Two months ago, global companies assumed three things: oil between $70 and $90, a stable transatlantic alliance, and a manageable cold war with China conducted primarily through tariffs.
This morning, all three assumptions are gone.
Oil is closing at levels not seen since the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine. The US is in an active blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, with Iranian mines and drones halting commercial shipping. The Bank of England is publicly modeling a peak rate of 6.2%. Air France-KLM raised ticket prices. Air Canada pulled its 2026 outlook. Three American farmers told the Wall Street Journal they are switching corn acres to soybeans because diesel costs have rewritten the math on this growing season. None of this was in any board deck written before March.
Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said Washington had been humiliated by Tehran. Trump responded by floating troop withdrawal from Germany, a move the Pentagon said it was not expecting. The transatlantic alliance is now operating on the assumption that a personal spat can move 35,000 American service members. King Charles flew to Washington and used a state visit to deliver, in the British press's reading, a master class in understated rebuke. He also extracted the elimination of Scotch whisky tariffs on the same trip. That is the new statecraft: monarch-as-trade-negotiator.
The UAE has left OPEC. Read that sentence twice. The architecture of the global oil cartel that has shaped energy markets since 1960 just lost one of its most important members, and Abu Dhabi is now openly aligning with Israel against Iran while Saudi Arabia watches. The Wall Street Journal called it a new Middle East order. That is not hyperbole. It is the most accurate description.
In Washington, Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) flipped her vote on the Iran war. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is insisting the US is not at war as the 60-day War Powers clock runs out. DefSec Pete Hegseth is telling the Senate that the ceasefire has paused the deadline. Press conferences and tweets are rewriting the legal framework governing American military deployments since 1973. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court's voting rights ruling has triggered a redistricting arms race. Louisiana has already suspended a primary. Florida is next. The political map your government affairs team modeled in January is obsolete.
And beneath it all, AI capex is on track to reach $1 trillion by 2027. The hyperscalers are spending faster than their cash flow can sustain. Intel's share price doubled in April. Apple printed $111 billion in Q1. Mark Zuckerberg blamed the war in Iran for Meta's slower sales and for AI costs that led to layoffs. The AI supply crunch is now a board-level resource allocation problem, not a technology problem.
Here is what this means for your company.
The post-Cold War assumption that economic interdependence prevents conflict has been reversed. Conflict - military and trade - is now reshaping economic interdependence in real time, and your board has been operating on a model that no longer applies. You cannot navigate this environment with a quarterly review cadence and an annual offsite. You need continuous geopolitical intelligence, weekly scenario planning, and a communications posture that anticipates volatility rather than reacts to it.
That is what a Chief Geopolitical Officer does. Caracal Global provides this capability on a fractional basis to Fortune 1,000 companies and private equity portfolios that need the function but are not ready to hire it full-time. If the items above are now on your board's agenda and you do not have a geopolitical officer in the room, that is the conversation we should be having this week.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc.
You can always reach me @ marc@caracal.global.
