Foreign-affairs analyst exhibits optimism amid global challenges

The United States president is erratic on social media and demonstrates a lack of impulse control in multiple areas of his public and private life. The Middle East and North Korea continue to be flashpoints of conflict or the threat of conflict, respectively. And China is stealing our technology and gaining the upper hand as the world’s economic superpower.

But there’s reason for optimism, foreign-affairs analyst Ian Bremmer assured the capacity crowd at Symphony Hall Wednesday night as the penultimate speaker of this season of Lesley University’s Boston Speakers Series.

“I’m going to make you 10 percent less uneasy about politics,” Bremmer said in a straightforward yet jocular, rapid-fire manner influenced by his upbringing in Chelsea, Mass.

Among the first steps to becoming less anxious, Bremmer said, is minimizing time on social media and tuning out Donald Trump, if that’s even possible.

“We talk about him too much,” Bremmer said, adding that Facebook executives don’t even allow their own children access to Facebook, as they’re aware of the ways users are vulnerable to any manner of chicanery and malevolence, both related and unrelated to politics.

Bremmer is the president and founder of Eurasia Group, a global political risk research and consulting firm. He is the founding chair of the Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk at the World Economic Forum, and an acclaimed authority on the connection between politics and the financial markets.

“We still have strong institutions,” Bremmer said, adding that “even with the orange man” and the emboldened alt right, the United States isn’t in jeopardy of becoming a fascist state, especially in comparison to other Western countries like France and Germany, where overt extreme nationalists, anti-Semites and anti-immigration candidates have been gaining a stronger (though still minority) foothold in government.

“I am a fan of Brexit,” as it makes America’s problems pale in comparison, joked Bremmer, citing the United Kingdom’s future breakaway from the European Union, although that appears on hold for another several months even more than two years after citizens voted to leave the alliance.

Bremmer added that tensions between the United States and our Canadian and Mexican neighbors can’t compare to other regional conflicts. “Turkey would love neighbors like that,” Bremmer said.

Plenty of bad news, too

Though Bremmer insists America is not in decline as a world power, we are a nation divided because of several realities: widening economic inequality among citizens, significant anti-immigration sentiment, debates over war and the use of American troops overseas and in Latin America, and the negative aspects of social media.

“Trump is a symptom, not the cause” of what ails the country, Bremmer said, adding that virtually every developed nation except Japan experiences the same societal maladies confronting Americans.

In other challenges facing the United States:

• Russia, which we never helped rebuild after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is angry at us and hammering us in the one area of parity — internet technology — influencing American voters and fomenting unrest (creating at least two phony Black Lives Matter-related Twitter accounts to disseminate anti-U.S. propaganda).
• China is leading the way on technology, and often violating copyrights, to address global climate change (Bremmer opposes the so-called Green New Deal, saying, “We need a Green Marshall Plan,” one that remakes national and global infrastructure in a more environmentally responsible way, similar to the way we rebuilt Europe after World War II).
• While the Islamic State caliphate appears to be demolished, various pockets of ISIS aggressors and other terrorist organizations continue to operate in the Middle East and Europe.
• North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un refuses to give up his nation’s nuclear weapons (presumably not wanting to share the fate of non-nuke-holding enemies of the United States, such as Saddam Hussein and Moammar al-Gaddafi)
• Venezuela’s exchange of power, if it happens at all, is likely to remain fraught with violence and corruption, possibly putting pressure on the United States to authorize military intervention.

But Bremmer said he believes the United States and China will make substantial progress on a trade deal, that North Korea will be kept in check vis-à-vis the testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles, and even the scuttled nuclear-program deal with Iran can be resurrected — provided there’s no second Trump term.

See more photos from the event here.