The New Era of Geopolitical Resilience

Shielding operations is no longer possible

The term “resilience” has been entrenched in the corporate lingo ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At that moment, the walls separating geopolitics and business collapsed. Every organization was forced to coexist with an ever-growing list of flashpoints that challenged the rules, norms, and systems that many businesses depend on.

The C-suite faced three options: fold, fight, or adapt. Few wanted to exit markets unless forced to (fold). Even fewer wanted to swing and get bloody (fight). This put 99% of companies in the last boat: adapt operations to a world in disorder. At the center of this push was resilience, which meant keeping business operations and objectives intact even as the geopolitical storms raged.

This single word had different outcomes depending on the geopolitics.

When it came to US-China, resilience meant diversifying supply chains. When it came to Ukraine-Russia, resilience meant leaving Russia or splitting the Russian division from the rest of the company. When it came to America First, resilience meant creatively meeting America’s demands without threatening global business interests.

Whenever asked to advise on corporate strategy, new and old geopolitical experts have banged the drum of resilience. Yet, little attention has been given to what resilience means today. If the world is in flux, might resilience be as well?

Redefining Resilience

While a few years ago, resilience was about shielding a business or nation from shocks, today, most stakeholders cannot be shielded. Everybody is exposed to some degree.

Policies are becoming radical and inescapable (i.e., the US GAINS Act forcing American firms to prioritize US technology orders over global orders). The flashpoints are not moving in a predictable direction (i.e., America is pursuing Greenland even if it splits or breaks the West). The pulse of old institutions and systems is slowing as new alternatives form (i.e., the Board for Peace or the new Saudi Arabia-Pakistan-Turkey axis).

These are not shifts that stakeholders can shield themselves from. The era when one could run from a battlefield is over. Today, running from a battlefield at one end means entering a different battlefield at the other end.

The new definition of resilience: proactively choosing a geopolitical corner and learning how to bleed.

At the core of the new definition is that nations and businesses cannot stay neutral. The space for autonomy is shrinking. Everybody is being squeezed to pick sides. Some are doing so presciently, like Malaysia, pegging itself to the US after half-a-decade of holding China’s hand, or Anthropic refusing to sell its AI services to companies more than 50% owned by China. This is “new resilience” in practice. And, it is a paradox. Nations are prioritizing sovereignty and autonomy at a moment when this will be harder and harder to come by.

New Outlook

Organizations that try to maintain their positions or make slight degrees of change to their operations in a bid to remain resilient are blindly walking toward the cliff. Many corporate resilience strategies today are not aligned with the geopolitics playing out.

In just a few short years of the war in Ukraine, the chaos in the Middle East, and the return of Donald Trump, the goal posts of resilience have changed. A few queries reveal how radically different the world has become:

• Does diversifying supply chains really protect a business from US-China geopolitics?

• How is leaving Russia a real strategy if the West is eyeing a recoupling with Russia?

• How can a business double down on globalization when the institutions underpinning it are actively crumbling?

Of course, understanding the new definition of geopolitical resilience and applying it are two different things. At a moment when many organizations count costs and prepare for a major global slowdown, investing more in geopolitics, when the only guaranteed return is more pain, is a hard sell. Yet, this is exactly what proactive geopolitics requires: turning logic upside down, approaching the future in reverse, and treating geopolitical strategy as the pre-requisite to business success.

All put together, the new era of geopolitical resilience requires companies to rewire themselves, not just regarding the world stage, but the world as a whole. The era of tried and tested is ending. The era of constant reinvention has begun.

Conclusion

At the core of the new resilience and outlook is something I have repeated several times before. The cycles of geopolitical change are shortening. Major events are taking place multiple times a year instead of once in a generation. The ground is shifting so fast that billion-dollar strategies designed just 36 or 48 months ago are already nearing their best-before date.

Suddenly, resilience today means something very different.

Executives and policymakers cannot expect strategies formed out of disruption and reactivity to provide any real longevity, especially when many leaders have been quietly hoping (or betting) the old world will return.

Instead, the strategies that will stand the test of time are those that are born out of an acceptance of the moment and ultra-flexibility. These are modular and built-for-review, not built-to-last.

If there is one lesson of the past several years, it is that even the current definition of resilience will be up for reexamination by the end of the decade. The pace of geopolitics is only quickening. Unpredictability reigns. In such an environment, the status quo never lasts.

-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.