Tina Fordham: Geopolitical Risk Is Permanent, Not a Phase to Survive

Tina Fordham‘s thesis on geopolitical risk is unsparing: the era of ignoring politics ended, and it is not coming back. Speaking ahead of the September 2026 publication of Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, co-authored with Gillian Tett, Fordham argues that executives, investors and ordinary citizens are still making decisions on assumptions that expired roughly a decade ago.

From Citigroup to Fordham Global Foresight: Building a Geopolitical Risk Framework

Fordham spent 17 years at Citigroup, joining in 2003 as Wall Street’s first Chief Global Political Analyst, before founding Fordham Global Foresight in 2022, in the weeks after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The firm, co-founded with Martyn Brush, brings more than 50 years of combined financial-services experience to what Fordham describes as a critical gap: boards and C-suite leaders under-prepared for sustained geopolitical dislocation.

Her own credentials span advisory roles at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (where she holds an MIA from 1999) and the University of Cambridge, service as a senior adviser in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and six inclusions in the FN100’s ‘Most Influential Women in European Finance’, which Chartwell Speakers notes makes her the only political risk professional to appear on that list. The firm’s senior advisory bench includes Sir Ivan Rogers KCMG, who advised four British prime ministers and two Chancellors on trade and European affairs.

The Geopolitical Supercycle: Why the Tina Fordham Geopolitical Risk Warning Runs Past 2029

The book’s central argument rests on a dataset covering 2010 to 2025, which found a tripling of events posing geopolitical risk even before Donald Trump’s second term began. Fordham is direct about the implications: ‘People hope things will get better after Trump leaves office in January 2029, but the evidence suggests that the drivers of geopolitical risks are multiplying and have been for a long time.’

The framework distinguishes between the drivers of risk (declining trust, climate change, income inequality) and the guardrails that historically contained damage: good government, central-bank liquidity, functioning institutions, social cohesion. ‘When these guardrails are damaged, even relatively small risks can become quite disruptive,’ she says. The guardrails are either eroding or being actively dismantled.

The historical baseline matters here. Fordham identifies the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 as the most peaceful and prosperous in all of human history, and warns against treating that era as the norm. ‘You can mess it up,’ she says, with characteristic economy.

Iran, Ukraine and the Limits of Military Power

On the Strait of Hormuz, Fordham was early in arguing the conflict between Iran, Israel and the US would not be short. Her reasoning: Iran has never responded to maximalist demands, and aerial bombardment has a near-zero historical record of causing regime change. ‘Every US president since Jimmy Carter in the 1970s has wargamed and studied possible options for dislodging this regime and concluded that it was too hard to do without massive loss of life and huge disruption,’ she observes.

The current outcome, she argues, leaves Iran more powerful than before: the country has acquired a source of leverage it will not relinquish, while the US has depleted its stock of long-range munitions faster than Iran can exhaust its drone capacity. Markets have priced the near-term good news on oil supply; the structural shift in the regional power balance has received less attention.

Ukraine offers a different, more mixed signal. Fordham sees Beijing pausing for thought: ‘The fact that both the US and Russia have been dealt a serious blow by much weaker middle powers suggests that might doesn’t necessarily win.’ On Russia itself, she puts 40% of its energy infrastructure as destroyed, creating domestic pressure on Putin. A palace coup is more plausible than a popular revolution, but the absence of credible successors limits the scenario’s near-term probability. A material risk of Russia attacking a Nato member remains her base-case concern for British investors who have not priced it.

The Investment Upshot: Persistent Uncertainty, Not Episodic Shocks

Fordham’s message to investors is structural. ‘We used to think about geopolitical risk in terms of what could go wrong and undermine a portfolio,’ she says. The current environment is different: constant potential danger rather than sporadic upsets. The threats, in her assessment, will not dissipate within a year or two; she judges the backdrop set to last longer than a decade.

AI adds a second layer of pressure. Fordham argues that the demographic most exposed, middle-class workers in their 20s and 30s, is also the most politically mobilised. Combined with pension-age delays affecting those in their 50s and Europe’s growing defence spending requirements, the political economy she describes is one of rising demands on governments already operating under constraint.

Mad World: A Geostrategy Survival Guide for Leaders, co-authored by Tina Fordham and Gillian Tett, is published by Whitefox on 3 September 2026. WEL Books is offering signed copies. The Kindle edition is also available. Fordham Global Foresight previously collaborated with the London Stock Exchange Group to produce The Navigator, a geopolitical strategy playbook for listed-company boards.

The next test for her thesis is the US midterms. A Republican loss of at least one chamber of Congress will clarify whether the institutional guardrails she describes can reassert themselves, or whether Trumpism outlasts its architect.