The writer is a geostrategist and founder of Fordham Global Foresight
For the first time in memory, C-suite leaders are identifying geopolitical risk as their top concern in “year ahead” surveys for 2026.
Global executives were rudely awakened after US President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” speech. Although the market impact soon receded, for corporate leaders 2025 has been the year of the geopolitical wake-up call, as the US has sought to reset global trade and security relations.
The geopolitics supercycle — or an upswing in more frequent, more interconnected and longer-lasting shocks — has been years in the making. But 2025’s fundamental change in the global order has marked the official end to the peak globalisation era, when companies could rely upon a US security backstop and continuity in the operating environment.
For an entire generation of MBA-educated, Pax Americana-born and bred leaders, optimisation and efficiency were the overarching objectives of global firms. Chief risk officers managed financial and operational risks, while government affairs and legal departments handled regulation and compliance while being focused on business-specific policy issues. A geopolitics expert, usually a retired general or diplomat, could be parachuted in once a year, then largely ignored.
Goodbye to all that. Resilience is now king. This means rapid adjustment for global firms: working across more jurisdictions, rewired supply chains, navigating more interventionist and less transparent government policies, compressed political cycles, elevated incidence of kinetic conflict and social disruption — and higher costs.
Corporate paralysis followed the initial post-liberation day shock. Then, in more enlightened cases, the motivation to re-examine business strategies and retool for a new era. We are currently in the “now what?” stage of the cycle, with a related question — “who’s responsible?” — fast emerging. The subsequent gap in domain expertise and questions about organisational responsibility at many firms has been exposed.
According to McKinsey, every firm now needs a geopolitical strategy. Taking the idea further, the World Economic Forum, among others, has advocated the creation of a new addition to the C-suite: a chief geopolitics officer.
Integrating geopolitical considerations into C-suite decision-making is now a business imperative, but is creating a new role the way to accomplish this? As the first chief global political analyst at a global investment bank (Citi), and a geostrategy practitioner and C-suite adviser of long standing, my caution may seem counterintuitive. Hear me out.
I have seen first-hand how the arguments against those holding these roles unfold: the lack of a market “signal” justifying the caution around a geopolitical risk; the pressure from competitors to stay in a given market; the confidence that some insiders have a better grasp of the operating environment. The CGO will be in the awkward position of having to tell the CEO or CFO that their ideas for “chasing alpha” and “value creation” engender excessive risks. No one likes a party pooper in the C-suite.
During the course of writing my forthcoming book I have reflected on some of the more consequential transactions and business strategy decisions I have advised on over the past 25-plus years, in particular those where I had made the right call on the geopolitics but where the business had followed commercial logic. In most cases, the timeline before negative geopolitical or financial considerations of the decision emerged was more than 10 years, too long for most industries.
Finally, geopolitical experts may, like leopards, struggle to change their risk-averse spots and become opportunity spotters. Rather than creating a C-suite level role that could be marginalised and cause additional friction (talk to last year’s chief sustainability officers), a more durable option is for leaders to raise their own PQ, or political quotient, and that of their senior teams.
Raising PQ means challenging biases — normative, confirmation and others — incorporating a wider range of data and sources into decision-making, and accepting that accountancy-based approaches to classifying risks fall short.
Most of all, adapting to the challenges of the new business environment means overcoming the voice of denial that says that a return to “normal” is imminent.
