[...]... Chinese for “no thank you.” D This is the G-Zero: Everyone is waiting for someone else to put out the fire How did we reach this breakdown in the international order? FROM THE ASHES The road to the G-Zero begins at the height of American dominance At the end of World War II, much of Europe lay in ruins for the second time in less than thirty years Even before the war ended, representatives of forty-four nations... economy’s strength These baked-in Western advantages are no accident At Bretton Woods, most of the other forty-three participating countries gathered around the negotiating table depended on Washington for wartime aid Call them a coalition of the broke and hungry As for the American agenda, President Franklin Roosevelt opened the conference with a call for U.S.-led international cooperation He compared... as much an arena of conflict as a forum for cooperation Over the next several years, this lack of leadership will have far-reaching implications for all of its toughest challenges Then there are the older and more familiar multinational institutions New Yorkers woke on the morning of May 15, 2011, to news that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, had been pulled... make large strides forward But GZero is not the feel-good movie of the year, and these and other emerging powers are unlikely to bid for a bigger share of global leadership Why? Because they face so many formidable challenges at home in managing the next stages of economic development and in protecting their domestic political popularity For emerging-market countries, emergence is a full-time job, and... likely for the foreseeable future Coordinated efforts to address the questions that matter most for relations among nations and the global economy were once made by the G7—elected leaders and finance ministers of the United States, Japan, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Canada, the world’s leading industrialized powers With American leadership, these free-market democracies set the international... peace Another terrorist attack on U.S soil might reignite public interest in an assertive foreign policy, but it might also do just the opposite, by increasing popular demand for a new brand of isolationism If this is bad news for U.S foreign policy, it is worse news for many other countries, because America has acted for decades as the primary provider of global public goods The American security presence... individual governments, particularly Germany and France But the real reason Lagarde was a shoo-in is that the major emerging-market countries weren’t very unified in their opposition and couldn’t agree on a serious alternative candidate Before the choice of Lagarde was finalized, Chinese, Indian, Russian, Brazilian, and South African officials signed a public letter warning that selection of another European... further dilutes the efforts of any one country or group of countries to set an agenda within them That, in turn, undermines their cohesion and effectiveness As the Copenhagen climate summit illustrated, a diversity of voices is good for maintaining the status quo but bad for management of transnational threats that demand decisive action Nor are we likely to see the formation of new alliances outside these... adjusted for differences in purchasing power, at $7,519 That’s good for a ranking of ninety-fourth in the world, about half the per capita income of Lithuania and one-third that of Portugal.16 More to the point, China’s leaders have publicly acknowledged that the strategy that generated explosive growth rates for the past three decades cannot lift China to the next stage of its development To move forward,... foundation for a new global economy From the agreement signed there in July 1944 came the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (which soon became part of what would be the World Bank), and a plan to establish new commercial and financial relations among nations and set exchange rates that tied the currencies of each member to the U.S dollar The need for reconstruction . Inc. Copyright © Ian Bremmer, 2012 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bremmer, Ian, 1969– Every nation for itself : winners and losers in a G-zero world / Ian Bremmer. p Taras) Nations and Politics in the Soviet Successor States (with Raymond Taras) Soviet Nationalities Problems (with Norman Naimark) EVERY NATION FOR ITSELF Winners and Losers in a G-Zero World IAN BREMMER Portfolio. Bremmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 97 8-1 -1 0 1-5 605 1-8 1. Economic development. 2. International cooperation. 3. World politics. 4. Leadership. I. Title. HD82.B6917