CEO Diplomacy in a Fragmenting Global Order
Why the CEO’s geopolitical mandate requires a Chief Geopolitical Officer to execute it
The post–World War II global order has fragmented; states now routinely use trade, technology controls, capital rules, and sanctions as durable tools of strategic competition—changing how markets function.
Geopolitical exposure is no longer only a Fortune 500 problem: mid-tier firms with cross-border sourcing, customers, data, or currencies are already operating inside fragmentation, often without a systematic process to manage.
CEOs need a dedicated, embedded capability—a Chief Geopolitical Officer—to filter signal from noise and translate geopolitics into governance-grade options and decisions tied to supply chains, capital allocation, legal risk, and market access.
In January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos and offered a stark diagnosis: that the post–World War II international order—the rules, institutions, and shared expectations that structured state behavior—has ruptured. Carney’s insistence on “rupture,” rather than transition, functions as political framing—meant to rally Canadians, stiffen resolve, and signal that hard trade-offs lie ahead as Washington increasingly approaches economic policy in zero-sum terms. It also sets the stage for diplomacy aimed at widening Canada’s room for maneuver, including Carney’s subsequent travel to China and India to explore rapprochement and risk-reducing diversification away from the United States. In that sense, the Davos remarks are international statecraft: they signal to states and markets how Ottawa intends to navigate an international system that endures even as the global order fragments in ways not seen since the end of World War II.
The CEOs of globally prominent firms, rubbing shoulders with Carney and other political and business leaders, are themselves products of an international order now under strain. Their companies scaled in the late-twentieth-century wave of economic globalization that liberalized trade and capital flows, integrated supply chains across borders, and gave corporations a degree of autonomy from the state that would have seemed unusual in earlier eras.
Take Citigroup as an example. The bank today operates in roughly 95 countries and serves clients in about 180, including China while having only recently exited Russia after the Ukraine war. In 1991, by contrast, the institution then known as Citicorp operated in just over 90 countries, a reflection of how the late twentieth century era of economic globalization expanded the reach of major firms. Speaking at the same Davos meeting as Carney, Citi’s chief executive Jane Fraser acknowledged the changing international environment, warning that “geopolitics is going to be the biggest shift in the world of finance.” Concerns about the consequences for global commerce echoed beyond finance. Vincent Clerc, the CEO of the Danish shipping giant Maersk, observed that “we are operating in a world that is becoming more fragmented and more volatile,” a reality already visible in the disruptions and rerouting of global supply chains.
Enterprise Geopolitics Is Not Just for Global Giants
The instinct is to frame geopolitical risk as the concern of firms like Citi or Maersk—corporations operating across dozens of jurisdictions with the scale and resources to maintain dedicated country risk teams. That framing is now obsolete.
Enterprise geopolitics applies to any firm that is globally exposed, not only to those that are globally prominent. A mid-tier manufacturer sourcing components across three Asian jurisdictions, a professional services firm billing clients in multiple currencies under different regulatory regimes, a technology company whose cloud infrastructure crosses data-sovereignty borders—each of these organizations is already operating inside the fragmentation Carney described. Most have no systematic process for managing it.
The consequences of political decisions now directly determine which markets are accessible, which capital sources are available, which technologies can be deployed, and which supply chain configurations are legally permissible. These are primary strategic variables, not background conditions. And they apply at scale to the mid-tier in ways that were not true a decade ago, when the underlying order still provided a degree of predictability that absorbed much of the risk.
At the same time, the informational environment has become saturated. Political developments appear continuously across financial media, social media, and internal risk reporting systems. Leadership teams face not only genuine geopolitical exposure but a constant flow of commentary, speculation, and headline-driven noise that makes it harder, not easier, to act with precision.
The CEO’s mandate is not to monitor geopolitics. It is to distinguish between developments that materially affect the firm’s exposure and those that do not—and to build the decision architecture that acts on that distinction. That task now sits squarely at the executive level, across a far wider range of firms than conventional thinking assumes.
The Function Behind the Mandate
The geopolitical signal has to be monitored, filtered, and translated before it reaches the executive layer. Exposure baselines have to be built and maintained. Scenario structures have to be stress-tested. Board materials have to be prepared to governance standards.
In other words, the organization needs a capability that converts geopolitical information into structured executive insight.
This is the role of the Chief Geopolitical Officer. The CGO provides the analytical infrastructure that allows leadership to distinguish between material geopolitical risks and opportunities and the background noise that appears daily across news feeds and market commentary. The function maps state interests across jurisdictions, tracks policy instruments and regulatory trajectories, and translates geopolitical developments into exposure diagnostics that connect directly to capital allocation, supply chain architecture, legal risk, and market positioning. Without this function, the CEO’s geopolitical mandate has no analytical backbone.
The CGO is not a government affairs function. It is not an external advisor retained for occasional commentary. It is an embedded analytical and decision-support capability, operating at the intersection of geopolitical intelligence and enterprise governance, producing structured output on the cadence the current environment demands.
That output is structured to move. From exposure identification, through signal filtering and scenario development, to cross-functional ownership and governance integration — the CGO function is designed around a single endpoint: a decision the CEO can make and stand behind. Not a risk register. Not a watch list. A decision, with defined options, documented rationale, and clear accountability.
Through my work as a Fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer, I help companies build that capability—conducting Geopolitical Management & Resilience Assessments to benchmark governance and leadership decision-making; mapping portfolio, asset, and transaction exposure to identify material geopolitical risks and opportunities; designing geopolitical PMO structures that bring discipline to risk management and mitigation initiatives; developing scenario analysis and stress-testing frameworks—including those supported by large language models and other decision tools—to expand strategic optionality; and advising leadership and boards during crises, sanctions shifts, regulatory shocks, and conflict-driven disruptions. If these questions are beginning to surface inside your organization, I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how this capability can be established or strengthened.
Patrick Fruchet provides Fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer services to executive teams and institutional investors. | cgo@fruchet.com | +1 646 830-0450 |