- Trump would love to come in as the man who ended the Ukraine war.

But the only way I can imagine, in my limited way, for how you do that in 24 hours is you have a call with Vladimir Putin and you say, "Vlad, what do you need?"

(light music) - Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And as Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House with the GOP-controlled House, Senate, and conservative majority on the Supreme Court, I'm ready to declare to all my Spencer Tracy fans that we now live in a MAGA, MAGA, MAGA, MAGA world.

Emphasis on world because Trump's re-election has huge global implications for everything, from the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, to potential trade wars with China, not to mention some erstwhile European and Asian allies.

With all the votes in the US election counted, we're now in that awkward position of knowing enough about the next four years to game things out, while also knowing full well that any predictions we make are liable to blow up in our faces.

- Why can't you have a little confidence in me?

(explodes) ♪ It's a mad, mad, mad, mad world ♪ - But look ahead we must, and here to help me stare into the crystal ball, New York Times, White House, and National Security Correspondent, David Sanger.

And later, GZERO heads to Paris to try to give peace (speaks in french).

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by: Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and- (pleasant music) (enticing music) - On Friday, November 15th, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz picked up the phone, dialed Moscow.

Over the course of the next hour, he urged President Vladimir Putin to bring about an end to the war in Ukraine.

And as far as we know, it was the first call between the sitting leader of a major Western nation and Vladimir Putin since late 2022.

And it was in direct response to Donald Trump's re-election.

President-elect Trump, who has possibly reportedly already spoken with Putin since retaking the White House, and at least seven times since first leaving office, vowed on the campaign trail to bring about a swift end to the war.

- If I'm president, I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours.

(audience applauds) - [Kaitlan] How would you settle that war in one day?

- 'Cause I'll meet with Putin, I'll meet with Zelensky.

They both have weaknesses and they both have strengths.

And within 24 hours, that war will be settled.

It'll be over.

- Note that Trump did not say Ukraine would win the war in 24 hours, which nobody thinks is possible anymore, just that the conflict would be, quote, settled.

And so in the wake of Trump's re-election, a clearly unsettled Olaf Schultz picked up the phone and did something that would've been unthinkable two years ago.

Heck, a couple of weeks ago.

He discussed the terms of a negotiated peace with the instigator of an unprovoked invasion.

Call just the latest sign that Trump's return to office could reshape the global order far more radically than his first term ever did.

On January 20th, 2025, Trump will reassume the most powerful office in the world with a global backdrop of two major wars, comparatively weaker US allies, more aggressive rogue states, and a more complex and competitive geopolitical architecture.

Trump's Ukraine policy, not to mention his transactional approach to alliances, will put plenty of strain on the transatlantic relationship.

The Europeans, already struggling economically, will also be facing higher tariffs from the Trump administration.

Will they take a stronger, more consolidated position on Ukraine, or will they fragment?

And then there's the war in Gaza, where Trump has already signaled to his longtime political ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that he's willing to write him a blank check to help him win that war.

That's bad news for the Palestinians, but it could also embolden Bibi to take even more aggressive actions in the region, potentially against Iranian nuclear facilities.

And let's not forget China.

The world's second-largest economy is seriously underperforming, and Beijing is feeling defensive about the tariff threats that Trump repeated on the campaign trail.

The Chinese are going to be frantically trying to reestablish backchannels to China-friendly Trump allies, like maybe Elon Musk, hoping they can facilitate a less confrontational relationship.

So, yes, America's allies should be nervous, but so too should its adversaries.

Whatever happens, I can predict two things.

First, that President-elect Trump will operate with the backing of an American public who decisively voted him back into office in November.

And second, that whatever Trump does, it won't be boring.

Speaking of not boring, let's get to my conversation with New York Times, White House, and National Security Correspondent, David Sanger.

David Sanger, good to have you back on the show.

- Great to be back with you.

- A lot for us to talk about in this environment.

Maybe start, you said that we were going to have foreign policy picks that would be America First as opposed to Neocon.

What did you mean by that and do you still feel as strongly about it?

- Well, it's a Donald Trump administration, which means that ideological consistency is not the currency of the moment.

Loyalty is the currency of the moment.

Couple of interesting things about the group of people that he has chosen so far.

First of all, we saw none of them in the first term.

Second, in the first term, Donald Trump was looking for people who looked like they fit the part.

They looked like establishment figures.

Rex Tillerson, the former chief executive of ExxonMobil.

Jim Mattis, incredibly well-respected former combatant commander, four-star, comes back out of retirement, so forth.

What did Trump discover?

That they were a restraint on him doing whatever he wanted to go do.

- What he wants.

Yeah, absolutely.

- And every one of them had something in common.

They all got fired.

And the first thing he did here was not appoint some people.

It was announce who he would never appoint.

- [Ian] Mike Pompeo- - Mike Pompeo, his former secretary of state who said, "It might not be a good idea to blow up the Iran deal."

Or, Nikki Haley, who ran against him, the completely unforgivable step.

So, what do we have now?

Initially, some very conventional choices.

Marco Rubio, you may like his politics, you may not like his politics.

He's been in the Senate for 14 years.

He has been the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee.

He is not an out-of-boundary choice for secretary of state.

- You could imagine him secretary of state under a Mitt Romney administration.

- You could imagine him a secretary of state in a George W. Bush administration.

- [Ian] Absolutely.

- But it was a slightly different Marco Rubio.

It was a Neocon Marco Rubio back then who was tough on Russia.

He has shifted in recent times, as has Mike Waltz, the newly appointed national security advisor.

Only in the past few months, as it became clear they were up for positions in the new administration, did they begin to shave back to America First, which was to say, "We're not going to support the Ukrainians.

We're not gonna give them another $95 billion."

They both found reasons to vote against that Ukraine package.

So, what does this tell you?

At first, when we heard about Waltz and Rubio, we thought, "Okay, Trump's roughly replicating his first term."

Then came the next wave, the revenge nominees.

That is Matt Gaetz as attorney general, a man who was under investigation by the Justice Department that he would be leading as attorney general, was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee - House Ethics Committee, yeah.

- for, among other things, the possibility of drug use and trafficking in minors.

That investigation is now being buried away 'cause he quit his House post just a few days ago.

We saw Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence, somebody who took an unexplained trip to Syria to try to work with the Syrian dictator, Bashar Assad, somebody who has frequently spouted Russian talking points during the course of the war, blamed the United States at one point for building a biological weapons lab in Ukraine.

There's no evidence they ever did that.

This person would be sitting atop- - She sort of recanted that, eventually.

- She did, eventually, but she would be sitting atop a structure of 70,000 intelligence professionals across 16 or 17 different agencies, and preparing the Presidential Daily Brief of what President Trump sees each day, something for which she's had no training and no experience.

None of these folks have been vetted in the normal way.

- And indeed won't be vetted in the normal way because the FBI is not being allowed by President-elect Trump to come in and vet them.

- Presumably because he's afraid of what it was they will say, or they'll come back and say, "We would not recommend this person for security clearance."

- Now, the Trump people would say it's because the FBI has become a politicized institution, is itself not trusted, and needs redress and reform.

I mean, this is part of the issue, is that the institutions themselves in the United States have become the object of politics.

Not the policies, but the institutions.

Is that correct to say?

- It is not only correct to say that, Ian, beyond that, what we have seen is people being put on top of these institutions with the explicit assumption that they're there to go disassemble those institutions from their current state, which is exactly what the supporters of President Trump were looking for.

He was explicit about this.

If you voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, it was probably with a thought that these institutions need to be blown up.

- Let's look at policy for a second.

Start with China.

Chinese Xi Jinping just met with Biden, said, "We welcome working with a new Trump administration."

Do you think the Trump administration welcomes working with Xi Jinping?

- Here's the big question for China.

If you were looking at the three elements of the Biden policy, part one was trade.

He's the one who put 100% tariffs on new Chinese all-electric cars.

So he was trying to sort of preempt the Trump argument before there were any Chinese cars on the streets in America.

He did not pull back on any of the Trump-era tariffs.

He didn't expand them much other than the cars, but didn't do that.

The second thing he did was a strategy of depriving China of the most advanced semiconductors, we've discussed this before, while trying to build up the industry here in the United States.

This is for the core technology that everything else depends on.

And here, I think there will be some change.

President Trump, at the end of his campaign, expressed great doubt about the CHIPS & Science Act, which, by the way, had its origins in his previous presidency.

But we'll set that aside for a moment.

And what he said was, "With tariffs, you can force everybody to build these chips here in the United States."

- [Ian] So you don't need the subsidies?

- You don't need the subsidies.

Secondly, the question's going to be, will President Trump continue President Biden's statements that the United States would come to the aid of Taiwan if it was invaded or choked off by the Chinese?

I'm having a really hard time imagining Donald Trump looking at a globe, saying, "This island is way over there.

The Chinese are 100 miles away.

We're thousands of miles away."

This would be far worse than any conflict over Ukraine or something.

I can't imagine him saying that an America First policy would call for the defense of Taiwan.

- We can move to Russia-Ukraine.

There's been a phone call, of course, between Trump and Zelensky.

Elon was on it.

But since then, Zelensky has said a whole bunch of things that he never would've said under Biden.

Like, "I can see this war being over soon because of Trump coming in."

Do you think this is gonna be one of Trump's earliest wins?

- The question here is what do you call a win?

What would Trump like?

Trump would love to come in as the man who ended the Ukraine war.

He doesn't particularly care whether or not it ends on terms that give Vladimir Putin 20% of the country, and therefore ratifies Putin's bet that he could expand Russia's borders by doing the invasion.

So during the Biden administration, the byword was "Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine," which was to say, "We're not gonna go negotiate with the Russians behind Ukraine's back and then force them into a deal."

I'm not entirely sure, Ian, how it is that you get an agreement in 24 hours to end the war.

But the only way I can imagine, in my limited way, for how you do that in 24 hours is you have a call with Vladimir Putin and you say, "Vlad, what do you need?"

And he's gonna say, "Well, how about the 20% of the country I already have and a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO."

- Can't join NATO.

- Or, can't join them for 30 years or something like that.

And then the next phone call, you could imagine, could be Donald Trump to Zelensky.

"Do I have a deal for you.

For a mere 20% of your country, and for a commitment that you will not join NATO, you will get peace, you'll get investment, I'll send my best hotel buddies over to think about how they can rebuild Kyiv.

It'll be beautiful.

You'll continue to be able to have a corridor down to ship your grain out from across the Black Sea."

So you can easily imagine him sort of forcing a deal.

And Zelensky wouldn't have much of a choice because the alternative would be a full cut-off of US aid.

- Right, which he utterly and desperately needs.

Look, certainly Zelensky has shown in the last couple of weeks that he recognizes that he needs desperately to stay on Trump's good side.

- The sign for this, Ian, is that all of a sudden, the Ukrainians are talking about what do the security guarantees look like?

At one point, American officials said their goal here was, this was during the Biden era, to make sure that Russia could never do anything like this again.

Not to Ukraine, not to anybody else.

They've clearly failed at that objective.

The deal that seems to be everyone's dancing around would give some territory to Russia, but I don't understand what would keep Russia from using some time to rebuild, learn the lessons from the mistakes they made, and move to take the rest of Ukraine.

- Let's move to the Middle East.

One place we see a lot of ideological alignment from the Trump appointees is, of course, on Israel.

This has to be the strongest, most pro-Israel constellation of leaders.

And in some ways the most overtly anti-Palestinian constellation of leaders that a US administration has ever seen.

I'm thinking not just of the top cabinet officials, but also Elise Stefanik for UN, Mike Huckabee for ambassador.

- Let's look at those two, Ian.

First of all, he appointed his UN ambassador and his Israel ambassador before he appointed a secretary of state, which tells you he wasn't really terribly interested in what his future secretary of state thought about these ambassadors.

- Who will appoint, who will report.

- Nominally, Elise would report to the secretary of state.

That tells you that Donald Trump wanted to send the message, "These two ambassadors report straight to me."

Second, in Mike Huckabee, he picked somebody from the evangelical side of the Republican Party who has said in the past that the Palestinians don't really exist as a people, that the West Bank isn't really a separate territory.

- [Ian] Israeli.

- It is just part of Israel.

And so he's laid his cards out pretty well on the table.

The question is, does this so poison the chances that the United States could act as something of a intermediary between the Palestinians and the Israelis, which has been the traditional role, or is he saying with this, "We are so far in the camp with the current Israeli government that we're not gonna pretend to go do that, we're going to get a peace deal here by doing it directly with Netanyahu."

- Yeah, I think Trump's position would be, "Look, we created a two-state solution as part of the Abraham Accords last time around.

Take it or leave it."

Palestinians refuse to take it, and so now we no longer support a two-state solution.

- Well, I'm not sure that Donald Trump was ever a real full supporter of the two-state solution in the first term.

There was a famous moment where he said, "Two states, one state, kind of whatever works.

Doesn't make that big a difference."

Well, it makes a big difference.

I think if you're the Palestinians, you're gonna sort of think to yourself, you know, you may be forced into a deal here because both Hamas and Hezbollah have been left in such terrible shape.

I think the real crunch with Netanyahu though doesn't come over Gaza.

- [Ian] Gaza.

- [David] Doesn't come over Lebanon.

- It's Iran.

- It's Iran.

It's the big element here.

I don't think that Donald Trump wants to get into a direct conflict with Iran.

He pulled back from many opportunities to do so in his first term.

He's tried nuclear diplomacy once.

- With the North Koreans.

- Didn't work out so well.

By my count, they've got 60 to 100 nuclear weapons now.

The end of the Singapore meeting, the first meeting with Kim Jong-un, at one point, the president said during a press conference, in response to a question I asked there, "Oh, I think within months you will see the North Koreans turning over their nuclear weapons."

Well, didn't happen.

If you're the Iranians right now, you've got a really tough choice.

because your proxies are in tough shape.

- Are stuck, yeah.

- Your own missiles don't seem to be able to get inside Israel terribly well, given the last two experiences.

So there's gonna be a faction in Iran that's going to say, "Our only choice here is lift the fatwa on nuclear weapons.

Let's go for building it."

And there's gonna be another choice saying, "That's the one thing with Donald Trump we can't do."

- You can't do, or with the Israelis, for that matter.

- That's right.

- Yeah.

David Sanger, good to have you on.

- Great to be with you.

(stolid music) - From national security to international cooperation, just days after Donald Trump's decisive victory in the US presidential election, leaders from around the world gathered in Paris for the annual Peace Forum.

With so much uncertainty about the future of America's global commitments, from climate financing to funding for Ukraine, the vibe, anything but peaceful.

Here's GZERO's Tony Maciulis.

(engaging music) - [Tony] Now in its seventh year, the Paris Peace Forum brings together a global network of government, nonprofit, and private sector leaders to tackle the biggest issues of our time.

- Our leadership has put words like security, solidarity, but also the need to keep our societies together center stage.

- [Tony] But on that stage, it's been looking more like curtains for true cooperation.

- The theme this year is "Wanted: A Functioning Global Order."

What makes the current world order so dysfunctional?

- Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's for all to see, both on the security side with two or three wars going on.

And so we'll be focusing on these hot crises.

But then also in terms of, I would say North-South relations.

The world order doesn't function for many countries from the Global South because of debt, because of the problems they have in the green transition, or simply to eradicate poverty.

- [Tony] And a new era of regional wars is making those problems worse.

This year's Global Peace Index reported the highest levels of armed conflict since the end of World War II, at a time when geopolitical competition threatens diplomatic efforts for peace.

- Gone are the days where you saw comprehensive peace processes and peace settlements.

Here we are in the era of big power rivalry and multipolar world where there are more actors piling in, whether it's in Gaza, whether it's in Haiti, whether it's in Ukraine, whether it's in Sudan.

Getting to the peace table is difficult.

- There's been no shortage of critical issues for leaders to address here in Paris.

But top of mind for Europe, the ongoing war in Ukraine and what Donald Trump's victory in the US election might mean for American support next year.

- Personally, I don't think that Trump will simply throw Ukraine under the bus.

He cannot just sell out to Putin and appear to be weak.

I think the conclusion is still however that Europe should be ready to support Ukraine by itself.

Whether it can is another question, but it should be ready.

- The honest answer, we don't know what will be the policy of next president administration.

But what we know for sure, that Ukrainians will continue of a fight for freedom.

We have no other choice.

Putin openly say that there is no Ukrainian nation, there is no Ukrainian language, there is no Ukrainian culture.

So if we stop fighting, it will be no more us.

- For GZERO World, I'm Tony Maciulis in Paris.

(mystifying music) - That's our show this week.

Come back next weekend if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you just know that you need to keep watching, because it's a train wreck out there.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

(animated music) (animated music continues) (animated music continues) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com - [Announcer] And by, Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

Cox is working to create an impact in areas like sustainable agriculture, clean tech, healthcare, and more.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by: Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and- (pleasant music) (gentle music)