Six Months into The United States of Trump

Last week, President Trump hit the six month mark on his first term in office. In half a year, his administration has yet to rack up any major legislative accomplishes and is under constant threat of death by a thousand Russia revelations. Ian Bremmer evaluates Trump's first six months through the prism of Eurasia Group's Top Risk for 2017: 'Independent America.' 
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Usually, it's not the United States that drives global risks – it's other countries around the world that go bump in the night.

I want to talk a little about where we are on 'independent America,' which was for the first time ever – our Top Risk for 2017. That Trump's election and 'America First' created a feeling of an 'independent America' that the rest of the world would react badly towards, that would cause more global instability.   

And we see this from the G7 meeting, the G20 meeting – the very fact that we now have a US-Russia relationship between Putin and Trump that is seen to be, by far, Trump's best relationship of any leader in the world unnerves American allies. Makes them feel like they have to hedge, they can't count on the United States as much. That's certainly one major impact of 'independent America.'

Another has been Trump's ability to be constrained, educated, and influenced by those who are appointed to help him and support American national interests has been limited indeed. And we've seen, in a number of mistakes that the US has made, that had to get rolled back. “The Mexicans are going to pay for the wall”— no one really believes that. And now US – Mexico relations much more problematic. Trump goes to Saudi Arabia: the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Emiratis – they want to go after Qatar, and Trump supports them.

So I think what we see is a strong unilateralism of President Trump and more broadly the Trump administration showing very clearly that the United States is not providing leadership on global security, on global trade, certainly on global climate after pulling out of the Paris deal. Even on global values, in some ways perhaps the most critical, the one the US was looked up for so long in terms of its legitimacy, exceptionalism, its soft power, the United States has abdicated leadership.

Those things are under question in a way they have not been in any point since the end of World War II, and that is driving a significant amount of political risk, probably the greatest uncertainty for the world in 2017.

Read Eurasia Group's full Top Risks report for 2017 here. 
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