Irregular: Hedgehogs, foxes and history in real time
Three years of Geopolitical Dispatch.
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.
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.
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
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