Irregular: Looking back

A big year

Spherical Self Portrait, MC Escher, 1950, woodcut, Escher in the Palace Museum, The Hague.

Hello from Melbourne,

In today’s Irregular, I want to do something a little different. Not a review of the world: Michael will take that on next week, surveying the big trends, what mattered, and what changed.

Instead, this is a brief reflection on us, on our company Geopolitical Strategy, and on the hidden machinery behind Geopolitical Dispatch. Because while you read Geopolitical Dispatch each day, you don’t necessarily see what sits beneath it: the work, the people, the decisions, and the ambitions that make this publication, and our firm, what it is.

Consider this, then, a small year-end note of thanks, explanation, and invitation. A little primer on who we are, why we do this, how our year unfolded, and where we’re going next. And, equally, a feeler for anyone interested in working in geopolitics, partnering with us, or deepening their institution’s ability to understand and use geopolitical insight.

In an AI-slop-dominated world — incidentally, the Economist’s “word of the year”, which I am reticent to put between em-dashes — it also feels worthwhile to show the human face behind what you read each morning.

As with most stories, it’s best to start at the beginning.

The beginning

Geopolitical Dispatch began on 1 May 2023, when we sent our first edition. That day, Parisians were in the streets for their thirteenth consecutive day of protests against Macron’s pension reforms. Some things do not change. Erdoğan announced that Turkey’s intelligence services had assassinated the leader of the Islamic State in Syria, a country whose president, once associated with that terrorist organisation, would soon enough appear at Davos and in the Oval Office. Some things do change.

And then there was us, writing our first public “hello world.”

Two years later, by May 2025, Geopolitical Dispatch had grown to over 8,000 subscribers, all “organically”, to put it in marketing jargon we’ve now, after a few years in business, become all too familiar with.

But more important than numbers are people: both the people reading and the people doing the work.

On icebergs

What you read in Geopolitical Dispatch each day is the visible tip of a much larger project.

Geopolitical Dispatch is, in effect, the public version of our client brief: an analytical product we use in our advisory work with executives, boards, and institutions across the world. It does not appear out of thin air. And despite frequent jokes that we make about our Chief Strategist and principal author of Geopolitical Dispatch, Michael Feller, being the original LLM — ingesting an enormous amount of global news and somehow producing five concise analyses each morning like clockwork — it is emphatically not machine-written.

This year, we dramatically expanded our client book, bringing on board some of the world’s largest, most thoughtful and innovative companies. In doing so, we discovered, somewhat belatedly, the inverse relationship between the number of clients you serve across multiple time zones (we now operate principally across the US, Europe, and Australia) and the number of hours of sleep you can plausibly expect.

But we also discovered the far more pleasant truth that hiring exceptional people dramatically improves both your sleep and your sanity.

In June, we appointed Christian Habla as CEO, marking a significant step toward moving from a spirited “hobby shop” to a serious, professional, global advisory firm. Christian has been instrumental in making our analysis and advice accessible to businesses, expanding our community of readers, deepening our client engagements, and giving us a permanent foothold in Paris. La vie est belle. Alongside him, our growing team of senior and junior analysts has been a daily source of pride and joy. And we’re very excited to be bringing on board some outstanding talent early in the new year.

We also welcomed, less formally, President Donald J. Trump as Chief Marketing Officer. His global communications strategy — consistent, energetic, and entirely unsolicited — has done wonders for illustrating the need for businesses to pay closer attention to geopolitics. Had FIFA not awarded him their inaugural Peace Prize recently, we may well have done something similar ourselves.

We don’t often speak publicly about the advisory work we do behind Geopolitical Dispatch, though it has grown significantly over the year. So I thought I would lift the lid a little.

Broadly speaking, our services fall into three streams: intelligence, strategy, and diplomacy.

Intelligence

On the intelligence side, we provide enterprise-wide subscriptions to Geopolitical Dispatch that allow boards and executive teams as well as risk, strategy, legal and public affairs teams to monitor global developments in a rigorous and systematic way.

For many clients, this is supplemented with monthly one-on-one sessions with me, Michael, and the team — essentially an “ask us anything” forum to stress-test organisational strategy against geopolitical realities, coupled with forecasts on the issues that matter most to them, and often simply a conversation exchanging views on what is going on in the world.

This work has been deeply rewarding. Understanding what our readers and clients care about, then building tailored scenarios, forecasts, and analytical frameworks for their particular sector, geography, or exposure, has revealed just how valuable clear geopolitical thinking can be in a period of rapid, structural change.

Throughout this work, we’ve drawn heavily on the diplomatic and intelligence tradecraft we learnt while cutting our teeth in government – the art and craft of forecasting, leader-reading, secular-trend analysis, and horizon scanning, all grounded in the specific needs of each client.

We’ve also been pleased to be working with leading universities and business schools to make Geopolitical Dispatch available to researchers, staff and students. We’re excited to roll this out more widely in the new year. So if you’re a student, researcher or administrator and think access to Geopolitical Dispatch could be something your colleagues would like to be able to access through the library — without dipping into their own pocket — do not hesitate to reach out.

Next year, we will launch Geopolitical Edge, a new monthly deep-dive for investors and funds and anyone who needs to understand how geopolitics drives valuations, market movements, and investment opportunities. More on that soon.

Strategy

Our strategy work has centred on helping companies understand the fundamental geopolitical shifts underway and make long-term decisions under uncertainty.

Much of this has — thanks to our Chief Marketing Officer — focused on the implications of the United States’ significant changes in foreign, trade and security policy as well as domestic political convulsions.

We’ve advised American companies on the second-order consequences of international reactions to the Trump administration’s positioning. We’ve helped European, Asian and Middle Eastern companies interpret what one CEO aptly described as “the tectonic shifts afoot” — from supply chain resilience to industrial policy, regulatory nationalism, and the increasing politicisation of the economy. And we’ve done so not just ourselves, but by bringing in our senior advisors — mostly former senior ambassadors and senior trade and defence officials — to act as personal advisors and sounding boards for corporate leaders.

Practically, this has meant running scenario workshops, building internal forecasting models with clients, and helping organisations shift to strategic postures that not only manage risk but also look for silver linings. Almost all surveys of corporate and finance leaders in recent years show a delta between acknowledging geopolitics as a concern and doing something about it. We’ve been pleased to help many organisations start bridging that gap.

At this point, it’s worth underscoring that our firm is very deliberately called “Geopolitical Strategy” and not “Geopolitical Risk”. Not only to avoid clunkiness, but because of a core philosophical commitment: that companies that see geopolitics not merely as a threat but as a realm of opportunity will out-compete their peers, find new markets, and form new partnerships. That geopolitics may create confusion, but need not create fear. And that monitoring and truly understanding the meaning of geopolitical events is not just an interesting thing to do, it’s essential for making many really important decisions.

Amid shifting alliances, multipolarity becoming real, international rules weakening, and diplomacy becoming ever more transactional, there are many opportunities for organisations that read the landscape correctly and engage governments — both domestic and foreign — intelligently.

And that brings me to our third area of work: corporate diplomacy.

Diplomacy

This third stream of work is the natural extension of the first two. If intelligence is understanding, and strategy is deciding, diplomacy is executing.

We have been helping firms understand what is happening in treaty negotiations, trade talks, and commercial forums, what those developments mean for them, and what posture they should adopt. Then we help them embed those insights into their government relations, public affairs and commercial diplomacy work.

To be clear: we are not lobbyists. There are enough of them. Instead, what we do is help companies shape their overarching messages, identify strategic forums in which to influence discourse, prepare leadership for events like the Munich Security Conference, the WTO Public Forum, and the COP climate process (to name just a few), and understand the “art of the possible” in international negotiations. We have spent much time in these diplomatic forums, conference venues and negotiating rooms throughout our careers — in both diplomatic services and international organisations — and have been pleased to bring some of this experience to our work with private sector clients.

What we’ve discovered over the course of this year is that corporate leaders are increasingly eager not just to admire the problem of geopolitical upheaval but to do something about it. Our diplomacy practice helps organisations and leaders do exactly that.

The future is now

A few other milestones are worth noting.

We have been building an executive-education program — to launch next year in partnership with a global organisation — to democratise sophisticated geopolitical thinking for leaders of businesses, big and small. It has already sharpened our own internal frameworks. And we’re really excited about the opportunity this will present individuals and firms to deepen their understanding of the fundamental forces at play today, analyse developments with the same rigour as an intelligence agency, and develop strategic responses befitting today’s multipolar world.

We also developed what we believe is the world’s only robust and intuitive measure of national power: our National Power Index, now deeply integrated into our client work, forecasting models, and bilateral-relationship analysis. I will give some more background on this in the new year and would be pleased to discuss how this framework can be integrated into how your organisation views and responds to a changing world order.

And finally, we have continued to engage publicly through interviews, podcasts, and speeches across Europe, the United States, and the Asia-Pacific. Topics that have resonated particularly well include the geopolitics of artificial intelligence, the future of world order, the market implications of geopolitical shocks, and what business leaders can practically do in response. We’ve spoken at industry conferences, board off-sites and internal leadership conferences, and now you can easily inquire about a speaking engagement by Michael or me through our speakers bureau or directly.

We’ve also put up a new website, fresh off the digital press this week, which I would encourage you to check out.

Thanks

Looking back, it has been a big year. A satisfying year. A year of growth, consolidation, hard lessons, and enormous rewards. It has also been a year of becoming more expert in this niche field of geopolitics, business and markets — an intersection in which, as far as we can tell, we remain one of the few firms that specialise exclusively.

Above all, it has been a privilege to build this with a growing team and a growing audience of people like you, who — whether you realise it or not — have been supporting us each day simply by reading.

So, without further ado, thank you.

Thank you for reading Geopolitical Dispatch. If you’ve been enjoying it, do know that a great deal of iceberg sits beneath the visible tip. And also know that your organisation may benefit from engaging with us more deeply, whether through strategy workshops, enterprise subscriptions, private monthly calls with our team, ongoing advisory retainers, our forthcoming executive-education programs, bespoke briefings, or having us speak at your events.

If any of that is of interest, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thank you, and see you in the new year,

Damien