From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

We're delighted you listening to this podcast. If you enjoy it, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify and elsewhere.

And please also be kind enough to leave us a favorable review. Now, at the journal's editorial page, we believe strongly in free expression. And each week on this podcast, we explore in-depth and candor issues of topical and other interest. We speak in-depth to people who are leading figures in their field, practitioners, experts, commentators, to give us a better understanding of the major issues of our times. I'm happy to say my guest this week is Ian Bremmer, geopolitical analyst, author and commentator. He's the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the global research and consulting firm, and also of G0 media, which provides coverage and analysis of global affairs. That's named, by the way, for the concept that Ian developed of a G-Zero world,

one in which no major power has hegemony in an increasingly complex and competitive era.

He is a prolific author, and he has a new book out this week called The Power of Crisis,

How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. Ian Bremmer joins me now. Ian, thank you. Jerry, always good to talk to you. I want to get onto your book, obviously, in the three crises that you talk about and how we respond to them. But it is, of course, one of the perils of book writing that we can be overtaken to some extent by events. And I know you completed this book, I think literally days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fact, you include an addendum in the book in which you address it and talk about that and how it fits in. So I do want to start with that if we could, because I know you're a keen observer of these things and you talk to top politicians and policymakers around the world. And you've been observing the last couple of months, just as the rest of us have with, I suppose, a degree

of awe and shock. So let me ask you, start with this if we could with Russia and Ukraine. We are now,

as I say, two months into this war. It clearly hasn't gone according to Vladimir Putin's plan.

It's clearly resulted in an extraordinary response that in many ways probably is weakening

Russia much more than Putin could possibly

have anticipated. And the Ukrainians are sharing extraordinary resilience and a military capability.

Where do you think this goes from here, Ian? How do you assess this and where does it leave

Russia's ambitions? Well, Jerry, first of all, I wish that Putin had read my draft.

Because I feel that maybe he might have not pulled the trigger on this full-on invasion into Ukraine.

It's the whole point of the book.

That's one of the most creative blurbs that anyone could possibly have come up with the world.

Yeah, yeah, I'm not sure he'd want to give me a quote, frankly. I mean, the fact is that this is a crisis that we are so obviously taking

advantage of, and it was Putin who clearly thought that that wasn't possible. And that's

why he invaded. He believed watching the lack of response from the West in Georgia in 2008 in Ukraine in 2014,

watching the quagmire in Afghanistan and the United States pulling out of that war in disaster

and largely unilaterally, watched the United States wanting to focus

...