An Expert’s Guide to Geopolitics from SIPA Alumna Tina Fordham

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Tina Fordham MIA ’99 says she had to pitch Citibank to hire her as a chief global political analyst. This was back in the early 2000s, and she was envisioning a job that didn’t yet exist there – or any other major financial institution.

Fordham credits her education at SIPA with giving her the confidence to convince a bank it needed someone on staff to help forecast and analyze geopolitical trends. It also gave her the educational chops to deliver in that role. “Now we see global political analysts at every financial institution,” Fordham said in an interview with SIPA News. “Buy side, sell side, in many, many companies. I think I was a trailblazer in that sense.”

In 2022, she established her own independent geostrategic firm, helping clients navigate today’s rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape.

In her forthcoming book, Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, Fordham explores the forces remaking the world order. SIPA News spoke to Fordham about her career, her new book, and how all of us can make sense of this geopolitical moment. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to write this book now?

The timing wasn't necessarily chosen so much as this is when I felt like I had something useful to contribute to the dialogue. But it's certainly true that over the course of the writing of the manuscript in earnest, over the last 12 months or so, we went from the initial shock of Trump 2.0 and the Liberation Day tariffs to 2026, when I am of the view that the sense that geopolitics was not just increasing as a risk factor in terms of its salience in the business and investment environment, but actually the major driver of business and investment, has really gained momentum.

I can confirm this on the basis of the conversations I have with my clients, who are C-suite executives, board leaders, and institutional investors. The nature of the questions has completely changed from, “Tell me what things I should be worrying about in the world,” to “Tell me how I think about the world because nothing corresponds to the strategy and playbooks of my professional career.”

What is the framework you use to analyze geopolitics?

My approach brings together international relations and [other theories from] political science, which I triangulate with the consensus view in markets, which is easy enough to understand because you can look at prices – that's what markets do. They price risk and they price assets. It's a multi-pronged approach. 

I look at where there are disconnects, and where there are gaps in the analysis, and [I] also look at historical comparisons. For example, market participants [such as investors or institutions] tend to think that conflicts will be short because they perceive that one party to a conflict has greater military might and will be able to force the other into submission. But as we've seen, whether it's Russia and Ukraine, or the US and Iran, sometimes the weaker party is able to mobilize resources and outlast the willingness of their adversary and turn the tables. 

Understanding how business leaders and market participants think about geopolitics is a big part of where I'm able to add value, because there are many subject matter experts in areas adjacent to geopolitics that go and see business leaders, but they may not have the vocabulary nor do they understand the way that decision-making happens inside large organizations. That's an advantage that I have, having spent 17 years as a managing director inside a top five global investment bank. It’s really bringing together quite a lot of experience and areas of expertise.

Can you give some examples of how you explore this in the book?

In the book, I talk about the two frameworks that I've developed. One is Vox Populi Risk, which has to do with the grassroots “people power”-oriented political risks that brought us Brexit [in 2016], for example, and other populist movements and mass protests, for example, the Iranian [protests] in January before the war started. Vox Populi Risk looks at those sorts of phenomena.

My Geopolitics Supercycle research looks at geopolitics, which is misdefined and misunderstood as being current events. That's where international relations theory comes in, because geopolitics is about power and the different ways that countries project power beyond their borders, whether that's tools of statecraft such as tariffs or sanctions or espionage and propaganda, [including] below-radar “gray zone” operations. Or old-school conflicts, invasions, and simply crossing over borders and taking stuff. Geopolitics is really about strengthening your own country's position – whether its land or other assets – at the expense of your adversaries.

Can you talk more about this Geopolitics Supercycle? 

The Geopolitics Supercycle is a thesis I first wrote about for a Forbes column three years ago, and then we set up an empirical project to test the thesis. I worked with a quantitative political scientist Tsveta Petrova, a lecturer in the political science department at Columbia University. 

We created a framework where we looked at the drivers of geopolitical risk, and this can be factors like climate change, or declining trust and corruption. We then looked at the guardrails that help act as shock absorbers and buffers. That includes everything from central bank liquidity to US shale gas supplies to international institutions and diplomacy. So [the Geopolitics Supercycle] is the proliferation of drivers against eroding guardrails, translating into more geopolitical risk events.

That was the framework. We then created a whole dataset drawing upon dozens of open sources. We looked across cyber attacks, climate change, economic warfare such as tariffs and sanctions, and conflict. What we found was that during 2010 and the end of 2024 – so before Trump 2.0 – there was a tripling in geopolitical risk events.

The inspiration for doing that was because every boardroom I walk into, we'd go in to talk about the state of geopolitics, and there would be often heated debate about whether this uptick in geopolitical risk was real, whether it was a function of the news cycle, and whether we'd see mean reversion again – that is, returning to the conditions that people were used to. There wasn't a way to really answer the question that is on the minds of every government leader, as well, which is: “Are we going back to normal, and if so when was normal?” 

We have had a succession of significant crises, from the global financial crisis to the Eurozone crisis to the pandemic to [Russia’s] invasion of Ukraine and October 7 and the Gaza war, and now this. I think people's sense of normal is pre-2010 and that was a long time ago. You have the cumulative impact of these shifts, but in my view, you don't have any reason to see the political winds shifting back toward this peak globalization, Pax Americana ideal, because the political support for institutions and democracy has really shrunken. 

How do you assess the US’s role in this Geopolitical Supercycle?

The postwar system was designed by the US to consolidate its global advantages and to maintain its position, also by creating buy-in and opportunities for countries around the world, and what now seems like very quaint notions of being a beacon of democracy, human rights, free trade, and all of those good things. It isn't just that President Trump is not interested in that vision of US power, but there is a great deal of ambivalence in the US population as a whole. 

Trump was elected twice for a reason. America periodically goes through times of isolationism. This time feels different. Even if the US returns to a global posture that is more recognizable to its allies, one of the things that I write about a lot in my day-to-day work in my advisory firm is how other countries are moving to rearm and to strengthen their own defenses – which is probably quite overdue – and to reduce their dependencies. That's something that has been under discussion for many years now – the notion of reducing dependencies. But it really was about reducing dependencies on China. Now it's about the US and China. 

That is, I think, a shock for a lot of American executives who don't understand, or don't really take seriously the idea that there might be alternatives to Lockheed F-35 fighter jets, for example, or Google, or the Microsoft Cloud. Certainly, there aren't necessarily peers, but something really changed this year with Trump's Greenland threats, as well as those against Canada, as [Trump calling it] the “51st state.” 

Whether and how that consolidates into something stronger and more powerful really remains to be seen, but there is a real challenge to the notion of a return to pure great power competition, some kind of tripartite world, if you like, between the US, China, and – in Russia's dreams – Russia, too. That's the idea of a “middle powers" alliance, which Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, talked about at Davos this year. When we think about the countries that make up those middle powers, there are some hugely important, dynamic economies, most of them democracies. It includes countries such as India and Japan and South Korea and Australia and Canada and Mexico. Also Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. These are significant economies, and they will be looking to do more business together and develop homegrown alternatives [to US defense and technology]. 

Now, that might sound fanciful to US multinationals. It certainly isn't going to be fast. But it is seen as an existential requirement for surviving in these times. The reason is simple. It's the idea of a kill switch – for example, [the fear that a company such as] Microsoft, possibly at the behest of the White House, could simply turn off the cloud against a country that displeases the United States. 

The primary imperative of a country is security, not the economy. In a security-first world, everything really changes. For companies, that means a shift from an optimization lens of lowest cost, just-in-time to a lens of resilience. Resilience is now gaining ground on geopolitics as one of the most used terms in company documents, because it's become a byword for how to strengthen defenses against geopolitical risk. But it's more expensive to build resilience, so what does that mean? 

We're in the very early stages of what I would call this interregnum in the global operating system. It’s not really an event to forecast, because many decisions – or not taking action – will shape where the world is. I think we're looking at a 10- to 15-year period of this interregnum before we settle into some kind of pattern, and many countries and companies are going to be shaping where we land based on the decisions they take.

Many of your clients are not bystanders to these shifts in the global operating system; many may have influence or power over the technological and political forces reshaping the world. How does that factor into your advisory role? 

For a long time, of course, companies were focused on profits and their bottom line. They still are, but that was something that was possible in a global ecosystem where the infrastructure of the global system was fairly stable. Where you had America underwriting the security guarantee for the world's shipping lanes, so there weren't countries taking hold of chokeholds like the Strait of Hormuz, of which there are many others, and where we had an international system where institutions were arbiters, such as the World Trade Organization. Now we've reached the peak of that. We're now in a declining phase of countries being willing to follow the rules of the game.

For companies who are trying to do longer-term planning – trying to look five, ten, 20 years out – the shift in America's global role is probably the most significant geopolitical development because no one is quite sure what it means. 

One of the ways that we will find out what it means is if an actor on the world stage decides to test America's resolve, and that's why here in Europe, for example, there's been a lot more discussion about whether even though Russia has hit a wall in the war in Ukraine, and its economy is struggling, and it's losing a lot of soldiers in battle, whether Russia might actually open a new front. And why would that happen? Well, it would be a very effective way, potentially a high-risk way, of testing NATO, say by an invasion of a NATO member state, like one of the Baltics or Finland. If not every country responded to this collective defense requirement, if the Article Five guarantee wasn't activated, Putin would certainly regard that as confirmation that NATO is a paper tiger. That would send a chill around the world, not just in Europe, as many countries have US security guarantees, such as South Korea and Japan. It would give the sense that there is now a free-for-all on borders and territory, because that's really the most important outcome of the post-World War Two era, the notion of sovereignty.

The boardrooms and leadership teams have definitely got the message, but there are huge debates about whether this is a temporary challenge, and we'll return to the system as we knew it during peak globalization and Pax Americana – the kinds of things that you study at SIPA – or an environment which is much more uncertain and erratic and volatile and disruptive.