CEOs rarely win in the game of geopolitics

BY TRADITION, broadsheet newspapers put political stories, domestic and foreign, in the front half of the paper and business and finance stories in the back half. But how much longer can the tradition last? Where do you put a story about protests over Volkswagen’s plant in Xinjiang Province? Or about Elon Musk’s agonies over whether to supply his Starlink service to the Ukrainian armed forces?

As geopolitics and business collide, the distinction between the “front half” and the “back half” dissolves.

Companies that once dreamed of a borderless world are having to deal with a world fragmenting along ideological lines. And governments that once dreamed of shrinking the state are increasingly treating corporations as instruments of national power: hence the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Safety Review Board, and the White House’s Council on Supply Chain Resilience.