The world has not been great lately.
The last two to five years have brought a severe uptick in the worst of the human experience:
Political violence and assassinations.
Three active and ongoing genocides, the rise of fascism, and the single worst premeditated act of sexual violence our nation has ever seen.
When I started my firm back in 2020, I never imagined that I would be advising enterprises on how to navigate the tumultuous, erratic regime that has overtaken my own country as the rest of the world teeters on the precipice of World War III.
And yet here I am, six years later, watching the internal dismantling of the United States government as it nosedives into indisputable (albeit poorly executed and wholly incompetent) fascism.
And that’s not even to mention total economic implosion, the rapid deterioration of public health standards, and complete environmental collapse—all of which could have been directly avoided.
I’m not quite angry. Not yet. But I am incredibly confused. And many other young people carry the same sentiments:
What, then, was the point of my $100,000 education in the “best practices” of the international economic and political system if for the last seventy years, none of these “best practices” have been applied?
What was the point of pushing for a just and diplomatic world if a state’s sovereignty could be overrun in an instant, and none of its so-called “allies” or global alliances would deign to defend it?
What is the point of the United Nations if it is weaponized as a tool for economic exploitation and imperialist expansion?
What is the point of technological advancement if it actively destroys everything else we need to survive on this planet?
What is the point of touting the benefits of democracy across the globe if we cannot even confirm or maintain our own country’s voting integrity or political protections?
What is the point of living in the “greatest country in the world” if the “rights” that my ancestors fought to gain are entirely conditional, arbitrary, and can be revoked at the whim of our increasingly corrupt leaders and their financial backers?
What is the point of fighting mysterious, looming boogeymen abroad when in reality we were the bad guys the entire time?
Through all the international upheavals, foreign interventions, terrorism (and counterterrorism), preemptive strikes, and resource extraction, are we supposed to conclude that the greatest political risk of the last seventy years has actually been the United States government?
Is this what the fall of an empire looks like?
Now we’re hearing talk among young scholars of Balkanization: the dissolution of this American empire into smaller polities, much like the USSR in 1991, or the British, Ottomans, and Romans before it. These scholars are not speaking in hypotheticals, likelihoods, or random black-swan events. They’re saying that it’s not IF, but WHEN.
That means we—as a people, as global citizens, and as active participants in world affairs—need to prepare sooner rather than later. The very systems, structures, and environments businesses rely on might not even exist by 2035.
But truthfully, I don’t believe simple preparedness or standard business agility will be enough to survive that.
If you want to carry your business through this period of unavoidable change, you can’t just hope for the best. You need real data, real research, and real analysis. You need a wide variety of perspectives to cover as many bases as possible. And most importantly, you need to lead the way toward a better, more sustainable future for everyone.
That’s exactly what we are trying to build at A.G. Sanning. Our goal has always been to Do More and Go Further than anyone else in the political risk industry. For the last two years, I’ve been working on rebranding this organization to figure out what that actually looks like in the context of the new world we’re stepping into.
My conclusion:
The post-Cold War era of standard government affairs and political risk analysis is over.
Learn Now.
Adapt Earlier.
Build Resilience.
Survive.
That is the support I hope to bring to my clients with the new Sanning Global Solutions Network.
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