It's a mixed bag these days. Europe appears to have arrested its fall into the abyss and the U.S. economy is finally looking up. But with a looming consensus that war with Iran is in the offing and Putin's recent return to power in Russia, geopolitical chaos lurks around the corner. Foreign Policy once again turned to Nouriel Roubini -- who's always good for a little doom and gloom -- and Ian Bremmer to make sense of the ticking time bombs. And they didn't hold back.

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When asked about the consequences of war in Iran, Roubini sees prolonged high oil prices "$170, $180, $200 a barrel" and warned of the knock-on consequences: "the last three major global recessions ... were all caused by a geopolitical shock in the Middle East that led to spike in oil prices." But Bremmer's not buying all the war hype: "the Obama administration does not want to engage in military strikes against Iran -- and they sure as hell are going to resist it, no matter what -- before the elections."

When it comes to metaphors, the pair of prognosticators didn't disappoint: Roubini still sees a dark outcome in Europe -- "a slow-motion train wreck" -- while Bremmer sees the Chinese economy as a "very, very fast car" hurtling down a highway ... "the problem is that there's a bend in the road coming up and there's no steering."

But the real surprise comes at the end of the conversation, where Roubini and Bremmer both worry about instability in Moscow and Beijing bringing the two nations together -- but it might be less a case of keeping your friends close than keeping your enemies closer.

Foreign Policy: February's job numbers are out, the third straight month of 200,000-plus gains, but unemployment stays steady. Are we seeing the green sprouts of an economic recovery here?

Nouriel Roubini: My feeling is that the economic data are mixed. Certainly creating 200,000 jobs per month as opposed to only 100,000 is a positive signal. But while the data for the last 2 to 3 months were consistently surprising on the upside, some recent data suggests an element of caution. For example, real consumption spending has been flat for three months in a row. Durable goods orders -- a proxy for capital spending by the corporate sector -- are sharply down in January after the tax advantages expired at the end of last year. Construction spending is still down. Home prices are still falling. Today, the number on the trade balance in January came in worse than expected. So if you look at the macro supply data it looks better. But the demand data, whether it's consumption or residential or net exports, suggests there's still softness.

My view of it is still that economic growth is going to be soft, anemic, and below-trend. I think the tail risk of an outright recession conditional on external shock, like eurozone turmoil or oil or China is a small risk right now compared to six months ago. But I think the data is not consistent with the views that we are going to start growing at 3 percent plus in the next 12 months.

Growth for this year is going to be maybe 2 percent. And by next year, what's going to happen is that -- regardless of whether Obama is reelected or a Republican (say, Romney) there will be, first of all, a meaningful fiscal drag, because mandated spending cuts start to be triggered if they refuse to do the draconian spending cuts on defence or discretionary funds. All the tax cuts -- dividends, capital gains, estate, income taxes -- expire and not all of them are going to be fully renewed. The payroll tax cut is also supposed to be one year, now it's two years, but we cannot have it forever. And discretionary transfer payments are going to be reduced and government spending is on the way down. So you have a fiscal drag. Disposable income growth has been boosted for the last year and a half ... so some of the growth of last year and this year has been stolen from the future. And because of the fiscal drag and the effect of that on household disposable income, I see further economic softness even next year.

Ian Bremmer: From my perspective -- not to disagree with anything Nouriel was saying -- but we are, broadly speaking, in 2012, we've entered the post 9/11 era. We're not going after Bin Laden or al Qaeda. We're out of Iraq, we're getting out of Afghanistan, and we're entering the post-crisis period.

Really, since 2008, if it's not been one thing, it's been something else. We no longer believe that there's meaningful likelihood that a shock is going to send the world back into recession. That's in part true because of the strengthening of American numbers. Nouriel's right, these are not exciting growth numbers -- this isn't the robust bounce-back that we think is going to power a global economy with the kind of figures you saw before the crisis, but it's a very different environment from the last four years. That's very important in terms of getting consumer confidence back, but it's also very important in terms of the orientation of CEOs to start spending some of the major cash that they've left off the table. I think the answer that they'll start doing it -- and not just in the United States. I don't want to say they're getting ebullient, but they're less fearful about medium and long-term trajectory.

And it's clearly true in Europe as well, where just six months ago, you had folks saying "oh my god, even if I don't know how to assess it, there's a possibility that the euro's just going to fall apart." They're not worried about that now. From that perspective, we're in a much better macro environment than we have been.

FP: Ian, how much of this has been because Europe did actually get its political act together, that it came through with the requisite bailouts for Greece, and stemmed the immediate, pressing concern of a massive default?

IB: I think it's about three things. First, it's about the U.S. numbers being higher that what any of the broad consensus views were six or 12 months ago. Some of that is real. People underestimated how bad the recession was going to be in the United States. They also underestimated how much resiliency the U.S. economy would develop in 2012. Second, you have Europe, which is a very big piece of that, and it's not just about putting together a couple meaningful bailout programs for the Greeks. It's also about sticking with austerity, with vastly improved governance in Spain, Portugal, and Italy -- especially Italy, where the new leadership of Mario Monti and the ability to get the broad political spectrum actually together on budget and competitiveness in a country that does actually manufacture things and has a long-term trajectory in a way that Greece does not. I think that's very meaningful, as is the structural movement toward eventual fiscal compact.

But I think the third point, which is a meaningful one, is that in that last six months, we haven't had another Fukushima -- we haven't had North Korea blow up; we haven't had a war with Iran. There are a lot things making headlines, especially in the Middle East, but frankly, from a geopolitical period, the last few months of American recovery have not been accompanied by any real, horrifying external shocks. And we should recognize that, because in this geopolitical environment, we can't count on that.

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