Ian Bremmer

“Syria: Towards the Endgame” was the headline the Economist splashed across one of its most recent covers. But as we’ve seen with this week’s assault on Aleppo, the end of the Assad regime is, in all likelihood, not even close. Let’s unpack why and enumerate the ways:

1. China’s and Russia’s vetoes

The two countries vetoed the most recent U.N. Security Council resolution, which would have authorized sanctions against Assad’s government as a result of its repeated failures to adhere to promises to bring peace to the nation. While the result is disappointing for the Syrian people, the effect of the vetoes of China and Russia is twofold. First, the U.N. obviously has been robbed of one of the tools it uses to protect citizens of oppressive regimes. But second, the impact of the veto, coming from two countries that have up-and-down relationships with the U.S., serves to turn any American interventionism into an international incident.

Let’s be clear: This is playing politics on a global, humanitarian scale. We always knew that Russia and China would not support a U.S. intervention in Syria, not even in the way they grudgingly did when it came to Libya. But ultimately, the bloodshed there is not just on their hands. While Obama has cover for his hands-off foreign policy thanks to the veto, U.N. resolutions have hardly stopped or even influenced U.S. foreign policy in the past, especially when it mattered.

2. Even without vetoes, the U.S. has no stomach for intervention

It’s messy. It’s expensive. There’s no domestic constituency for it. The U.S. is still reeling from the price tag of the Iraq war, and still extricating itself from Afghanistan. But more important than whether we have the stomach for an overseas campaign is our lack of a solution or an exit strategy. It’s not clear at all who could successfully replace the Assad regime. We don’t know what would come after him. There’s always the possibility that some internal assassination or bombing could take him out. But as long as he has his military apparatus, he’s going to be able to smash any attempt by opposition forces to gain strength against him. There’s simply nothing rising up in Syria that might take Assad’s place. So, the question of freedom for Syrians turns very sadly pragmatic indeed: What, exactly, would we be fighting for?

3. The civil war in Syria has begun, and it’s dragging the region with it.

As in countries across the Middle East, the civil war here is rooted in ethnic identity: Shiite vs. Sunni Muslims. The Shiite minority holds power. The Sunni population has been oppressed. The answer to the question of who should be running Syria, other than that it should not be a murderous dictator, is entirely unclear. What is clear is that other countries are experiencing tensions and internal strife thanks to the bloodshed there. Turkey and Qatar have interests in the outcome. China and Russia, and the United States, have investments and interests in the area. By proxy, U.S. relationships could also face further deterioration as the Syria conflict drags on.

There was a time when the U.S. would race to the rescue, playing world cop on the global stage, and attempt to intervene and end strife. It would lead a peloton of countries toward the outcome it thought was most desirable, and it would commit, in blood and treasure, whatever it took to get the job done. Whether for better or for worse, in our new G-Zero world that sort of thing just doesn’t happen anymore. We can blame the U.N., Russia, China, and Syria itself all we want, but the reality is, the U.S. has decided it’s just not getting involved.

This essay is based on a transcribed interview with Bremmer.

PHOTO: Syrian soldiers celebrate after their entry to al-Midan neighborhood in Damascus, July 20, 2012. REUTERS/Stringer

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.

As Europe’s leaders struggle to restore confidence in the single currency and America’s economy limps ahead at a painfully slow pace, China’s economy continues to power forward at its now characteristically strong clip. For the past three decades, China has been the world’s fastest growing economy—and within the next several years, the People’s Republic will overtake the United States as the world’s largest. Some economists have even argued that, measured by purchasing-power parity, China has already pulled ahead. Such prognostications, accurate or not, have led to dire warnings that liberal capitalism’s best days are behind it, that the future lies with authoritarian market managers who are able to relocate populations and move mountains by decree. For the moment, at least, state-managed capitalism appears to be triumphant.

Such appearances, however, are misleading. The appeal of state capitalism lies in its ability to withstand the occasional crises that afflict market systems, thus shielding the general population from politically inconvenient disruptions. It is a system in which the state uses state-owned enterprises, national champion firms, sovereign wealth funds, and politically loyal banks to dominate the process of domestic wealth creation. To be sure, this is not communism; significant segments of state capitalist economies are in private hands. But the state plays the largest role in ensuring that market forces serve political ends—by ensuring that, profitable or not, businesses invest in projects that bolster social stability and protect the ruling elite’s political control.

China is not the only state capitalist economy producing impressive results. As the Arab world continues to contend with the risks of political turmoil, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have stockpiled the cash they need to maintain stability by controlling much of the wealth produced by national oil companies. Even some emerging democracies have begun to flirt with limited forms of managed capitalism. Brazil’s private sector remains crucial for the country’s expansion, but its government leans on state-owned energy firm Petrobras and privately owned mining champion Vale to help create jobs. President Dilma Rousseff’s government won’t milk cash from these firms as President Hugo Chávez has done with state-owned oil company PDVSA in Venezuela, but Petrobras is already at risk of becoming a much larger, less efficient, and thus less profitable company.

State control is not the future of capitalism. It is a dead end from which China will have to free itself if it is truly destined to dominate the world economy. As a system and by design, state capitalism ensures that wealth creation does not threaten the leadership’s hold on political power. Its ability to stimulate growth and general prosperity is a secondary benefit. Forced to choose between public wealth and political survival, state capitalists will always protect their own interests first. In China, as elsewhere, commercial activity depends on access to information, and the Internet provides the best and most efficient access to it. Yet if the Internet threatens to enable popular resistance to China’s authoritarian government, and if political officials have the means to shut the Internet down, even temporarily, they will do just that.

State capitalism’s greatest weakness lies in its intolerance of “creative destruction,” a process that invests liberal capitalism with vital self-regenerating momentum. The liberal capitalist model makes it possible for the workers, resources, and ideas invested in a dying industry to spontaneously recombine in novel configurations to produce goods and services that satisfy emerging demand. But the economic engineers of state capitalism fear any form of destruction that develops beyond their control. This is why state-owned companies, which build influence within government over time, often succeed in resisting the need to adapt to changing times.

Then there is the question of openness. Within autocratic state capitalist systems, government-owned companies like China National Petroleum Corporation and some of the Arab world’s sovereign wealth funds shun the transparency that long-term resilience and adaptability demand. This opacity can benefit a country’s ruling elite by hiding unsuccessful investment decisions, but it is very harmful for the system’s long-term health. When such institutions can hide their failures, they are free to inflict much more lasting harm than they otherwise could.

Managed capitalism also falls short when it comes to exploiting innovation, though government-directed investment can play an important role in the development of new technologies. The Internet arose from a U.S. government subsidized defense project, but it was profit-driven companies that developed and reimagined the Internet and thus transformed the world. History shows that over time state officials never value assets and allocate resources as efficiently as market forces can.

Even in China, state officials understand that citizens are the engine of economic vitality. That is why the state has embarked on an historic and ambitious plan to shift wealth from China’s largest companies to the country’s consumers. China’s leaders know that the next generation of economic growth must be less dependent on exports to Europeans and Americans; creating domestic consumer demand is crucial. Thus the process of empowering Chinese consumers will undermine state capitalism’s appeal even within the country that has made this system so seductive.