Review: Every Nation for Itself by Ian Bremmer

Ian Bremmer’s Every Nation for Itself: Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World is an eminently readable, current, mainstream take on the geopolitical environment. It’s a step above the toilet paper put out by the likes of Friedman, Zakaria, and the other Friedman.

Every Nation is a 20,000 ft view of what happens to world as the massive debt bubble pops.  Chapter One is a fantastic discussion of why nothing is going to get done re: climate change, oil, terror. Simply: when they launched globalization, they forgot about control systems. It’s a chapter that should be taught in schools.

The rest reads like someone narrating a game of pool just after the break: China’s going one direction, the 8-ball another, and in the corner Turkey’s slamming into Greece. It the ricochets of globalization. And as far as what that means to nation-states and Fortune 500 companies, this is a good read. These are, after all, Bremmer’s bread and butter clients.

But in doing so, he ignores the drivers. The major trends. Things like peak oil and systems disruption. Even when he tries to include cybersecurity, it reads like one of his marketing aides told him to add a buzzword. It’s un-nuanced at best (he only covers it as a tool of states and kingmakers).

So it’s not for anyone concerned with unpredictable events or disruptive innovation. But it is a good way to stay on top of white-collar mainstream thinking – which, appropriately, is all it claims to be.

-Shlok
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