Irregular: The butterfly effect
Spread your wings
Hello from Paris,
In this edition of Irregular, let’s take a step back and look at one of the stranger truths of international affairs: how events in far-flung corners of the world can shake lives, markets, and politics on the other side of it.
International relations is a complex beast — often surprising, almost always unpredictable. Even the best analysts are routinely blindsided. They might foresee the first-order consequences of an event but rarely the second or third. That’s not because they’re foolish, but because the system itself behaves like one of those mathematical “complex systems” — full of feedback loops, network effects, and nonlinear shocks.
The famous butterfly effect describes it neatly: a butterfly flaps its wings in one hemisphere, and somewhere down the chain a tsunami forms in another.
History is littered with such causal absurdities. A war in Afghanistan triggers refugee flows into Europe, fuelling populist backlashes that lead — eventually — to Brexit. A neglected and overlooked conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo or Sudan (as Michael and Oscar wrote this week in Week Signals) disrupts the supply of critical minerals and chemicals used in technologies from semiconductors to Coca-Cola.
Complexity theory teaches us that some nodes in a network matter more than others. Maritime chokepoints like the Suez Canal, the Strait of Malacca, or the Panama Canal are obvious examples: tiny slivers of geography through which the entire global economy flows. But the same logic applies to countries and industries. Taiwan’s dominance in semiconductors, South Korea’s in memory chips, the Netherlands’ in photolithography — each is a critical node. A political tremor in any one of them can ripple through global markets in seconds.
We all became accidental complexity theorists during Covid. We learned what it meant to drive the R-number below one — to halt a contagion spreading through a network. Since then, “going viral” has lost some of its charm. Yet ideas and politics obey the same mathematics. When their rate of transmission exceeds one, they too spread uncontrollably.
That’s why Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Benjamin Netanyahu fret so publicly about TikTok. A single viral video now carries more geopolitical weight than a Foreign Ministry press release. Influence itself has become contagious.
The same is true in business. Companies that manage to embed network effects — where each customer adds value for the next — rarely lose. Those that turn clients into evangelists thrive.
Not everything we want should go viral, of course. Depending on your political tastes, you might prefer that populism, nationalism, or authoritarian nostalgia stay well below an R of one. But there are some ideas worth spreading.
Take New York, where a viral grassroots campaign helped elect a socialist mayor — in the global capital of capitalism. Or take Geopolitical Dispatch. For us, the dream is simply to make our R-number greater than or equal to one.
That’s why, last week, we launched our referral scheme. If you find Dispatch valuable — the analysis, the puns, the artwork, the occasional heresy — we’d love your help in spreading it. Think of it as a benign contagion: share it with friends, colleagues, or family within your 1.5-metre radius.
Here’s how it works:
Refer one person: get one month free of full access.
Refer three: get three months free.
Refer five or more: get six months free — complete access to all five daily stories, every weekday.
We pour a frankly irrational amount of time and thought into each edition. Every line is argued over; every pun is deliberate. Helping us reach our own “R ≥ 1” keeps this experiment alive — and spreads the good kind of contagion: curiosity.
Why do this?
Not just to help us — though we’d be deeply grateful. It’s also for you. It’s a way to access Geopolitical Dispatch’s full analysis for a period of time that’s entirely free of charge — or more precisely, for the cost of sharing something you already find valuable with someone else.
By referring others, you don’t just unlock all five daily stories instead of one; you unlock the real value of Dispatch: connection. Because in geopolitics, as in complex systems, the meaning lies in the links. Seeing a single story gives you a glimpse; seeing all five each day shows how seemingly distant events are part of one global web. A trade dispute in East Asia, an election in Latin America, a coup in Africa — none of them exist in isolation. Understanding one in light of another multiplies insight exponentially.
That’s why a full edition isn’t just five times as valuable — it’s many times more. It allows you to form the holistic worldview that makes sense of a system that rarely does.
And if you help us get our “R” above one, you’ll be fuelling what comes next. We’re building a set of new ventures we’ve so far kept under wraps:
An executive education course for business leaders on How to Understand Geopolitics, drawn from our advisory practice and decades in diplomacy.
A premium forecasting product for the financial and corporate world, offering scenario analyses of flashpoints and global risk.
An expanded advisory practice, helping boards and executives navigate a more unstable strategic landscape.
By helping Geopolitical Dispatch grow, you don’t just gain full access — you help make these next steps possible. You make better analysis available to more people, and you help build a community that sees the world as it truly is: interconnected, dynamic, alive.
And that, in a way, is the original purpose of Geopolitical Strategy. After years working in diplomacy, trade, and international organisations — alongside colleagues who have advised presidents, ministers, and multilateral leaders — we saw a gap. The quality of geopolitical analysis available publicly simply didn’t match what governments relied on privately. We founded Geopolitical Strategy to close that gap — to bring government-grade insight to a wider world where geopolitics no longer lives in foreign ministries alone, but in boardrooms, markets, and daily life.
So by sharing Geopolitical Dispatch, you’re not just spreading a newsletter. You’re strengthening a network — of readers who think clearly about a complex world, who connect dots across continents, and who understand that in geopolitics, as in everything else, what spreads matters.
Best wishes,
Damien