Sixty-five

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.

The discipline behind spreading an idea

Why do thought leadership?

Because thought leadership is the spreading of an idea, and the spreading of an idea is never an accident.
Most leaders treat communications as something that happens after the real work is done. The strategy gets set in one room, and then someone is asked to "get the word out." That sequence is backward, and it is the single most common reason corporate communications fail.

The spreading of an idea has a process. I call it E-STOCK.

Event: What is the context? Every idea lands inside a moment: markets, politics, the news cycle, your own org chart, a book launch. Identify an action forcing event before you open your mouth.

Strategy: What are you trying to achieve? Not "awareness." A decision. A specific target. Something that will help you maintain or expand. A measurable shift in how your company is understood. Name the outcome before you choose the tactics.

Tactics: What tools will you use? Op-eds, podcasts, briefings, a keynote, a quiet lunch. Tactics are the easy part, which is exactly why they are the wrong place to start.

Organization: What systems do you need? Ideas die in the gap between intention and execution. You need the people, the calendar, the material, the resources, and the approvals that turn a good thought into a published one.

Consistency: What is your cadence? One brilliant post is a flare. A reliable rhythm is a signal. Audiences trust pattern over brilliance. Create an editorial calendar and execute consistently. Like daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly.

Know-how: What can you share that no one else can? This is the whole game. Your proprietary insight, your scar tissue, your view from inside the room. Commodity takes don't spread; actionable insights do.

Here is where most organizations go wrong.

They jump straight to tactics.

"Let's do a podcast." "We need to be on LinkedIn." "Get me a TED talk." They pick the tool before deciding what they are trying to achieve, and then wonder why the audience never showed up.

That is not a thought leadership problem. It is a sequencing problem.

Done right, thought leadership does more than build a profile.

It creates new opportunities to expand commerce and shape culture. It opens doors that cold outreach cannot. It lets a company shape how it is understood before a crisis forces the conversation. In an environment defined by permanent disruption, the organizations that can deliberately spread an idea hold an advantage that those still "getting the word out" will never match.

So the real question is not whether you should be a thought leader. The question is the one you have been avoiding.

What idea are you holding back?

Start with E-STOCK. Build from there.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly. 

-Marc

You can always reach me @ marc@caracal.global.

MI5 and US Soccer made the same mistake

Think the expensive suburban travel team is the road to the US Men's National Team. Think again.

Only about a third of National Team Coach Pochettino's World Cup 26 came from that affluent club-soccer world. Cristian Roldan was raised in Pico Rivera, a 91 percent Hispanic city, by parents who fled Guatemala and El Salvador. Ricardo Pepi and Alejandro Zendejas are from El Paso. Max Arfsten is from Fresno, played college soccer, and never spent a day in a pro academy. Nineteen of the twenty-six reached this team through a system that charged their family nothing.

The expensive path is not worthless. It produced Gio Reyna and Brenden Aaronson, and Christian Pulisic was a Pennsylvania club kid before Dortmund. It is wildly oversold. The system looked where it expected the talent to be, but the talent was somewhere else.

This is not a sports story. It is the oldest mistake an institution can make, and the UK spies got there first.

In the 1930s, the Soviet recruiter Arnold Deutsch found his perfect first agent in a young Englishman named Kim Philby. Philby was introduced to him by Edith Tudor-Hart, a Viennese communist, photographer, and spy, the subject of Daria Santini's new biography, A Woman Named Edith. MI5 was watching Tudor-Hart. It was watching her fellow Austrian émigrés in Hampstead. And it missed Deutsch's British recruits entirely, the men who became the most damaging spy ring in modern British history. The service could not imagine that idealistic young men from Cambridge would betray their friends and their country for a fashionable ideology. So it watched the working class, but never looked at the elite class.

Two institutions. Two class stereotypes pointing in opposite directions—the same failure.

Every communications strategy makes this mistake in some form, and it is expensive and based on assumptions.

You decide who your audience is, then you spend accordingly. The marquee press hit. The analyst day. The campaign aimed at the room you already sit in. It feels like rigor. It is a stereotype with a budget, the boardroom cousin of "a spy would be working-class." And while you spend time there, the verdict on your company is forming exactly where you assumed it would not.

Stop confusing the audience you can picture with the audience that decides. The outlet your board likes to see is rarely the channel where belief about your company is actually built. Name the audience that moves your license to operate, your valuation, and your ability to hire. Then look at your budget and see how little of it reaches them.

Go where the understanding is forming, not where it is comfortable to be seen. Your reputation is taking shape in your frontline employees, in a regulator's junior staff, in your customers' group chats, and in the AI systems now describing your company to the world without ever contacting you. Those are the Cambridge common rooms of your business, hiding in plain sight, and almost no one is watching them.

Then build the pipeline instead of renting the prestige.

US Soccer's fix was not a better travel team. It was free academies that reached the talent the old system priced out. Yours is direct, owned, durable access to the people who actually shape how your decisions are understood, before the moment you need them.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc