North Korea has nuclear weapons, a succession plan hiding in plain sight, and a personality cult that has outlasted Stalin's and Mao's combined. Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau chief Jonathan Cheng argues the world keeps misreading Pyongyang because it insists on reducing it to an authoritarian state.

North Korea is also a religious society, built on a divine rule centered on a "god-king", Cheng argues. Kim Jong Un, third generation leader of the Kim dynasty was able to consolidate his power while developping the nuclear arsenal his father had succesfully created.

Now, with the Iran war reshaping global order, Kim's long bet on nuclear weapons looks like the smartest foreign policy call of the century. North Korea, long treated as a pariah nuclear nation on the international stage, seems to be taken seriously by top China has quietly dropped "denuclearization" from its own documents. Trump calls Kim Jong Un a friend. And Kim is already preparing a successor, his daughter, reportedly 12 years old, in plain sight.

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Rising energy prices, higher inflation, and growing economic uncertainty — a Harvard economist says the fallout from the Iran war is already being felt.

On the GZERO World Podcast, Ian Bremmer sits down with Harvard economist and former IMF Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath to unpack how the conflict is rippling through the global economy. As oil and gas prices surge, inflation is climbing, adding new costs for households and businesses and putting pressure on growth worldwide.

Gopinath explains that while the immediate hit to global growth may seem modest, the bigger concern is longer-term “structural damage”—the slow-moving economic shifts caused by trade fragmentation, strained alliances, and geopolitical conflict. They also discuss why the US may be more insulated than other economies, how China is positioning itself for a more fragmented world, and whether the recent boom in AI investment can offset some of the economic drag.

As inflation rises and global economic ties continue to shift, what comes next may matter even more than the immediate shock.

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Ian Bremmer sits down with Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and political scientist, to discuss Hungary's consequential upcoming election and what it means for the far right globally.

For sixteen years, Viktor Orbán has dominated Hungarian politics, rewriting rules, consolidating power, and positioning himself as Europe's leading nationalist and Donald Trump's closest ally on the continent. But with parliamentary elections approaching on April 12th, his aura of invincibility is finally cracking. Opposition candidate Péter Magyar, a conservative former Orbán insider, is polling ahead by double digits, and the Trump administration is scrambling to help keep its favorite European in office.

Krastev explains what most Americans get wrong about Orbán: that his real economic patron isn't Trump but China. Chinese investment in Hungary now exceeds Chinese investment in Germany and France combined, and Beijing's interest is straightforward: Orbán's willingness to veto any EU anti-China policy. Krastev also breaks down Orbán's ideological roots, arguing he is far closer to Putin than to Trump, anchored in 19th-century Hungarian nationalism and the grief of a nation that lost everything after World War I.

Together, Krastev and Bremmer look ahead to what an Orbán loss would mean for Europe's far-right parties, for EU policy on Ukraine, and for Trump's own political brand. "For President Trump and for President Putin," Krastev says, "Orbán losing is going to be their personal loss." And if Trump's oldest, best-known European ally falls, being backed by Washington may soon be worth far less than it once was.

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