The Personalisation of Geopolitics
When relationships between leaders become as important as relationships between states
For most of the modern era, businesses have been taught to think about geopolitics in terms of countries.
The United States, China, Russia, The European Union, India, Iran.
Companies build country-risk assessments. They monitor elections, sanctions, trade policy, regulatory changes and military developments, and they map supply chains against jurisdictions, calculating exposure to political instability.
This model, however, is becoming incomplete.
Increasingly, countries are not behaving as institutions, they are behaving through the personalities of the people who lead them.
Foreign policy is becoming more personal, diplomacy is becoming more transactional, relationships between heads of government can influence the temperature between states, while personal rivalries, friendships, grievances and political calculations increasingly shape decisions that once would have passed through layers of diplomatic, bureaucratic and institutional machinery.
This is not entirely new - personal diplomacy has always mattered, leaders have always built relationships, established back channels and used personal trust to resolve disputes.
What is changing is the degree of dependence on the individual, and that creates a new, and uncertain, category of geopolitical risk.
Leader risk.
For governments, that is a challenge to institutional resilience. For multinationals operating across multiple jurisdictions, it could become something much more consequential: a balance-sheet risk.
Consider the way international politics is increasingly understood through individual relationships: Trump and Xi, Trump and Putin, Trump and Kim Jong Un, Xi and Putin, Modi and Trump.
The personalities are no longer representatives of the relationship, they are part of the relationship itself, and it is this distinction that matters most.
Institutions provide continuity, clarity. Personal relationships do not. A government can change while a treaty remains, or a foreign ministry can change while diplomatic channels continue, and a regulatory system can survive an election.
A personal relationship can disappear overnight; a leader leaves office, falls out with their counterpart, becomes weaker, or a successor can reverse the relationship. Perhaps more dangerously, a leader can decide that the political value of confrontation has become greater than the economic value of cooperation.
For business, this creates an uncomfortable reality: you cannot diversify a relationship with a person in the same way you diversify a supply chain.
It is not without merit to suggest that this model of governance has been accelerated by Donald Trump, but that is not to say that Trump is wholly responsible for the personalisation of international politics. Personal diplomacy has existed for centuries, and successive American administrations have relied upon direct relationships between leaders, but Trump's approach has made the phenomenon particularly visible.
His foreign policy has repeatedly demonstrated the extent to which personal relationships, direct negotiation and individual political incentives can become intertwined with international affairs.
That does not necessarily make personal diplomacy dangerous, in fact, it can be extraordinarily effective. When formal channels are blocked, a relationship between two leaders can create a route through which negotiations become possible. Personal trust can prevent miscalculation. Direct communication can shorten the distance between crisis and resolution.
The problem begins when personal diplomacy stops supplementing institutions and starts substituting for them, that is the line businesses should be watching, because once international relationships become excessively dependent upon personalities, geopolitical stability becomes more volatile.
A policy that appears strategically rational today may become politically inconvenient tomorrow, a trade agreement may become a bargaining chip, a diplomatic relationship may become transactional, a security guarantee may become conditional, or market access may suddenly become part of a completely unrelated political negotiation.
The corporation caught in the middle discovers something uncomfortable, that it was never operating in a market, it was operating inside a relationship.
This then means that corporate thinking needs to evolve.
Traditional country-risk analysis asks familiar questions: How stable is the government? What is the regulatory environment? What is the economic outlook? What sanctions could be introduced? What is the probability of conflict? How exposed is the supply chain?
All of those questions remain important, but they are no longer sufficient.
The next generation of geopolitical intelligence needs to ask a different set of questions: Who actually influences the decision? Who does the leader trust? Who does the leader distrust? Which relationships are strategic, and which are personal? Which political commitments have been institutionalised, and which exist primarily because two individuals currently want them to exist? What happens if one of those individuals disappears from the equation?
This evolution is critical to the globalisation of businesses. A billion-dollar investment based upon a durable institutional relationship is one thing, but a billion-dollar investment whose political viability depends upon two leaders maintaining a constructive relationship is something else entirely.
The financial models may look identical, yet the risk profiles are not.
The relationship between the United States and China demonstrates why this matters.
Washington and Beijing are not only negotiating trade. They are managing an enormously complex relationship involving tariffs, technology, semiconductors, rare earths, investment, security, Taiwan and global economic influence. Yet the relationship is also increasingly mediated through the personalities of the leaders themselves, and that creates a strategic problem for companies with substantial exposure to either market.
A multinational cannot afford to understand US-China relations purely through tariff schedules or regulatory announcements, it needs to understand the political psychology surrounding the relationship.
What does each leader need domestically? What constitutes a political victory? What would cause either side to escalate? What does each leader consider unacceptable? What concessions can they sell to their domestic audiences? Which issues are effectively existential?
Most importantly: What happens when the personalities change?
That final question is frequently missing from corporate geopolitical analysis.
Business has spent decades optimising for efficiency, but there is a deeper lesson here.
Global corporations have spent decades building extraordinarily sophisticated systems around efficiency. Global sourcing, international manufacturing, cross-border investment, global talent.
The assumption underneath much of this architecture was that political relationships would remain sufficiently predictable for economic integration to continue, and that assumption is becoming harder to defend.
The world is moving towards a system in which geopolitical relationships are more volatile, more competitive, more transactional and increasingly dependent upon political personalities.
That does not mean globalisation is ending, it means the risk model behind globalisation is changing.
Companies that continue to treat geopolitics as a background issue for the legal, government affairs or compliance function may discover that it has become something much bigger - it has become a strategic issue for the board.
There is a temptation to think the solution is identifying which leaders are unpredictable, yet that is too simplistic.
The greater danger is predictable personalisation. Once companies understand that a particular leader makes decisions according to a particular political logic, they may become overly confident in their ability to anticipate them. That creates its own vulnerability.
Leaders are not algorithms, they operate under domestic political pressure, respond to crises, they react to perceived slights, they change their calculations as circumstances change.
So when political systems become highly personalised, the number of people capable of correcting a bad decision can shrink. That is why institutional resilience matters.
Strong institutions create friction, sometimes that friction is frustrating as it slows decisions, complicates negotiations, and produces compromises. that friction can also prevent a single political impulse from becoming national policy overnight.
For business, friction can be a form of stability, a system in which one individual can rapidly change foreign policy may look efficient, but it is also then highly exposed to political volatility.
The corporate response cannot be to “monitor politics,” that is no longer enough and lacks the appropriate parameters.
The companies most exposed to geopolitical volatility will need something closer to political intelligence.
Monitoring tells you what happened. Intelligence tries to understand what it means, what may happen next, which signals matter and what second-order consequences could follow.
For major corporations, that means developing a much more sophisticated understanding of leadership dynamics alongside traditional country risk.
The question is no longer: What is Country X going to do?
It becomes: Who is likely to make the decision, what is driving them, what constraints do they face, and how resilient is that decision if the political environment changes?
That is a fundamentally different way of thinking.
Corporations already understand key-person risk internally. They know that losing a CEO can affect investor confidence, they know that losing a founder can affect strategy, they know that losing a critical engineer can affect intellectual property, and they know that losing a major customer can destabilise revenue.
Yet many still mistakenly model geopolitical exposure as though governments were static entities. Governments have key people too, and increasingly, those people can exert extraordinary influence over the commercial environment.
That means the next generation of geopolitical risk management needs to incorporate leadership psychology, political relationships, succession scenarios and institutional resilience into corporate strategy, because the question is no longer whether a country is stable, it is whether the relationship on which your business depends is stable.
That distinction could become one of the most important strategic questions of the next decade.
The personalisation of geopolitics is not a consequence of a handful of powerful personalities, it reflects a broader transformation in how power operates.
Political communication is faster, more direct and more personalised. Leaders can communicate foreign-policy positions directly to enormous audiences without passing through traditional diplomatic machinery, statements can move markets, threats can alter corporate behaviour, and meetings can generate or destroy billions in market value.
The boundary between political personality and geopolitical strategy is becoming increasingly difficult to separate, and for businesses operating at global scale, the old distinction between political risk and strategic risk is therefore beginning to break down.
The leader sitting across the negotiating table may influence your tariffs, their relationship with another leader may influence your supply chain, their domestic political incentives may influence your investment environment, and their personal worldview may influence whether your sector is considered strategic, hostile or expendable.
That is not traditional country risk, it is something much more intimate and nuanced.
It is geopolitical key-person risk.
Companies that fail to understand it may discover that their most consequential exposure is not to a country at all, it is to a person.
The next generation of geopolitical risk will not only ask which countries are stable, it will ask which relationships are stable - and who they depend upon.