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South Korean soldiers outside the National Assembly
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Corporations and markets must prepare for a more violent and unstable world

Two years ago, Colin Reed wrote a piece on the need to develop “corporate foreign policy”. In this follow-up piece, Colin Reed and Lewis Sage-Passant examine how the turbulence of early December 2024 portents the approach of a more violent and unstable geopolitical environment that leaders of global corporations – and the markets in which they sit – will be forced to navigate in the coming years.

“There are decades where nothing happens,” runs a popular quote, “and weeks where decades happen.” This has likely never rung as true as in the first week of December 2024, which witnessed, in the span of a mere handful of days, the declaration and revocation of martial law in South Korea, an election overturned in Romania amidst accusations of foreign interference, the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, riots in Georgia, the collapse of the French government, a major tsunami scare for California, and two ongoing major wars in Europe and the Middle East. In an excellent Bloomberg piece, Marc Champion hailed the week as indicative of what he coined as “the post-American world disorder,” prophesying more chaos in the weeks and years to come. 

Amidst all of this, the international business community continued to churn along, mostly undisturbed, until a masked assassin with a political message scrawled on bullet casings shot dead UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson outside an investor conference in New York and made the abstract suddenly very personal. Rising global violence suddenly seemed relevant to corporate leaders, spawning days of media coverage and a flurry of hard questions and commentary from security leaders, business titans, and the public peanut gallery. 

While corporate leaders have become more aware of global risks in recent years, little consensus has yet emerged as to what this really means for businesses, and Thompson’s killing seems to have brought this dichotomy fully into the light. For some, it is the end of an era; for others, markets look good, but geopolitics threatens to spoil the whole party. The executive press is joining in, warning that geopolitics is splitting global business along political lines. Meanwhile, governments are increasingly paying attention to threats to economic prosperity posed by technology theft and hybrid warfare activities. This morning, Denmark’s foreign intelligence service – Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste – released its annual forecast, in which it specifically calls out Iranian, Chinese, and Russian espionage in high technology industrial sectors. Similarly, the Five Eyes alliance has begun providing start-ups with counterespionage advice. Other governments have sounded similar alarms in recent months. In all cases, the reality seems to be sinking in that geopolitics is becoming a major market-shaping force. 

While global risks are nothing new – the British East India Company established a “Secret Committee” for dealing with geopolitical risk in 1778, and Lloyd’s of London established the “Lloyd’s Agency” to gather intelligence on global risks in 1811 – most modern executives have spent the bulk of their careers operating in the post-Cold War “Pax Americana” world, where geopolitics represented a fringe topic of little impact to business. Today, this bubble of prosperity seems likely to pop, throwing businesses back into a more chaotic world.

For many corporate leaders, geopolitics and insecurity appear as a series of crises to be responded to rather than pervasive conditions in which they must now operate. In order to not miss the scale of the shifts the global system is undergoing – as the first week of December’s events demonstrate – leaders must evolve beyond reactive crisis management, and treat geopolitical conditions as a core factor in their decision making. Think about it this way: businesses don’t stand up crisis teams to understand global economics; they engage proactively with the macroeconomic environment as a constant, ever-changing terrain. Thinking of geopolitics in a similar way means focusing not on specific events which might represent short crises, but instead as a set of pervading conditions backdropping the company’s entire operations.

The “Pax Americana” environment provided a relatively smooth operating environment, in which disruptive geopolitics could be treated as distinct crises. It facilitated open seas, free trade, and subsequently globalisation. Never before had it been so low-risk to embark on global business ventures. This in turn has contributed to unprecedented profitability while the muscles of risk management have atrophied. That is now changing, and venturing overseas will return to its traditional roots as being a risky and complex endeavour. Despite this, it remains a necessary one; few major companies would be content to only serve small and isolated local markets, and given the distribution of modern supply chains, few could realistically do this without continuing to draw on components and raw materials from around the globe. As such, businesses must brace themselves and pay close attention to geopolitical and security realities.

Operations in this complex and insecure world will come with additional overheads. From building redundant and protectionism-compliant supply chains, moving from “just in time” to “just in case” stockpiles, and physically securing both assets and executives, companies will need to invest more to continue to operate globally. As such, expectations should be set. Business leaders must steel themselves for a world in which they must take more risk, make greater investments, just to achieve the same (and potentially lower) returns. Crucially, they will need to learn to justify these facts to markets that have grown used to decades of the “Pax Americana” world’s dizzying returns.

This chaotic geopolitical landscape is already spawning a cottage industry of experts offering corporate leaders predictions, explanations, and guidance. While many of these advisors are field-leading experts with impressive resumes, and are able to offer valuable context for a deeply complex global problem set, the externalised approach risks viewing the geopolitical landscape as a generic problem. In reality, each company will face a dramatically unique challenge from geopolitics as a result of the nature, culture, organisation, and risk tolerance of the firm. In this environment, knowing about the problem is only half the battle; knowing about yourself, the company, its goals, its supply chains, its physical footprint, and its broader interests is the other, and perhaps more significant, element of crafting a strategy. 

When searching for insights, therefore, CEOs are best served closer to home. To overcome this, the problem is best filtered through internal “interpreters”. These are the various in-house Intelligence and Risk teams such within almost all large corporations which already have extensive experience in understanding geopolitics from a risk perspective. Yet despite the innate advantages in-house teams have as a result of their familiarity with their own firms, many feel under-utilised by executive leaders, who often overlook them in favour of star-studded line-ups at external consultancies. A full third of corporate intelligence practitioners surveyed by the authors noted that they had never met with their C-suite leaders. At the same time, 56% of teams surveyed described contested ownership of the geopolitical risk portfolio, often resulting in territorial disputes and confusion over subject matter expertise. This is a critical failure for these teams, but also for their corporate leaders in such dangerous times. 

In the longer term, ensuring that the company’s intelligence capabilities and geopolitical strategy are anchored at a sufficiently senior level will be key to solving these challenges; while many companies have Chief Economists, very few have “Chief Geopolitics Officers”. They’ve never needed to, until now. Nokia has led the way with its announcement that it has created a “Chief Geopolitical Officer” position, and we expect others to follow. Geopolitics now touches so many disparate parts of corporations that it requires efforts to understand and adapt to it at a sufficiently senior level. Doing so will empower corporations to overcome inertia, and – in what is likely to become increasingly important in the coming years – demonstrate to the market the company’s seriousness about navigating geopolitical turbulence. 

The necessity of this shift was highlighted by the unprecedented interview with the chiefs of the “Five Eyes” intelligence agencies earlier this year, when MI5’s chief Ken McCallum observed, “…if you are operating at the cutting edge of tech in this decade, you may not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you.” The companies which thrive in the post-American world of turbulence will do so because their leaders have recognised and reacted to this change now.

Suggested books for in-depth reading on this topic: 

Additional reading suggestions can be found on our 2025 geopolitical reading list.

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Colin Reed is a geopolitical risk adviser working in the US technology sector, specialising in strategic intelligence and global planning for businesses and executives. In his current role he works to identify, assess, and inform senior technology leaders on emerging topics of geopolitical & economic significance, and chairs an intra-business Geopolitical Strategy Council which works to align company posture to global events. He is a dual graduate of both Russian History and International Relations from North Carolina State University and a postgraduate in International Security from Georgetown University. Colin previously worked for the US government and engages regularly with industry groups and security professional associations on the intersectionality of multinational business and international affairs.

Dr Lewis Sage-Passant is the Global Head of Intelligence at a major pharmaceuticals company, and researches the field of intelligence and espionage. Lewis holds a PhD from Loughborough University, where he is a Visiting Fellow in intelligence studies, and is an adjunct professor teaching intelligence at Sciences Po Paris. He has extensive experience working and living in the Middle East and Asia Pacific regions in a variety of geopolitical analysis and intelligence roles. He has appeared in numerous media outlets, including the BBC, France24, CNBC, Harvard Business Review, The New Arab, El Mundo, GQ, and others, discussing intelligence, geopolitics, and security topics. He is the author of “Beyond States and Spies: The Security Intelligence Services of the Private Sector“, which explores how corporations use intelligence to navigate and shape the world around them.

Photo: South Korean soldiers outside the National Assembly during the declaration of Martial Law (shared by Reddit User mujjingun)