The United States is no longer merely retreating from global leadership but actively dismantling the international order it created, according to Eurasia Group’s Top Risks 2026 report written by Ian Bremmer, president, and Cliff Kupchan, chairman. The report opens with an unambiguous assessment: “The United States is itself unwinding its own global order. The world’s most powerful country is in the throes of a political revolution.” Rather than being driven by an external challenger, the authors argue that the destabilization of the global system is originating in Washington itself, marking a historic break with decades of American-led governance.
Bremmer and Kupchan stress that the scale of this transformation is without precedent in modern US history. “In our lifetimes, we have never witnessed an American president so committed to and so capable of changing the political system and, accordingly, the United States’s role in the world,” the report states. While comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt are often raised, the authors caution that “the comparison is lacking,” emphasizing that the current transformation targets not only policy outcomes but the institutional constraints that once limited presidential power. Whether this political revolution ultimately succeeds or fails, the report warns, “the implications for the United States and the broader world will be felt for a generation.”
The report identifies unpredictability as the defining feature of America’s new global posture. “For other countries, the United States has become unpredictable and unreliable,” Bremmer and Kupchan write, noting that allies and partners now face an urgent need to adjust. Some states, they argue, have already benefited from this shift. “China is today in a stronger geopolitical position accordingly; so too are India and the Gulf states.” Others, however, face worsening conditions. “Europe is now surrounded by adversaries and probably too late to remake itself effectively,” the report says, while countries such as Canada, Mexico, and much of the Global South are left to hedge, defend themselves, or “muddle through as best they can.”
The authors place this American transformation at the center of global instability. At a time when “the world today bears witness to some 60 active conflicts, the most since World War II,” the report argues that few of these conflicts are likely to stabilize. Instead, it warns that “at a time of disruption, most everyone is concerned principally with making sure their own house is in order.” This inward turn, particularly by the United States, has eroded the capacity for collective crisis management, leaving ceasefires fragile and global coordination weak.
Bremmer and Kupchan argue that domestic upheaval has directly reshaped US foreign behavior. The report describes an effort to “systematically dismantle the checks on presidential power, capture the machinery of government, and weaponize it against political enemies.” What began as norm-breaking has become “a system-level transformation beyond partisan hardball or executive overreach,” leaving uncertainty over “what kind of political system the United States will be when this revolution is over.”
As institutional constraints weaken, the report warns that the effects will radiate far beyond US borders. “Even as external conflicts recede, the United States itself will be the principal source of global risk in 2026,” the authors write. Alliance commitments, they caution, will increasingly “shift with the presidential mood,” while American soft power will continue to erode. The report states plainly that Washington’s retreat from multilateral cooperation is accelerating “a more fragmented and conflict-prone G-Zero world,” adding that “when the next global crisis hits, there will be no ‘committee to save the world.’”
The authors also warn that the consequences of American political change will not remain confined within US borders. “What happens in America won’t stay in America,” the report states, arguing that democratic backsliding in the United States will “embolden autocrats elsewhere.” As executive impunity expands and the rule of law weakens, the report notes that the business environment will also be tested, with companies forced to account for political alignment, regulatory retaliation, and selective enforcement in their economic decisions.
Even if the current political revolution ultimately collapses under institutional resistance or internal fracture, the authors emphasize that reversal is impossible. “There will be no return to the status quo ante,” Bremmer and Kupchan write. The next president, they argue, will inherit “whatever expanded powers and weakened constraints” are entrenched before the end of the decade, while the grievances that fueled the upheaval will remain unresolved.
In one of the report’s starkest conclusions, the authors state that the United States in 2026 “can’t be categorized as a representative democracy, not because it’s heading toward dictatorship but because it’s in the middle of a political revolution whose outcome will remain genuinely indeterminate for years.” They liken the moment to “America’s own late Gorbachev era,” describing a country “careening toward something, but nobody knows what.”
The report closes with a warning that captures its central thesis: “Whether Trump’s revolution succeeds or fails, there is no going back to what came before.” For the global system built around American leadership, that assessment signals not a temporary disruption, but the end of an era.
