Strategic Intelligence: Geopolitics Executive Briefing (Fifth Edition)

Geopolitics is grabbing headlines due to the humanitarian toll of conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and, since the start of this year, the radical impact of Donald Trump's second presidency on the world order. This briefing, the latest in a series of quarterly publications launched in March 2024, explores the drivers behind the news and examines the varying types of business exposure to geopolitical shocks as an aid to risk management and spotting associated opportunities.

Key Highlights

• Geopolitical risk stems from rivalry between Great Powers. The end of the Cold War left the US as the world’s sole superpower, but China’s rise challenges that status. The military, economic, and financial weight of such powers ensures that their rivalry affects the rest of the world. The adversarial zero-sum dynamic of the US-China rivalry, which increasingly dominates global affairs, must be considered in many political and business decisions to manage risk and grasp opportunities, notably in relation to non-aligned countries like India.
• The struggle is more tense for being in the early stages: such efforts that are being made to manage rivalry lack the spirit of give-and-take required for reaching a stable and predictable equilibrium founded on, for example, mutually respected spheres of influence. In the Cold War, it took nearly two decades for tensions to become more stably managed-and this was only achieved after the world faced nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Report Scope

• We update and deepen the analysis in the previous (August 2025) edition of our Geopolitics Executive Briefing focusing on Trump's policies and reactions to those policies that matter most for the global economy and major industry sectors - that is, the tariff chaos upending the postwar global trading system and the related intensification of US-China struggle in tech and critical minerals
• Sector analysis covers aerospace, defense, and security, automotive, consumer, financial services, oil and gas, and pharmaceuticals.

Reasons to Buy

• The most serious threats to trade, supply chains, and investment materialize when geopolitical tensions erupt into actual and potential armed conflicts, which have proliferated this year from the chronic and bloody battles in Ukraine and Gaza to new, albeit brief, wars in Iran, South Asia, and South-East Asia - and now also, as we go to press, the imminent possibility of a US military operation against Venezuela modeled perhaps on the one-off strikes against Iran in June 2025.
• The business risks stemming from all these recent and continuing wars would pale beside any possible conflicts in East Asia-around Taiwan first and foremost, but with explosive potential also on the Korean peninsula and in the South China Sea.
• Some sectors-notably tech and energy (including green energy)-are exceptionally ‘geopoliticized’, making them liable to be weaponized. Geopolitical tensions have become entangled in other global challenges-namely, the climate crisis and increasing migration-with strong feedback loops.