The Zero G condition and its consequences

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 19/08/2026

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Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a world-leading risk management company, coined the term Zero G to define a global geopolitical condition characterized by chaos. Zero G describes a world in which no country or group of countries is willing to assume leadership of the international community or on any specific issue. Zero G is therefore characterized by acute and widespread geopolitical instability, international impunity, and the adoption by nations of transactional policies, completely detached from international rules, in which one nation's triumph comes at the expense of another.

This creates power vacuums in the international arena, as no superpower assumes responsibility for managing global public goods, resolving transnational crises, or enforcing international agreements. Consequently, impunity reigns, because both major powers and corrupt actors find themselves without any checks on their conduct. This leads to a growing lack of control over conflicts, as we witnessed with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It also expands, almost without limit, the capacity of major powers to influence the behavior of medium-sized or small international actors, laying the groundwork for the consolidation of vassal states.

Diplomacy ceases to be an exercise in harmonizing interests between nations and becomes a mechanism for extracting short-term advantages. Long-term international commitments are relegated, the multilateral dimension is undervalued, and a short-sighted bilateralism, restricted to almost immediate interests, prevails.

In today's world, it will be difficult to create universal policies for technological deployment that allow for the early integration of lower-income nations into the platforms that govern telecommunications. An example of such policies was the work carried out by the International Telecommunication Union on satellite communications. Thanks to the creation of a universal framework for these technologies, nations around the world were able to expand their access to more efficient, effective, and lower-cost communications. Nor will it be easy to create a space within the international monetary system for cryptocurrencies or for the tokenization of assets in general.

In some ways, the Zero G condition is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, when, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, central authority disappeared and Germanic tribes invaded and occupied former Roman territories. An economic collapse ensued as major trade networks broke down. Barter gained ground over currency as a medium of exchange. Cities lost population, which migrated to the countryside fleeing epidemics, attacks, and insecurity.

The knowledge accumulated and preserved in universities and monasteries contributed, centuries later, to eroding the pillars of the medieval order as it was systematized during the Renaissance and widely disseminated during the Enlightenment. In short, a profound revolution in knowledge and technology ultimately transformed the foundational bases of the Middle Ages. Perhaps the immense revolution in artificial intelligence will also contribute to ending the Zero G condition.

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