Tina Fordham, the former chief global political analyst at Citigroup, has warned that the current period of geopolitical instability is not a temporary phase but a lasting shift. In an interview, she said that data from a study covering 2010 to 2025 showed a tripling of events posing geopolitical risk, even before Donald Trump's second term.
Fordham, who now runs Fordham Global Foresight, argued that the drivers of geopolitical risks are multiplying and that the guardrails which temper these risks are either eroding or being actively dismantled. She said the idea that we only have to survive another year and a half before things return to normal is misplaced.
Her forthcoming book, Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, is aimed at business leaders and executives. Fordham said there are also implications for everyday people who have to manage their lives and careers in a time of unprecedented global change.
She noted that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was the most peaceful and prosperous in human history, but argued this was not the baseline for the future.