Ian Bremmer

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.

There are two countries right now – China and the United States – that could contain North Korea, which remains among the poorest and most totalitarian countries in the world. China, in the middle of its own transition of power, which has been peaceful but not without intrigue, hardly has the capacity to fully engage on North Korea. Obama has learned that there is no quick win to be had in North Korea – and if he is telling the Russians he doesn’t want to deal with issues surrounding missile bases before the November election, we can imagine he has no desire whatsoever to contend with an entire rogue country, especially one as bizarre as North Korea.

While the U.S. would love China to step up here, that’s not going to happen. As has been said, a good analogy would be that China would sure like it if the U.S. could step up on Iran already. To put it simply, what everyone would most like is for North Korea to stay quiet for much of the next year. That way China can get its transition under way, and Obama and the Republican nominee can talk tough on North Korea without actually having to do anything about it.

The last thing either country’s leadership needs is for anything on the Korean peninsula to escalate in the coming months. It’s a sort of limbo diplomacy, where Obama’s best friend is the boring passage of time that would allow him to push off the North Korean situation onto the Chinese. It’s a good plan – but it’s still early in the year. Will things work out that way? Stay tuned.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama looks through a pair of binoculars as he visits U.S. military personnel stationed at Observation Post Ouellette along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that borders North and South Korea, March 25, 2012. REUTERS/Larry Downing

Iran’s nuclear brinkmanship is leaving President Obama with few options: push Iran too hard, and energy prices rise. Do too little, and leave Israel in danger. Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer explains how the U.S. can contain the Iran threat. Part 2.

Iran’s taunting the West, Israel’s rattling its sword, and gas prices are rising. All that puts President Obama’s future at risk, Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer tells Chrystia Freeland. Part 1:

Could it be that the international sanctions against Iran are hurting the Obama administration more than Iran itself? The argument over whether sanctions ever work is an age-old and never-ending debate, and to be clear, that’s not the one I’m trying to have in this column. But I do think it’s worth examining the negatives of Obama’s Iran policy, especially because it is likely to play out during this election season.

Let’s start with the background: Iran’s recent parliamentary elections went off without a hitch. No major protests (see: Russia), no violence, barely a blip in the Western media. Turnout on voting day was surprisingly high, even for the Islamist republic. That has a little to do with the fact that government is actually quite factionalized in Iran — Khamenei versus Ahmadinejad, yes, but also all sorts of high and midlevel bureaucrats — and each faction worked hard to drive turnout, to be able to pass the hot potato of blame should the election have gone poorly. Well, the election didn’t go poorly at all, and suddenly Iran’s government looks more legitimate, internally and externally, than it has in years. Reformists in Iran also picked up a large number of seats, and Iran has everything it did before the election — real economic wealth, a social safety net and huge oil resources that it can sell to every country that doesn’t adhere to the sanctions, of which there are plenty.

That’s the country Barack Obama has to keep in a box to win the election, which is to say one that doesn’t exactly look deplorable to large parts of the global community — like Russia, China, nearly all of Africa and even much of the Middle East. The Iranians won’t be easy to demonize, and to get the sanctions lifted, they are even making concessions to the Europeans, suggesting in talks they’d be amenable to restarting inspections. They’ll play the razor’s edge, even as the uncertainty in the oil market and fear of a shock — like an attack by the U.S. or Israel — steadily drives up the price of oil around the globe.

And that’s the downside for Obama — not only does he have to keep the hawks on their heels to stay true to campaign promises of avoiding unnecessary conflict, but he’ll have to do it as the threat in Iran appears to mount and the price of oil continues, most likely, to climb from its already-high perch of about $107 a barrel. Can Obama really squeeze Iran economically? Given the facts on the ground and Iran’s willingness to play at good behavior, I just don’t buy it. With an improving economy here and a self-defeating Republican field, this is one area that can go bad for the incumbent administration in a hurry, much more so than Europe’s shaky economy or the Greek debt crisis boiling over.

Yet the president is managing the situation as well as anyone could. In meetings with the hawkish Israeli prime minister, Obama kept Bibi Netanyahu talking in abstracts rather than concrete plans for Iran. He promised the country he wouldn’t telegraph his plans, arguing it’s foolish to tell a potential enemy what’s going to happen. (That’s a striking about-face for a country that so recently had a doctrine of preemptive war.) Obama probably got a good performance from Netanyahu because the U.S. has covertly provided Israel with much support on the Iran situation. But make no mistake: Behind the scenes, Bibi has surely drawn a line beyond which Israel won’t placidly follow U.S. policy.

Even though the energy-consuming behaviors of Americans are surprisingly elastic, as illustrated in a new study showing we’re driving far less than we used to, citizens and voters do fear the idea of $5-per-gallon gas — and they’ll punish the politicians who allow it to happen. Even if Obama manages to contain the financial and housing crises, not to mention stop the bleeding on unemployment, he can’t replace them with an energy crisis and expect to avoid pushback in the voting booth. And that’s what, heading toward November, he’ll have to fear in the standoff with Iran and the U.S.’s relationship with Israel.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

Ian Bremmer sat down with Reuters’ Paul Smalera to discuss President Obama’s plans to boost the American economy. Watch here:

By Ian Bremmer
The views expressed are his own.

When President Barack Obama announced in late 2009 that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, few were as pleased as Defense Secretary Robert Gates. A holdover from the George W. Bush administration, Gates had championed the 2007 surge of troops into Iraq, a move that helped turn both the tide in that country and public opinion in the U.S. on its future. Gates and the generals hoped for similar success against the Taliban.

But how do you measure success in a place like Afghanistan? Soldiers, no matter how many, can’t build democratic, financial and industrial institutions overnight. At best, they can help make Afghans safer and life much harder for those who would launch attacks beyond the country’s borders. By that measure, the record of both surges is mixed, if generally positive. But post-surge, one thing is certain: Obama allowed Gates to prosecute the war on his terms, but new Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will be asked to implement a plan that has less to do with Kandahar than with Capitol Hill.

Withdrawal is the right move, maybe the only move, for Team Obama. The president has gotten the politics of the moment exactly right, yet again. In the first half of his term, he retained Bush’s team at the Pentagon and reshuffled his top generals, namely David Petraeus, through various leadership positions in Iraq and Afghanistan. A surge that seemed to be working was allowed to play out, and Bush was likely to take the blame if the strategy failed. But President Obama knows that Bush’s burdens are now his—the economy, jobs and the wars.

Now the president has put Petraeus, who understands how to use intelligence as a military commander, in charge of the CIA. In this role he’ll likely use agency operatives to conduct the kinds of covert operations that will keep Afghanistan (and Iraq) free of influence from large terrorist networks. Panetta, having learned the CIA’s capabilities during his tenure as its chief, takes charge at a Pentagon braced for budget cuts. The war is being moved off of the Defense Department’s books, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. can afford to simply pack up and head home. Afghanistan will become a quieter conflict, allowing for “nation-building here at home,” as the president said in his statement announcing the end of the surge, and a forward-looking platform for his re-election campaign next fall. Bush is the president who promised to avoid nation-building, but it’s Obama who is keeping that promise.

If Obama can afford to turn to domestic challenges, that’s largely thanks to the stunning successes of special forces and counter-terror operations—in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The effect of the troop surges on the long-term prospects for stability in these two countries is debatable, but bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda has been routed. This won’t be last time you read about the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan vis-à-vis the coming presidential election.

But what if Obama is wrong? What if the Taliban refuses the president’s offer to talk? What if China or Russia or both decide that departing U.S. troops create opportunities for a bid to lay claim to the country’s vast natural resources? Worst of all, what if Afghanistan starts to crumble? What if the corrupt men that President Karzai has been protecting allow the country to again become an international locus for terrorists? What if the 68,000 U.S. troops set to remain in the country find themselves besieged by tribal warlords or Qaeda militants? What if Iran and Pakistan, for entirely different reasons, create turmoil in Afghanistan that again destabilizes the region?

In other words, it would take less than a miracle for Afghanistan to become Obama’s problem all over again. Even if Republicans nominate a candidate who wants to end the war, conservative pundits could still score points at the president’s expense. Obama — the president who killed Osama bin Laden — could find himself painted as Jimmy Carter, a leader reacting to events rather than shaping them.

More damaging still, a flare-up in Afghanistan could divert Obama from his primary electoral challenge, making it impossible for him to focus his closing political argument on job creation and the health of the American economy.

That’s a fight the president knows he must win.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

PHOTO: An Afghan shepherd walks with a flock of sheep past a U.S. Marines armored vehicle of the Weapons Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines outside the Camp Gorgak in Helmand province, southern Afghanistan July 5, 2011. REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov