Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Trump hints at the ultimate counter-counter-response.

• UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. The UAE differentiates itself into a target.

• CHINA. Trade talks seek to shape Washington’s expectations.

• PHILIPPINES. Sara Duterte is impeached for the second time.

• SOUTH AFRICA. Ramaphosa’s rivals find a scandal down the back of the couch.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Life support

Trump hints at the ultimate counter-counter-response.

Donald Trump said Iran’s counterproposal to end the war was “garbage” and the ceasefire was “on life support”. Regional media said Trump was “inclined” to resume military operations after being briefed Monday by a “large group of generals”.

INTELLIGENCE. Trump has no good military options for ending the war. A ground attack would almost certainly lead to US casualties and reprisals across the Gulf. Naval warfare would further expend expensive missiles against cheap Iranian drones. Yet one unspeakable option was hinted at when the Sixth Fleet issued a rare press release announcing the arrival of an Ohio-class submarine in Gibraltar, capable of carrying 20 Trident II nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

FOR BUSINESS. Trump has done the barfight equivalent of opening his coat to reveal a bazooka, but oil prices barely rose, with many traders still expecting TACO Tuesday. Yet while this, or a request to Beijing, to where Trump shortly departs, is more likely, he may recall the effect of an encounter with Xi Jinping in April 2017, when, as dessert was served, he left the dinner table to order a missile strike on Damascus. Nuking Tehran would be extreme, but on brand.

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. Dubai of the storm

The UAE differentiates itself into a target.

The UAE carried out an attack on Iran’s Lavan Island refinery in early April, the Wall Street Journal said Monday, the first legacy English-language report of such an attack. A hijacked tanker carrying Emirati oil was taken to Somalia, Egypt said.

INTELLIGENCE. The hijacking of the M/T Eureka off Yemen earlier this month was

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Trump’s threats are met with an ‘unacceptable’ response.

• UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Putin’s peace offer is neither here nor there.

• BRITAIN. Starmer faces an unlikely leadership challenge.

• AUSTRALIA. A populist win threatens the right, not the left.

• HANTAVIRUS. MV Hondius becomes a petri dish for anxiety.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. No laughing matter

Trump’s threats are met with an ‘unacceptable’ response.

Donald Trump said Iran's counterproposal to a peace deal was "totally unacceptable" and Tehran would "be laughing no longer". Brent crude rose 4% in Asian trade as Narendra Modi urged fuel-saving measures to conserve forex reserves.

INTELLIGENCE. Tehran is extending the pain ahead of Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping, and as oil shortages start to bite. Described as an “atomic bomb” by the regime, the Strait of Hormuz may be double-blocked for trade, but it‘s under Iranian control, and it’s difficult to see this changing without risking US troops and another lengthy forever war. IRGC boats have been sighted, potentially laying mines. The UAE, Kuwait and Qatar have each reported drone attacks.

FOR BUSINESS. Trump is in a zugzwang, where every move puts him at further disadvantage. His least-worst option may be to beg Xi’s intervention, which will at least give him a short-term reprieve – on a midterms timescale – even if it endangers long-term US predominance. The question is whether Xi believes involvement is worth the cost. While doing nothing means higher energy prices, China is better placed than any of its strategic rivals to weather the storm.

UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Schröder's cat

Putin’s peace offer is neither here nor there.

Vladimir Putin said the Ukraine war may be “coming to an end” and he’d be willing to negotiate with Europe via former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. EU Council President Antonio Costa earlier said there was “potential” for talks.

INTELLIGENCE. Berlin has expressed doubts on Schröder's credibility, with the

Read more

Hello from Melbourne,

In today’s Irregular, I am sharing below my remarks to the Global Mobility Forum that took place in Melbourne earlier this week.

While the audience was chiefly human resources executives, I used it as an opportunity to set out a vision for how corporate leaders — whatever their role —can tackle what has become one of the thorniest management problems today: how to deal with a world that not only has become more volatile, unpredictable and dangerous but also more challenging for businesses.

I set out the five-step framework we use with boards and executive teams to manage geopolitical risk and the specific challenges corporate leaders face.

1. How to understand some of the fundamental changes in the international system and build a coherent worldview.

2. How to move from vague abstractions to precise understandings of where politically-driven events could specifically hit the firm to get an accurate picture of your exposures to geopolitics.

3. How to take geopolitically-driven threats and use some basic rules-of-thumb to turn them into measurable risks - after all, “what gets measured gets managed”.

4. How to focus event monitoring on what truly matters and avoid what doesn't, and prevent overwhelm in the face of apparent chaos.

5. And how, ultimately, to manage geopolitical risks with the tools at a firm’s disposal.

I am also sharing, somewhat reluctantly, a video of the address for anyone, unlike myself, who might enjoy watching the replay. If our approach piques your interest or you would like to learn more, feel free to reach out.

Best wishes,

Damien

How to prepare for the next inevitable geopolitical disruption

As delivered, 7 May 2026

When Katie asked me to speak at this event six months ago, my first thought was: fantastic. I’d spoken at the Global Mobility Forum in Sydney last June — same audience, same sort of room, different people — and my second thought was equally encouraging: I can recycle that speech. Say roughly what I said last year, avoid having to think too hard, and get away with it.

Then Donald Trump intervened.

The man who first frustrated Kamala Harris’s presidential ambitions, then Elon Musk’s technocratic ambitions, then NATO’s hopes for a stable relationship with the United States, then Zelensky’s hopes for dependable American support against Vladimir Putin — has now frustrated my speechwriting ambitions as well, by launching a war against Iran.

That may not be the most important impact of the war, but it is a good reminder of Trotsky’s adage that “you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”.

Last year, I made the case that geopolitics matters — not only to foreign ministries and defence departments, but to companies, to corporate leaders, to the broader economy and, yes, to global mobility professionals like yourselves.

I warned that if President Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, Iran might respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. That could send oil prices soaring, push insurance costs through the roof, disrupt travel across the Middle East, and trigger cascading supply chain failures. If it persisted, the consequences would not just be an economic shock of a kind we have not seen in decades. It could become a food crisis — given the Gulf’s critical role in global fertiliser supply.

That was last year. Not even twelve months later, we are living inside that scenario.

Trump — the greatest disruptor of the international order in a generation — has forced me to rethink what I want to say today.

No one in this room needs to be persuaded that geopolitics matters. That case has been made by events. It is now beyond reasonable doubt that disruptions in faraway places can reach even a country like Australia: a continent unto itself, protected by the world’s largest moat, allied to the most powerful nation on earth, with a relatively stable economy and political system.

John Donne once wrote that “no man is an island entire of itself”. Today, Jean-Paul Sartre’s darker line seems more fitting: “hell is other people”. Both capture the essence of geopolitical risk in the modern economy.

Subscribe now

The context today

What I will not do is run through the news. You are saturated by it. You read it every morning and watch it every evening. There is no shortage of punditry, prediction, and prevarication. Nor will I attempt to prove a point you already accept.

Instead, I want to ask the harder question. It is the question that CEOs, board members and executives are putting to me — in Australia, in Europe, and in the United States — every week at the moment. The question is not: what is happening? Nor even what will happen? The question is: what can you, as business people, actually do about it?

Over the past six weeks, I have spoken with chief executives across fertiliser, transport and logistics, groceries, agribusiness, construction and software. Every situation is different. But almost every firm is confronting, in essence, the same problem. They were unprepared for precisely the kind of scenario I described in Sydney last year — and they are now struggling to work out what to do.

The impacts are arriving in different ways. Building companies are running short of PVC piping — PVC has become, in some respects, the PPE of this crisis, if you can cast your mind back to COVID. If you do not have plumbing, you cannot finish the job. Supermarkets in this country, despite Australia growing much of its own food, are looking at significant price rises driven by the inflationary effects of the war. Fertiliser companies do not know when the ships carrying their goods — currently stuck in or near the Persian Gulf — will emerge and make landfall.

And no one, including Donald Trump, knows exactly what happens next.

What we do know is this: even if the war ends tomorrow, even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, the economic consequences will persist. They will move through the global economy in the form of higher prices, supply disruptions and, at worst, shortages of fuel and diesel and the serious prospect of global recession. That, sadly, is not my base case. Why? Because, tragically, both sides think they have the upper hand and both think that time is on their side. That may be true, but time is not on the side of businesses affected.

So yes — geopolitics matters. But you know that. And you’re not the only ones.

We recently surveyed more than 300 Australian CEOs. The report will be released next week, and I will happily share it with anyone who would like a copy. There were many striking findings. But the most arresting was this: every single CEO surveyed said they were more concerned about geopolitics than they were six months ago — yet only 7 per cent had done anything meaningful in response.

That gap — between concern and action — is the problem I want to address today.

Share

Step 1 - Modelling a changing world

The first, and most essential, step is updating your model of the world.

Most firms carry an implicit picture of how the world works. Most of us do as individuals. Because of when and where we were born — because of the particular decades in which we came of age professionally — the model in our heads is largely one of a stable, peaceful, and “rules-based” international order that facilitates cross-border commerce and the free movement of goods, capital, services and data. In that model, trade barriers gradually fall. Major powers may compete, but they do not fundamentally rupture the system. International rules are broadly respected. International institutions support the flourishing of global commerce. Supply chains work; even if they bend, they do not typically break. People move. Capital moves. Data moves.

That model is no longer a reliable description of the world.

And this is not simply because of Donald Trump. Over the past decade, frictions between the major powers have intensified. Trade has been weaponised for political ends. Barriers to investment have been erected – and enforced – on national security grounds with increasing frequency. Diplomatic solutions to points of disagreement have become harder to reach. Governments are concluding fewer agreements to open and liberalise trade — and more measures to restrict it. And wars are becoming more frequent, more severe, and more prolonged. How’s Putin’s “three day war” going?

So the first, and most fundamental, step is to update your organisation’s foundational assumptions about how the world operates — and to embed, in your organisation’s thinking, a clearer understanding of the links between geopolitics, government action, national security, the economy, and firm-level impact.

But that is not enough.

Just as knowing how economics works does not make a firm resilient to economic shocks, knowing how geopolitics works does not make a firm resilient to geopolitical shocks. Leaders in this room — whether your responsibility is international mobility, human resources, workforce planning, supply chains or professional services — need to move from understanding the world to understanding how geopolitics affects your world.

Step 2 - Mapping your exposures

That means mapping specific threats. It means identifying the ways in which governments can interrupt the flows we have long taken for granted: the movement of people, goods, services, capital, data and energy. It means asking, systematically and with some rigour, where a political decision made in a distant capital could cut off your people, your supply chains, your customers, your suppliers, your revenues.

For those of you in global mobility, this is particularly direct. Your entire professional domain is built on the assumption that people can move — that borders are crossable, that visas are grantable, that travel corridors remain open. Geopolitics is now in the business of challenging every one of those assumptions.

The Strait of Hormuz is a textbook illustration of the modern global economy’s “weakest-link” problem. The system is extraordinarily efficient — but that efficiency depends, in critical places, on a very small number of chokepoints. When one of those chokepoints is threatened, the consequences move quickly, widely, and in ways that are very difficult to anticipate in the moment.

Think about the disruptions firms are encountering right now: the Strait remains closed, the Middle East harder to access, staff stranded, cargo delayed, insurance repriced. Now ask yourself a different question: what if you had already identified this as a plausible scenario? What decisions would you have made differently? What plans would already be in place? What conversations would already have been had?

And Hormuz – a tiny piece of geography very few people had ever thought about – is far from the world’s only chokepoint. There are other maritime chokepoints, too – the Straits of Malacca, closer to home, as well as in the Red Sea and through the Panama Canal. But there are also data chokepoints, such as clusters of undersea cables. There are capital chokepoints, such as legal tools to cut corporates off from use of the US dollar or the SWIFT banking system. And there are people chokepoints, such as when major aviation hubs go offline.

Subscribe now

Step 2 - Measuring geopolitical risk

The next step is to turn possibilities into risks.

A possibility is not yet a risk. A risk is a threat with a probability and an impact. And rather than simply acknowledging that the world is more dangerous — or identifying, in the abstract, that there are threats to your organisation — you need a way of asking two very specific questions.

As I go through these, I want you to imagine one specific geopolitically driven threat to your organisation that is relevant to your work. Maybe a country sanctioning a counterparty. Maybe a government introducing politically driven visa restrictions. Maybe a regional office being cut off by a state-sanctioned cyber attack. Maybe staff getting stranded in a warzone. Ideally, imagine something novel but realistic and plausible based on where the world is headed.

The first question you need to ask is: how likely is this to happen?

Many people’s instinct is to say “I don’t know” or “You can’t put a figure on that” or “It’s impossible to predict the future”. The way around this – the way that intelligence agencies think about these issues – is not to forecast the future, but to look backwards. How often has something like this happened before? If something like this occurs once a decade, treat it as roughly a 10 per cent annual probability. If it occurs once every hundred years, it is closer to 1 per cent. If it happens every couple of years, it is closer to 50 per cent. You use that historical base rate as your anchor, and then you adjust it — up or down — based on what you observe in the current environment. It is not a perfect method. But it is an honest and disciplined one, and it is far superior to either ignoring the question or pretending that precision is possible when it is not. So – take your imagined threat and give it a percentage chance of occurring over the next year.

The second question – to turn a threat into a risk – is to ask: how much would it cost us?

If the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for three months, what is the cost to your firm? If staff are stranded in a conflict zone, what are the direct and indirect costs? If the United States sanctions a key counterparty, if a major transit hub becomes inaccessible, if a government decides overnight to restrict the visa category on which your international assignment programme depends — what is the order of magnitude? Is this a hundred-thousand-dollar problem? A million-dollar problem? A ten-million-dollar problem?

Once you have a probability and an impact, you suddenly have something far more useful than anxiety or a vague sense that “geopolitical risk is rising”. You have – probably for the first time – a basis for decision-making. You can multiply those two numbers together and produce a risk figure. You can compare it with your other risks. You can ask whether it is material. You can total up several imagined threats and work out your total annualised expected loss from geopolitics. And you can begin to ask what you are willing to spend — in time, money and management attention — to reduce it.

Companies do this already, routinely, for operational risk, legal risk, security risk and cyber risk. Very few do it properly for geopolitical risk — particularly in Australia, a country blessed by distance, good fortune and a history of “Stephen Bradbury-ing” our way to victory while the rest of the world falls over at the finish line.

But as the Iran war is showing us in real time, that approach is no longer sufficient. And if you need any answer to why measuring geopolitical risk is important, all you need to do is recall the old adage that “what gets measured gets managed” – and its corollary, what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get managed.

Subscribe now

Step 4 - Managing the risks you’ve identified

All those preceding steps are in service of action.

The essential task of geopolitical strategy is to reduce the probability of the event affecting your organisation, to reduce the impact if it materialises, and to increase your capacity to respond quickly and effectively.

Often that means diversification. Building redundancy into critical processes and relationships. Developing second suppliers, alternative routes, different jurisdictions, different staffing models. Having crisis protocols that are written down and rehearsed — not assembled in the middle of the crisis itself.

It is also to ask what “no regret” moves you can take now to make sure that no matter how the world of geopolitics evolves, you will be as prepared as you can be. And it is to ask what plans should we have in place – ready to go – if any of our imagined threats come to pass.

For mobility professionals specifically, this is where your function has an opportunity to reposition itself within the firm. Geopolitical risk almost always surfaces, first and most visibly, as a people problem. Where are our people? Can they get out? Can they get in? What do we owe them? What does our duty of care require? What happens to the assignment programme if that country becomes inaccessible? What happens to our talent pipeline if the visa environment shifts?

Some of you will have been dealing with geopolitics a lot over the past few years. And in very different ways. Dealing with staff whose views on Israel and Gaza are creating real tensions in the workplace — and the question of how to manage a divided workforce across different jurisdictions is itself a geopolitical problem. Some of you will be dealing with the politicisation of visa categories that were, until recently, entirely routine. Some of you will be grappling with evacuation planning for assignments in regions that have become rapidly more volatile. Some of you will be watching the competition for mobile international talent intensify as certain corridors close and others open. And some of you will be wondering whether it would be wise to give your staff burner phones when they travel to the United States, just as you might if they were visiting Russia or China.

The specifics will vary by organisation. But there is no credible version of corporate life, in the world as it currently exists, in which geopolitics does not reach the mobility function.

Step 5 - Monitoring what matters - and ignoring what doesn’t

The final piece of the puzzle is to address the noise issue itself. Geopolitics is extraordinarily noisy. Things seem to change by the day. Or by the tweet. It can feel distracting, disorienting and discombobulating. And it’s often all those things.

It’s easy to say “just focus on signal, not noise”. But that is literally impossible if you have not done the work that I have outlined. If you haven’t worked out where your own vulnerabilities are, where state actions could create threats to the firm, if you haven’t worked out what types of threats really matter to you and which ones are actually not that significant, then you will have no way of working out “what matters” and “what doesn’t”.

But – if you have done those exercises, then it becomes quite simple.

Very practically, for each of your key risks, you identify the two or three events that would materially increase its probability or its impact. Suddenly you have gone from having a vague notion that everything in geopolitics matters; that everything is consequential; to a much narrower and more manageable list of ten, twenty or thirty things to really watch out for. And that allows you to narrow your aperture, to focus on only those things that matter not to the world but to you, and to ignore – blissfully – all those tweets that don’t.

Subscribe now

Serenity now

Let me close with this.

It is easy to despair about geopolitics. The news is relentless, the complexity is genuine, and the feeling that events are moving faster than our ability to understand them — let alone respond to them — is entirely rational.

It’s just as easy to throw your hands up and say there’s nothing we can do about it. After all, you cannot change American, Chinese, Russian or even Australian foreign policy. The rise and fall of nations, war and peace, is beyond your control.

But my counsel today is not despair. And it is not trying to control things that you cannot control. It is, in fact, a version of the Serenity Prayer, which any good Christian or member of Alcoholics Anonymous will know well – “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”.

You cannot change geopolitics. You cannot predict the future. But you can understand the world. You can understand your organisation’s relation to geopolitics. You can map your risks. You can measure them. And you can take actions to reduce them.

My hope today is simple. I had two aims. First, to help you see that geopolitical risk is not just something “out there”, that it is relevant to your work and that it is, in fact, manageable. And, second, to not have to re-write this speech for next year – I am looking at you, President Trump.

Hello,

In this edition of Week Signals:

• IN REVIEW. Fragmentation at the heart of finance; the corrosion of unpredictability; and the paucity of alternatives.

• UP AHEAD. Putin reigns on his parade; April’s CPI awaits; Trump goes to China as Modi goes to Europe; and the BRICS gather in Delhi.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. If you’re not receiving the full edition, you can upgrade below.

Subscribe now

The Week in Review: Trust no one

The week began with “Project Freedom”, a mission to get ships out of Hormuz as a “humanitarian” gesture. It ended with the de facto collapse of the Hormuz ceasefire. What Donald Trump referred to as an Iranian “love tap” gave way to Iranian strikes on the UAE (we, embarrassingly, misheard this as a “love trap” and proceeded to craft an entire edition around that – but what is a love tap anyway?). Not so much love as war.

But in a week of gaffes, outrages, and distractions – or a week like any other – perhaps the really shocking thing was the blatant market manipulation seen early Wednesday morning. And don’t just take our word for it. Economist Paul Krugman has done a pretty good analysis on the whole thing. Citing analysis from former M&A banker Adam Kobeissi, Krugman noted $920 million worth of crude shorts placed just over an hour before the latest Axios report on a (possibly fictitious) Iran-US memorandum to end the war. Blame the journalist or the leaker or someone else, but this wasn’t garden-variety insider trading.

We don’t need to go into the specifics here, but the event does join the dots to what may be not only the week’s other major theme, but the major theme of the year, if not the decade: the growing insider dealing and manipulation at the heart of modern capitalism, despite (or because of) all the technologies designed to counter it: 24/7 markets, new prediction platforms, ultra-cheap retail trading accounts, and the blockchain.

US bank notes, for those who still carry them, contain the motto “In God we trust”. The dollar is no longer backed by gold, but it is backed by 11 nuclear aircraft carrier groups and the implicit understanding that this legal tender is worth something, and that the US will honour its commitments. There’s a reason why a US dollar is worth more than a Zimbabwean dollar (the $100 trillion note, until it was removed from circulation, had no motto but a waterfall and buffalo on the reverse, which says it all). And there’s a reason why, for all the criticisms of the hard currency crowd, we continue to price almost everything in it (even, for now, Middle Eastern oil).

Yet beyond the silent thief of inflation, common to virtually all currencies, it’s increasingly apparent that something more insidious has emerged at the heart of modern US-centric finance. The Ancient Romans had their debasement, reducing the amount of silver in a coin. The Bourbon French had their système de Law, in which a nation’s balance sheet was essentially turned into a scam. Modern America, beyond non-fungible tokens and Bernie Madoff, now has something to beat them all: the second Trump presidency.

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Trump says Iran’s in a ‘love trap’; he’s in a war trap.

• ISRAEL. PALESTINE. The Gaza peace plan lies in ruins.

• BRITAIN. Voters lodge a protest in no particular direction.

• EUROPE. UNITED STATES. Washington issues another ultimatum.

• BRAZIL. Ahead of a knife-edge election, the US plays both sides.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Nothing's gonna change

Trump says Iran's in a 'love trap'; he's in a war trap.

Missiles were reported across the UAE early Friday after Iran attacked three US destroyers transiting Hormuz. Donald Trump said no damage was caused and Iran was stuck in a "love trap". The US said its own strikes were in "self-defence".

INTELLIGENCE. Trump claims the ceasefire holds, but there’ll come a point where the status quo becomes intolerable for the US and its allies. Already, there are reports that he only suspended earlier transits because Saudi Arabia denied use of its airspace. Iran likely judges it can extract more concessions by keeping the war going and Hormuz closed, including ahead of Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping, and probably beyond. It may have one card, but it’s a trump card.

FOR BUSINESS. Estimates of Iran’s remaining launchers and missiles have been lifted to 75% and 70%, respectively. The Washington Post says the CIA believes Iran can survive at least another three to four months before facing severe hardship. Satellite imagery suggests several ships are still on fire in Hormuz. Irrespective of who is taking the greater hit, time appears to be on Tehran’s side. Brent crude prices have rebounded after falling on earlier hopes of a deal.

ISRAEL. PALESTINE. Back to the drawing board

The Gaza peace plan lies in ruins.

The son of the official tasked with negotiating Hamas’s disarmament died Thursday after an Israeli strike. The Board of Peace received $100 million from the UAE, Israeli media reported, the biggest sum so far despite $17 billion in pledges.

INTELLIGENCE. Stage 2 of Trump’s Gaza peace plan looks awol. The US is

Read more

Welcome to our May Private Roundtable, with the team behind Geopolitical Dispatch.

Our Private Roundtables give Geopolitical Dispatch subscribers the opportunity to engage directly with our experts on their most important questions.

Consider subscribing to Geopolitical Dispatch to attend these monthly events, and to access a transcript of part of the conversation—the second half of each Private Roundtable is off-the-record.

In today’s edition, we explore the Iran war, the UAE leaving OPEC, the Ukraine war and Russia’s potential next moves and President Trump’s upcoming trip to China.

This is a transcript of the first of two Private Roundtables we do each month for paid GD subscribers.

Consider subscribing for exclusive access to these events and the opportunity to ask your questions direct.

Subscribe now

An edited transcript of our 6 May 2026 conversation between Christian Habla, Michael Feller and Damien Bruckard follows.

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Leaks on a deal show desperation, not progress.

• ISRAEL. LEBANON. The war returns to Beirut.

• UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Moscow warns diplomats to leave Kyiv.

• NORTH KOREA. Kim turns his back on the South, for now.

• PUBLIC HEALTH. Hantavirus is not Covid-19, at least not yet.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Selling lemons

Leaks on a deal show desperation, not progress.

Oil prices crashed before recovering after Axios reported that Iran and the US were close to agreeing a “one-page memorandum” to end the war. Iran’s chief negotiator said “Operation Fauxios” had replaced “Operation Trust Me Bro.”

INTELLIGENCE. A series of shorts were placed minutes before the report was published, suggesting market manipulation. But as each such attempt is made, using favoured journalists, the effects will presumably dissipate. The reality still points to a stalemate. While backchannel talks are undoubtedly occurring, no peace deal is ever one page. Red lines remain largely irreconcilable. A trusted third-party mediator is needed for a durable, genuine solution.

FOR BUSINESS. The war has been a boon for traders (and the reporter who’s made the same claim five times in 19 days) but few others. As each day of false dawns passes, the world loses another 10 million barrels of supply. Some oil, largely Iranian, is still getting out, but a physical crunch is nearing not only for energy, but plastics, fertiliser and helium. Iran’s timeline seems to be extending, however, with storage limits being revised from 15 days away to 45.

ISRAEL. LEBANON. Back at it

The war returns to Beirut.

The IDF bombed Beirut for the first time since Donald Trump’s 16 April ceasefire late Wednesday, saying it was trying to target the commander of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force. Benjamin Netanyahu said he had spoken to Trump about Iran.

INTELLIGENCE. Netanyahu and the IDF have been consistent on their desire to

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Project Freedom is paused for unscheduled maintenance.

• SAUDI ARABIA. Strategic diversification trumps the economic kind.

• ROMANIA. A budget spat risks reopening the gates to Moscow.

• CHAD. A spectre haunts one of the region’s more resilient regimes.

• CUBA. The US is looking for a problem it can solve.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Between projects

Project Freedom is paused for unscheduled maintenance.

Donald Trump said Operation Project Freedom would be “paused” at Pakistan’s request to allow for a “complete and final agreement” with Iran. Oil price sank. Tehran said it was surrender as Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi visited Beijing.

INTELLIGENCE. Project Freedom managed to escort at least two ships from Hormuz but was met with salvos at US vessels, commercial carriers, and the UAE. A Stratotanker was forced to make an emergency landing. Washington says the move gives peace a chance, with a warning having been sent. Tehran says Trump has chickened out. Ahead of Trump’s own visit, Araghchi’s trip to China suggests now may be the time for more durable third-party mediation.

FOR BUSINESS. With his current forces, Trump can’t risk military escalation at land or sea. He and Marco Rubio have said as much. Yet with the nuclear question still open, the US can’t be seen to retreat. Ongoing embargoes suit neither side. Iran is unlikely to buckle before the US. Negotiations led by China could provide an out, but it would presumably come at long-term cost to the petrodollar and US prestige. For short-term market relief, however, Trump may take it.

SAUDI ARABIA. LIV to fight another day

Strategic diversification trumps the economic kind.

Saudi Arabia recorded a Q1 budget deficit of $35.5 billion as defence spending rose by 25%. Riyadh's share of the LIV golf franchise was put on the market as its Desert Warrior film grossed just $500,000 against a budget of $150 million.

INTELLIGENCE. Eyeing Abu Dhabi’s success, Riyadh has embarked on a historic

Read more

Hello,

Apologies for the publishing delay. Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Like Epic Fury, Project Freedom risks boiling the ocean.

• ISRAEL. LEBANON. Shorn of pretence, the Hezbollah war heats up.

• SUDAN. An attack on Khartoum is blamed on Abu Dhabi.

• INDIA. Modi’s party has a historic win in West Bengal.

• NEPAL. Kathmandu reopens a Sino-Indian border dispute.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Ceasefire extinguisher

Like Epic Fury, Project Freedom risks boiling the ocean.

Fujairah was hit, and the UAE intercepted over a dozen other missiles, as the US claimed to have destroyed six IRGC boats following Iran’s efforts to stop naval escorts via Operation Project Freedom, the successor to Operation Epic Fury.

INTELLIGENCE. Project Freedom claims to have escorted two US-flagged ships out of Hormuz. Tehran disputes this and says it forced a US frigate to turn back (earlier claims of a hit have been denied, but a Stratotanker may have been downed). All other vessels, including those of the ostensibly neutral states Donald Trump claimed his rebranded operation was meant to assist, remain stuck. Brent crude remains above $110. The UAE has said it might retaliate.

FOR BUSINESS. The US seems no closer to breaking Iran’s blockade. As with any military solution to removing the residual nuclear threat, Washington would need a lot more than the estimated 100 aircraft and 15,000 troops currently deployed. Bush 1’s Desert Storm, against much smaller Iraq, began with 750,000 troops. Bush 2’s Coalition of the Willing had 500,000 allied personnel. Nobody has yet joined Trump’s US-Israeli effort, though the UAE may in time.

ISRAEL. LEBANON. Timing is everything

Shorn of pretence, the Hezbollah war heats up.

Lebanon’s president said talks with Israel would not be held “at this time” as the speaker of parliament said diplomacy could not continue amid the war. Fighting stepped up in Lebanon’s south, with both sides using first-person-view drones.

INTELLIGENCE. There was never any real ceasefire in Lebanon as the guns fell silent

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Markets react coolly to Trump’s ‘Project Freedom’.

• GERMANY. NATO. The Pentagon begins a painful extraction.

• UKRAINE. RUSSIA. The war pivots further to the Baltic.

• CANADA. EUROPE. Carney joins a confab, but the EU seems remote.

• TAIWAN. CHINA. Lai reaches Eswatini, but more important trips await.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. To mark three years of publishing, we’re making today’s edition free for everyone. If you’d like to continue, please upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Ship may safely grouse

Markets react coolly to Trump's 'Project Freedom'.

Oil prices fluctuated in Asian trade despite Donald Trump promising to "guide" ships safely out of Hormuz as a "humanitarian" gesture "with" Iran. Tehran said such a mission would violate the ceasefire. A tanker was hit off Fujairah.

INTELLIGENCE. “Project Freedom”, due to start today, may simply end up allowing certain vessels, which have already escaped the strait, or paid Iran tolls, to pass through the US maritime blockade. This could be a tacit acknowledgment that some ships are already evading both chokepoints, including an oil supertanker and a very large gas carrier in recent days. But Iran’s alleged strikes off Fujairah, and another near Sirik, inside Hormuz, will keep most ships at bay.

FOR BUSINESS. If Project Freedom was an attempt to jawbone the market, the gambit has failed. Yet another ray of hope may materialise as Trump considers a 14-point proposal sent via Pakistan. So far, the president says he’s unimpressed. Iran’s plan seems a variation of previous offers (i.e., to allow its nuclear program to continue, or at least not be dismantled). But between resuming strikes or surrendering, fruitless talks may be the best near-term outcome.

GERMANY. NATO. Auf Wiedersehen, Pete

The Pentagon begins a painful extraction.

Pete Hegseth ordered 5,000 troops to withdraw from Germany over the next six to 12 months. The Pentagon said the decision followed a “thorough” force posture review, even if it came days after a spat between Trump and Friedrich Merz.

INTELLIGENCE. Merz has sought to downplay this latest transatlantic rift. Yet irrespective of the decision’s causality, and the fact that another 30,000 US troops will likely continue to stay, Merz will bear the political cost. Germany continues to double down on its own defence spending, and integrate with other European NATO members, but the move will be read as a further signal by adversaries that the US is wavering in its commitment to European defence.

FOR BUSINESS. Amid reports that other allies are having their arms purchases delayed on account of US constraints in the Middle East, the withdrawal seems alarming. Yet a lot can happen over a year, and there is plenty of scope for the troops to simply be sent closer to NATO’s eastern flank (e.g., Poland or Romania). And as Trump, Hegseth and JD Vance continue to criticise NATO partners, Marco Rubio will visit Europe this week on a “bridge-building” tour.

UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Balts and braces

The war pivots further to the Baltic.

Drones were reported over Estonia’s Russian-majority city of Narva Sunday as Ukraine hit the nearby port of Primorsk. Kyiv earlier hit oil two tankers in Russia’s Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Sweden seized a suspected false-flag tanker.

INTELLIGENCE. Ukrainian strikes on Russian export facilities have distracted Moscow and crimped windfall profits, but overall volumes have remained steady throughout April, at around 3.5 million barrels per day. Moreover, more exports are now going through Pacific ports, and as summer nears, Arctic waters will be able to carry extra cargoes. The ultimate effect of strikes on Primorsk and Ust-Luga is they may give cause for Russia to test NATO in the Baltic.

FOR BUSINESS. A grey-zone attack on Narva is one of the scenarios NATO planners have long theorised, alongside a seizure of Sweden’s Gotland, or – beyond the Baltic – the arrival of Russian forces on Norway’s Svalbard (the territory’s governing treaty only prohibits its use for “war-like” purposes). US equivocation makes such scenarios slightly more plausible, particularly if Russia can claim just cause, such as the arrival of drones via NATO territories.

CANADA. EUROPE. Neither Armenia nor elbow

Carney joins a confab, but the EU seems remote.

Mark Carney visited Yerevan for the European Political Community summit Monday, the first time a non-European had attended. Montreal was last week selected as host for a new NATO-adjacent Defence, Security and Resilience ​Bank.

INTELLIGENCE. Alongside the launch of a Canadian sovereign fund, the DSRB is another symbol of Ottawa’s emergence from underneath the US umbrella. But speculation that Carney’s visit to the EPC represents a step toward joining the EU is unfounded. The EPC, if anything, is a foil against EU integration. Its current host has little chance of EU accession in the short-to-medium term. The host from the first half of last year, Albania, has similarly little chance.

FOR BUSINESS. As symbolism goes, Carney’s visit is important, but economically, geographically and strategically, Canada will stay North American. Stronger EU and multilateral ties can hedge Canada’s bets, but US dominance is overwhelming. Ongoing twice-yearly EPC attendance may, however, let Carney keep up with his peers if NATO cancels its own 2027 summit, as reported, on account of its European members wanting to avoid another Trump showdown.

TAIWAN. CHINA. Rat and mouse

Lai reaches Eswatini, but more important trips await.

Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te arrived in Eswatini on a visit that was earlier cancelled due to nearby states refusing overflight permission. Beijing said Lai was "a rat scurrying across the street". Taipei said this was "fishwife's gutter talk".

INTELLIGENCE. Sledging aside, the real visits to watch will be those of Paraguay’s president to Taipei on Thursday, and Trump’s visit to Beijing next week. A planned visit to Washington next month by the chair of the opposition Kuomintang also bears watching, particularly if she lands a requested meeting with Trump. But irrespective of the US president’s engagements, if all Taiwan can count on are Eswatini, Paraguay and ten more, it’s diplomatic catmeat.

FOR BUSINESS. China is unlikely to invade Taiwan for as long as its own military purge continues, and Ukraine and Iran prove the risks of asymmetric warfare. Yet China can achieve its long-term integration goals by wearing down Taiwan’s political and economic independence. In Trump, Xi Jinping may have found a leader with whom to strike a “grand bargain” to accelerate that trend, including via reduced US arms sales and treatment of Taiwanese technology.

Thank you for subscribing to Geopolitical Dispatch. Feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.

Best,

Michael Feller, Chief Strategist

michael@geopolitical-strategy.com

Hello from Melbourne,

This weekend marks three years since we began publishing Geopolitical Dispatch. I want to use the occasion, first, to thank you for subscribing and reading, and second, to offer a few reflections on what we have learnt over that time about geopolitics, about writing about geopolitics, and about the increasingly direct links between geopolitics, markets and business.

When we began writing in May 2023, we did so on a fairly simple proposition: geopolitics was becoming more important, more complex and more central to the global economy. The large forces in international relations were changing, slowly but unmistakably, and those changes would in time alter the rules of international commerce, the operating environment of businesses around the world, and the assumptions on which many corporate strategies had been built. Understanding the major trends, and interpreting the daily events through which those trends reveal themselves, would therefore become a critical business function. Not because every executive needed to become a diplomat, but because business leaders would increasingly need geopolitics to understand not just the world, but their world.

Not long after we started, one prominent businessperson, investor, and serious student of history told us that what we were doing was, in effect, chronicling history in real time. He did not mean that Geopolitical Dispatch was a news service, simply reporting events or chasing the sensational and the newsworthy. He meant that, by taking a structured and consistent approach, by trying each day to distinguish what mattered from what did not, and by linking events together over time, we were attempting something slightly grander: writing a kind of living history book as events unfolded.

I was reflecting on that comment recently while rereading an essay I have returned to many times in my adult life: Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox, his famous essay on Tolstoy’s view of history.

War and peace

Berlin begins with the fragment attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He uses it to distinguish between two broad intellectual temperaments. Hedgehogs relate everything to one central vision, one organising theory of the world. Foxes, on the other hand, resist such neatness. They focus on particulars, contradictions, contingencies and the stubborn variety of experience.

Tolstoy, in Berlin’s reading, sat uncomfortably between the two. The theorist in him wanted to be a hedgehog. He wanted to find the laws of history, the deep forces that explained why events unfolded as they did. But the novelist in him was, by nature, a fox. He saw the irreducible complexity of human life. He understood that history was made not only by structures and forces, but by people, accidents, misjudgments, moments of courage, moments of vanity, weather, exhaustion, fear and chance.

Returning to Berlin’s essay made me wonder whether Geopolitical Dispatch, over the past three years, has been more hedgehog or fox. And, more importantly, whether those two ways of thinking can be reconciled. This is not simply an exercise in intellectual history. It goes to the heart of how we should understand the present moment: whether history is moving according to large impersonal forces, or whether it is being shaped by the particular people and decisions that fill the daily news. I think you know who I’m talking about.

In some ways, Geopolitical Dispatch is structurally a fusion of both.

The Daily Dispatch is our fox-like product. Each weekday we examine five specific developments, each on its own terms. A battlefield shift in Ukraine. A cabinet appointment in Washington. An Israeli strike in Lebanon. A court ruling on tariffs. A Chinese export control. A crisis in the Red Sea. A speech by Xi, Trump, Putin, Modi, or Macron. Each is particular and each has its own context, its own incentives, its own actors, its own history.

This is foxy thinking. The particulars matter, the personalities matter, the views of leaders matter, as do their fears, motives, ambitions, constraints and misreadings. The fox says that every country is different, every conflict is different, and every bilateral relationship has its own history and emotional charge. Over three years, covering at least five events each weekday, we have analysed roughly one hundred discrete events each month, more than 1,000 each year, and somewhere around 3,500 separate pieces in the grand mosaic of political behaviour around the world. That is a lot of foxes.

Subscribe now

One big thing

And yet there is also a distinctly hedgehog side to what we do.

Each Saturday, in Week Signals, we step back from the particular events and try to discern the broader patterns they reveal. We look for the impersonal forces emerging from the accumulation of these daily decisions: the trends, structural shifts and system-level changes that cannot be seen clearly from any single event. Over the past three years, we have returned repeatedly to a set of themes: the personalisation of politics, the weaponisation of trade, the weakening of international institutions, the strain on the rules-based order, the erosion of collective respect for international law, the fusion of economics and security, and the growing tendency for geopolitical events and motives to seep directly into the business environment.

This led us, in April 2024, to the frame we have used more than almost any other: the geopolitical interregnum. The argument goes that the old order, built on American primacy, broad support for multilateralism, stable institutions, open trade and a largely taken-for-granted alliance system, may not yet have collapsed but it is no longer providing the stable frame of reference it once did. The United States remains the most powerful country in the world, but it is more ambivalent about the burdens of leadership. China has become more powerful, more capable and more central to the global economy. Europe has largely stagnated while power across the world has become more diffuse. While the rules still exist, they no longer settle disputes with the same authority. In short, the old order is coming to a close but it is not yet clear what is taking its place.

That is our hedgehog thesis: geopolitics is the foundation on which the international commercial order rests. When that foundation shifts, the rules of business shift with it. Trade, markets, energy, shipping, technology, capital and law do not float above power — they depend on it. For several decades, many businesses could behave as if the political foundations of the global economy were settled. But as our 2023 hunch went — and what seems to have now come to pass — the foundations are cracking. The old rules that allowed for the gradual integration of the world economy, the generally peaceful resolution of disputes and a broader sense of order rather than chaos never existed in a vacuum; they were political achievements, underwritten by power, habit and consent. And those conditions are now changing.

Quick brown fox

But the fox keeps interrupting. The interregnum tells us that the system is unsettled, but it does not tell us precisely what will happen next. It does not tell us how the Iran war will play out, whether Trump will overreach, whether Xi will move on Taiwan, whether Putin will escalate or compromise, whether the European Union will cohere or fragment, or whether markets will finally reprice the risks they have so often ignored. The macro hedgehog-y thesis explains the structural terrain, yet it does not determine history’s path.

This tension between the particular and the general, between individual agency and impersonal forces, is not just an “intellectual’s cocktail-party game”, as went one backhanded compliment of Berlin’s essay. It is the central challenge of understanding today’s geopolitical moment. The fox-like view says prediction is impossible, and that one must focus carefully on the specifics of what has actually occurred. This is hard to refute. Knowing where missiles are landing may be more immediately useful than knowing that “conflict risk is structurally higher”. Knowing the precise wording of a tariff order matters more, in the moment, than saying “trade is fragmenting”. Knowing precisely which ministry in which country could create regulations that would affect your particular supply chain is often more useful than saying “China risk is rising”.

And yet the big trends matter too. If you only monitor daily events, you drown in detail. You see movement but not direction. You consume information but lack a frame. For organisations, the urgent and specific matter precisely because that is where real, tangible risks lie. But strategy requires some view of the accumulated effect of events. Businesses cannot operate only in the day. They must allocate capital, build supply chains, choose markets, hire people, enter contracts and take positions on the future. And that requires a view, however provisional, of where the world may be heading.

Berlin’s essay is useful because Tolstoy wrestled with exactly this problem in War and Peace. Napoleon believed he could bend history to his will. He saw himself as the master of events, the great man whose genius would impose order on the chaos of war. Tolstoy thought this was delusion. Napoleon, in his telling, was like a child sitting in a carriage, pulling at the reins and believing he was steering, while the horses, roads, weather and countless other forces carried him along.

And yet it would be absurd to say Napoleon did not matter. His worldview, ambition, ego, fear, calculations and decisions mattered enormously. Without Napoleon, there is no Napoleonic invasion of Russia. But once he acted, he entered a world he could not control. The Russian winter mattered. Logistics mattered. Kutuzov mattered. Soldiers mattered. Chance mattered. The gap between intention and outcome became the space in which history unfolded.

Share

The illusion of control

There are uncomfortable echoes today. Donald Trump is, by any reasonable measure, having a larger impact on the course of history than any other individual alive. This is partly because he leads the world’s most powerful country, but also because he is exercising that power in ways no recent American president has done. His tariffs, threats, demands, transactional style and disdain for inherited constraints are reshaping the assumptions of allies, rivals, markets and companies alike. No serious analysis of the present moment can ignore him.

But neither can it treat him as omnipotent. Like Napoleon, he may have more faith in his ability to bend events to his will than events will ultimately justify. He may have had some success in some theatres, and he has certainly forced governments and businesses to respond to him. But he has also encountered constraints: courts, Congress, markets, allies, adversaries, domestic opinion, administrative capacity, military realities and the stubborn fact that other people also act. In Iran, as elsewhere, his decisions collide with the decisions of others, and the outcome may be quite different from what he intended.

This is not to draw a direct equivalence between Trump and Napoleon, which would be too neat and therefore wrong. It is simply to illustrate the broader point. Geopolitical analysis must be hedgehog-like enough to recognise the structures through which power moves, and fox-like enough to understand the individuals through whom those structures operate. No amount of big data, abstract trend analysis or neat categorisation is sufficient if you do not understand Trump, Putin, Xi, MBS, Modi or Zelensky as people with their own worldviews, fears, vanities and constraints. But no psychological profile of any one leader is enough if you do not understand the system in which they act.

After three years of writing Geopolitical Dispatch, where does that leave us? Perhaps with the only honest answer: a bit of column A and a bit of column B. History is neither a machine nor a fog. It is not governed entirely by impersonal forces, but nor is it simply open to individual will. It is more like a drama played on a field set by power, geography, resources, institutions and time.

The field matters. Some positions are stronger than others. Some moves are available and others are not. Some leaders and countries “hold the cards” while others are barely at the table. But judgment still counts. Resolve, vanity, miscalculation, courage, intelligence and stupidity all matter. Structure may create the conditions, but ultimately, people decide how to meet them. And, at certain moments, those decisions can alter the course of events far beyond what the underlying forces alone would have suggested.

Against the machine

That, too, is why we remain cautious about the promise that artificial intelligence can solve this problem for us. If Tolstoy could not reconcile the forces of history with the actions of individuals, we have little confidence that an algorithm will. If history is not merely the aggregation of data points, then no volume of data, however vast, will reveal a clean pattern. If events turn, as they so often do, on will, fear, ambition and misjudgment, then understanding requires something closer to empathy than computation.

History demands both the attention of the novelist, who sees the texture of human experience, and the abstraction of the philosopher, who seeks the shape beneath it. We are, frankly, unaware of any world leaders who has ever outsourced their understanding of geopolitics to a dashboard, a dataset or a digest. Yet today, with technology and its peddlers promising not only omniscience but a quick fix, there is an increasingly tantalising temptation to rely on The Machine. A solution that may be smart, but that will never be wise.

The practical consequence is that geopolitical analysis cannot stop at either abstraction or observation. It has to move between the two. The large forces matter because they set the terrain. The particulars matter because that is where exposure, decision and opportunity actually live.

Where this leaves us

That is also the approach we try to bring to our advisory work at Geopolitical Strategy, the firm that sits behind Geopolitical Dispatch.

On the one hand, we help business leaders understand the large forces changing the international system: the shifting balance of power, the return of the state, the weaponisation of trade, the fragility of supply chains, the geopolitical character of energy and technology. That is the hedgehog work: helping them see the larger shape of events.

But we always move back to the approach of the fox. We sit with boards and executives to translate those trends into what they mean specifically for their organisation. We help them identify the exposures, decisions, markets, people, regulations, routes, counterparties and watchpoints that matter specifically to them. And we work with them on the most important question to grapple with in light of how history is unfolding: what to do.

Over the past three years, working with leaders across a range of industries, I have increasingly come to see that the point of engaging with geopolitics is not to predict the future, but to position for it. To understand the forces that will shape the world, the contingencies that could alter it, and the specific signs that would tell you which way events are moving. That requires the hedgehog’s sense of structure, the fox’s attention to detail, and the flexibility to move between the two.

Perhaps that is what chronicling history in real time really means. Not pretending to know where history will end, but watching carefully as it forms. Not reducing the world to a single thesis, but not surrendering to chaos either. Trying, day by day, week by week, to see both the one big thing and the many small things that might yet change it.

That is what we have tried to do for three years. That is what we will keep trying to do. And we are very glad to have you with us on the journey.

Best wishes,

Damien

Subscribe now

Hello,

In this edition of Week Signals:

• IN REVIEW. George III to Charles III; age, leadership and feedback; angry young men and women; lessons from Europe and Japan.

• UP AHEAD. Debates on Essequibo; results for West Bengal; Starmer’s Götterdämmerung; Taiwanese diplomacy; and the ASEAN leaders’ summit.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. If you’re not receiving the full edition, you can upgrade below.

Subscribe now

The Week in Review: Gerontocracy and its discontents

The week began with an assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. It ended with Donald Trump declaring not so much victory in Iran, but – for the purposes of congressional reauthorisation – a “termination” of the war, because there was a ceasefire. A naval blockade remains. The clock starts afresh. Trump, anointed by or as God – depending on the day on Truth Social – remains president, or perhaps king. It was, after all, the week when he hosted a real king, Charles III, to help celebrate the 250^th anniversary of US independence.

It was a big week by any measure, and particularly so for a man soon to enter his ninth decade. But Trump wanted you to know on Thursday that it all was okay:

Anybody running for President or Vice President should be forced to take a Cognitive Examination prior to entering the Race! By doing so, we wouldn’t be surprised at people like Barack “Hussein” Obama, or Sleepy Joe Biden, getting “ELECTED.” Our Country would be a much better place! I took the Exam three times during my (“THREE!”) Terms as President, and ACED IT ALL THREE TIMES — An Achievement that, even on a single Exam, according to the Doctors, has rarely been done before! President DONALD J. TRUMP

To be fair, Trump seems more energetic than a man half his age. And measured by executive orders – let alone war, peace, and policy U-turns – he is probably more energetic than any president since Franklin D Roosevelt, who, stricken by polio, could also be forgiven for a far less hectic pace.

In January, following his threats to invade Greenland, we wrote about Trump’s psychology, as seen largely through the writings of his niece, Mary Trump, a registered psychologist. This week, it seems a good time to write a follow-up on Trump’s mental acuity and the reality, as of next month, that there’ll be another octogenarian in the White House.

Beyond Trump’s evident narcissism and antisociality – drivers of a unique personality and presidency – he is exhibiting signs of cognitive decline. That is not meant to be a partisan statement. Like many, we had the same concerns about Joe Biden. And if this were any other country or president, knowing that a commander-in-chief sleeps in meetings, rambles through speeches, or confuses mathematics, people, or countries, should be of key concern to any business or investor.

Following our report last week on the rumours around replacing Trump with JD Vance, lest the midterms prove terminal (gerrymanders notwithstanding), such an analysis should also warrant scrutiny for anyone considering invoking the 25^th Amendment. Trump may have nine lives, but almost nine decades in, he’s mortal like the rest of us. All leaders have an expiry date. And, as was so frequently reminded this week, one of the reasons the US parted with Britain 250 years ago was because they didn’t want anything to do with what Percy Bysshe Shelley would later call “an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king”.

Whether Trump goes in 2028, before or after the midterms, or – per the hopes of Steve Bannon and others – at some point beyond, it’s worth asking as well what lessons we can draw from other gerontocratic regimes, past and present, to assess what might happen next. It’s worth asking, too, whether gerontocracy, in an era of extended career paths, late Baby Boomer retirement, and longevity bros, will in fact become a global norm (perhaps alongside plutocracy and kakistocracy), as it was in Ancient Sparta or the 1970s Soviet Union. Beyond Donald Trump, what are the fiscal, cultural and technological implications for such a political order? Is this yet another point of pressure for the young – between AI stealing graduate jobs and empty-nesters staying in entry-level homes – or are there benefits here that the pundits might otherwise ignore?

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. US allies demure on reopening Hormuz.

• ISRAEL. UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. A rival alliance takes shape.

• PANAMA. China tries to flip a point of supply chain leverage.

• MEXICO. Trump tests Sheinbaum ahead of trade talks.

• MARKETS. Amid a global crisis, stocks seem artificially elevated.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Coalition of God willing

US allies demure on reopening Hormuz.

The US confirmed reports it was assembling a new “Maritime Freedom Construct” to bring together allies and companies to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Britain unveiled a new “Northern Navies Initiative” to deter Russia from the North Sea.

INTELLIGENCE. Besides Lithuania, no one has yet shown interest in the new coalition of the willing. France and the UK have their own plans, in addition to the Royal Navy’s initiative against Russia. Japan is talking to Iran directly about safe passage. Germany has joined Italy and Spain in the diplomatic dogbox. Canada sees its US ties as “weakness”. Australia is securing jet fuel from China. This may be fresh grist for the America First mill, but it won’t open Hormuz.

FOR BUSINESS. Like Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, which has allegedly only received $1 billion of $17 billion pledged, the Maritime Freedom Construct looks forlorn. With no Tony Blair to Trump’s George Bush, the US will need to find other options. Israel reportedly assesses fighting to resume next week. CENTCOM has allegedly given a range of kinetic options to the administration. Tehran has promised to respond with “long and painful strikes” if attacked.

ISRAEL. UNITED ARAB EMIRATES. Spartan league

A rival alliance takes shape.

Israel had deployed laser systems to the UAE, the Financial Times reported, in the first major sign of defence cooperation. Saudi Arabia had warned Lebanon not to “outpace” the kingdom in its outreach to Israel amid US urging, Reuters said.

INTELLIGENCE. The Iran War briefly obscured the growing rift between Riyadh and

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Trump’s mental load is a gift to the Kremlin.

• IRAN. As the blockade extends, Tehran threatens “unprecedented” action.

• ISRAEL. LEBANON. The IDF admits the ceasefire does not exist.

• THE PHILIPPINES. Another impeachment attempt won’t save Marcos.

• BRAZIL. A revolt against partisan jurists could hurt Lula’s re-election.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

UKRAINE. RUSSIA. Handler with care

Trump's mental load is a gift to the Kremlin.

Donald Trump said he and Vladimir Putin spoke Wednesday about “a little bit of a ceasefire” and that the wars in Ukraine and Iran might have a “similar timetable”. Trump said all of Ukraine’s ships and planes, and most of its drones had gone.

INTELLIGENCE. Trump appears to have mixed his talking points on Iran and Ukraine, but either way, the confusion is a gift to Kremlin propaganda. Russian influencers have gone on to claim Putin had agreed to peace once Kyiv was seized. Trump’s subsequent threat to review a possible reduction of troops in Germany has also been amplified. With drone attacks belying an effective frontline stalemate, Trump’s brain is now the war’s most important battleground.

FOR BUSINESS. Trump will use a likely ceasefire around Russia’s V-Day parade as proof of his negotiating brilliance and narrative control, but such truces have become standard, like those on Orthodox Easter. Many may now wonder if Putin is indeed the one controlling Trump. More likely it’s that the US has another president in cognitive decline (or at least, judging by his 4 am tweets, under great stress). His Ukraine ambassador’s resignation may prove the point.

IRAN. Stuffed pigs might fly

As the blockade extends, Tehran threatens “unprecedented” action.

Crude extended gains in Asian trade Thursday after Trump vowed to continue the blockade of Hormuz. Trump said Iran was “choking like a stuffed pig” and “we’re not flying anymore” for talks. Tehran said it may take “unprecedented action”.

INTELLIGENCE. Trump and Pete Hegseth continue to call the war an “astounding

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• OPEC. The UAE revives a fight with Saudi Arabia.

• IRAN. Faced with no good options, Trump looks to invent one.

• IRAQ. The prime minister-designate will still be beholden to the militias.

• INDIA. CHINA. A gathering of enemies looks strangely harmonic.

• BRITAIN. UNITED STATES. Warm speeches cannot stop a cold tide.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

OPEC. Cartel blanche

The UAE revives a fight with Saudi Arabia.

Abu Dhabi said it was quitting OPEC after almost 60 years. Brent crude dipped slightly as traders priced in greater Emirati leeway to increase oil output. The UAE earlier said the Gulf Cooperation Council was at its “weakest” position “in history”.

INTELLIGENCE. The UAE said the move was increasing production capacity. But with capacity moot amid the Iran war, the move is more about a strategic rift with Saudi Arabia. Riyadh dominates OPEC and the GCC, which held a reportedly testy leaders’ meeting in Jeddah Tuesday. Its clashes with Abu Dhabi had been muted since the start of the conflict, but they’re now back in the open, with the UAE seeking a harder line on Iran and a softer one on Israel.

FOR BUSINESS. It’s too early to say if this will end OPEC. Doha left in 2019, during its own rift with Riyadh. OPEC+, involving Russia, has grown more important. Iran and Israel are not the only issues splitting the UAE and Saudi Arabia. They back opposing forces in Sudan and Yemen, and Emirati ties with Ethiopia and Somaliland could clash with those Saudi Arabia has built with Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey. China, Russia and the US will try to avoid choosing sides.

IRAN. Unilateral thinking

Faced with no good options, Trump looks to invent one.

Donald Trump claimed Iran said it was in “a state of collapse” and wanted the US to open Hormuz “as they try to figure out their leadership”. Agencies were evaluating how Iran may respond to a unilateral declaration of victory, Reuters said.

INTELLIGENCE. One doesn’t need the US intelligence community to know how Iran

Read more

Dear Geopolitical Dispatch subscriber,

A reminder to register for next week’s exclusive Private Roundtables, where subscribers will explore the month’s geopolitics with Geopolitical Dispatch experts. Join us on 4 or 5 May.

If you’re trying to make sense of the war in Iran and its implications for the US, Iran, China, and your business, this is the conversation to join.

This event is exclusive to paid subscribers. Upgrade now to secure your place.

Subscribe now

What are Private Roundtables?

Our Private Roundtables are an opportunity to go beyond the daily brief, hear directly from our authors and experts and ask your questions (off-the-record) on the major geopolitical developments from the past month.

After our 30-minute facilitated briefing, we will hold a 30-minute, off-the-record discussion. A space to ask questions, exchange perspectives and hear the critical questions the Geopolitical Dispatch community are asking.

Two options are available to accommodate your schedule:

Option 1
📅 Monday 4 May 2026 (US/Europe) / Tuesday 5 May 2026 (Asia–Pac)
🕔 5:00 PM EDT · 11:00 PM CEST · 7:00 AM AEST (Tue)

Option 2
📅 Tuesday 5 May 2026
🕗 4:00 AM EDT · 10:00 AM CEST · 6:00 PM AEST

Please register for your preferred session below:

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• IRAN. Trump and Tehran wait to see who runs out first.

• RED SEA. Iran may not need Yemen to block a second chokepoint.

• PAKISTAN. AFGHANISTAN. Islamabad pauses peacemaking to return to war.

• ISRAEL. UKRAINE. A stolen wheat shipment threatens fragile cooperation.

• BRITAIN. ARGENTINA. As Charles visits Trump, the Nimitz drills off the Falklands.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

IRAN. Shortage circuit

Trump and Tehran wait to see who runs out first.

The White House said the US would not negotiate with Iran “through the press” and had been “clear about our red lines” amid reports Donald Trump was unhappy with a purported Iranian offer to separate nuclear talks from Hormuz access.

INTELLIGENCE. Decoupling the dual blockades from uranium enrichment negotiations won’t be easy. Both sides see control of Hormuz as the key point of leverage. Tehran boasts of Washington’s diminishing political runway. The US says Iran will run out of storage capacity for its gummed-up oil by mid-May (though this didn’t seem to be a problem during Covid). Both claim the other is seeking talks. Waiting for who’ll choke, neither is moving from current positions.

FOR BUSINESS. Both sides also claim the other is politically fractured. This may be true for Tehran, but is definitely true for Washington, irrespective of reports that JD Vance has broken ranks with Pete Hegseth over munition stockpiles. Trump has until Saturday to end the war or seek a declaration from Congress (the War Powers Act only allows a further 30-day extension to wrap things up). Oil continues to move up as more US air assets enter the region.

RED SEA. New foe, Houthis?

Iran may not need Yemen to block a second chokepoint.

A second ship was seized off Somalia Monday, a week after Mogadishu banned Israeli-linked ships from transiting the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. US drone operations in southern Somalia had decreased amid fuel shortages, local media said.

INTELLIGENCE. The Somali government in Mogadishu has no way to block Israeli

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• UNITED STATES. Another shooting shows the schizophrenia of US politics.

• IRAN. Hormuz remains shut and the backchannel remains unrealistic.

• ISRAEL. A unifying opposition to Netanyahu could backfire.

• MALI. Moscow’s ally faces a common enemy.

• MYANMAR. Min Aung Hlaing is back at the table.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

UNITED STATES. Reactions speak louder

Another shooting shows the schizophrenia of US politics.

An alleged shooter was apprehended at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. After evacuation, Donald Trump said the suspect was “anti-Christian” and “pretty sick”. Republicans slammed efforts to block a secure White House ballroom.

INTELLIGENCE. Trump said there was a moment of unity as Washington’s elite hid together before Cole Allen, the alleged gunman, was disarmed. Yet outside, the paranoid style of politics went haywire. Iran-linked accounts boosted images of Allen in what looked like an IDF shirt. The chair of Media Matters pointed to a false flag theory boosted by a Fox reporter’s exchange with Karoline Leavitt’s husband. Others pointed to an alleged time traveller’s 2023 tweet.

FOR BUSINESS. The shooting was at the DC Hilton, the same venue where, in 1981, a schizophrenic musician tried to kill Ronald Regan to impress Jodie Foster. As then, it probably doesn’t matter what Allen’s motives were. What does is how quickly disinformation has spread. And while unsurprising – Trump himself has manufactured dozens of conspiracy theories – it shows how little shared narrative now exists, even with the entire press corps in one room.

IRAN. No show

Hormuz remains shut and the backchannel remains unrealistic.

US negotiators cancelled a trip to Islamabad after Tehran refused to talk. Axios said Iran had offered to reopen Hormuz if the US ended its blockade and postponed nuclear talks. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi went to meet Vladimir Putin.

INTELLIGENCE. The US and Iran are in a stalemate on Hormuz. The proposed

Read more

Hello,

In this edition of Week Signals:

• IN REVIEW. Political points of fracture, regime change in America, Mani and the few.

• UP AHEAD. King Charles’s visit, Jerome out of the wilderness, China and the US, war powers.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. If you’re not receiving the full edition, you can upgrade below.

Subscribe now

The Week in Review: Midterms in the garden of good and evil

The week began with peace talks in Islamabad, subsequently cancelled before they began. It ended with peace talks in Islamabad, albeit of a “preliminary” and indirect variety. In both cases, JD Vance, like a shag on a rock, was left waiting at Andrews Air Force Base, in the worst of all positions - neither a mediator, like the mercurial duo of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, nor a fighter, like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, sending out social media non sequiturs in an effort to look manly and tough.

The war in Iran is fast becoming the defining event of the second Trump administration, in the way that Covid was for the first. As then, Trump might blame others for the debacle, but his inability to lead calmly and consistently in a crisis is once again on manifest display.

It’s a war that few want to perpetuate, but, as should now be obvious, there’s no easy way out. We’ve discussed several scenarios before, but each exit strategy carries risks for both Washington and Tehran, making an unhappy drift more likely. As oil futures begin to converge with physical prices, a recession-inducing long-term supply shock thus looks more probable.

The last time we had such a moment was in the 1970s. The OPEC crisis lasted only six months, but its impact was felt for decades. Forcing him to take ever more extreme political and economic measures to stay in power contributed to Richard Nixon’s downfall. Long after fuel rationing and lower speed limits were forgotten, the legacy of stagflation and OPEC’s chokehold would range from a revived USSR to the end of the post-war consensus, the rise of neoliberalism, and more polarised US politics.

It’s no surprise that many are looking for a Nixonian solution – the president’s resignation. And while the current crisis may be more seen as a repeat of the Carter administration, insofar as the Iranians have again taken an American presidency hostage, there was never a sense then that Jimmy Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, would make much difference.

Today, on the other hand, many are looking to JD Vance to play the role of Nixon’s Gerald Ford, though potentially with a twist, if he needs to replace him via a 25^th Amendment palace coup. Being the only member of the cabinet who can’t be fired by the president, it’s no wonder that Trump appears to be doing what he can to make Vance a political neuter. From the humiliations of Iran, to plumping an endorsement of Viktor Orban, defending #JesusGate, or lecturing the Pope, Vance’s unpopularity is now as deep as Trump’s.

Yet rumours of Vancian plotting have been rife ever since he suddenly appeared on the national political scene, at the behest of tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel and David Sacks. They accelerated when Sacks left the White House as AI czar last month (less noticed in the press as it was sandwiched between Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi). And as others leave a sinking ship, the rumours will likely grow some more.

It may seem speculative, but with so many other Iran war offramps foreclosed, it is worth investigating whether the fracture point will be in domestic US politics. Regime change in Washington, rather than regime change in Tehran. Like the release of hostages the day of Regan’s inauguration, it could certainly give the Iranians a face-saving way to relinquish control of Hormuz and get serious about nuclear negotiations, without the alternative of war or a humiliating (to America) Suez-style Beijing mediation.

It would also suit the many in the Republican Party worried about the president’s mental acuity and competence, let alone the likelihood of a midterm wipeout, facilitated by recent Democrat gerrymandering wins, that could then almost certainly see an ugly Epstein-flavoured impeachment process. And at the extreme end, it would get in front of fears that Trump is planning an authoritarian October surprise: a state of emergency, perhaps built on escalating claims of deep state citizenship and voter fraud, which would cancel the elections and bring with it the biggest political crisis since the 1860s.

Deposing a leader is hard, and even the most incapable ruler can be followed by something worse. Claudius may have followed Caligula, but anarchy followed Nero.

Presidential vacuums, even of the constitutional lame-duck variety, are geopolitically destabilising. Beyond Iran, how would Russia respond? How would China?

Domestically, the MAGA faithful would hardly tolerate Trump’s ousting (then again, they didn’t tolerate Joe Biden’s free and fair election either). And would Trump willingly step down without pardon or a redoubt in Argentina, Israel or Russia to flee to?

The post-presidential saga of Evo Morales shows how tricky it can be for a ruling party to get rid of a cult-like leader with idiosyncratic predilections out of office. And while the US is not Bolivia, it’s not exactly Denmark either.

Like many others, we’ve been thinking a lot about Iranian history over the last few weeks. One chapter that’s largely been forgotten is the cult of Mani, a third-century Iranian prophet who established a world religion that at one point spread from the Roman Empire to China before being eclipsed by Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. Today, the term Manichaean is largely remembered idiomatically as a dualist worldview of good versus evil (Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, once told Jon Stewart that George W Bush had a “Manichaean paranoia”). But Manichaeanism was not just about binaries but men trapped in a cosmic drama, in a material and darkened world. A world like the Trump administration. Could Vance, hence, be the Manichaean candidate?

Read more

Hello,

Here are the five things you need to know today:

• INDONESIA. A joke on tolls should be taken seriously, not literally.

• IRAN. Amid a stalemate, Trump talks up his inaction.

• ISRAEL. LEBANON. The protagonists undermine their own ceasefire.

• RUSSIA. Putin’s economic windfall could bring political headwinds.

• PREDICTION MARKETS. The drums beat loud for the fortune-tellers of war.

Geopolitical Dispatch is the daily client brief of Geopolitical Strategy, an advisory firm helping businesses and investors to get ahead of the world. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more. And if you’re not receiving the full edition, upgrade below.

Subscribe now

INDONESIA. Fulcrum's errand

A joke on tolls should be taken seriously, not literally.

Foreign Minister Sugiono said tariffs would not be imposed on Malacca Strait transits after Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa told an infrastructure forum that Indonesia might want to split a toll between Malaysia and Singapore.

INTELLIGENCE. Indonesia sees itself as a “fulcrum” between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It also takes ministerial comments lightly. Purbaya’s remarks were seen as a joke, as was President Prabowo Subianto’s 8 April comparison between Malacca and Hormuz. Yet Indonesia has closed archipelagic passages before, notably the Sunda Strait. As Iran sets a precedent, and finances worsen on the economic shock, there’ll be temptation to follow farce with tragedy.

FOR BUSINESS. Javanese humour is subtle and ironic, but tolling Malacca, through which 40% of the world’s trade passes, caused diplomatic palpitations. Purbaya may have been freewheeling, but many of Jakarta’s policies, from free school meals to nationalised mines to a capital in the Borneo jungle to joining the Board of Peace, were born in a fit of absent-mindedness. Malaysia responded that tolls couldn’t be unilateral. That’s hardly an outright rejection.

IRAN. Sweeper generalisations

Amid a stalemate, Trump talks up his inaction.

Oil rose as Iran posted a video of a stormed cargo ship and the US said this didn’t breach the truce. Donald Trump said US minesweepers were clearing the Strait of Hormuz and the navy had shoot-to-kill orders against anyone laying them.

INTELLIGENCE. Commercial data suggests there are no US minesweepers near

Read more