably would.
They know that he's doing the same against Zelensky.
So, I mean, I think that there's like the easy way, which is Putin actually accepts
There's the easy way, which is Putin actually accepts, okay, we gotta like, you know, calm this down.
Or there's the harder way, which is, you know, pro-Goshen plus, and because this guy is driving the economy in the ditch.
But absent those two things, it gets worse.
It gets worse.
And we are seeing that the Russians are, they're stepping up their attacks on civilian targets inside Kiev.
And as they do that, the Ukrainians are going after all these refineries across Russia.
I mean, this does not look like we're about to have a ceasefire.
So we have to wrap it up pretty quickly, but one final question is that as you're surveying the environment, you're looking at the landscape,
What is the one thing that you're waiting for, like a shoe to drop, or what is the one thing that we should all be looking for in order to have a better understanding of what actually is going on?
I think that we've actually passed peak Trump disruption on the global stage.
His ability, whether it's on tariffs and hitting the Chinese, or it's on Russia and doing a deal over the heads of the Europeans and Ukrainians,
Or whether it's Iran and forcing them to capitulate, like ultimately the limits on Trump's power globally have become more clear.
That will become even more so after the midterm elections in November.
And so seeing countries being able to hedge, stand up for themselves,
Look forward to what a post-Trump-America relationship is like.
Those are things that are going to become more clear, I think, and more clarifying to us over the course of the coming months.
So Ian, thank you.
We're no doubt going to call on you to help explain what is going on over the next few months, but always grateful for your wisdom and your insight.
Be well, have a wonderful day, and we'll see you soon.
Happy summer, everybody.
That was Ian Bremmer in conversation with Helen Walters.
This conversation was recorded on July 28th, 2026.
If you're curious about Ted's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today.
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