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Wars. Chokepoints. Nationalism. Tariffs. AI. Angry Gen Z.

The world is awash with disruption. The old structures, systems, and alliances are being dismantled. Nations are moving in opposite directions to secure the future. From rival economic corridors to weaponized supply chains, regions are being torn apart as governments move to call the shots and block rivals.

This is not fragmentation. This is a fracturing of historic proportions.

This is a Great Fracturing.

My new book, “The Great Fracturing: How Geopolitics Is Breaking the World,” reveals:

• Fractured Landscape: How new, clashing projects, from new forms of connectivity to AI governance, are turning the world into a jungle.

• Hidden Causes: Why nations have become angry at the old order and what brought governments to the doorstep of this systemic break.

• Next Risks: Hidden threats that will shape the global economy over the coming decades.

• Future Scenarios: The next chapter of the Great Fracturing, spearheaded by geoeconomics, sovereignty, and hard power.

• Re-Americanization: A roadmap for America to keep leading as the established order crumbles.

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The old world is dead. A new, fractured world is forming.

The Great Fracturing is a window into the new wiring of the global economy and the world. There is no going back to what was. Lazy paradigms like “geopolitical recession” or “supercycles” are useless. Geopolitical strategies like nearshoring or diversification have reached their limit. The West no longer guarantees stability; and the rest are starting to play be a different set of rules.

A new era has begun. A new status quo has formed. Everything is fracturing, separation and division are forming everywhere, and control of the future is suddenly up for grabs.

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Mr. Geopolitics is the property of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc., and is protected under Canadian Copyright Law. This includes, but is not limited to: ideas, perspectives, expressions, concepts, etc. Any use of the insights, including sharing or interpretation, partly or wholly, requires explicit written permission.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Last week, Russia held its annual St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). One session, mapping out the biggest threats to Russia till 2050 (mid-century), discussed fifteen different scenarios divided between geopolitics, demographics, technology, and more.

In the good basket of scenarios: Russia annexes Kyiv, the EU breaks apart, and Russian ideology prevails against the West. In the bad basket, Russia loses the war in Ukraine, and Ukraine joins NATO.

In the middle basket, Moscow uses nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe related to the ongoing war. Yes, the probability of a nuclear exchange is rising.

Regardless of the basket, and whether or not they consciously realize it, Russia’s intellectual brass views the future through a single lens: The Great Fracturing.

In the backdrop of that, zero-sum thinking is returning to geopolitics. There is a different phrase for this, what I call “Geopoliticalmaxxing,” where nations are taking the most extreme approach to how they conduct themselves and think about the future.

Russia is not alone in Geopoliticalmaxxing.

The US threats, like taking control of Greenland or the Panama Canal, the blockade around Cuba, the move against Maduro in Venezuela, and the ongoing war in Iran, all point to American hard power being used in the most extreme ways. The Iranian weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz and the Yuan-denominated toll-booth, while no longer surprising, is exactly the “nuclear scenario” many envisioned if the US and Iran went to war: Tehran closes the critical chokepoint. This has happened; Iran has played its most radical card.

The most extreme ideas are being tabled or played.

The era of Geopoliticalmaxxing will not follow Lookxmaxxing or other types of “maxxing” that are taking over the mainstream. Those are likely to fizzle out. However, Geopoliticalmaxxing is likely to snowball.

This changes the calculations for the world.

Most investors and policymakers are still viewing geopolitics through the lens of “incremental changes.” In today’s world, incremental means a tariff here, a tech sovereignty push there, a new bloc here. But, Geopoliticalmaxxing points to rapid escalation. It points to nations going for the jugular right away or planning for their enemies to do so, pushing them to take new action from trade to economy to AI.

What sets Geopoliticalmaxxing apart from traditional geopolitics is that nations are no longer holding their highest cards in reserve. They are leading with them. The era of "escalation ladders" is collapsing. A new game of prey or predator has begun.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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*”GEOPOLITICAL IPO” is a concept/expression of Abishur Prakash.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Over the past few months, particularly since the Iran war started in February, a new crisis has begun (and flown under the radar).

The number of people analyzing geopolitics now exponentially outweighs the number of geopolitical experts.

Think about that for a moment. More people are dissecting global events than ever before, yet there is also more geopolitical noise than ever before, including from so-called “experts” who have been sitting at the table for decades.

What do we call this? In a world of AI slop, I propose “geopolitical slop.” Here are a few examples of geopolitical slop that I have picked up in recent times (no names for obvious reasons):

• A sudden spike in headlines saying that China is about to cut rare earth exports to the US, with no real data or justification given. Just “putting it out there,” so to speak.

• So-called “experts” convinced that America has lost the competition for the 21st century, using the Iran war and the dealmaking in the Global South as the main reasoning.

• Constant moving of the goalposts around when and how the Ukraine war will end, by folks, including former military, who have been repeatedly proven wrong since the conflict began in 2022.

With every passing day, it is becoming clear. In the geopolitical world, few, if any, are breaking new ground.

It is shallow analysis, conspiratorial overtones, outright nonsense, recycling someone else’s ideas, or simply being wrong nine times and right once, all packaged as deep insight or even intelligence. This is not limited to the random YouTuber uploading clickbait videos. This also applies to those whose ideas once provided clarity.

Put simply, there is a huge shortage of actual insight into the new jungle of geopolitics and the dynamics driving it. Titles and brand power continue to overshadow a clear lack of understanding of the enormous shifts occurring in the world today.

The geopolitical slop represents a multi-front crisis.

1. In the West, particularly, the geopolitical slop is pushing societies away from pragmatic thinking and toward beliefs about the world that have zero basis. Critical thinking is disappearing. Lazy ideas, like “political risk” or “supercycles,” are being reinforced, or conspiratorial ideas, like that China and Russia will take over the globe, are spreading like fire.

2. For organizations, finding the next generation of reliable and credible experts is becoming harder and harder. How does somebody judge who is an actual expert versus who is acting like one? Education or experience no longer separates experts and amateurs, because most geopolitical education and experience today is for a world that no longer exists. Most are trying to map their experience during the Cold War or the era of hyper-globalization to the environment that exists today (and that does not work very well).

3. Those in reactive mode, like investors, have to be even more cautious as geopolitical slop spreads. This is not about verifying deepfakes or Russian bots spreading lies. It is about choosing which signals to follow or ignore. If 20 geopolitical experts are saying China is about to ban American tech, and two experts are saying the opposite, who do investors follow (and why)?

AI slop is easy to see. All of us have developed an internal radar that goes off when we see paragraphs written a certain way or an image that looks a bit strange. We can see the fingerprints of AI. And, when we do, we are instantly turned off. Because few truly value what AI puts out versus what humans put out.

Yet, with geopolitical slop, it is a different story, with a twist of irony.

Geopolitical slop is hard to spot. It is not just about unknown names putting out analysis. It is also about established names plateauing in their ability to guide. Of course, there are some tell-tale signs. Concepts like “New Cold War,” “Axis of Evil,” or black-and-white frameworks all signal a deep lack of understanding about the current global status quo.

And, while AI slop turns us away from AI, geopolitical slop turns us away from humans, and perhaps, towards AI. When human intelligence is in doubt, people may trust AI more.

In tandem, there may be no choice.

Creating a video saying “China will invade Taiwan tomorrow” gets a million views, while a video laying out the state of China-Taiwan relations, and why it could take five years for war, might get 50 views.

As geopolitics turns the world upside down, everybody is rushing to figure out what is happening and what to do. But in this rush (or race), caution is more necessary than ever before. Geopolitical slop is a real and pressing crisis. Those who ignore it risk getting lost in the fog. Those who identify it risk paralysis, unsure of what direction to move in. For now, there is no real solution to geopolitical slop.

The only prescription is knowing that geopolitical slop exists. And the worse the world stage gets, the worse geopolitical slop will become

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Mr. Geopolitics is the property of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc., and is protected under Canadian Copyright Law. This includes, but is not limited to: ideas, perspectives, expressions, concepts, etc. Any use of the insights, including sharing or interpretation, partly or wholly, requires explicit written permission.

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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More than two months into the US-Iran war, and markets are bouncing up and down. At every turn, the value of options such as oil or fertilizer rises or falls as diplomatic hopes peak or plateau. When President Trump says a “deal is close,” oil drops under $100. When Iran launches strikes on the UAE and Kuwait, oil rises more than 2%.

From the investor lens, there is nothing “strange” here. Investment has always been driven by sentiment and emotion. Reactivity is the norm. But investors are now operating in a new geopolitical landscape. The West is broken, wars are spreading, trade is fractured, and sovereignty overshadows everything.

In such an environment, reactivity is dangerous.

(*Geopolitical Reactivity is a concept/expression of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc)

Because, how long can investors play ping-pong with geopolitics, chasing headlines, constantly picking risk over reward or vice-versa? In the old world, when stability, structure, and rules prevailed, flare-ups were either short-lived (i.e., US-North Korea on the brink of war in 2018) or isolated (i.e., there was an eight-year gap between Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022). But today, geopolitical flare-ups are not temporary or rare; they are frequent and multiplying. How long can investors keep running from sell to buy, or buy to sell, when the fires never stop raging - when the timeline of a geopolitical event is limitless?

Instead, investors must redefine their “geopolitical reactivity”: how they respond to a global crisis.

This means, instead of strategies being governed purely by the immediate shocks (i.e., Strait of Hormuz paralysis creating a global energy crisis), they are also governed by long-term geopolitical strategy. This requires investors to understand the “A-to-Z” of a flashpoint, and where it could land, what I often refer to as “gaming out geopolitics.”

Armed with clarity and direction, investors will be interpreting geopolitics through a new lens. Most important, they will not be steering portfolios with the subtle expectation that normality returns, a sentiment clearly seen in the ongoing US-China rivalry, which is completely unseen in markets as investors remain satisfied with the Washington-Beijing “tariff pause” but are not seeing other warning signals, like that China has been supplying AI to Iran to strike American forces or that America has not shipped a single advanced AI chip to China in recent months.

Put simply, there is a deep and growing disconnect between markets and geopolitics. Eventually, this will be corrected. Those with traditional geopolitical reactivity will be disrupted. Those with new reactivity will absorb the pressure.

At the center of all this is a central paradigm, one that I have been driving home in boardrooms for at least half a decade now. Businesses must start putting politics ahead of profits. They must think from a “Geopolitics first” position.

The ongoing war with Iran should be treated as a wake-up call for the global investment community. Jumping up or ducking low cannot be the strategy to weather geopolitics. In fact, it is no strategy at all. To navigate a fractured world, investors must treat geopolitics as a constant - and view reactivity as the quickest way to bleed.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Chapters

0:00 - May 2026: End of Allies

1:00 - #1: Return of Radical States (Mali)

1:54 - #2: US-Japan Fight (Yen Collapse)

3:04 - #3: Governance Crisis (Romania, Israel-Ukraine Grain)

4:17 - WILDCARD (Geopolitical Boycotts*)

*“Geopolitical Boycotts” is an expression/concept of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Mr. Geopolitics is the property of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc., and is protected under Canadian Copyright Law. This includes, but is not limited to: ideas, perspectives, expressions, concepts, etc. Any use of the insights, including sharing or interpretation, partly or wholly, requires explicit written permission.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Mr. Geopolitics is the property of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc., and is protected under Canadian Copyright Law. This includes, but is not limited to: ideas, perspectives, expressions, concepts, etc. Any use of the insights, including sharing or interpretation, partly or wholly, requires explicit written permission.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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As you read this, a myriad of crises are besieging the world, all stemming from the Iran war. Alongside exploding energy prices, which have forced Sri Lanka to introduce a QR-code system to ration fuel at the pump, there is a dangerous food emergency brewing, forcing countries like India to pay double for compounds like urea, as some fertilizer options rise 50% or even 100%.

In the backdrop of this, the US-China standoff has been pushed aside. Not because it is less important, but because the fragile truce, inked last October in South Korea, has continued to hold. Put simply, Washington and Beijing have not been getting bloody.

Except, now they are - and it all centers around technology. Yet another crisis is surrounding the globe, as the world’s two superpowers collide after months of “calm.”

Over the past two weeks, a flurry of technology-related events has occurred:

• US strikes: The White House has formally accused China of stealing American AI models, which is being called “reverse distillation” or “adversarial distillation,” where Chinese firms input huge numbers of prompts in US AI models (i.e., Claude, ChatGPT), and train their own systems on the answers.

• China strikes: China is restricting US investments in its leading tech firms and startups. Already, state agencies have told “several” Chinese firms to reject US capital. However, it is not clear whether this affects Chinese firms listing on US exchanges or the growing number of Chinese firms “repackaging themselves” as Singaporean to access US funding. It comes as a new 2025 survey from the US-China Business Council (USCBC) finds that only 48% of companies plan to invest in China, a drop from 80% in 2024.

• US strikes: In a rare instance of bipartisanship, a bill sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans has entered the US Congress (American Security Robotics Act), seeking to restrict Chinese robots in US society, like ground robots or humanoid robots, starting with US government procurement.

• China strikes: Citing national security, China is forcing Meta to divest its purchase of Manus, the Chinese AI company. The $2 billion acquisition inked last December has been in the crosshairs of Beijing for months, including a “probe” announced in January, and a separate ruling in March that banned Manus co-founders from leaving China while the state probe was ongoing.

• US strikes: The FCC has banned all new foreign-made consumer routers in the US, citing significant cybersecurity and national security risks (current routers on the market or already sold are exempt). The target is clearly China, as TP-Link, a single company, manufactures approximately 65% of home routers in the US. The ban applies to any router or hotspot that is “produced, assembled, designed, or developed” outside the US. Surprisingly, most foreign routers in the US are not manufactured in China, as Chinese firms have moved production to Vietnam, Mexico, and elsewhere.

In the backdrop of all this, DeepSeek, the infamous Chinese AI company that upended how the world thinks about funding —> R&D, has announced a new model that will be entirely powered by Huawei chips, a new milestone in China’s tech-sovereignty journey. The DeepSeek-Huawei tieup is quite significant. The Huawei chip in question is the Ascend 950PR, a chipset developed explicitly to match and replace American options, specifically Nvidia’s H200, which the US has greenlit for exports, but not a single chip has actually moved.

These “strikes” make it clear: the US-China are getting bloody again. But it is not over soybeans, autos, or even TikTok. It is over the key technologies and supply chains that power societies, like AI or home routers.

Without a doubt, a new US-China tech war is beginning. Alongside Iran, it is the single biggest threat to the ongoing superpower truce and US President Donald Trump’s visit to China next month.

In this new US-China tech war, several things are occurring at once:

• China is building new “technology walls” against America, compounding with the existing walls that Washington has imposed under the banner of America First (i.e., increased outbound investment restrictions).

• The new “finger-pointing” is not coming from commerce, treasury, or the US intelligence community. It is coming directly from the White House, making it unofficially the new US geopolitics.

• China is clawing back control of its most critical AI companies, fearful that America will gain leverage through M&A - exactly the outlook the US has had of China for decades.

• Fears are snowballing in the US (and West) that China controls the tech backbone of societies (i.e., routers), and could weaponize this in a future conflict (like over Taiwan or the Philippines).

• Perhaps the biggest takeaway: the US and China are clear-eyed that the differences (or chasms) between them are far, far too great to overcome. Even if China buys 500% more soybeans or the US pauses arms flows to Taiwan, the US and China are on a collision course in practically every domain, particularly technology.

However, there is a strange paradox here.

The US and China are clearly battling one another with technology. But, this does not necessarily mean the US-China fight that ignited last April with Liberation Day tariffs is about to restart. The global economy is far too wobbly. Investors are far too skittish. The wiggle room, runway, and reserves are rapidly being exhausted.

It is possible that President Trump and President Xi sign a range of deals in the backdrop of the new US-China tech war. And, that few of these deals actually result in long-term stability. What is beginning is a new US-China tech war that could rage in the backdrop of broader US-China stability. Of course, the other side of the coin, is that “something” triggers America to slap tariffs or sanctions across the Chinese export economy, such as what I have consistently pointed out as a “red line”: China supplying Iran with satellites and AI to help Tehran attack American forces in the Middle East. So far, Washington has overlooked this (to my surprise).

As technology becomes key to future global power, the US and China are not taking any chances. In the blink of an eye, robotics has become a new battlefield, even before they are rolled out across the globe. And, with the router ban, the US is telling individuals that the very devices they have installed could together give China a huge advantage over America if tensions explode. None of this is familiar. More than Taiwan or overcapacity, technology is now driving the US-China relationship.

-Abishur Prakash aka “Mr. Geopolitics”

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Mr. Geopolitics is the property of Abishur Prakash/The Geopolitical Business, Inc., and is protected under Canadian Copyright Law. This includes, but is not limited to: ideas, perspectives, expressions, concepts, etc. Any use of the insights, including sharing or interpretation, partly or wholly, requires explicit written permission.