Ian Bremmer

“Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” – Winston Churchill

In a little less than two weeks, Egyptians will choose their first new president since Hosni Mubarak took office in 1981. Before we talk about the contenders as selected by Egyptians in the first round of voting in May, let’s pause to consider how far Egypt has come in an incredibly short period of time.

Egypt has seen its thousands of years on the planet pass by without a democracy. Then, over the course of 18 days, it found itself with a revolution partly fueled by digital tools like Twitter that deposed a president (since sentenced to life in jail). Objects of the world’s attention, the protesters found themselves splashed across the pages of Time magazine, a symbol of the power of change that even oppressed citizens can have when they make the most of their moment and refuse to give up. So why the recent disappointment?

For starters, take the outcome of the first round of voting: The two remaining candidates aren’t exactly the liberal-minded leaders the West had been hoping for. One, Ahmad Shafik, idolizes the deposed Mubarak – whom he briefly served as prime minister – calling him a “role model.” The other, Mohamed Morsi, comes from the Muslim Brotherhood, the moderate (for Egypt) Islamist association that for years has run something like a social services agency combined with a religious militia, but is now evolving into a political organization. That’s a key understanding of the Brotherhood – generations of Egyptians may have fond feelings for it, but it’s nascent as a party or electoral force, since Mubarak and the military ruled the state for so long.

While outsiders could argue that the two finalists are the worst possible choices from the first round, the reality is, shockingly, Egyptians didn’t much care about this vote. Turnout, for a country we might think would leap at the chance to exercise democracy, came in at an anemic 46 percent. Most Egyptians aren’t actually clamoring for the kind of radical change we in the West might expect. Some may actually welcome the return of a Mubarak-like figure – kleptocracy worked perfectly fine for a sizable chunk of the population. Tourism was booming, bread was on the table, and the ideology and value set of the government – at least as espoused, if not as practiced – was consistent with commonly held beliefs.

It’s almost June. So why is the euro zone story just about the same as it was in January? It’s a little like the movie Groundhog Day – every day seems to be a repeat of the last, and the story remains the same. But remember: That movie ended. And every day wasn’t the same. Bill Murray made incremental changes – painful ones – until he figured his way out. That’s what the euro zone is doing right now.

Despite all of the elections, the pain, the protests and the German Sturm und Drang, the fundamental basis of the crisis, and the situation, remains the same. Yet this isn’t as bad as it sounds. The actors in the euro zone are very much playing the long game. They’re using the markets both to punish deviations from the outcome they see as the best possible one and to engineer that outcome and help them shape the policies they think will end the crisis for good.

Despite the protests, the overall commitment to the euro zone remains as strong among all of the key players – Berlin and the peripheries – as it was before. That’s hugely important, reflecting that the overall tenor of the conversation has not shifted toward the disintegration of the euro zone, or any individual exits. Indeed, after the long, dragged-out process that’s happened in the markets these last months, the Germans are finally showing the willingness to compromise that we have long expected. They are very gradually moving toward the idea of the ECB increasing the money supply, accepting some inflation, softening the fiscal compact in the zone – moving forward on a whole host of issues, in fact. But with all that movement, they aren’t giving up on the fundamental premise of keeping the euro zone fiscally stable over the long term and recommitting every member nation to budgetary responsibility. That’s why it’s taken so long to get from there to here.

Who says America is in decline?

Not me. But, if you listened to a recent Rush Limbaugh show, you might’ve heard him dismiss my new book, Every Nation for Itself, as a “declinist” tract that says America’s time as leader of the world is “over.” Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s an inordinate amount of concern out there that writers who are trying to understand the seismic shifts the world has undergone in recent years are in fact doomsayers – wonks who are convinced the U.S. is no longer a superpower and has lost its swagger. On the other side of this false dichotomy is the camp that tries to pretend all the upheaval of recent years has changed absolutely nothing about America’s objective standing on the world stage.

The split is playing out right now, in fact, in the presidential campaign, with the GOP accusing President Obama of being a declinist, while Obama counters that he is merely being a realist and that the Romney camp doesn’t understand the complexities of foreign affairs in the world today. Here’s the thing – not only is that irrelevant, but the very way the debate is being framed for the public is misleading, at best.

Here’s a simple way to think of it: If you’re camping and suddenly find yourself being chased by a bear in the woods, you really don’t need to outrun the bear – you need to outrun the other guys who are in the woods with you. And so far, the U.S. is doing a fine job staying ahead of the pack.

This is an excerpt from Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World, published this week by Portfolio.

Is the U.S. really in decline? Can China become a superpower? Can Europe rebuild? How fast can the rest rise? These are interesting issues, but today’s world faces a more urgent and important question: While we’re figuring all that out, who will lead? Unfortunately, the answer is no one. In this G-Zero era, no one is driving the bus.

The United States and its European allies can no longer drive the global political and economic agenda. The scramble to produce a coordinated and effective multinational response to the 2008 financial crisis made that clear, but the growing leverage of emerging states like China, India, Brazil, Russia and others was apparent years before U.S. financial institutions began melting down and the Eurozone descended into crisis.

A generation ago, the United States, Europe and Japan were the world’s powerhouses. Now, according to Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer, we’re living in a world where everyone – and anyone – can set the agenda. So, what does G-Zero mean for the world?

It’s often said that kinship runs deeper than friendship. Lately, when it comes to chumminess among world leaders and their colleagues in neighboring countries, friendship has trumped citizenship.

Until recently, it was rare to find leaders willing to forge friendships with candidates across borders or to find would-be leaders campaigning inside foreign countries. There are good reasons for that: Candidates who cross these lines can find it harder to win elections or to govern once the electoral test is passed. Their foreign friends can pay a price for backing the wrong horse and for forfeiting a bit of diplomatic leverage once they find themselves sitting across the bargaining table from the man or woman they campaigned against. Consider three current examples.

Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s support for the re-election bid of French President Nicolas Sarkozy is especially startling. It’s hardly surprising that Merkel wants Sarkozy to win. The two leaders have forged a durable personal relationship as they navigated their way through Europe’s ongoing crisis of confidence. The French and German leaders deserve considerable praise for their well-coordinated bid to bolster the euro zone.

We can’t afford to throw him out.

Last week, likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney caused a tempest in a teapot when he told CNN that he thought the top U.S. geopolitical foe is Russia. President Obama’s White House seized on the comment, rebutting that al Qaeda is actually our top foe abroad. But if we look at the way American foreign policy has been enacted since the beginnings of the global crisis, it’s clear that America’s biggest opponent on the world stage is really itself.

Take what’s going on in Syria as the most recent example. That country’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, continues to tease the world’s diplomats by claiming to want peace for his people, yet he cracks down with unfettered abandon on their protests against his oppressive regime. Having just agreed to yet another peace plan, a troop withdrawal by Apr. 10, it’s clear he’ll find some way around his latest bargain, as he always has. What’s even more shocking is that the peace deal, negotiated by Kofi Annan, did not even call for Assad to leave power, which to outside eyes seems like a precondition for any sort of success. And the absence of the demand that Assad go is squarely due to the U.S.’s refusal to back it up with the sort of severe consequences it used to dole out: military strikes, preemptive wars and overwhelming use of force. For the U.S., at least for now, those days are over. And Washington won’t make foreign policy promises it can’t or doesn’t intend to keep.

After all, consider the fall of Gaddafi in Libya. Here was a decades-long enemy of the U.S. whose people rose up against him in a huge insurgency. His people lived in a backward state while he enriched himself with billions of stolen dollars. To borrow a phrase, the case for his deposal was a slam-dunk. Yet even this most climactic act of the Arab Spring did not draw out a single ground-troop commitment from the Obama administration. The U.S., in fact, only ran about 10 percent of the total NATO bombing runs over Libya – not exactly the type of campaign the U.S. military is used to making against brutal dictators with bad reputations who antagonize it.

President Obama’s recent trip to South Korea may have gained attention for his “open mic” slipup with outgoing Russian President Medvedev over missile defense, but that’s just a media distraction from the importance of Obama’s visit to the Korean peninsula. After Kim Jong Il’s death in December, the U.S. took an early lead in negotiations with North Korea – doing so because Obama and his team thought it could be an easy diplomatic win. With the promise of aid and food, the U.S. could let new leader Kim Jong-un quietly drop the consistently belligerent stance the country has taken in what passes for its foreign policy.

It’s now clear that easy win is not going to happen. Despite Kim’s titular status, we still don’t really know who is in charge in North Korea. While there have been no major coups, protests, or blowups, there have been plenty of smaller events, like military executions due to insubordination, that point to a high likelihood of purges happening in the regime. Now factor in that North Korea has gotten decidedly more, rather than less, militant on the nuclear arms front. Its announcement of a satellite test is a thinly veiled attempt to launch a long-range ICBM. The global community is perceiving it as such – with South Korea threatening to shoot the missile down. The vitriol coming out of the North Korean propaganda machine is as hardline and aggressive as we’ve seen in many years.

Several months into the Kim Jong-un regime, there’s little cause for optimism. There’s much cause to be on heightened alert, though, because other than belligerent press releases, the new regime has not shown any ability to deliver on its promises. The South Koreans recently held live-fire exercises on five islands near the disputed Yellow Sea boundary with North Korea; their angry neighbors, despite loudly promising a response, did nothing. As much as we can be glad there was no international incident as a result, it’s not a good sign if the reason the North Koreans didn’t follow through on their threats was that the Kim Jong-un regime was unable to control the military well enough to direct it to do so. The regime change, in other words, has not yet stabilized.

The world’s great powers don’t have enough incentive to intervene in Syria, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer tells Chrystia Freeland.