We're still not able to get inside Gaza.

It's very frustrating for those of us who have been covering this story very closely to not be on the ground reporting firsthand and crucially talking to Palestinians and platforming those voices.

Hello and welcome to GZERO World.

I'm Ian Bremmer and today we are zooming out, way out and taking stock of the world in 2025.

One that's becoming more fractured, more volatile and increasingly defined by conflict.

If you follow the news and if you're watching me instead of binging Stranger Things or whatever Mr.

Beast is blowing up on YouTube, I suspect that you do, you might think that global instability this year came down to two places, Gaza and Ukraine.

For good reason.

Those wars are massively consequential.

They triggered humanitarian crises and they reshaped global politics.

If you're really plugged in, you might also be thinking about the catastrophic civil war in Sudan or maybe the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

Of course, there's at least one world leader who's been very focused on tracking global conflict this year.

He even carries a scorecard.

But I brought, I mean, just a little list of, look at this, wars.

How many did I solve?

Cambodia, this is, Cambodia, Thailand, Kosovo, Serbia, Congo, the Congo, and Rwanda.

I do want to talk about, I mean, you have branded yourself the peace president.

Well, I think I did pretty good.

I solved, those are eight of the nine wars I solved.

Eight or nine wars.

And while the jury is out on whether those conflicts are actually solved, recent clashes on the Thailand-Cambodian border and renewed violence in eastern Congo suggest otherwise, that's a big number.

But here's the problem.

President Trump's list doesn't scratch the surface.

It doesn't include the brutal civil war in Myanmar that's displaced millions and embroiled the country in ethnic violence.

Or Burkina Faso, where the military government is battling Islamist insurgents.

Or Ecuador's declared internal armed conflict with cartels that have sent the murder rate soaring.

The uncomfortable truth is that right now there are more global conflicts than at any point since the end of World War II.

Not eight or nine.

Closer to 60.

That level of violence has huge ripple effects.

It means governments are pouring money into militaries and weapons instead of education and health care.

It means more people are forcibly displaced today than at any time in recorded history.

And it means a world where people feel less safe, less hopeful, and less trusting of governments, institutions, and of each other.

These aren't isolated crises.

They're symptoms of a global order that's breaking down.

So today, we are digging deeper, beyond the headlines, into what's happening on the ground, the global conditions fueling so much conflict, and how to think about the future of international stability.

To help make sense of it all, I'm joined by CNN's chief international correspondent, Clarissa Ward, and then Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group.

Don't worry, I've also got your puppet regime.

President Putin sent me invitation to his holiday party.

Do you know if this is for real?

But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at Prologis.com.

And by Cox is proud to support GZERO.

The planet needs all of us.

At Cox, we're working to seed the future of sustainable agriculture and reduce plastic waste.

Together, we can work to create a better future.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities.

And... Clarissa Ward, thanks for joining us on GZERO.

Thank you for having me.

We all see you from various places around the world, frequently places that we are not going to attend ourselves, and appreciate that hard work.

Tell me, you know, in the context of you covering in person some of the most heart-wrenching global stories of conflict and dismay, what has hit you the hardest over the past year?

I think the thing that has hit me the hardest, which perhaps is not obvious to many people around the world, is the fact that as international journalists, we're still not able to get inside Gaza and report from on the ground.

There have been some opportunities for journalists to go into the so-called yellow zone of the Gaza Strip, the 53% of it that is under the control of the IDF.

- They're still embedded though with the IDF.

- They're embedded with the IDF.

And what's crucial, and again, I think a lot of people don't realize this, you cannot talk to Palestinians if you go in with the IDF for pretty obvious reasons, right?

So what that means is that we are really playing catch up constantly, trying desperately to put together the pieces of the puzzle.

We obviously are working closely with Palestinian journalists on the ground who have been doing heroic and courageous work.

But now that there's a ceasefire, which really had been the ostensible reason given by the IDF for not allowing international journalists in, and I should add, there have been regular infractions and it's still a dangerous, volatile situation on the ground, but still, the, you know, the reason that was articulated, security no longer really holds.

And so it's very frustrating for those of us who have been covering this story very closely, obviously since October 7th, but for decades beforehand as well, to not be on the ground reporting firsthand and crucially talking to Palestinians and platforming those voices.

And as a reporter covering a story, Ian, that is so hotly contested, that is so politicized, that is so divisive, where information is constantly being weaponized, having your own two feet on the ground and your own two eyes looking at whatever it is that's right in front of you allows you to speak with some level of authority and clarity that otherwise will continually be questioned because of the kind of red hot emotion on both sides of this conflict.

What's the reason given for why journalists aren't able to travel in those places?

Honestly, there isn't an actual justification or reason given.

And to be honest, by not allowing journalists in, you're really lending credence to the idea that this whole thing has never been about security.

It has been about trying to hide away from the eyes of the world the devastation and horrors that have been taking place over the last two years in Gaza.

And we can do a good job of working out what's happening on the ground from the outside.

But to be clear, there is absolutely no replacement for being there.

And I'm not just even talking about fact-checking and trying to understand the kind of anatomy of any given story.

I'm also talking about the sights, the smells, the feels, the human connections, the small moments on camera that capture a much larger theme.

It just doesn't allow for us, I don't believe, to fully convey to our audiences, who are already feeling kind of anxious and overwhelmed because of how hotly politicized this conflict has become, to adequately convey to them the realities.

Let's, I appreciate that, Clarissa.

Let's move to Ukraine, where we don't have those restrictions to get to the front lines of the war on the Ukrainian side, but we do have an incredibly dangerous environment where it's hard even for soldiers to get to the front lines given the drones that are picking them off every day, making it a lot harder to understand what the war is actually like.

You know, you're one of the world's best known war correspondents covering this war.

Talk to us a little bit about it.

You know, what's extraordinary in Ukraine is that, again, because of the nature of the warfare, it's very difficult now to get to the actual front lines, because the front lines effectively are being manned by drones at this stage.

So the whole nature of warfare has completely changed fundamentally and probably for good with this conflict.

And because it is so deadly, because it is so brutal, and because it is such a relentless grind, I mean, this really is a war of attrition, you are seeing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men who are trying to leave the country illegally, up to 100 Ukrainians every single week fleeing into Romania.

And I sat down in a cafe in a town called Sighet on the border with a 34-year-old taxi driver from Kyiv called Victor, who had literally just crossed hours before from Ukraine on his own, five days in the mountains, four nights, at one stage thought he might die.

And I was like, "What are you doing?

"Why would you do this?"

And he was very matter-of-fact about it.

He said, you know, "To leave is a risk, but to stay is a death sentence."

- You know, I mean, I talk to a lot of Ukrainians, Clarissa, and we talk about how courageous they are and how they've been able to stand up to a much larger Russian fighting force.

They don't like being considered superhuman.

No, and I think we do the Ukrainians a disservice, actually.

When we lionize them to the point of being superhuman, we are actually stripping them of their humanity.

Many Ukrainians are ordinary people who want to build a great life and a better future for their families, and of course they love their country, and of course they hate what's happened.

But there's also a limit.

And I don't want to speak for all Ukrainians, because Ukraine is not a monolith.

And when you have these conversations and they're quiet and behind closed doors, you realize there's a lot more nuance in the conversation internally.

- We've been spending so much of our time in the last year focusing on these two major conflicts.

If money and attention were no object, where's the place in 2026 that you'd really like to be able to spend more time getting to know the story and bringing it to people around the world?

- I think I would definitely like to spend more time in Sudan.

I actually traveled there last year to Darfur and ended up getting detained for four days.

- I remember that.

- And so was not able to do the type of reporting that I had hoped to do on the ground.

This is a conflict that is complex on many levels.

You have these two warring factions, neither of whom are certainly heroes, but the RSF still stand apart for the scale of the atrocities.

And the problem you have right now, I think is maybe two or threefold.

Number one, access.

It's almost impossible to get into Darfur.

And secondly, I think that there is, because of the complexity of the conflict, and because of these phones, I think people are feeling overwhelmed by the number of conflicts that they are expected, indeed it is demanded of them to care about this, know about this, educate yourself about this, feel emotional about this, post about this.

And I think for a lot of people, it feels like overwhelm and overload.

And so the way that I try to mitigate that some way is by finding human stories, like, let's put aside the politics of all of this.

Let's just find human stories of experiences that other people are having that maybe you can find, you know, move you to feeling you want to be more engaged, or you feel empathy.

I do think we're entering a moment, particularly in the West, where we're losing faith in the idea that anything is worth fighting for.

We feel that everything is so corrupted.

We've become so cynical and so divided that the idea of fighting for an ideal, it almost sounds Pollyannish in this day and age.

Clarissa Ward, great conversation.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Ian.

That was my interview with Clarissa Ward and her perspective covering global conflict on the ground.

Now for The Global View, here's Comfort Ero, president and CEO of the International Crisis Group.

Comfort Ero, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you for inviting me, Ian.

So we talk a lot about Gaza and Ukraine and not so much about the rest of the almost 60 major international conflicts happening around the world.

Start with a quick tour.

Talk about the places that you're spending most of your time that the rest of the world is not paying enough attention to.

Thanks.

So let me say one thing, Ian.

I think it's important not to stop talking about the Ukrainians and the Gazas, because what happens there in those two conflicts set the precedent for other places.

And I say this in relation to the principle of non-aggression.

So when I think about that and I think about other territorial expansionist-type conflicts, the reference point for us is Ukraine, that what you let go there enables other precedent-setting-type interventions.

I think it's important to focus on the two things.

Again, in terms of mass expulsion, of displacement, of the weaponization of food, of watching war crimes being committed or crimes against humanity.

Again, it's important to center our attention on those two things.

But you're right that below those two conflicts, Ian, that are at the heart of sort of media and diplomatic attention, the list of conflicts that are off the radar or deprioritized, that don't grab the same degree of attention are quite long.

So if I look at it from region to region, I look at Haiti, for example, where I think a year ago, or a year and a half ago, a number of us would have said that the idea of an international police force that didn't have the necessary financial and political backing from the U.S.

or Canada or even from the region inevitably meant that we needed to think through another model for bringing peace around in Haiti.

And then another set of conflicts, another region that's, of course, top of everybody's mind is on the African continent, from the Sahel to Sudan.

We've got an interesting development taking place in the Great Lakes.

We never imagined, Ian, for example, that the United States would get engaged in the way that it's been absorbed now.

You saw the two presidents there signing a peace agreement on the White House at the same time the rebels were still advancing in peace.

This is the Rwanda-DRC conflict.

Rwanda and DRC, particularly in eastern DRC.

And when I say to you, Ian, that it's important to keep Ukraine at the shadow, at the back of our minds, it's because that is also, at one level, about territorial grab there.

And then when I look at sort of other regions, Asia, for example, Myanmar, a few years ago, it was very much at the top of everybody's mind with the Rohingya crisis.

And you still have a military junta that is entrenched and is also at the center of some of the most aggressive campaign against civilians.

And then in Europe, and we tend to talk about just Ukraine, but we have the makings maybe of some kind of peace still between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

As you remember, you know, Azerbaijan taking back Nagorno-Karabakh, but still a lot of tensions between them.

Those are the sort of other conflicts that are at the top of the international agenda that don't sort of get much attention in the way others are.

And then there is also the development on the South China Sea and also Taiwan at the back of everybody's rear view as well.

- I mean, we do have in the United States today a president who talks more about some of these countries that you've spent so much time on.

So he talks about himself as a peace president.

Talk a bit about where you've seen useful progress as a consequence of that, where you haven't.

- Yeah, I mean, I think there's a sense in which he wants peace and he wants that to be his legacy.

And as you and I would agree that his North Star is the idea of getting a Nobel Peace Prize as well.

So all those things are true.

We were generally surprised at Crisis Group, for example, to see the kind of opening that we've got today in the Great Lakes region.

Now, there's a choreography of actors that have been involved in that Qatar, crucial to that.

The African Union, African leaders, also crucial to getting that process on the way.

But Ian, this is happening.

A peace deal is being signed, and the fighters are still fighting.

So the question is, what is it going to take to convert that, to make sure that the M23 don't continue their fight into the heart of the DRC, that they don't pursue what appears to be an effort to replace the government, that you're able to check the ambitions of Rwanda, and that you're also able to deal with internal DRC dynamics.

This is not a new story.

This is a region that has been at conflict for over three decades as well, and managing those rivalries, and a big surprise, but a very good surprise to see that it's been involved there.

So what I hear from you is a lot more needs to be done, but the role that the United States has played over the past months in this conflict between the DRC and Rwanda has largely been constructive.

It has been constructive, which is why I said that we have to avoid sort of falling into a negative camp in understanding a number of the deal-making that we have seen.

We've seen surprisingly new openings.

I think the concern for us, Ian, is whether any of these processes stick.

So I mean, we see this in so many places, right?

I mean, in Gaza, a lot of work done.

The hostages actually released.

Most people thought that couldn't happen.

The sustainability of the deal continues to be an enormous question.

The disarmament, the predisposition of, you know, who occupies what part of Gaza, what part, you know, gets rebuilt.

Thailand and Cambodia, they had an agreement, but then they're fighting again several months later.

We hear the same thing about DRC and Rwanda.

So if you were to look around the world, tell me which of these conflicts do you think the conditions are most ripe for resolution that is sustainable and why?

That's a good question.

Ian, as I speak to you, I'm trying to think.

And it's not that I don't think any of them can stick.

I think the careful choreography and making sure that, behind the deal-making of President Trump and the potential openings that he has, that you have the appropriate cast of characters ready to come in to fill the vacuum.

So you talked about Gaza.

Right now, there's a real fear, and it's a warning that we gave, that we may enter a situation where we are stuck in phase one and that getting to the more difficult issues around governance and around who provides the continuing transitional interim government within Gaza, getting there is going to be very difficult.

We may not get there, and so we're going to be stuck in this limbo of a no war, no peace situation.

And in essence, a scenario that may be welcomed by certain actors, but doesn't address the livelihood concerns of the millions of Gazans that are going to be stuck in that limbo.

And then on top of that, who is going to provide the international -- the international forces, the international stabilization force?

Who wants to go into a setting where there are still concerns, addressing the concerns of Israel around the decommissioning of the Hamas fighters?

How you construct a peace force in that situation?

These are hard questions that still need to be addressed.

Comfort Ero, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

After so much talk of war and conflict, it's time for something a little lighter, but still deadly funny.

I've got your puppet regime.

OK, sending invite to my holiday party and... Done.

Oh, oh, crap.

I accidentally sent invite to... What the... Invitation to Putin's holiday party?

This must be some kind of mistake.

Ugh, do I send another message to clarify that it was mistake, or will then I just look like loser for clarifying obvious?

It must be mistake, right?

Should I ask him?

But then he will have space to tell me it was mistake, which will be humiliating.

But what if he thinks it's real and then shows up?

It will be more awkward than Matty Healy showing up to Taylor Swift wedding.

Should I just show up?

What if he finally does want to meet?

No, no, no.

He would probably tell that poodle Witkoff to let me know first, right?

Maybe I should just ask poodle Witkoff to sort this out.

Hmm, I wonder who I could call for advice on this question.

Maybe the Europeans?

No, but seriously, I guess I have to bite the bullet.

>> Hello?

>> President Trump, I need your help.

Oh, this again.

Yes, President Putin sent me invitation to his holiday party.

Do you know if this is for real?

What?

What?

He's having a party and he did not invite me?

That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you've seen, or even if you don't, but you think you have a foolproof plan for global peace, why don't you come tell us about it at GZEROmedia.com.

[music] Funding for GZERO World is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains.

With a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- And by Cox is proud to support GZERO.

The planet needs all of us.

At Cox, we're working to seed the future of sustainable agriculture and reduce plastic waste.

Together, we can work to create a better future.

Cox, a family of businesses.

Additional funding provided by Carnegie Corporation of New York, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, and... [music]