That's the number of active kinetic conflicts happening globally this year. The Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP) recorded 65 active state-based conflicts. Wars in which at least one belligerent is a state and that produce at least 25 battle-related deaths in a year, the highest level since its records began in 1946. The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) spots an equally violent trend. "Despite a sharp decrease in battle-related deaths from 2022 to 2023," it observed, "the past four years have been the most violent period since the end of the Cold War."
We are now operating in the most violent international environment of the post-WWII era, and this isn't a spike. It's a structural shift. PRIO has tracked the curve for decades, and the message is consistent. We have left the relative calm of the post-Cold War period and entered something else.
Most global executives I talk to expect the world to revert to "normal" by year-end.
It won't.
The Iran war appears to be headed toward a 60-day ceasefire extension, and the Strait of Hormuz may finally reopen. Treat that as upside on fuel costs and shipping insurance. Assuming flows through the Strait gradually resume from June, global oil supply is projected to decline by 3.9 mb/d on average in 2026, to 102.2 mb/d. Per the IEA, the oil market remains in deficit until the final quarter of the year. With global oil inventories already being drawn at a record pace, further price volatility appears likely ahead of the peak summer demand period.
Three observations that civic and business leaders should be wrestling with.
1. Smaller countries can now defend themselves against bigger ones in ways they couldn't five years ago. Drones, AI targeting, cheap precision weapons, and commercial location data turned against deployed troops. The Economist spells it out: smart tech is making war a dumber choice, but it is also making it cheaper to start. Ross Douthat's NYT column connects the same theme. The mighty US military is built for the wrong century. Every defense ministry on the planet is now writing the same memo about whether half its existing force structure will be obsolete within a decade.
2. The Trump administration's foreign policy, per the new PBS Frontline documentary and the NYT's reporting, is operating on mood rather than strategy. Robert Kagan's warning in Le Monde this week is worth reading twice. The war in Iran risks permanently weakening the US position. The implicit guarantee that American power underwrites your supply chain, your dollar exposure, your dispute resolution, and your customer access in 70 countries is less reliable than it was 12 months ago. Allies are already pricing it in. Norway's nuclear coalition with France. Canada's Swedish surveillance buy. Britain and Poland's missile pact. None of those decisions would have made sense five years ago, let alone five months ago.
3. AI is now a battlefield asset, with all the governance debate that implies. JD Vance told Air Force Academy graduates this week that the military should never allow AI to make life-or-death decisions. The Pentagon is moving forward with AI in war anyway. The corporate parallel writes itself. Every company is deciding which calls to delegate to AI, and the line will land somewhere other than where the policy says it should.
Here is where this stops being geopolitics and becomes a communications problem.
Sixty-five conflicts is not background noise. It is an operating environment, and your stakeholders already know it.
Tariff volatility, supply chains rerouting around chokepoints, questions about NATO credibility, accelerating competition from China, AI corporate spending, tightening export controls, energy disruption, and interest rate uncertainty. These are not separate stories. They are the forces reshaping how your company is understood by regulators, investors, customers, and the press.
The companies that survive the next regulatory cycle are the ones that can give the same answer to the same question to a regulator, a journalist, and a customer.
That is not a legal problem or a strategy problem. It is a communications problem.
Communications shape how a decision is understood before it is made, while it is being made, and after the fact, and not explained after the damage is done.
The peace dividend is gone. A generation of executives built their careers running global businesses in a world that no longer exists. The companies that outperform the next cycle have stopped treating geopolitics as background noise and started treating it as a line item.
The ones who win the communications around those decisions are the ones who planned the communications first.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc
You can always reach me @ marc@caracal.global.
