The Next Global Superpower Isn't Who You Think | Ian Bremmer | TED

I have a big question. Which is, who runs the world? It used to be an easy question to answer. If you're over 45 like me, you grew up in a world

that was dominated by two giants. The United States called the shots

on one side of the Wall, the Soviets set the rules on the other. And that was a bipolar world. It's very simple. If you're under 45, you grew up when the Soviet Union

had already collapsed, and that left the United States

as the sole superpower, dominating global institutions

and also exerting raw power. And that was a unipolar world. And then about 15 years ago, things got a little more complicated. The United States increasingly

didn't want to be the world's policeman or the architect of global trade or even the cheerleader for global values. Other countries were becoming

more powerful, and they could increasingly ignore

many of the rules they didn't like, sometimes even setting

new rules themselves. What happened? Three things. Number one, Russia was not integrated

into Western institutions. A former great power

now in very serious decline and they are angry about it. We can argue about whose fault that is,

but we are where we are. Number two, China was integrated

into US-led institutions on the presumption that as they got

wealthier and more powerful, they would become Americans. Turns out, they're still Chinese. (Laughter) And the United States is not particularly

comfortable with that. Number three, tens of millions of citizens

in the United States and other wealthy democracies felt left behind by globalization. This has been ignored for decades. But as a consequence, they felt that their governments

and their leaders were more illegitimate. Now if you look at all the headlines

in the world today, driving all of this geopolitical

tension and conflict, over 90 percent of them

are because of these three reasons. And that's why today

we live in a leaderless world. But as we know, that's not going to be with us for long. So what comes next? What kind of a world order might we expect over the next ten years? Some of what I might say

I think will surprise you. Because we're not going to have a bipolar or a unipolar

or even a multipolar world. If we don't have one or two superpowers, we don't have a single global order. No, instead, we will have

three different orders, a little overlapping, and the third will have immense

importance for how we live, what we think, what we want, and what we're prepared to do to get it. But first things first. Today, we have a global security order. And as you see from the map, the United States and its allies

are the most powerful players on it. The US is the only country in the world that can send its soldiers and its sailors and its military equipment

to every corner of that world. No one else is close. China is growing in its military

capabilities in Asia, though nowhere else. Lots of American allies in Asia

are concerned about that. And as a consequence,

they're becoming more dependent on the United States

for a security umbrella. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US allies in Europe are becoming

more concerned and dependent on the United States and a US-led NATO. The Russian military, of course,

has been a greater global concern, much less so today, especially as they've lost

over 200,000 troops and all of that equipment and with sanctions making it extremely

hard for them to rebuild. Now, Russia and China and others

have nuclear weapons, but thank God it is still

suicide to use them. And as a consequence, our security order is a unipolar order and it is likely to remain

so for the next decade. Now at the same time

that there's a security order, there's also a global economic order. And here, power is shared. The United States is still

a very robust global economy. But the US can't use

its dominant position militarily to tell other countries

what to do economically. The United States and China are enormously

economically interdependent and so they can't control each other. You may be surprised to hear this, but today US-China trade relations

are actually at their highest level in history. Now, other countries in the world, a lot of them want access

to US military muscle, but they also want access

to the Chinese market, soon, by 2030, likely to be

the largest in the world. And you can't very well have a cold war if the US and the Chinese are the only two

that are prepared to fight it. Yes? Yes. So the European Union

has the largest common market and they set the rules. And if you want to do

profitable business there, you listen to those rules. India is playing a greater role

economically on the global stage. Japan still matters, too. And over the next ten years, there will be a rise and fall of the relative capacities

of these economies. But the global economic order is

and will remain a multipolar order. Now, between these two orders are tensions because the United States will use

its power in national security to try to bring more

of the world's economies towards it. And we already see this

starting to happen in semiconductors and in critical minerals

and maybe soon in TikTok. The Chinese are trying to use their

dominant commercial position to align more of the world diplomatically. And Japan and Europe and India and everyone else will do their damnedest to ensure that neither

of these two orders dominate the other. And they will mostly succeed. Now, so far I have spoken with you about the two world orders we already see, but there's a third that is coming soon

that's even more important. And that is the digital order. And the digital order

is not run by governments but by technology companies. We all know how much military support NATO countries have provided Ukraine during the war. But it's technology companies

that provided the tools allowing Ukraine to defend itself

from Russian cyber attack. It's technology companies

that gave the Ukrainian leaders the ability to speak with their generals

and their soldiers on the front lines. If it wasn't for those

technology companies, Ukraine would have been fully offline

within weeks of the war. And I don't believe President Zelensky

would still be there today. Technology companies determine

whether Donald Trump is able, in real time and without filter, to speak with hundreds

of millions of people as he runs again for the presidency. It's social media platforms and their ability

to promote disinformation and conspiracy theory. Without them, we do not have riots

in the Capitol on January 6. We do not have trucker riots in Ottawa. We do not have a January 8

insurrection in Brazil. Technology companies increasingly

determine our identities. When I was growing up,

it's nature or nurture. I mean, my deep and abiding

emotional problems either come from how I was raised -- (Laughter) Or some genetic failure. (Laughter) Could be both. (Laughter) But today, our identities are determined

by nature and nurture and algorithm. If you want to challenge the system, you can't just question authority, as we were all told

when we were growing up. Today, you have to question the algorithm, and that is a staggering amount of power in the hands of these

technology companies. What are they going to do

with that power? And that depends on who they want to be when they grow up. So if China and the United States

work to exert much more power over the digital world and technology companies

in those countries align with those governments, we will end up in a technology cold war. And that means the digital order

will be split in two. If, on the other hand technology companies persist

with global business models, and we retain competition

between the digital and physical worlds, we will have a new globalization,

a digital global order. Or if the digital order

becomes increasingly dominant and governments erode

in their capacity to govern, and we've already seen

the beginning of this, technology companies

will become the dominant actors on the global stage in every way and we will have a techno-polar order. And that will determine whether we have

a world of limitless opportunity or a world without freedom. Now at this point in my speech, I'm supposed to talk about the good news. (Laughter) But those of you that have heard this know that that is not coming. (Laughter) There is no pause button on these

explosive and disruptive technologies. I don't know if you know this, there are over 100 people

in the world today with the knowledge and the technology

to create a new smallpox virus. Honestly, I don't have answers, but I have a few questions

for the people that do. Because these technology companies

are not just Fortune 50 and 100 actors. These technology titans are not just men

worth 50 or 100 billion dollars or more. They are increasingly

the most powerful people on the planet with influence over our futures. And we need to know, are they going to act accountably as they release new

and powerful artificial intelligence? What are they going to do

with this unprecedented amount of data that they are collecting on us

and our environment? And the one that I think should

concern us all right now the most: Will they persist with these

advertising models driving so much revenues

that are turning citizens into products and driving hate and misinformation and ripping apart our society? (Applause) When I was a student back in 1989, and the Wall fell, the United States was the principal

exporter of democracy in the world. Not always successfully. Often hypocritically. But number one, nonetheless. Today, the United States has become

the principal exporter of tools that destroy democracy. The technology leaders who create

and control these tools, are they OK with that? Or are they going to do

something about it? We need to know. Thank you. (Cheers and applause)