When the global rulebook frays…

Welcome to 2026.  

If you’ve entered this year feeling more uncertain than ever about where things will go in the next 12 months, you’re in good company – and for good reason. 

For decades, our global institutions used to create a sense of a shared global playbook: international commerce policed by the WTO, security backed by NATO, and international cooperation and peace anchored by the UN. These institutions served as anchors of predictability, giving us a sense of faith in an underlying shared set of rules that gave businesses confidence to plan long term.  

Fast forward to today, it feels like that trust is fractured. As an American, I feel obliged not to gloss over the US administration’s bulldozing of norms, testing constitutional conventions, and treating multilateral agreements as optional as an obvious reason. But frankly, this is less about a single president than it is a deeper structural shift we’ve seen on a global scale. It feels as though national interests now routinely override global cohesion, raising questions around what used to be tried-and-tested safe bets across the global business landscape. It certainly sets an alarming precedent when superpowers start playing by their own rulebooks unchecked, and the ripple effects hit nearly everyone. 

For the rest of us, stability and certainty can feel like collateral damage in the geopolitical race for political power, economic strongholds and technological dominance. It impacts our supply chains, workforces, local and global markets, and short and long-term business plans alike. The old certainties are gone. There’s no single referee. And the reliable institutions we’ve depended on to coordinate multilateral interests seem less able to govern pace of change than they once did. 

But that’s the uncomfortable truth and perhaps the whole point.  

Waiting for clarity is not a strategy, and 2026 will be the year where decisive leadership wins in this environment. If we’ve learnt anything from the past year, it’s that you can’t take supply chain resilience for granted. Think of the cyberattacks on the likes of Jaguar Land Rover, M&S, Co-Op and others that paralysed production and exposed supply chain vulnerabilities. A single tariff or sanction that could upend entire cost structures overnight. That doesn’t even include the blistering advancements in the race for AI, data centres and semiconductors. If you’re not anticipating these shifts, you’re already on the back foot. 

The winners in 2026 and the world as we now know it will be those who stop longing for the old rulebook and are bold in their own. Ryan Wain, Senior Director of Policy and Politics at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, captured it well when he said: ‘’Remember: incrementalism is your enemy. The year 2026 will not be kind to hesitancy.’’ Being bold now means treating geopolitics as a core business function, not a quarterly talking points. And if you don’t understand AI, get to – because it’s not going away. Better to accept the flux head on and with a plan. Because if you’re waiting for the world to settle back into familiar patterns, you’ll be waiting a long time.