The Sovereign Decade

For thirty years the working assumption of Western business was that the state would set the rules and then withdraw. That assumption has quietly expired. Industrial policy, sovereign funds, security screening and procurement have made governments the most consequential counterparty in a growing share of transactions.

The implication is not that companies should lobby harder. It is that political judgement has to move upstream, into the decisions themselves — where to build, whose money to take, which markets to treat as adjacent rather than accessible.

Boards are poorly equipped for this. Political risk still tends to arrive as a slide near the end of the pack, presented by someone with no authority to change the plan. In the sovereign decade, that arrangement is a category error.