GEOPOLITICS FOR

INVESTORS

Pippa Malmgren

CELEBRATING 50 YEARS OF RESEARCH

GEOPOLITICS FOR
INVESTORS

Pippa Malmgren
 Statement of Purpose

The CFA Institute Research Foundation is a

not-for-profit organization established to promote
the development and dissemination of relevant
research for investment practitioners worldwide.

Neither the Research Foundation, CFA Institute, nor the publication’s edi-
torial staff is responsible for facts and opinions presented in this publi-
cation. This publication reflects the views of the author(s) and does not
represent the official views of the CFA Institute Research Foundation.

The CFA Institute Research Foundation and the Research Foundation logo are trademarks
owned by The CFA Institute Research Foundation. CFA®, Chartered Financial Analyst®,
AIMR-PPS®, and GIPS® are just a few of the trademarks owned by CFA Institute. To
view a list of CFA Institute trademarks and the Guide for the Use of CFA Institute Marks,
please visit our website at www.cfainstitute.org.
© 2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard
to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not
engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional service. If legal advice or other
expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
ISBN 978-1-934667-83-5
3 March 2015

Editorial Staff
Stephen Smith Cindy Maisannes
Editor Manager, Publications Production

Pat Light Christina Hampton

Assistant Editor Publishing Technology Specialist
 Biography

Philippa “Pippa” Malmgren is president and founder of the DRPM Group.

Previously, she served as deputy head of global strategy at UBS and as chief
currency strategist and head of global investment management business at
Bankers Trust. Dr. Malmgren also served as a financial market adviser to US
President George W. Bush, as a member of the National Economic Council,
and as a member of the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets and
the Working Group on Corporate Governance. She serves on several advi-
sory boards and working groups, including the British Ministry of Defence
Working Group on Global Strategic Trends, the Greater London Authority
Infrastructure Advisory Group, the MIT Legatum Center for Development
and Entrepreneurship, and the Indiana University School of Public Policy and
Environmental Affairs. Dr. Malmgren is a frequent guest on the BBC and a
guest anchor for CNBC and Bloomberg. She holds a BA from Mount Vernon
College and an MSc and a PhD from the London School of Economics.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  iii

 Contents

Foreword. . .......................................................................................................... vii

1.  How to Think about Geopolitics. . ................................................................ 1
Separatist Movements.............................................................................. 1
Borders Dissolving.................................................................................... 2
Financial Architecture Questioned........................................................... 3
Non-State Actors. . ..................................................................................... 3
Debt Problems.......................................................................................... 4
2.  What Is Geopolitics?.................................................................................... 5
Defining Geopolitics................................................................................. 5
A Non-Quantifiable Risk........................................................................... 6
Geography and Politics.. ........................................................................... 8
Benchmark Investing and Geopolitical Risk............................................. 8
Black Swans. . ............................................................................................. 9
Prediction vs. Preparation.. ....................................................................... 9
Investment and Geopolitics.. .................................................................... 9
The State as an Essential “Unit”................................................................ 10
The Social Contract. . ................................................................................. 10
The Power to Tax. . ..................................................................................... 11
Sovereign Risk and National Balance Sheets............................................ 12
Sovereign Powers..................................................................................... 13
Quantitative Easing and Geopolitics........................................................ 13
Geopolitics as Mapping............................................................................ 14
Nuclear Weapons. . .................................................................................... 16
Bioweapons.............................................................................................. 17
3.  A History of the Word Geopolitics................................................................ 18
Politics vs. Geopolitics.............................................................................. 18
Power and Sovereignty Are Indivisible..................................................... 18
The “Geo” in Geopolitics. . ......................................................................... 19
Classical Geopolitics................................................................................. 20
Cold War “Bloc” Geopolitics. . .................................................................... 21
Balance of Power...................................................................................... 21
The Origins of the EU: Geopolitics............................................................ 22
Two Blocs.................................................................................................. 23
“New Geopolitics” of Globalisation.......................................................... 24
Meta-Geopolitics...................................................................................... 26
Whose Geopolitics?.................................................................................. 27
4.  Weighing and Measuring............................................................................ 28
Effective National Territory....................................................................... 28
Ecumenes.. ................................................................................................ 29
Extra-Territorial Allegiances...................................................................... 30
 Non-Effective National Territory. . ............................................................. 30
Commodity Strength and Commodity Vulnerability............................... 32
Shipping Lanes......................................................................................... 32
Price Stability............................................................................................ 34
Raw Materials. . .......................................................................................... 34
Physical Footholds.................................................................................... 35
5.  World Order. . ............................................................................................... 38
What Is the World Order and How Much Is It Worth?............................... 38
Competing Visions of World Order. . ......................................................... 39
Hegemons, Capitalist Democracies, and Autocracies.............................. 41
Financial Architecture............................................................................... 42
The World Order and Finances................................................................. 42
Seigniorage. . ............................................................................................. 43
Pax Americana.......................................................................................... 44
The G–8.. ................................................................................................... 47
6.  Statecraft and National Interest.................................................................. 48
The Instruments of Statecraft................................................................... 49
Sovereign Wealth Funds and Geopolitics. . ............................................... 51
State Intervention..................................................................................... 53
Critical Assets. . .......................................................................................... 54
Modern Warfare and Diplomacy.............................................................. 54
Technology and Warfare.. ......................................................................... 56
Near Catastrophes.................................................................................... 57
Outsourcing Conflict.. ............................................................................... 57
Insourcing Conflict. . .................................................................................. 57
7.  Practical Applications.................................................................................. 58
Is Expertise Required?. . ............................................................................. 58
Big Data.. ................................................................................................... 59
Outsourcing.............................................................................................. 60
Think Tanks and Lobbyists. . ...................................................................... 61
Open Sourcing. . ........................................................................................ 61
Insourcing................................................................................................. 62
Asset Acquisition...................................................................................... 63
Special Situations. . .................................................................................... 64
8. Conclusion. . ................................................................................................. 65
References. . ........................................................................................................ 66

This publication qualifies for 5 CE credits under the guidelines

of the CFA Institute Continuing Education Program.
 Foreword

When I qualified as a doctor, being a generalist was a common career option.

Today, it seems as though more and more of my colleagues are specialising in
ever more detailed and intricate areas of medicine. The same has been true of
my experience in politics. The era of the generalist seems to be receding into
the past, and the ability to see holistically is limited—not only by this partic-
ular phenomenon but also by an increase in political short-termism and a lack
of institutional memory. Those who can remember high inflation, the effects
of interest rate hikes, or even, in a European context, state control of prices
and wages are increasingly rare. Fewer and fewer politicians can remember
when the “Washington Consensus” was not the generally accepted creed for
the governance of the global economy. Memories of the tensions and dan-
gers of the Cold War are fading into the past, all too often being replaced by
an irrational optimism that seems to lack logic and empiricism. Geopolitics
today is moving markets but is dominated by wishful thinking rather than
critical analysis. This matters in terms of our future security and prosperity,
which is why Dr. Malmgren’s analysis is both timely and important.
The world of globalisation and geopolitics, in which we currently find our-
selves, brings both opportunities and risks that are new. Yet, the forces and values
used in shaping it are not. Territorial acquisition, political and religious ideology,
and economic doctrine are all still in play. We need only look at Russian aggres-
sion in Crimea, the barbarity of ISIS (or ISIL, the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant) in the Middle East, and the challenges to economic orthodoxy that run
from Greece to Venezuela to see ample examples of this fact.
The era of globalisation not only brings greater interdependence in terms
of both the global economy and security but also makes it impossible to dis-
aggregate risk in a way that might have been possible in the past. Our govern-
mental structures, however, have not yet adjusted to this reality. Government
by silo, with an inability to connect the dots, adds to the difficulties we face in
managing risk down. Fund managers are similar, with their narrow focus on
single asset classes and single countries.
If we are to succeed in this task, there are a number of things that we
have to do. First, we have to understand the concept and application of risk
and how to measure it. Second, we have to find mechanisms to manage it in
real time, minimising the risk of quantum leaps resulting from unpredicted
external events. In terms of policy, we have to understand that if we do not
allow change, including geopolitical change, to be a process, it is likely to
become a stream of destabilising events.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  vii

Geopolitics for Investors

Crucial to this management of geopolitical risk is seeing how things really

are, not how we would like them to be. Events that have come to be known
as the Arab Spring are a good recent example. The uprisings in countries like
Tunisia and Egypt were certainly stimulated by global food price spikes in
2008 and 2010, with the result that state subsidies were unable to prevent
prices of staple commodities from rising to hitherto unknown heights. In
democracies, we throw out failing governments. In autocracies, people take
to the streets. Yet, such was the desire of Western politicians to see this as a
spontaneous outburst of support for Western liberal, democratic values and
institutions, that the fundamental point was lost. A market phenomenon, a
price change, spurred the overthrow of a government. This point was missed,
and confusion followed for policymakers and investors alike.
Understanding historical and cultural context, as well as the interrelations
between different elements of risk in the global economy, is an essential tool
in the management of today’s world. Zero geopolitical risk is not a realisable
goal. To fail to understand and address geopolitics and the various intercon-
nected disciplines is to fail to exercise due diligence. Dr. Malmgren’s work,
Geopolitics for Investors, is an essential addition to the toolbox of those who
seek to manage elements of global business, finance, and security. The CFA
Institute Research Foundation was prescient in commissioning this work last
year given all that has now unfolded. This book is a timely handrail. It will
help readers consider how to think about geopolitics before they dive into
what to think about geopolitics. Those who fail to understand and act upon
its advice and lessons do so at their own risk.

Liam Fox
Member of UK Parliament for North Somerset
Former UK Secretary of State for Defence

viii ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

1.  How to Think about Geopolitics

Geopolitical issues have a profound effect on investment strategies and

results. But there has been no easy-to-read and accessible guide to geopolitics
for investors—until now.
Geopolitics is everywhere. In August 2014, US Secretary of Defense
Chuck Hagel said, “The world is exploding all over.”1 Coups have occurred
and juntas have come to power from Tunisia to Thailand. Social upheaval
and civil unrest are becoming more widespread, with street protests and riots
from Argentina and Brazil to South Africa and Asia. The “Arab Spring” con-
tinues to unfold throughout the Middle East and in other nations as well.
Geopolitical events in Ukraine have threatened the world’s energy sup-
ply, the global food market, and the safety of commercial aviation, leading
to Russia’s departure from the G–8. In the South China Sea, the territo-
rial disputes between China and its neighbors have become more militarily
confrontational. Russia is challenging Japan more forcefully over the Kurile
Islands and making incursions into US airspace.
The old fault lines of geopolitics have become unstable again. Both
Russian and Chinese military vessels and aircraft are now frequently engaged
in near misses and close confrontations with those of the United States and its
allies. Allegations of nuclear missile launches, even if involving only unarmed
missiles, remind us that nuclear and conventional weapons treaties that took a
generation to negotiate can be violated or obliterated in the 2 to 60 minutes it
takes an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to reach its target.

Separatist Movements
Everywhere we see the rise of separatist movements that threaten the territo-
rial integrity of even the most important economies. The United Kingdom
had the Scottish independence movement. The European Union faces the risk
of exits by places as small as Catalonia and the city of Venice to countries as
large as Greece and the United Kingdom. From the US state of California to
Nigeria, more citizens are pushing for their preferred groups to gain greater
autonomy from the existing government. National borders are under threat
from multiple sources in multiple locales.
In the Middle East, the rise of civil strife in Syria and the return of
conflict between Israel and Gaza signal a return to instability with global
consequences. The United States’ intended departure from the region

Q&A with US Marines at Camp Pendleton, California, 13 August 2014.

1

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  1

Geopolitics for Investors

(Afghanistan and Iraq) has begun to change allegiances and the balance
of power there. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel are initiating diplomatic
and commercial relationships with China and Russia as the United States’
interest in their concerns seems to fade. Iran’s influence in the region has
increased, perhaps partly, but not only, because of its nuclear program. As
a result, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and even Egypt have all announced their
intention to become nuclear powers. The nuclearisation of the Middle East
is a new geopolitical development. Investors will have to decide whether
it is going to be anything like the “mutual assured destruction” (MAD)
approach that kept the United States and the Soviet Union in check during
the Cold War era.

Borders Dissolving
The sudden disintegration of the long-established borders in the Middle
East—from the era of the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1915)—is mirrored
in other territories. Even the United States has had to deploy the National
Guard in an effort to control its southern border, which has become porous
as a result of immigration. China and India are increasingly arguing about
the Line of Actual Control (LAC) between them, and both are building up
troops and infrastructure and testing each other’s resolve. Seemingly secure
borders are becoming more vulnerable and fluid.
US relations with long-standing allies are under threat. Germany recently
expelled the CIA’s station chief in Berlin. Germany not only declined the
United States’ offer to join the “Five Eyes” intelligence network but also
announced that the BND, Germany’s intelligence agency, would begin spy-
ing on the United States. The whole purpose of the US military presence
in Western Europe and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is to
protect Germany and Western Europe from Russia. Although the United
States and Germany may have been spying on each other for years, publicly
announcing that fact makes things awkward.
Core relationships that have underpinned the “world order” for decades
seem to be deteriorating. France and Germany no longer see eye to eye, espe-
cially on economic and debt issues. The shared concerns of Germany and the
rest of the EU no longer outweigh Germany’s concern about the debt and
structural problems elsewhere in the EU. Germany’s desire for other euro-
zone members to delegate a higher degree of sovereignty over fiscal matters to
Brussels has been met with political opposition in every eurozone nation that
has had the opportunity to test the notion at the ballot box. The relationship
between Russia and its border states has shifted from a benign to a challeng-
ing one. Russian border incursions into neighboring Baltic states and Ukraine

2 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 How to Think about Geopolitics

have become commonplace. As a result, military forces from Sweden to the

Balkans are enhancing their preparedness.
The United States’ relationship with both China and Russia had been
dominated by the assumption that common interests were more powerful
than opposing interests. This understanding no longer seems to be the case.
US, Russian, and Chinese military planes and vessels increasingly spar over
international waters.
The many near misses between US spy planes and Chinese and Russian
fighter jets are clear evidence that geopolitical risk should be an important
topic for investors. Superpowers that can project their might into space
are constantly testing and threatening each other’s space-based capabili-
ties. The desire for satellite and space dominance reveals how very impor-
tant this ambition is both militarily and strategically in a world of high-tech
communications.

Financial Architecture Questioned

Meanwhile, China and Russia are working together to create an alternative
financial architecture for the world economy, and both countries increasingly
challenge the United States and NATO militarily. The post–World War II
order is embedded in institutions that have an uncertain role in today’s world
or that are often impotent to fulfil it, including the International Monetary
Fund (IMF), the World Bank, NATO, the G–7/G–8/G–20, and the UN,
among others. The fundamental principles that underpin the world economy
and global markets are now increasingly called into question: Will or should
the US dollar remain the world’s reserve currency? China and Russia have
spearheaded the creation of the BRIC Bank, the increased use of rubles and
yuan in pricing and trading commodities, and a pooling of reserves for pro-
tection against a US dollar devaluation.

Non-State Actors
Many non-state actors are now at least as well equipped with technology and
weapons as many nation-states. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL or ISIS) can declare a caliphate in Iraq and take control of large swaths
of territory. The pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine can bring down a com-
mercial airliner with surprising accuracy. Terrorist groups can attack locations
across the globe and enter the heart of their opponent’s territory. Organised
crime and commercial enterprises can be deeply affiliated with nation-states,
making it possible for these states to use them in the conduct of statecraft
without having to “own” the outcome. In other cases, such as Mexico’s drug

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  3

Geopolitics for Investors

cartels or Eastern Europe’s infamous cyberwarfare gangs, organised crime

syndicates can operate entirely independently of the government and survive
all efforts to shut them down.

Debt Problems
The fact that most major economies—from the United States to Europe to
Japan—are heavily burdened by debt or financial difficulties makes the pursuit
of military action less of an option. Ironically, their inability or unwillingness to
deploy military strategies is arguably also spurring the return of geopolitics to
the investment landscape. The lack of a credible committed defense attracts, if
not invites, other nations to test borders and diplomatic boundaries.
In addition, the lack of reliable finance creates the impetus for higher
taxation and regulation, which can undermine the relationships between
citizens and their states. The “social contract” is increasingly questioned and
challenged across both the industrialised world and the emerging markets
as people realise that states cannot deliver on the promises they have made
to their citizens. In the industrialised world, this dynamic puts pressure on
existing geopolitical relationships. It not only stimulates separatist movements
but also puts enormous pressure on the relationship that has been considered
the linchpin of the European Union, that between Germany and France. The
pressures of weak finances and weak growth seem to be dissolving the very
glue that has traditionally held Europe together.
Financial distress is also what stimulates governments to reach for pri-
vately held assets, at home and abroad, whether held by citizens or nonciti-
zens. Investors need to take particular care when considering the multitude of
ways in which this can happen—from price controls to ownership restrictions
to outright expropriation and confiscation. As we shall see, all these risks are
geopolitical and can affect domestic and nondomestic investors alike.

4 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

2.  What Is Geopolitics?

Why consider geopolitics when making investment decisions? In the end,

the purpose of making an investment is not only to get your money back
but also to make the best return possible, given the risks and opportunities
involved. Therefore, investors who fail to consider all these factors could be
shortchanging themselves and the interests of the capital for which they have
a fiduciary responsibility. The deep interconnectedness of the world economy
has caused high global correlations to be commonplace. Events abroad can
easily affect purely domestic investment strategies. Most investment decisions
must be assessed against the backdrop of alternative possible investments and
locations, so a global perspective is necessary even when managing a purely
domestic portfolio.

Defining Geopolitics
The following definition permits an assessment of the modern landscape of
risk: Geopolitics generally refers to a state’s projection of power abroad by any
means or tools of statecraft. This definition encompasses both the active effort
to engage in geopolitics in order to project power externally and the passive
effort to respond to the geopolitical efforts of others to project power. It also
encompasses all aspects of sovereignty and power, regardless of whether the
tool or the objective is economic or political. The word “generally” is impor-
tant because it leaves the door open to external non-state actors that increas-
ingly are both the source of geopolitical pressures on states and the object of
geopolitical efforts by states.
Risk is probably best described by Elroy Dimson, a professor at the
London Business School: “Risk means more things can happen than will
happen.” When we combine the two topics—geopolitics and risk—we can
say that geopolitical risk refers to the range of things that can happen that are
caused by the efforts of states to project power. Investors and fund managers
are principally interested in the market and economic consequences of geo-
political risk—that is, its effect on asset prices, although social, political, and
legal issues can all affect valuations and prices as well. Culture and politics
play their part in driving geopolitics, but geopolitics is about power projection
aimed at multiple goals.
There are other definitions, but their usefulness for investors may be lim-
ited. The Merriam-Webster dictionary says:

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  5

Geopolitics for Investors

Geopolitics is the study of how geography and economics have an influence

on politics and on the relations between nations and a study of the influence
of such factors as geography, economics, and demography on the politics
and especially the foreign policy of a state.
Encyclopaedia Britannica defines geopolitics as the “analysis of the geographic
influences on power relationships in international relations.”
Geopolitics is more than just foreign policy. It is one thing to consider
nations’ efforts to engage in international relations, which implies a series of
bilateral relationships and dialogues. Geopolitics, in contrast, is a more inclu-
sive term that speaks to the need to respond to the foreign policy of others as
well as the vulnerability to events that are entirely outside national control.
International relations does not really deal with a blockage in the Strait of
Malacca caused by piracy, whereas geopolitics does. The international rela-
tions of Western Europe or Australia cannot really contend with the problem
of territorial disputes in the South China Sea, whereas geopolitics can. Any
change to the composition of the eurozone’s membership may be an interna-
tional relations issue for European nations, but it might well be considered
geopolitics by investors from elsewhere in the world.

A Non-Quantifiable Risk
Geopolitics, however we choose to define it—and there are many ways to define
it—is hard to quantify. Fund managers, by nature, often like to reduce reality
to a number. In an era when algorithms govern investing and drive governance
itself, it is easy to dismiss non-quantifiable risks. But it is dangerous to do so, as
Daniel Yankelovich (1972), the father of modern polling, has written:
The first step is to measure what can be easily measured. This is okay as far
as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which cannot be measured,
or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading.
The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured really is not very
important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what cannot be
measured does not really exist. This is suicide.
Another aspect to consider is that geopolitics involves unknowns and is
thus purely speculative and unworthy of time and attention. However, there
is a difference between truly “unknown unknowns” and knowable or probable
unknowns.2 But fund managers will inevitably ask why they should bother at
all if geopolitics cannot be quantified.

2
As described in the famous briefing given by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on
12 February 2002 (www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2636).

6 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 What Is Geopolitics?

The modern “science” of economics has long tried to dissociate itself from
the unquantifiable, using math as the wedge to distance itself from politics
and its global counterpart, geopolitics. But as historian E.H. Carr (1939)
rightly observed, “The science of economics presupposes a given political
order and cannot be profitably studied in isolation from politics.” Today, we
could say that the financial markets presuppose a given political order and can-
not be profitably studied in isolation from politics or geopolitics.
Because both politics and geopolitics are fluid, it is important to con-
sider the following question: How much of my risk management (strategy,
structures, institutions) assumes that politics and geopolitics will be stable?
Fund managers build portfolios on a foundation of geopolitical assumptions.
It is assumed that states will continue to exist when, in fact, coups, the estab-
lishment of military governments, and the dissolution of borders are ongo-
ing possibilities. It is assumed that nations do not confiscate assets when, in
fact, we see many examples of confiscations, from the Cypriot bank bailout
in 2013 to the contests over territory in the South China Sea that involve
“confiscations” of physical assets. It is assumed that conflict and war will not
affect valuations, and yet the spillovers from the breakdown of stability in
the Middle East raise the prospect of war, acts of terrorism, and the possibil-
ity of other market-moving events. It is assumed that borders are sound and
reliable when, in fact, we see many borders being challenged or dissolved and
incursions being made across them. The rise of “mapfare”—map warfare—is a
telling example: nations challenging borders and territorial claims by issuing
new maps of the geography in question.
What if the foundation on which asset management and investing are built
resembles sand more than rock? What if geopolitics can touch the portfolio in a
manner that could prove profitable or that should be guarded against?
Geopolitical risk can affect not only trading strategies but also the via-
bility of the institutions that manage capital. Current examples include the
Scottish referendum, which suddenly made a number of extremely large
institutions and investors rethink whether their headquarters should stay in
Scotland. Similarly, the Arab Spring rendered North Africa and much of
the Middle East almost uninvestable for a time. But Dubai and Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates, have ended up serving as havens for regional capital.
In less than a year after the Arab Spring began, Tunisia broke its own records
for new and successful IPOs. The geopolitical tension between the United
States, China, and Russia hardly existed a few years ago. Today, it has the
potential to undermine the existing financial architecture and could lead to
the creation of a new reserve currency that would replace the US dollar. These
are all important, market-moving developments.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  7

Geopolitics for Investors

Geography and Politics

Geopolitics has always been closely tied to the act of mapping the world. The
word geopolitics itself ties together geography and politics because geopolitics
describes the efforts of states to project power beyond their own borders in
the pursuit of their national interests.
Politics, in contrast, is “local,” as Tip O’Neill, the late US Speaker of the
House, famously put it. Most fund managers undoubtedly wish that politics
and geopolitics would stay out of the markets and the world economy most of
the time. But this view is rooted in several prejudices that overlook the simple
fact that neither can be avoided. Both politics and geopolitics are central to
the proper functioning of markets.
Markets depend on states to protect and defend property rights, con-
tracts, and borders and to provide a judiciary and protection from opponents
at home and abroad. In other words, the presence of a police force, a military
force, and a judicial system has value to financial markets. If the state did not
provide these protections, mob rule or organised crime or organised vigilantes
would step in to fill the vacuum. States also play the essential role of rais-
ing government revenue so they can provide whatever civil society requires,
including basic education, social safety nets, health care, and the like. But
states are obliged to pursue their national interests, however those may be
defined. Thus, states are required to project their influence abroad as well as
manage other states’ projections of power that touch their own citizens.

Benchmark Investing and Geopolitical Risk

Many fund managers may find themselves arguing that geopolitics does not
matter to them because their investment decisions are benchmark driven. But
even active managers who hug the benchmark have some latitude to alter the
weightings around an index—and indeed must do so in order to justify their
fees. These managers often find themselves engaging in what is called “agency
risk.” That is to say, they huddle together in the same views and trades because
of the asymmetrical risk–reward relationship that is inherent in geopolitics.
A fund manager who tries to defy trends or make calls early will certainly
be fired if good performance does not follow within a quarter or two at most.
In contrast, a fund manager can survive immense losses so long as the entire
industry or at least comparable competitors lose roughly the same amount for
the same reasons. This “agency” problem further encourages the industry to
turn a blind eye to the problem of geopolitics and renders the industry even
more vulnerable to geopolitical events of which it is potentially unaware or for
which it is ill prepared.

8 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 What Is Geopolitics?

Black Swans
There is also a notable tendency, especially among business people and fund
managers, to say that geopolitics is irrelevant because it is unpredictable by
nature—it is a “black swan,” as the philosopher and investment manager
Nassim Taleb calls it in his book of the same name. It is likened to an act of
God, an unpredictable event for which no fund manager or investor can be
held accountable.
But the fact is that geopolitical events create both risks and opportuni-
ties. Investors and fund managers are accountable for leaving money on the
table. Therefore, they cannot afford to assign arbitrary numerical weights to
geopolitics or to be dismissive of, or blind to, the subject.

Prediction vs. Preparation

Luckily, however, investors and fund managers are smart people who under-
stand what Richard Feynman, the renowned Nobel Prize–winning physicist,
had to say about risk: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—
and you are the easiest person to fool.” No one can accurately predict what will
happen on the geopolitical landscape. But as part of their fiduciary responsi-
bility, fund managers can and should assess how much value is created by
geopolitical stability or destroyed by geopolitical instability. This assessment
can then underpin more-practical decisions about when risk can and should
be taken or mitigated and when profits need to be pursued or protected.
The purpose of focusing on geopolitics is not to predict market- and price-
moving events. Rather, it is to become more skilled at scanning the horizon
and assessing scenarios so that investing strategies can become more robust
when confronted by geopolitical developments.
In this primer, I sketch out ways to map risk, adding elements that com-
plement the information that can be quantified and dealt with mathematically.

Investment and Geopolitics

Most books on geopolitics have been written by and for policymakers rather
than by and for investors. These books tend to catalogue the geopolitics of
the world, dividing the subject matter into local, regional, and national dis-
putes, fault lines, philosophies, and security issues. Books on geopolitics often
amount to historical timelines of events. Rather than doing that here, given
what interests investors, it seems more practical to outline issues that can
affect valuation, pricing, and risk management. Specific geopolitical events
are perhaps better deployed as examples than as items to be catalogued.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  9

Geopolitics for Investors

The State as an Essential “Unit”

Sovereign or “country” risk has always been a central concern for investors.
Obviously, every nation with borders constitutes an important investable
“unit” or construct in the world economy. Financial indexes (e.g., the MSCI)
and intergovernmental organisations (e.g., the World Bank, the IMF, the
UN, and the World Trade Organization) all assume that states can be treated
as discrete components. Geopolitics, as it relates to investors, begins with the
assumption that the unit of membership is a “state” or “nation” with its own
government and borders. These “sovereign” units called “states” or “nations”
constitute the building blocks of investment strategy. Sovereign risk, there-
fore, is at the heart of investment strategy.

The Social Contract

Sovereign risk and dealings with “the state” are important matters even for
purely domestic investors. After all, even the domestic investor has to ask
questions about the nature of the relationship between a state and its citizens.
Every state has a “social contract” with its citizens—the “deal” that always
exists between citizens and their states. The terms of the deal differ widely,
but in the main, citizens pay their taxes and agree to abide by the laws of
citizenship in exchange for a set of promises the state offers. States are called
upon to provide defense, internal law and order, some sort of reliable judi-
ciary, and some kind of commitment to public services, including health care,
education, and the like.
The terms of the social contract in France are bound to be markedly dif-
ferent from the terms in the United States or, say, North Korea. The state may
compel its citizens to abide by the laws of citizenship, though history shows
that such arrangements are less enduring, or the citizens may voluntarily
choose to abide. Either way, sovereign risk arises when the citizens decide to
change (to renegotiate) the social contract. This decision to renegotiate can be
expressed in various ways. For example, it can be expressed by voting out a
government at the ballot box or by violent revolution in the streets. Obviously,
prices and markets are bound to be affected whenever such events occur. In
the main, orderly changes are priced differently than disorderly changes.
Fund managers spend a good deal of time trying to understand how actions
or inactions by a sovereign will affect valuations and the landscape of risk and
opportunity even if the context is purely domestic.
These days, most investors invest across borders. Therefore, domestic
actions by nondomestic sovereigns can affect investors. Similarly, owners of
real assets in eastern Ukraine might no longer be sure whether they own their

10 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 What Is Geopolitics?

assets or under whose jurisdiction their assets now fall. Once it became clear
that a majority of Scottish voters might vote yes on the referendum to grant
Scotland independence (as we now know, the noes carried the day), many
investors deemed it necessary to move their assets into other areas of the
United Kingdom. Investors in natural gas assets in the eastern Mediterranean
might think their risk lies with Cyprus and Israel, given that Cyprus owns the
territory and Israeli firms hold most of the development licenses. But these
gas fields could become the subject of disputes because other countries—
including Greece, Lebanon, Turkey, and Egypt—have started to lay claim to
some of the gas fields. Geopolitical actions by any of these states could affect
the valuations of these assets. Or consider the attacks on Chinese nation-
als that occurred in factories throughout Ho Chi Minh City in 2014. These
attacks were in response to news headlines about China’s efforts to harvest
energy from interior waters that the Vietnamese perceive as their own. These
are all geopolitical risks.

The Power to Tax

The state’s power to tax is essential to its survival. No state can exist with-
out some capacity to generate a budget and provide for its basic needs, which
serves the interests of its citizens. Sovereign risk arises when a state seeks to
take wealth or assets away from investors without their consent, whether or
not those investors are its own citizens. It also arises when a sovereign can-
not provide the basic necessities for investing: a legal system, law and order, a
defense structure, and a social contract.
Even exclusively domestic asset managers and investors cannot ignore
geopolitics. A purely “domestic” approach for dealing with sovereign risk
is not viable for investors and fund managers partly because of the speed at
which information travels and at which investment parameters can change.
The interconnectedness of the world economy and global markets gives rise to
substantial correlation risk. Changes in one part of the world can lead inves-
tors to sell or buy assets in otherwise unrelated locations. Correlation risk
alone requires investors to factor in geopolitics even when dealing with purely
domestic portfolios. The cheapness or costliness of capital in one part of the
world can have a material impact on the relative cheapness or costliness of
capital in another. A sovereign state may appear attractive or unattractive on
its own, but global investors will always rank a nation relative to its peers.
A sovereign’s “risk,” or country risk, has always been closely linked to
its financial position. Typically, a nation’s balance sheet becomes “unbal-
anced” when the nation spends beyond its means. Throughout history, exces-
sive debt has usually arisen from the expenses of warfare. Over the last 100

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  11

Geopolitics for Investors

years, government debt, especially among the rich industrialised nations, has
also come about as the result of overpromising benefits and public services.
Sometimes the markets are amenable to such excessive spending and are will-
ing to tolerate financial imbalances for prolonged periods. In other cases, even
a small step in the direction of imbalance can be met with a sharp withdrawal
of investor interest.
Either way, investors should pay close attention to a sovereign’s financial
situation because governments are inclined to use their power to tax to resolve
cash constraints. The balance between the power of the state to tax and the
power of an individual or a corporation to generate a profit lies at the heart of
the social contract. States that overtax their citizens destroy the incentive to
work. Examples include the former Soviet Union, which formally ceased to
exist in 1991. One reason for its demise, among many possible explanations,
is that it simply ran out of income sufficient to follow through on the promises
it had made to its citizens.
Under Prime Minister Harold Wilson, Britain saw the tax rate rise to
83% on wage and salary incomes and to 98% on investment income—an event
that culminated in significant social unrest (the “Winter of Discontent”) and
the need to ask the IMF for a bailout. A generation later, the Arab Spring
resulted, at least in part, from the public’s unwillingness to continue seeing
most of the Arab nations’ wealth channelled into the hands of a very small
elite. The revolutionaries preferred a system in which wealth and taxes would
be both generated and redistributed more evenly and fairly.
A state can raise money in many ways, some of which fall within the
agreed-on social contract while others violate it. In either case, there can be
consequences for investors who have to consider the risk of higher taxation
or reduced delivery of expected public services. They must be alert to other,
more aggressive forms of taxation, including expropriation, confiscation, and
even inflation, which is a hidden tax that can be considered a stealthy form of
confiscation.

Sovereign Risk and National Balance Sheets

The normal barometer of sovereign risk is the rate of interest at which inves-
tors are willing to lend capital to the sovereign. Normally, all other risk
assets in an economy are priced against sovereign risk. In recent years, gov-
ernment spending beyond means has been so excessive—and sovereign debt
has become so risky—that many governments have had to resort to highly
unconventional monetary policies to sustain stability in the financial markets.
These policies are generally known as quantitative easing (QE). This term
encompasses components of or additions to QE, such as “forward guidance,”

12 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 What Is Geopolitics?

whereby central banks commit not only to offer extremely low interest rates
but also to give the markets substantial warning in advance of any change in
monetary policy.
Currently, there are significant uncertainties about sovereigns, interest
rates, and risk assessment because of the debt crisis and the policy response
to it. Although governments may have avoided a catastrophe by engaging
in QE and by pushing interest rates down, government debt problems can-
not generally be “fixed” by adding more debt. Some even argue that US and
G–7 government bonds, which used to represent the so-called risk-free rate
of return, may now represent the “return-free rate of risk.” If a pure cash flow
metric is applied to sovereigns, it is not hard to make the case that some small
African nations are more likely than many of the industrialised nations to
pay back their debt in full and on time. Yet the risk models the markets rely
on continue to assume that the United States and the G–7 are the least risky
sovereigns—in spite of the unusual measures that have been taken to prop
them up in light of their financial imbalances.

Sovereign Powers
Markets ascribe value to the fact that a sovereign has powers that other
investable entities do not have. A sovereign can print money. It can tax and
expropriate assets, if necessary. It can change the law. It can arrest or militar-
ily confront its opponents, whether internal or external. It has many quali-
ties and capabilities that encourage the markets to apply a different analysis
to its balance sheets and attendant risk than would ever be used in the case
of a private sector firm or an individual. Markets clearly ascribe a value to
having these qualities and capabilities; therefore, any enhancement to or
infringement of them changes the price of sovereign risk. In other words,
geopolitics—through either its absence or its presence—has an undeniable
impact on asset prices.

Quantitative Easing and Geopolitics

QE creates an ironic twist in the tale of modern geopolitics. In an effort to
protect against sovereign risk, central banks have injected record sums of
money into the world economy, thus driving down both volatility and the
cost of insuring against risk while driving up asset prices. As a result, fund
managers are disinclined to spend money on insurance of any kind (includ-
ing the hedging of everyday risks, let alone insuring against unlikely risks).
When both the price of money and the level of volatility fall, even as historic
geopolitical events are unfolding, the industry is encouraged to believe that it

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  13

Geopolitics for Investors

does not have to pay any attention to such risks. Why bother when there are
assurances that central banks will “fix” any problems caused by geopolitics—
or anything else—by simply adding more liquidity?
Meanwhile, central banks have had to engage in QE precisely because
governments are so deeply in debt that they are often incapable of sustaining
military action or expenditures. In other words, QE reflects the fact that sov-
ereign risk is so high that nations must engage in unconventional monetary
policies to address the severity of the problem.
This inability or disinclination to respond arguably invites other states to
test the boundaries of both territory and diplomacy, thus increasing the risk
of geopolitical events.

Geopolitics as Mapping
And so, geopolitics comes back to geography and mapping. Rather than start-
ing with a history of the definition of geopolitics, it might be more engaging
for a fund manager or investor, whose attention is inevitably drawn to the
future rather than the past, to begin with an image of the global map. Imagine
a three-dimensional holograph of the world rather than a two-dimensional
map. Or consider a cartogram, such as Figure 1—that method of mapping
in which the size of each territory reflects a variable (e.g., population, natural
resources, or government spending) rather than its actual geographic size. In
this way, we can begin to plot out the realms in which geopolitics affects mar-
kets and prices. For example, there is a section later in this book about how
modern warfare is conducted. Although it can be fought on the ground with
boots and blood, modern technology permits its conduct in new locations,
including cyberspace and outer space. Global markets now depend heavily on
both for almost everything that matters to daily life: telecommunications, the
Global Positioning System (GPS), and the World Wide Web.
Recent developments in computer technology mean that an opponent
can be stopped or hindered more efficiently and less expensively by insert-
ing a thumb drive that releases a disabling computer virus than by dropping
a bunker buster. Similarly, computer technology has allowed geopolitics to
creep into the daily concerns of financial and business institutions that are
now constantly hacked into and spied on, not only by private attackers but
also by states—friendly, unfriendly, domestic, and nondomestic alike—and
by non-state actors that can fairly easily hijack a firm’s data or systems to hold
for ransom.

14 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Figure 1.  Cartogram of the Global Population

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation 

Source: Copyright www.worldmapper.org. Reprinted with permission.

15
What Is Geopolitics?
Geopolitics for Investors

Nuclear Weapons
Investors and fund managers have not had to think very much at all about
nuclear weapons since the fall of the Soviet Union. For the most part, such
instruments of power have been tightly controlled and contained under a web
of carefully crafted nuclear nonproliferation treaties and policies. But these
treaties are now weakening or being abandoned as the superpowers reassert
their right to deploy nuclear weapons. China, Russia, and the United States
all have or are testing hypersonic vehicles that can deliver a nuclear payload to
almost anywhere in the world in less than an hour. In 2014, the United States
formally accused Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
Treaty (INF Treaty) after Russia allegedly fired RS-24 (“Yars”) and RS-26
(“Rubezh”) ICBMs. Russia, China, and the United States have all moved
nuclear weapons into closer proximity to their opponents in recent years.
Technology has moved on as well, allowing states to build and deliver
powerful weapons that may not fall under traditional treaty terms. In addi-
tion, the speed of delivery has been vastly enhanced, and thus any return to
an arms race will permit policymakers far less time to consider their responses
to geopolitical events. The Cuban Missile Crisis may have seemed a high-
pressure environment. But what took 10 days to address and resolve in 1962
might be compressed into minutes or hours today. Consider the speed of
Russia’s response to the possibility that Ukraine might join the EU, thus
bringing NATO to Russia’s doorstep in the south. From Russia’s perspective,
this episode was another Cuban Missile Crisis.
More and more small countries are seeking to acquire nuclear or sophis-
ticated weapons capabilities. In the Middle East, for example, Saudi Arabia,
Turkey, and Egypt have all announced their intention to obtain nuclear
weapons, given that Israel arguably has such weapons and Iran may be try-
ing to develop them. The superpowers and other nations increasingly fear one
particular development that is at least as toxic to peace and stability—namely,
a “dirty bomb” in the hands of a non-state actor.
Frankly, the weaponisation of small states and non-state actors is already
apparent. That is how a non-state actor like Hezbollah was able to sink an
Israeli ship in 2006. Hezbollah used a Chinese-made C-802 anti-ship mis-
sile that had not previously been known to be in the control of or used by a
non-state entity. Similarly, if ethnic Russian separatists in Ukraine are capa-
ble of downing a commercial aircraft, regardless of who supplied them with
the weapon, it is a warning that weapons have evolved in such a way that
non-state groups can securely control and deploy them. One of the great geo-
political worries is that Pakistan becomes destabilised and nuclear material
or weapons fall into the hands of the Taliban or some other non-state actor

16 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 What Is Geopolitics?

that would make ill use of them. But trouble can arise without such weap-
ons. Conventional small arms have spread throughout the world. They may be
enough to cause geopolitical pressures without any sophisticated technology.

Bioweapons
Recent developments in technology have forced investors to take leaps of
imagination and to consider the idea that warfare can now be conducted at the
subcellular and even subatomic level thanks to advancements in nanotechnol-
ogy and biogenetics. Today’s technology enables scientists to craft biological,
DNA-based viruses that affect only one individual, thus forcing security and
intelligence services around the world to both protect the DNA of their own
leaders and gather the DNA and other markers of other countries’ leaders.3
The idea of “warfare” has expanded dramatically in the post–World War
II environment. No longer are physical weapons required. Information and
knowledge can be a ready substitute for a battlefield. Industrial espionage,
spying, and clandestine operations in general are now back on the landscape
of the world economy in a way that has not been seen since Ian Fleming,
John le Carré, and Tom Clancy wrote their spy novels about the Cold War.
The public disclosure of the existence of America’s Echelon, Prism, and “Five
Eyes” programs and of the state-sponsored espionage capabilities of China,
Russia, and others has brought into focus that the world has entered a new era
of espionage risk. Today, the objective is not only to damage or destroy oth-
ers’ capabilities but also to read and hear their thoughts in order to outbid or
outmaneuver them in the effort to acquire valuable assets.

Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman, and Steven Kotler, “Hacking the President’s DNA,”
3

Atlantic (November 2012).

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  17

3.  A History of the Word Geopolitics

Our holographic, or cartographic, view of the global landscape can be

stripped down to reveal the origins of geopolitics. This exercise will show that
the geopolitical issues investors face today may be occurring on a new plane,
or in new dimensions, but the fundamental drivers are not so different from
those in the past.

Politics vs. Geopolitics

Where is the dividing line between politics and geopolitics? Politics and pol-
icy are typically considered domestic in nature even if local politics has global
causes or consequences. Geopolitics, in contrast, presumes political and policy
decisions that have deliberate consequences beyond the domestic territory and
population. Of course, the question of intent leaves the line between politics
and geopolitics remarkably blurry.
An intent-based definition does not serve well in the modern world
economy because it precludes a domestic policy that happens to have global
consequences, such as a decision by the US Federal Reserve to change the
level of interest rates. Inside the United States, this decision is clearly “policy,”
not “geopolitics.” But outside the United States, such a policy decision could
be considered to have immense global consequences that render it a “geopo-
litical” or “geo-economic” policy as far as observers are concerned. Similarly,
a decision by China to weaken or strengthen its currency may seem to be
domestic policy to the Chinese, but it certainly has global consequences with
respect to the United States and other nations.
Some might prefer to reserve the term geopolitics for military matters
alone, hoping to separate military power from political power. But in a world
where economic policy can have even greater consequences than the use of
military equipment, there must be some innovation in our thinking. After
all, which would do more damage to an industrialised country like the United
States, the United Kingdom, or Japan: attacking it with an army or simply
selling the outstanding sovereign debt and pushing up interest rates by several
percentage points?

Power and Sovereignty Are Indivisible

The Council on Foreign Relations and many others still try to distinguish
between geo-economics and geopolitics, making the assumption that one
involves commerce and the other involves the use of military might or purely

18 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 A History of the Word Geopolitics

political or policy tools. But if we look at the origins of geopolitics, it becomes

clear that the instruments of state power and statecraft remain inseparable.
The difficulty arises from the persistent belief that the two, economics and
politics, can be disentangled. This belief, in part, causes strategic security
experts to remain relatively ignorant of economics and causes economics
experts to remain relatively ignorant of strategic security issues.
In contrast, politicians and policymakers are well aware of the vast array
of tools and instruments they can wield to serve the national interest. How
interesting that Joseph Chamberlain, the UK Secretary of State for the
Colonies, said at a dinner in 1902, “You young gentlemen have entertained
me royally, and in return I will give you a priceless secret. Tariffs! They are
the politics of the future.” We have moved on from tariffs for the most part,
but economics as an objective and tool of statecraft remains in place.
One can try to refine the definition of geopolitics by exploring the terms
geo-economics, geostrategic, and other such derivations, but in the end, geo-
politics exists in reality even if it is not well dealt with by theory. As Carr
(1939, pp. 119–120) said,
Power is indivisible; and the military and economic weapons are merely dif-
ferent instruments of power . . . [and] in the pursuit of power, military and
economic instruments will both be used.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted that sovereignty is itself indivisible. In his
Social Contract and Discourses, he wrote, “Whenever Sovereignty seems to be
divided, there is an illusion.”4 Nations are obviously obliged to pursue their
national interests and use power in many forms to achieve their goals. They
will make use of every tool available to them in the conduct of statecraft:
political, economic, strategic, military, moral, and so on.
Geopolitics, therefore, is the practice of a sovereign’s seeking to influ-
ence abroad, outside domestic territory, no matter which tool is used. The
definition also encompasses the practice of a sovereign’s defending against or
managing efforts by other nations to project power and influence onto itself or
its nationals. Geopolitics can be offensive or defensive.

The “Geo” in Geopolitics

Although the conduct of statecraft, international relations, diplomacy, and
war has existed for thousands of years, the word “geopolitics” was not intro-
duced until the 20th century. In fact, it seems that the use of the word did
4
Social Contract and Discourses caused an uproar across Europe when it was first published, in
1762, and was on the Vatican’s Index of Forbidden Books. Hugely influential, it has remained
continually in print for more than 250 years.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  19

Geopolitics for Investors

not become truly commonplace until the 1960s, around the time that a moon
landing became feasible and people began to fully comprehend how quickly
a nuclear warhead could travel from one continent to another. That was the
moment when a “geospatial” view—a view of the world from space—began
to replace the more traditional approach, which had involved merely state-to-
state “international relations.” Before then, the use of the “geo” was meant to
convey a marriage between geography and politics.
When exploring traditional references to geopolitics, it is clear that most
of the forefathers of the notion never actually used the word. Instead, they
referred to the phenomenon.

Classical Geopolitics
There are several broad eras of geopolitics. The subject can be considered to
have begun in 1832, when Carl von Clausewitz, the great military historian,
wrote that “war is a continuation of politik by other means.” Although the
quote is often translated using “policy” for politik, the German word politik
combines “politics” and “policy” into one. Clausewitz thus began an align-
ment between the concept of politics and the projection of power beyond
national borders.
The “classical” era of geopolitics focused on the practical elements of
power projection. Several thinkers pursued the notion of “politics through
geographical control.” In 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that sea power
was the key to success in his famous book The Influence of Sea Power upon
History, 1660–1783. This tome was followed, in 1902, by H.J. Mackinder’s
book Britain and the British Seas and, in 1904, by his article “The Geographical
Pivot of History.” In that article, he established geography, and the conquer-
ing of it, as a principal focus of politics. In contrast to Mahan, Mackinder
focused on land. He introduced the idea of a “Heartland.” If one controlled
that, one controlled the world. For him, the Heartland was a “pivot area” that
encompassed Eastern Europe through Russia and into Asia.
At roughly the same time, in 1897, Friedrich Ratzel published Politische
Geographie, which focused much more on the acquisition and exercise of
power through control of land and space. He introduced the word lebensraum
(living space), which was later picked up by his student Rudolf Kjellén, who
was the first person to use the term geopolitics—in 1916, in the introduction
to Swedish Geography and the State as a Living Form. Kjellén added the words
volk (people or folk), reich (realm), and raum (room or space) to Ratzel’s ideas,
further justifying the case for a nation’s expansion. He also broadened the
definition of “national interest” to include economic well-being, which went
substantially beyond the mere law-and-order aspect of state power.

20 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 A History of the Word Geopolitics

Karl Haushofer, a German general and geographer, applied these ideas

in the field, which inspired his student Rudolf Hess to build the case for the
enlargement of Germany. Haushofer used the term wehrgeopolitik (war poli-
tik). These ideas were picked up by the National Socialists in Germany and
used as the basis for the German military–led expansion that culminated in
World War II; Hess became deputy führer under Hitler.

Cold War “Bloc” Geopolitics

Naturally, the term geopolitics became generally discredited because of this
history. However, in 1942, the Austrian émigré Robert Strausz-Hupé wrote
a book titled Geopolitics: The Struggle for Space and Power, which opened the
door to a new notion of geopolitics. Strausz-Hupé argued that the nation-
state was over and that “power blocs” would emerge in its place—and that is
roughly what happened. In reaction to the Nazis’ use of the term, the post–
World War II philosophy was to avoid geopolitics altogether by creating a
system that permitted nations to deepen their common interests and thereby
avoid the need for conflict. Instead of being called geopolitics, the tensions
between the two main post–World War II power blocs—the Soviet Union
and the United States—were referred to as the “Cold War.” All other geopo-
litical issues had a tendency to be subsumed under that larger confrontation.

Balance of Power
The European experience of war was that it was usually caused by the desire
to acquire someone else’s land and resources or by the loss of a “balance of
power.” This latter idea lies at the heart of the study of geopolitics. It assumes
that nations are unlikely to challenge each other if their abilities to project
power are roughly the same. Balance of power generally refers to weapons
capabilities, or possibly manpower capabilities. It implies the ability to deter a
potential opponent. The wars in Europe were typically driven by the absence
of a balance of power, by the desire to acquire territory and commodities, and
by the belief that increasing national power at the expense of another nation
would be worthwhile (as outlined by Kjellén and others, described earlier).
Shortly before World War I, an idea emerged that has underpinned geo-
politics ever since: the idea of world peace through world institutions. The
hope was that a supranational entity could resolve disputes through arbitra-
tion, negotiation, and diplomacy; enforce the disarmament of nations; and
resolve conflicts without any need for war. In 1910, this idea was promoted
by Sir Norman Angell in his book The Great Illusion, in which he argued that

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  21

Geopolitics for Investors

peace could be achieved through economic interdependence and global insti-

tutions. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for these ideas in 1933.
In practical terms, these ideas came to fruition in the form of the League
of Nations, which was established in 1919. It did not work. World War II
broke out a mere 20 years later. But this hopeful idea was expanded into the
multitude of institutions we see today, including the United Nations and the
World Trade Organization, among others.

The Origins of the EU: Geopolitics

During the interwar period, there was an intense debate about whether this
supranational approach was flawed. Though designed to ensure that everyone
benefitted and that no one would have reason to resort to war, it often pro-
duced uneven results. The immense burden of paying off war debts trapped
nations in long periods of low growth and high unemployment, which in
turn motivated some to fight for a better “deal.” Access to commodities also
remained a contentious issue. There are many arguments to be had over the
causes of World War II, but it is clear that Germany and France ended up
prepared to fight a war over who would own the steel-making resources in
the area we now call Alsace-Lorraine, on the French–German border. The
initial cornerstone of postwar European geopolitics was the European Coal
and Steel Community (ECSC), created by the Treaty of Paris in 1951, which
forced the two nations to share Alsace-Lorraine’s coal and steel resources.
This core supranational concept was proposed by two Frenchmen: Robert
Schuman (the French foreign minister) and Jean Monnet (who had served
in the exiled French government during World War II). In his famous
“Schuman Declaration” of 9 May 1950, Schuman declared:
The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for
the setting up of common foundations for economic development as the
first step in the federation of Europe and will change the destinies of those
regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of
war, of which they have been the most constant victims.
Monnet laid the groundwork for this approach with his “Theory of
l’Engrenage” (putting grit into the works), which proposed that war could
be averted in future if the ability to forge weapons was denied to Germany.
In practical terms, that meant giving political control over the Ruhr and Saar
regions, where coal was mined and steel could easily be made, to France and
giving commercial access to Germany. The ECSC evolved into the European
Community and then the European Union. (Interestingly, Japan’s entry into

22 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 A History of the Word Geopolitics

World War II was encouraged, to some degree, by US efforts to cut off Japan’s
access to energy and steel-making supplies.)
At the core of the Bretton Woods system, however, was not the denial of
access to raw materials but, rather, the idea that so long as goods and people
could freely cross borders, there would be no need for military forces to do so.
If enough wealth could be created from global trade, it would diminish the
need for conflict. This is the central idea of the Bretton Woods system, which
emphasised commitment to free trade and a US dollar–based trading system
as a means of diminishing the risk of conflict—the origin of the “dollar bloc.”

Two Blocs
So, Strausz-Hupé’s notion of geopolitics’ creating blocs did indeed come
true. But in the aftermath of World War II, another bloc also emerged—the
Communist bloc, as it was then called, which was dominated by the Soviet
Union and characterised by its Communist philosophy. The dollar bloc, or
Bretton Woods system, was dominated by the United States and character-
ised by its capitalist philosophy.
A balance of power between the two was believed to exist. The common
economic interests within these blocs—and the balance of power that came
from the nuclear and conventional weapons both sides had—managed to pre-
vent conflict on a global scale. Of course, the two blocs were engaged in many
local conflicts, from Vietnam to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the prospect of
a world war seemed to have subsided in the realm of geopolitics. Instead, the
greatest worry was that the United States and the Soviet Union, in particular,
might engage in nuclear conflict, which was a very different and more terrify-
ing image of “world war.”
Saul Cohen (2009, p. 24) has written that the “balance of power”
(explained later in the book) between these two blocs “re-awakened” interest
in geopolitics. But when conflicts began to unfold between the United States
and the Soviet Union, all the events were simply subsumed under the term
Cold War, even if geopolitics was indeed the subject at hand.
It was during this period that the views of Nicholas Spykman began to
gain momentum. He became known as the “godfather of containment” and
argued, in 1942, that Mackinder had been wrong. The “Heartland” was not
the key to power projection. The “Rimland” was the place where power would
need to be projected (see Dodds 2007, p. 37). By Rimland, Spykman meant
the coastal areas of Europe and Asia. In this way, the rise of the Soviet Union
could be “contained” or restrained. This view set the stage for the compe-
tition between the United States and the Soviet Union for influence in the

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  23

Geopolitics for Investors

Rimland, which included Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina), East Africa,
India, and the Middle East.
In 1954, President Eisenhower confirmed that the United States and
Communist powers were vying for control of the Rimland (specifically,
Indochina) by announcing the “domino theory.” He said that the “falling
domino” principle meant that
you have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, the second,
and so on until all are knocked over. So, you could have a beginning of
a world where either capitalists or communists successfully project power
and gain influence over specific geographies, which would have profound
consequences.5
This concept set the stage for US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who
was also a national security adviser to the president, to use the term geo-
politics from the mid-1960s until the late 1970s as he conducted the standoff
with the Soviet Union in the Rimland. But Kissinger’s use of the term has
been criticised. The famed military historian Michael Howard (1994) wrote,
“For Kissinger ‘geopolitics’ is simply a euphemism for power relationships. . . .
[The] ‘power politics’ [Kissinger describes] is a concept (though not a practice)
and what he was really talking about was ‘the politics of power.’”

“New Geopolitics” of Globalisation

In 1989, any debate about geopolitics became moot with the demise of the
Soviet Union. This event further reduced the need for the term because all
“geopolitics” disappeared when that superpower ceased to exist. The United
States emerged as the sole serious superpower. And most talk of “geo,” or
what goes on beyond one’s own borders, was no longer focused on the pos-
sibility of conflict between nations but, rather, on the necessity of commerce
and trade. Francis Fukuyama (1989) summed up the US view at the time: The
Cold War had ended. The United States had “won” the intellectual argument
between capitalism and Communism, and there was no longer any competi-
tion between superpowers. Only one superpower existed: the United States.
Obviously (at least from the US point of view), geopolitics was over.
Globalisation became the catchword of the day because a more globally
integrated world economy was assumed to work in the best interests of all the
participants. Indeed, there was a keenness to find a new term to signify the
new focus on the economic aspects of geopolitics.
At the time, John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge (1989) used the term
“new geopolitics” in their essay “The New Geopolitics: The Dynamics of
5
Press conference (7 April 1954).

24 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 A History of the Word Geopolitics

Geopolitical Disorder”: “It refers to the changing nature of the competition

in the international arena, from the military-political sphere to the economic
one.” The historian and military strategist Edward Luttwak (1990) used the
term “geo-economics” to emphasise that the competition was no longer for
territory but for economic prosperity. Writing about this new economic focus,
he described geo-economics as “the admixture of the logic of conflict and the
methods of commerce.” The simple idea was that growth rates and geopoliti-
cal power were interconnected and correlated.
The idea caught on, and President Clinton summed it up beautifully
(albeit in a slightly different context) in his famous phrase, “It’s the economy,
stupid.” His secretary of state, Warren Christopher, translated this campaign
slogan into the realm of geopolitics in 1993, when he said, “In the post–Cold
War world, our national security is inseparable from our economic security”;6
“the new centrality of economic policy in our foreign policy” is that “eco-
nomic security is the foremost priority, ahead of the fate of the former Soviet
Union or nuclear proliferation.”7
After a decade of US efforts to persuade most countries to go in a capital-
ist direction, the geographer Saul Cohen (2009) concluded that the United
States—and indeed the world—could never fully end or even contain geo-
politics. Geo-economics might be a real phenomenon, but geography was still
the key. In addition to the Heartland and the Rimland, Cohen focused on
what he called the “Shatterbelts” (e.g., the Middle East and Africa), which
were so fragile as to be unconvertible to capitalism and unmanageable in an
era of globalisation. The military historian Robert Kaplan picked up on this
idea that the geopolitics of certain parts of the world, such as Africa, was
beyond management. For him, the North–South divide could not be sur-
mounted. In 2012, he released his latest book, The Revenge of Geography: What
the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate, in which he
returns to the idea that geography is the defining driver of geopolitics.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as secretary of state under President
Carter, also went back to the notion of geopolitics as geography in his book
The Grand Chessboard, which came out in 1997. He talked about the need for
the United States to control certain parts of the world in order to maintain its
influence or at least deprive other potential superpowers of certain parts of
the map. But even this former secretary of state did not feel comfortable with
the term geopolitics and gave his book the subtitle American Primacy and Its

6
Patrick Radden Keefe, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (New
York: Random House, 2005): 192.
7
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (4 November 1993); Warren Strobel, “Christopher
Looks beyond the Recent Struggles at State,” Washington Times (12 November 1993): A1.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  25

Geopolitics for Investors

Geostrategic Imperatives. He took Cohen’s idea of Shatterbelts and extended it

to a “global Balkans” concept whereby ancient and tribal disputes interrupt or
interfere with global stability.
The one idea that persists throughout the modern use of the term geo-
politics is that the superpowers will and must continue to project power inter-
nationally. Nature abhors a vacuum. Decisions to withdraw from geopolitics
can create more geopolitics. The United States, Europe, China, and Russia
might like to believe that they can avoid engaging with certain parts of the
world without consequences. But the reality seems to be that absence from
the global stage of geopolitics invites conflict just as much as presence does.
Paul Kennedy became the modern father of what is called “critical geo-
politics,” another post–Cold War notion of geopolitics, with his idea that
such vacuums can be created by having insufficient funds to engage with
the world. In his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic
Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, he suggested that a declining
economy would mean increased (defensive) geopolitics, decreased influence,
and less power projection, sooner or later. In other words, low economic well-
being would put an otherwise powerful nation on the geopolitical defensive.

Meta-Geopolitics
There are other angles to geopolitics that one can explore. For example, Nayef
Al-Rodhan (2012), the polymathic Oxford University professor, has written
a book about meta-geopolitics in which he talks about the geopolitics of outer
space and the competition for control of geostationary orbits and the like.
Although this notion may sound fanciful at first, nations are fiercely compet-
ing for control of space these days. The ability to control or dominate space is a
principal aim of national interest for the United States, China, Russia, India,
and Japan. Smaller nations are also vying for corners of space. Society today
depends heavily on space-based technology for satellite guidance systems,
GPS, and other communications. Nearly all military equipment—certainly
nuclear weapons—depends on physical assets in space. A common complaint
in recent years is that some nations will blow up their own satellites just to cre-
ate dangerous debris in orbits where other nations’ space assets reside. There
are also somewhat more mundane examples of reliance. Increasingly, farmers
use satellites to resurface their land and achieve greater efficiencies with their
use of water, chemicals, fertiliser, and seeds. Even Google has launched bal-
loons into low-space altitudes as a means of delivering Wi-Fi connectivity to
remote parts of the world. Clearly, outer space is a contested commercial and
geopolitical arena.

26 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 A History of the Word Geopolitics

Whose Geopolitics?
It would also be interesting to outline how Russia, China, India, and smaller
nations have viewed geopolitics from their distinct perspectives, though,
oddly, no such comprehensive reader or reference work seems to exist.
So, to repeat, geopolitics generally refers to a state’s projection of power
abroad by any means or tools of statecraft. This definition encompasses both
the active effort to engage in geopolitics in order to project power externally
and the passive effort to respond to the geopolitical efforts of others to proj-
ect power. It encompasses all aspects of sovereignty and power, regardless of
whether the tool or the objective is economic or political. The word “gener-
ally” is important because it leaves the door open to external non-state actors
that increasingly are both the source of geopolitical pressures on states and
the object of geopolitical efforts by states.
This definition still leaves many questions unanswered, such as which
style of geopolitics is more effective—one driven by a utopian vision or a real-
politik approach? Does it matter to markets whether geopolitics is being pur-
sued or managed by a democracy or by a capitalist autocracy? This question is
especially important given that investors have tended to find autocracies like
China easier to invest in than democracies like India. Government control
increases certainty, to a degree. And yet, the greater the autocratic nature
of the government, the more difficult it is for innovation to flourish because
of the constraints on personal freedom. Fund managers struggle with their
desire for the certainty that autocracy brings and the loss of freedom that it
implies. Similarly, they struggle with their desire for the freedom to innovate
that democracy offers and the uncertainty that is inherent in balancing com-
peting interests.
But the critical issue for fund managers and investors remains: How can
an investor understand the relationship between geopolitics and valuation?
Investors need to think about the value that markets ascribe to the presence or
absence of geopolitical concerns.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  27

4.  Weighing and Measuring

Practitioners in the field of geopolitics use a few key measures when analys-
ing country and geopolitical risk that may be useful for fund managers and
investors to consider. For example, borders tend to be artificial, manmade
constructs that are subject to debate and change over time. This fact matters
given that borders define an investment unit called a state. Border disputes
can become important for purposes of valuation and pricing. Many border
disputes are potentially relevant to markets.
Some border disputes attract ongoing attention. China and most of
its neighbors are engaged in major disputes about who owns what in the
South China Sea. The arguments are pursued through “mapfare”—that is,
each nation puts out its own maps of the territory with its own claims to
specific areas. For example, China’s “10-dash line map,” which (among other
things) seems to incorporate Taiwan, contrasts with the maps issued by the
Philippines and other Pacific nations. Japan and Russia continue to dispute
the Kurile Islands, which each country includes on its own maps. Increased
physical presence in a disputed territory, whether by military or commercial
ventures, is another way to claim an area.
Incursions across borders are important signals for markets. Air and land
incursions that test border responses have been increasingly common in recent
years. Whereas market investors tend to downplay or ignore these events as
noise, states are compelled to protect or pursue their national interests, ensur-
ing that such events are always met with a response.

Effective National Territory

One useful measure, then, is to compare national borders with effective
national territory (ENT). Developed by geographer David Hooson (1966, p.
342), the central idea of ENT is that it represents “a major part of the country
which consistently produces a surplus in relation to its population and which,
by implication, is therefore supporting the country in a very real sense.” The
needs and interests of one part of a nation can be an important driver of
national interest in general.
One can think of several pertinent examples: Australia is divided between
the west, which produces wealth from mining, and the east, which contains
most of the population. This uneven distribution of raw-material wealth and
demographics creates interesting, market-relevant tensions. Australia’s defense
strategy is tied to that of the United States, but the economy, especially in the

28 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Weighing and Measuring

west, is tied to China’s economy. As the United States and China spar over
territorial and other issues, that tension creates important geopolitical pres-
sures for Australia that require attention and management.

Ecumenes
Another important geopolitical feature is the ecumene. An ecumene is a
core geographical area, one with special significance. Cohen (2009, p. 35)
uses the term to refer to areas with the greatest population density and
the greatest density of wealth creation: “The most advanced portion of
the state economically, it is usually its most important political area.” In
most countries, stress always exists between political/economic centres and
other regions. For example, in the United Kingdom, there is an ongoing
argument about the relative power of London versus the rest of the United
Kingdom. London generates at least 20% of the tax revenue for the nation
and substantially more than its proportionate share of GDP. It is one of the
fastest-growing and largest megacities in the industrialised world. But it has
little autonomy from the central government in Westminster. Increasingly,
it seeks to raise its own taxes and finance its own infrastructure. London
has been approached by political leaders and investors from China, the sov-
ereign wealth fund (SWF) of Norway, and other nations about investment
deals in property and infrastructure that would strengthen London’s ability
to argue for more financial independence and greater freedom to generate
its own tax revenue.
As another example of an ecumene that is relevant to investors, consider
the situation in Nigeria. That nation has immense oil wealth. It is one of the
largest suppliers of oil to the United States. Yet the southern part of Nigeria
is wealthier than the northern part, where the oil actually comes from. The
perceived inequality in the distribution of oil wealth stimulates all kinds of
political and geopolitical pressures, from separatist movements to terrorist
attacks. Any disruption to Nigeria’s oil supply to the West caused by these
forces would be considered a geopolitical event by investors.
Arguably, the world itself has certain ecumenes that matter to investors.
If we think about the possibility of disruptions to major choke points in the
world economy, we are forced to consider geopolitics. For example, ISIL in
Iraq has threatened to disrupt tanker traffic in the Suez Canal. Such an event
would certainly be considered geopolitical. China’s fear of US power over
the Panama Canal has led it to finance the construction of a new canal in
Nicaragua, which would provide an alternate route between the Pacific and
the Atlantic Oceans. China’s presence in Latin America and its control of an
alternate route could be perceived as a strategic threat to the United States.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  29

Geopolitics for Investors

The new canal would stimulate commerce between Latin America and China
(and the rest of Asia) and thus attract investment. Once again, geopolitics
bears down on market activities.

Extra-Territorial Allegiances
A state might have allegiances from people living outside its national bor-
ders. Cultural, tribal, and historical affiliations sometimes mean that a border
does not coincide with a group of citizens who want to pledge their allegiance
to a state they do not live in. The Middle East is rife with such examples.
Recently, the actions of pro-Russian separatists along Russia’s borders have
raised renewed awareness that borders and territorial integrity can break
down. Some might argue that President Putin’s use of the word Novorossiya
(New Russia) suggests that Russia might want to return to its imperial bor-
ders or at least welcome the various pro-Russian separatists who live beyond
Russia’s borders back inside them.
As another example, it could be argued that Mexico, or at least the area
along the US border, is increasingly fluid and lacking in territorial integrity.
Some would argue that the border is effectively moving north as migration
pushes in from Mexico. Others might argue that the border is moving south,
driven by increased investment and integration between the United States
and Mexico and rendering Mexico part of the effective national territory of
the United States.
The degree of affiliation and alignment may vary substantially. The
French colonists in North Africa felt themselves to be part of France. The
Irish diaspora also felt an alignment with their home country, but they did
not seek to push their state of residence toward either a breakup or a different
alignment with Ireland.
One way for investors to think about geopolitical risk is to consider not
only current borders but also the possibility that borders might be “mean
reverting,” as we say in the markets.

Non-Effective National Territory

ENT is mirrored by non-effective national territory (N-ENT). There are places
on the planet that are effectively ungoverned and potentially ungovernable
owing to their remoteness or to a lack of interest on the part of the sovereign.
The eastern arm of India—including Arunchal Pradesh, especially along the
border with Bhutan—has long been considered a “not very effective” national
territory of India. Similarly, Thailand finds it hard to manage or police its
border with Myanmar (Burma), an area renowned for drug trafficking.

30 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Weighing and Measuring

Many countries claim various rock formations in the South China Sea
as their own but cannot effectively police or protect them from challenges
by other countries. The US foothold in Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is
of great strategic importance to the United States even though it is not part
of US territory. Kaliningrad is ENT for Russia. Although owned outright
by Russia, Kaliningrad is not necessarily as easy for Russia to govern as its
mainland territory. Mutual weapons-inspection treaties and limited airspace
force Russia to cooperate with Kaliningrad’s neighbors to a greater extent
than might occur in other parts of Russia.
Non-effective national territory is becoming a significant issue in geo-
politics again. Places that are effectively without administration or that the
sovereign cannot control even though physically inside its legal borders are
magnets for geopolitical pressures and events. A few examples follow.
As mentioned previously, India’s Arunchal Pradesh and its Himalayan
borders are remote and thus quite hard to govern effectively. The Falkland
Islands are again being claimed by Argentina. In 2014, announcing the issu-
ance of a new bank note, the president of Argentina declared:
This is a[n] homage to our Islas Malvinas and to all those who gave their
lives to this cause. It will compel every Argentinian to keep alive on a
daily basis the flames of love for our islands which are and always will be
Argentinian.
The weakness of the Argentine economy, damaged by inflation and slow
growth, has increased the need to generate revenue. The Falkland Islands
have immense natural resources in the form of protein (fish and sheep) and,
arguably, energy (natural gas and oil) now that technology has improved the
capability to extract energy resources in difficult locations and more cost
effectively. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Argentina occasionally tests whether the
Falklands constitute effective or non-effective national territory of the United
Kingdom. Is it an area the United Kingdom would still be prepared to protect
and defend?
If that sounds far-fetched, think about the efforts of Spain to test British
resolve regarding Gibraltar. In 2013, Britain and Spain sparred over fishing
rights off Gibraltar. Spain has long claimed ownership of Gibraltar. In the
end, the British sent a warship (a frigate), the HMS Westminster, to Gibraltar
as a show of force, which quelled the dispute.
N-ENT need not be merely a physical location. It can also apply to a
situation in which the economy or market function begins to be controlled by
unwelcome non-state actors. The rise of organised crime in Greece might be
one example. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the various defaults (or

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  31

Geopolitics for Investors

haircuts), and increased austerity, the ability of organised crime to get a foot-
hold has grown. Statistics show that organised crime activity has been steadily
rising in Greece. The alignment of such opposition groups as the right-wing
Golden Dawn Party with organised crime culminated in the arrest of the
party’s leadership and of several military officers accused of fomenting a coup.
Surely, a military coup, backed by organised crime, in a eurozone nation
would qualify as a bona fide geopolitical event. The fact that the government
alleges that this coup was attempted means that investors cannot afford to
ignore the possibility of such seemingly implausible events. It shows that any
nation that finds its effective control over its own territory reduced will neces-
sarily have higher geopolitical risk factors.

Commodity Strength and Commodity Vulnerability

One final measure of geopolitical risk arises from dependence on commodi-
ties. Some states are blessed with access to valuable resources. Saudi Arabia
has oil. The United States has natural gas. Greenland has rare-earth metals.
The Himalayas have water. National interest and foreign policy are heavily
defined by a nation’s degree of access to natural resources. China’s foreign
policy and national interest are strongly motivated by its relative lack of water
and domestically grown food, as the cartogram in Figure 2 vividly illustrates.
Russia’s foreign policy and national interest are substantially driven by the
fact that Russia supplies energy to Western Europe. And in return, Western
Europe’s policy stance strongly reflects its energy dependence on Russia.
Figure 2 reveals that countries with adequate supplies of water are greatly
outweighed by those populous nations experiencing water insecurity.
Commodities are a traditional source of conflict among states. This fact
still drives geopolitics today. Otherwise, banning food imports and prohibit-
ing, for national security reasons, foreign entities from investing in domestic
“critical assets” would be non-issues.

Shipping Lanes
Investors tend to think too narrowly about commodities. They assume that
this topic is limited to oil and gas, iron ore and steel, water, wheat, livestock,
and a few other basic materials. But other commodities also have geopo-
litical importance. Shipping lanes, for example, are a precious commodity,
given that some 80% of global trade traverses the high seas. Although many
nations claim that they seek to protect shipping lanes from disruption, not
all would agree. For example, the United States says it is there to protect
the shipping lanes for the benefit of all, including China. However, the

32 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Figure 2.  Cartogram of Global Water Insecurity

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation 

Source: Copyright www.worldmapper.org. Reprinted with permission.

33
Weighing and Measuring
Geopolitics for Investors

suspicion in China is that the United States is trying to protect the ship-
ping lanes from China, not for China. Similarly, China may say it shares
this common interest, but the United States and its regional allies fear that
China seeks to challenge the US presence on the high seas—as well as in
space and cyberspace—as a means of serving China’s national interests
alone and not those of the broader community.

Price Stability
Price stability is a type of commodity. Any efforts to destabilise prices in
the world economy usually translate into geopolitical events. Even a country
like Zimbabwe, which has debased its currency more severely than any other
nation so far this century, has managed to create a geopolitical risk issue for
its neighbors. Others could argue that it has given a foothold in Africa to
such outside parties as China. The expropriations of land and other privately
held assets in Zimbabwe have arguably increased the taste for pursing expro-
priations elsewhere in Africa.

Raw Materials
The Arctic has become the centre of a formidable effort by many nations to
lay claim to valuable strategic assets. The competition for a presence in the
Arctic is aimed partly at ownership of strategic materials. President Putin is
on record as saying that he expected some 20% to 25% of Russia’s GDP to
come from the incredibly rich Arctic resources, including oil, gas, minerals,
gold, nickel, and even diamonds. Russia subsequently established a new divi-
sion of its Federal Security Service, which deploys Special Forces commandos
who are specifically trained for Arctic fighting. Other nations—including
Norway, Canada, and even the United States—have moved more of their
military command and control centres to the Far North in order to manage
the potential threat to the integrity of their own territories. China currently
has the fastest icebreakers and dominates the business of passing through
Arctic waters. China has also strengthened its ties with Greenland, partly
because of new finds of rare-earth metals there and partly because managing
an Arctic strategy is easier with local physical access.
But some raw materials can also be acquired in purely commercial ways.
Abu Dhabi’s investment authority has honed its commodity-trading expertise
in the hope that doing so will permit it to engage in purchases and M&A
deals in the food industry, a move that will help cushion Abu Dhabi against
food price fluctuations. China has emerged as an important buyer of US agri-
business and farm assets—its diminishing water supplies and huge population

34 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Weighing and Measuring

have raised the spectre of its being unable to feed itself, as depicted in Figure 3
and Figure 4. The largest acquisition to date is the Smithfield deal, in which
Shuanghui, a Chinese company, acquired the large US pork producer. In this
way, China acquired not only a supply of pork but also access to the technol-
ogy needed to render its own pork farmers more efficient.

Physical Footholds
In the aftermath of the financial crisis in Europe, China’s state-owned entities
were quick to realise that many assets would be for sale. In Greece, Chinese
entities purchased the main port in Athens, at Piraeus, and apparently many
agricultural assets as well. In Portugal, the Chinese found a number of avail-
able assets at good prices, including the possibility of building a forward base
in the Azores. Neither the United States nor the European Union had the
money to pay the rent on the old NATO airbase there; China has increasingly
expressed an interest in paying a good price for the asset. Obviously, such an
event would have significant geopolitical consequences.
The United States maintains physical footholds in many diverse locations,
from Cuba (Guantánamo) to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to a string of
military bases in the Middle East and East Africa.
China has reinforced its foothold in the South China Sea by declaring an
“air defense identification zone” across Chinese waters. This move requires
non-Chinese, noncommercial aircraft to comply with China’s demands.
India has recently announced its intention to enhance its physical and
military infrastructure so that it can reach its Himalayan borders much faster.
India worries about China’s growing presence on the other side of the border.
Investors should note that both sides accuse each other of border incursions.
Investors can consider many ways to measure geopolitical events and
trends. But weighing their importance is a different task that cannot be so
easily quantified.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  35

36
Figure 3.  Cartogram of Global Croplands
Geopolitics for Investors

Source: Copyright www.worldmapper.org. Reprinted with permission.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Figure 4.  Cartogram of Global Pastures

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation 

Source: Copyright www.worldmapper.org. Reprinted with permission.

37
Weighing and Measuring
5.  World Order

It is often said that one of the greatest drivers of the prosperity of the 1990s
and the following decade—until the 2007–09 financial crisis—was the rise of
the “peace dividend.” All the money spent on nuclear and other weapons, as
well as the spending on troop deployments and materiel around the world—by
the United States and Europe, but also by Russia and others during the Cold
War—had been fundamentally unproductive. Although one could argue that
weapons production generates GDP and employs workers, there is little doubt
that it is much more productive to take the same talent, assets, and capital and
redeploy them in the civilian economy, where they can pursue whatever innova-
tions the economy is prepared to reward. Moreover, conflict is costly. Spending
on conflict—even spending on its prevention—comes at a price.
Markets, therefore, ascribe some kind of value to geopolitical order and
certainty. It is hard to decide how prices should move in response to geopo-
litical events if you have no idea how to ascribe value to peace or to conflict.
Such extremes are not even necessary. The question is, What kind of world
order increases or decreases market value?

What Is the World Order and How Much Is It Worth?

In 2014, Henry Kissinger published a book called World Order, in which he
said, “The concept of order that has underpinned the modern era is in crisis.”
But what was the concept that underpinned the modern era? It is important
to ask, because every generation—indeed, people from different countries and
different philosophies—defines “world order” differently.
Some may not even know they hold a notion of a world order in their
minds, but they do. For my father’s generation (now in its 70s and 80s), there
is typically a longing for the Bretton Woods era, when currencies were tied to
the gold standard and almost everyone, except the Communists, believed that
free markets were the fairest and most efficient way to build and distribute
wealth in the world economy. Today, the notion of a gold standard is dis-
missed by policymakers, and by much of the public, as an extremist idea and
a throwback, one that reveals a lack of understanding about modern finance.
Similarly, today’s investors are likely to assume that the post–Berlin Wall
world is “normal.” They assume that there is an endless stream of emerging-
market workers who are prepared to continuously push down wages and
prices, thus eliminating the risk of inflation. They assume that growth rates
are generally high because that is what happened, in most places, following

38 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 World Order

the fall of the Berlin Wall. In such an environment, it makes much more
sense to focus on getting rich than to focus on obtaining power. There is a
tendency to continue assuming that the world order discourages conflict and
encourages growth when, in fact, the circumstances that gave us the peace
dividend have changed. Now that emerging-market workers are demand-
ing higher wages and pushing prices up, the dynamics have changed. These
workers are no longer sure they will be rich before they are old and are now
more prepared to fight for political power instead of turning their energies to
wealth generation alone.
Professional fund managers of the current generation, as well as most seri-
ous investors, are under the age of 50, which means they were born in or after
1964. The Strategic Arms Limitation Talks began in 1991, when members of
this group were 27 or younger. So, they have grown up in a period when the
peace dividend has allowed them to work in the world economy without hav-
ing to focus on geopolitics very much. Of course, there have been geopoliti-
cal conflicts—some ongoing—since 1967. But from an investment perspective,
these conflicts have, in the main, been regional and not global, so they have not
affected global valuations. They have affected the investment landscape only in
specific locations, which is why the market places higher valuations on industri-
alised countries that have relatively little conflict and lower valuations on those
that have such a risk. The United States is traditionally viewed as a country with
low geopolitical risk and Lebanon as one with high geopolitical risk, which is
why the market has priced Lebanese assets much more cheaply than US assets.
In an ideal world, we could rely on a calm and peaceful investment envi-
ronment. But geopolitical events can intrude on, damage, or destroy what-
ever benefits peace can bring. As R.G. Hawtrey (1930) noted, “If war is an
interruption between two periods of peace, it is equally true that peace is an
interval between two wars.”
As is always the case, the current generation of fund managers and inves-
tors has been deeply influenced by its own experience. Thus, most have come
to assume that world order rests on the relatively free movement of goods,
people, and capital, underpinned by the idea that markets, rather than states
or their governments, should determine the distribution of wealth and assets.

Competing Visions of World Order

There are many ways to think about the concept of world order. It is impor-
tant to understand that colleagues, commercial adversaries, and allies alike
may have very different visions of world order. Some see the current insti-
tutions (the Pax Americana, the Washington Consensus, the post–Bretton
Woods system—there are many names) and principles as inherently biased.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  39

Geopolitics for Investors

Wallerstein’s World Order.  Another lens for viewing the world order
comes from the political theorist Immanuel Wallerstein, who wrote the first
volume of his series The Modern World-System in 1974. At the heart of his
argument is the idea that political power is not as important as economic
power. For Wallerstein, the degree of economic trade and interconnection
between states defines hierarchy in the world order. His is a Marxist view of
the world, but there is no doubt that many still see the world as a system in
which a major country like the United States can systematically take advan-
tage of smaller, less-developed nations.
The Clash of Civilisations. One may try to establish a world order,
but it always remains vulnerable to what the political scientist Samuel
Huntington called “the clash of civilizations,” the title of his famous 1993
article in Foreign Affairs. Huntington refuted the idea that Francis Fukuyama
had put forward (Fukuyama was his student), noting that we were not expe-
riencing “the end of history.” In fact, he said, there is a permanent “clash”
driven by ancient ethnic and tribal rivalries that will always reappear in a con-
test for pure power regardless of how much wealth is created or how evenly it
might be distributed. The conflicting interests of the various participants are
so great—culturally, politically, and economically—that they cannot be rec-
onciled except for relatively short periods. A given world order may exist, but
it is constantly threatened by this “clash of civilizations.” A modern example
might be the efforts of the United States and other Western nations to intro-
duce representative democracy in Iraq. Instead of democracy flourishing, Iraq
has been declared a caliphate by a non-state actor.
In contrast, many dictatorships in the Middle East have been over-
thrown, making way for more-representative democracy. Tunisia is a good
example. So, the bias is not one way only. The direction a culture clash takes
is not predetermined.
Investors need to consider the risks to the portfolio or to the strategy that
would arise from culture clashes. There are many examples. Ukraine has been
a favoured location for agribusiness investment, given the richness of its soil
and the fact that it is roughly the fourth-largest producer of food in the world.
Some of these investments have become difficult to manage now that local
separatists have broken away from the central government. These Russian-
speaking separatists can be said to be involved in a culture clash with the local
Ukrainian political leaders, whom they accuse of being “fascists.” The two
groups opposed each other during World War II and, arguably, even before
the Russian Revolution, in 1918. In 1939, Leon Trotsky wrote:

40 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 World Order

The Ukrainian question, which many governments and many “social-

ists” and even “communists” have tried to forget or to relegate to the deep
strongbox of history, has once again been placed on the order of the day and
this time with redoubled force.8
These cultural rivalries continue today, and as a result, the values of farmland
and agribusiness investments in Ukraine have fallen substantially.
Culture clashes arise when a cultural group identifies more with its
members than with the state it belongs to. Catalonia’s efforts to separate
from Spain are rooted in a culture clash. But generally speaking, the term is
reserved for the deep religious and ethnic divides that seem to provoke ongo-
ing conflicts throughout history.

Hegemons, Capitalist Democracies, and Autocracies

Any study of geopolitics must consider the various configurations of a world
order.
One idea is that there must always be a hegemon, a single player that dom-
inates the rest and can make and enforce the rules of the world order. The
term is used in the sense that Britain was a hegemon during its imperial era,
defining and enforcing its definition of world order. The United States has
been the hegemon behind the post–World War II world order. Many believe
that China has emerged as a regional hegemon.
Clearly, though, there have been long periods in history when there was
more than one great power. The postwar period of competition between the
United States and the Soviet Union thus led to the use of other definitions of
world order, including a “bi-polar” and a “multi-polar” world order.
For an investor, the relevant question may have more to do with the char-
acter of the hegemon than with the fact that a hegemon exists. The values,
principles, ethics, and ideals of a hegemon are bound to dominate the invest-
ment landscape. Investors are faced with the question in a different, more
subtle way. A nation may be a liberal democracy, like the United States.
Singapore stands as the best example of a capitalist autocracy—such govern-
ments are highly centralised, not welcoming of political challenges or internal
conflict, prepared to quash opposition, and yet supportive of capitalist mar-
kets. In a capitalist autocracy, economic freedom is strongly promoted even as
political freedom is strongly curtailed. China is now considered a capitalist
autocracy even though it has a strongly Communist system of government.
Russia is considered autocratic in a different sense. It has strong centralised
control and economic freedom within limits.

8
See www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/ukraine.html.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  41

Geopolitics for Investors

Perhaps the central geopolitical question facing this generation of inves-

tors relates to these extremes. Should investors favour liberal democracies,
where investment decisions are subject to democratic political processes? Or
is it more attractive to place capital with nations that take a more centralised
and directive approach, curtailing individual freedoms in exchange for law
and order? Is one philosophy better for innovation than the other? Is one bet-
ter for capital generation or preservation?
States also have very different characteristics, characters, and qualities that
influence the geopolitics they project and the way in which they manage others’
projections. It is a wide-open debate whether democracies or capitalist autocra-
cies are better for markets. The latter is a somewhat new form of government.
Democracies have long been considered the friendliest environment for
commerce because personal political freedom aligns with personal economic
freedom. But markets have tended to reward China, the capitalist autocracy,
more than India, the democracy. Democracies are more difficult to predict.
They find it harder to build infrastructure, and populist movements some-
times impose unexpected taxes and regulations on investors.

Financial Architecture
The debt problem in the industrialised world has raised questions about the
desirability and viability of a world economy whose chief currency is the US
dollar. It raises questions about the entire post–World War II financial archi-
tecture, in which the rules of the game and the institutions have been created
and defined principally by the United States. Financial architecture refers to
the system of rules and institutions that form the foundation on which com-
merce and financial markets operate.
Geopolitics arises when states begin to attack or abandon the existing
financial infrastructure, as we see today with the concerted efforts of China
and Russia to create alternative institutions and currencies to compete with
the system that has dominated the world economy since World War II.
Similarly, geopolitics arises when the United States and western European
nations seek to exclude a country, such as Russia, from the global financial
and trading system.

The World Order and Finances

These characterisations of a world order are relevant to an investor or fund
manager because they affect prices, markets, and valuations. A central char-
acteristic of geopolitics today is disagreement about the current world order.
China, Russia, and other emerging markets are no longer content to submit

42 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 World Order

to the current world order. Investors must now ask themselves what will hap-
pen to the United States’ ability to continue spending beyond its means if
Russia, China, and others no longer believe that financing the gap between
the United States’ income and its expenditures is in their own interest.
To put this issue in perspective, the Congressional Budget Office esti-
mated in 2014 that the United States will go from paying $233 billion annu-
ally in interest payments alone to $880 billion, thus making interest costs
one of the largest items in the US budget—surpassing defense spending and
Medicaid and dwarfing all other expenditures except Social Security and
Medicare. Therefore, the movement toward more transactions in renminbi
or rubles instead of US dollars is not just a technical economic issue. It is a
means of allowing a sovereign the freedom to finance its own expenditures—
or depriving a sovereign of that freedom.
In contrast, a nation that depends on foreign investment and foreign-
supplied assets, like food, can find itself isolated and unable to grow in the
absence of outside capital—as Argentina, Russia, and others have discovered
when they have either chosen to default or decided to restrict the ability of
foreign investors to buy or sell assets within their borders.
The geopolitics of finance raises important market questions. Does it mat-
ter to markets, prices, and valuations if core global commodities like oil and
food are no longer priced in US dollars? What power does being a “reserve
currency” really confer? Another way of looking at this question: Perhaps the
true definition of a superpower is a state that the world’s investors continue to
fund even though it spends beyond its means, tampers with currency stability,
and overreaches geopolitically.

Seigniorage
The global financial architecture matters to pricing and valuation in the finan-
cial markets. It matters whether oil and other critical commodities, including
food, will be priced in US dollars or renminbi. It matters whether the rules
of the game are defined by the United States or by China and Russia. The
country whose currency is the reserve currency has the privilege of paying
back debt in its own currency. It has the power to simply print money, which
also brings the added advantage of something called seigniorage. This word
derives from the phrase “the power of the lord to mint money.” The Financial
Times defines seigniorage as the “revenue governments derive because the cost
of minting coins or printing paper money is less than the market value of that
money.” To lose this privilege of seigniorage is to lose the freedom to spend
more than one earns without incurring a penalty from the market (usually in
the form of relatively higher interest rates).

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  43

Geopolitics for Investors

Russia, China, and others now envisage a world economy with a new
set of rules and without the same dependence on the United States—on its
currency or its philosophy and global institutions—as in the past. They also
envisage a United States that loses its reserve currency status and thus incurs
much more discipline from the markets. The cost of having reserve currency
status is that the nation with that status tends to build up a trade deficit owing
to the relative strength of its currency.
Others, mainly in emerging markets, believe that the efforts of central
banks to create inflation (QE) should be viewed as hostile acts because the
consequences—higher food and energy prices—cannot be easily addressed by
domestic monetary policy responses. A rate hike in India will not bring down
the global price of food nor will it produce more protein.
So, the potential for social unrest, which a higher cost of living inevitably
incites, fully justifies some nations in their efforts to reach across borders for
such critical assets. People need food and energy at the right price or they
will turn on their government. Therefore, QE warrants not just an economic
policy response but also a military response. The logic: If you default on us
(and inflation is just a form of default), we are justified in protecting ourselves
by any means, including reaching across borders for critical assets—from food
supply chains to energy assets to strategically valuable territory. Whatever the
driver or the logic, commodities have always been a potent source of conflict
and geopolitics throughout history.

Pax Americana
The current world order (Pax Americana) is based on the post–World War
II financial system. This system was initially called Bretton Woods, after
Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where a meeting was held on 1–22 July
1944, before the end of World War II, with delegates from the United States’
allies in the war—the winning side. The delegates agreed to a broad infra-
structure that would form the philosophy, principles, and practical means of
conducting trade, commerce, and finance in the postwar world.
The simple idea behind the Bretton Woods system was that there should
be relatively free movement of goods, people, and capital across borders. In
other words, markets, rather than states, should determine the allocation of
wealth in the world economy. At the time of its creation, the Bretton Woods
system clearly sought to be a counterpoint to Communist ideology, which put
the power to allocate wealth, assets, and even jobs into the hands of the state.
Initially, this postwar financial system was based on a loose gold stan-
dard. Instead of pegging the value of currencies directly to gold, the Bretton

44 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 World Order

Woods system pegged the value of currencies to the US dollar, which was
defined as 1/35 of an ounce of gold.
This system worked well until the United States began to experience
inflation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time, Robert Triffen, a
Belgian economist, became famous for identifying the “Triffen dilemma”—
namely, that the United States was obliged to have a permanent trade deficit
if it wanted to provide the world with the US dollars other countries needed,
given that everything was priced in US dollars. This dynamic created an
“overhang” in which the US trade deficit got worse and the global demand for
US dollars increased. Politically, the United States became less comfortable
with the situation. The seemingly permanent trade deficit to which such a
system gave rise did not sit well with US voters.
In addition, during this period, starting in the early 1960s, the United
States “overspent” by attempting to have both “guns and butter”—the idea
that a state should spend on both war and social programs that raise the qual-
ity of life for its citizens. The United States committed to the Great Society
programs that President Johnson hoped would help integrate the African
American population into the mainstream economy and society. Johnson also
sought to win the ever more costly war in Vietnam while spending more on
the weapons needed to maintain a balance of power with the Soviet Union. In
other words, he accelerated a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
The combined cost of all this proved too great. Inflation began to creep
up in the mid-1960s, and by 1971, President Nixon believed that he had to
choose between preserving the Bretton Woods system and preserving the US
standard of living. Naturally, he chose to support the interests of voters and
announced that the United States would leave the gold standard, devaluing
its currency and thus risking further inflation (which ensued and remained a
problem until after the end of the decade).
This action meant that foreign investors in US and US dollar–denominated
assets suffered a sudden fall in the price and value of those assets. Other coun-
tries experienced weaker growth because the devalued US dollar made US
goods and services less expensive and thus more attractive. The decision to leave
the gold standard meant that the United States was able to restore its competi-
tiveness at the expense of others in the Bretton Woods system. In response to
complaints that the United States was inflating—effectively defaulting on its
creditors and undermining the Bretton Woods system—John Connally, secre-
tary of the Treasury at the time, famously said in 1971 that the US dollar was
“our currency and your problem.”
This background is important today because Russia and China now
believe that they have had to live with a global financial architecture that was

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  45

Geopolitics for Investors

designed by the United States to serve US interests but that has not necessar-
ily served their interests as well—or even well at all.9 The Federal Reserve’s
attitude seems very similar to John Connally’s. The Federal Reserve either
denies that QE has any spillover effects or argues that emerging markets
should take responsibility for such effects and act locally to manage price sta-
bility. This view is a modern version of “our currency, your problem.”
As the United States and the G–7 have stumbled into ever-larger debt
problems and financial imbalances, Russia and China have been at the fore-
front in the creation of a new, alternative financial architecture. At one level,
this is a technical exercise that involves the creation of new institutions—such
as the BRIC Bank, in which China, Russia, and many other emerging mar-
kets have pooled their reserves and made mutual commitments to support
one another in times of instability.
This effort involves moving the pricing and valuation of transactions away
from US dollars and toward rubles and yuan. It also involves changing the
current balance of power in existing Bretton Woods–era institutions, such
as the IMF, the World Bank, and the UN. In each case, China and other
emerging markets want a greater voice and more voting power on the basis of
their increased financial commitments to each institution.
The competition to control or dominate the global financial architecture
has intensified. The United States and Russia have increasingly turned to
financial market and economic sanctions as they argue over the geopolitics of
both Ukraine and the South China Sea. The United States continues to ban
China from access to high technology while offering China’s rival, India, full
access to the highest technology of all: its nuclear program. This is economic
diplomacy and a “sanction” of a different sort. The United Kingdom has pro-
posed that Russia be banned from using the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunication) settlement system, on which global
banking depends to execute money transfers from one bank to another and
from one country to another.
It is not only nations that need to consider whether the old financial
architecture of Pax Americana still serves their interests. Investors have many
reasons to rethink the existing world order when they see a European nation
like Cyprus expropriate privately held assets, as it did when so requested by

9
It is worth noting that one of the central difficulties in thinking about geopolitics is that
states do not “feel” nor do they usually have one view. A policy position may be established,
but even within a single government, there will typically be several different points of view
on any given issue. However, there is usually a sense of zeitgeist (literally, spirit of the time), a
general public or policy preference that becomes known if not assumed.

46 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 World Order

the very institutions that form the heart of the global financial system—the
EU, the World Bank, and the IMF.

The G–8
Another element of the financial architecture is the cornerstone of the effort
to create an ongoing dialogue between the most important economies, popu-
larly known, until recently, as the G–8 gathering of major economic powers.
The G–8 is now back to being the G–7 because of Russia’s departure from the
group. Initially, in 1975, it was the G–6. Canada joined in 1976, thus creat-
ing the G–7. In 1998, it became the G–8 when President Clinton formally
invited Russia to join the group. In 2014, Russia renounced its participation
in the G–8 over the Ukraine issue. In contrast, frustrated by their lack of a
strong voice, the emerging markets pushed for the creation of a similar group
that could confer on economic issues: the G–20.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  47

6.  Statecraft and National Interest

No study of geopolitics can occur without some awareness of the concepts

of national interest and statecraft. National interest is defined by the values,
principles, goals, and objectives that a nation pursues in the belief that doing
so serves its citizens. Statecraft is the means by which these national interests
are pursued.

National Interests

According to the Commission on America’s National Interests (in July

2000), “Vital national interests are conditions that are strictly necessary to
safeguard and enhance Americans’ survival and well-being in a free and
secure nation.” The commission then outlined these interests.
Vital US national interests are to:

1. Prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of nuclear, biological, and

chemical weapons attacks on the United States or its military forces
abroad;
2. Ensure US allies’ survival and their active cooperation with the
United States in shaping an international system in which we can
thrive;
3. Prevent the emergence of hostile major powers or failed states on US
borders;
4. Ensure the viability and stability of major global systems (trade,
financial markets, supplies of energy, and the environment); and
5. Establish productive relations, consistent with American national
interests, with nations that could become strategic adversaries,
China and Russia.
Instrumentally, these vital interests will be enhanced and protected by
promoting singular US leadership, military and intelligence capabilities,
credibility (including a reputation for adherence to clear US commit-
ments and even-handedness in dealing with other states), and strength-
ening critical international institutions—particularly the US alliance
system around the world.
Extremely important national interests are conditions that, if compro-
mised, would severely prejudice but not strictly imperil the ability of the

48 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Statecraft and National Interest

US government to safeguard and enhance the well-being of Americans

in a free and secure nation.
Extremely important US national interests are to:

1. Prevent, deter, and reduce the threat of the use of nuclear, biological,
or chemical weapons anywhere;
2. Prevent the regional proliferation of WMD and delivery systems;
3. Promote the acceptance of international rules of law and mecha-
nisms for resolving or managing disputes peacefully;
4. Prevent the emergence of a regional hegemon in important regions,
especially the Persian Gulf;
5. Promote the well-being of US allies and friends and protect them
from external aggression;
6. Promote democracy, prosperity, and stability in the Western
Hemisphere;
7. Prevent, manage, and, if possible at reasonable cost, end major con-
flicts in important geographic regions;
8. Maintain a lead in key military-related and other strategic technolo-
gies, particularly information systems;
9. Prevent massive, uncontrolled immigration across US borders;
10. Suppress terrorism (especially state-sponsored terrorism), transna-
tional crime, and drug trafficking; and
11. Prevent genocide.

National interests can conflict and often do. The fact that both the United
States and China now define some or all of the South China Sea as an area
of “core interest” sets them on a confrontational path. Similarly, the desire
by both the EU and Russia to encourage Eastern European nations in their
respective directions sets these two entities on a path to conflict.
Investors must determine the pricing and financial consequences when a
state or territory leans one way instead of the other.

The Instruments of Statecraft

Statecraft is the art of leading and governing a state in the pursuit of national
interests. States are trying to achieve their national interests at all times, so

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  49

Geopolitics for Investors

this is the defining aspect of their behaviour. But the definition of national
interest, as outlined earlier, can change over time and from one government
to another. Priorities shift within the agreed-on definition of national interest
in ways that also affect markets.
If power and sovereignty are indivisible, then all tools are at the disposal
of the sovereign in its pursuit of the national interest and conduct of state-
craft, however these may be defined. Geopolitics then requires study of the
tools. Here is a short list of the tools that investors should keep in mind when
analysing geopolitics:
•• Influence and prestige
•• Diplomacy (commercial, political, cultural, and economic)
•• Espionage and intelligence gathering
•• Enforcement, both domestic (police function) and international (military
function)
•• Taxes, tariffs, fines, levies, and expropriation (price controls, inflation,
asset seizure, unannounced or unlegislated tax increases)
•• Military tools
•• Political, cultural, and commercial tools
•• Methods of conducting geopolitics
Geopolitics, as a word, has a hard edge to it. It tends to suggest that rela-
tions between or among nations are not going well. Otherwise, the more
neutral language of commerce and international relations would be deployed.
Even the word “diplomacy” implies that there is a difference of opinion, a
dispute that somehow must be managed in an effort to prevent geopolitics
and conflict. So, it is worth considering the various facets of geopolitics and
thinking about how to price the risk associated with them.
For Thomas Schelling (1960), the Nobel Prize–winning economist and
political scientist, this field of study was not “geopolitics but rather the ‘strat-
egy of conflict’”:
Among diverse theories of conflict—corresponding to the diverse mean-
ings of the word “conflict”—a main dividing line is between those who treat
conflict as a pathological state and seek its causes and treatment and those
that take conflict for granted and study the behavior associated with it.
Whatever the driver—bad actors or bad rules—conflict is inherent in geo-
politics. There would be no need to project power if there were no conflicting

50 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Statecraft and National Interest

goals, views, and beliefs. The purpose of power projection is to change the
situation beyond one’s own borders.

Sovereign Wealth Funds and Geopolitics

Sovereign wealth funds present important issues for market investors and
sovereigns alike. An SWF is a pool of capital established and managed by a
country for its own benefit and typically invested abroad. The central pur-
pose of an SWF is often to prevent accumulated excess capital and reserves
from driving up inflation or causing economic imbalances. An SWF is a
mechanism for pushing reserves outside the country while still serving
national objectives. The apparent goal of an SWF’s investment program
may be to secure the best possible return on capital. But in the main, SWFs
are not driven by performance alone. They usually also serve to further such
national interests as obtaining access to strategic assets and resources, from
food to technology.
SWFs have worked very hard to diminish the world’s attention on their
geopolitical role and goals. Instead, they have emphasised their investment
strategies from a performance perspective. This tactic worked well in a world
where geopolitics did not dominate the global landscape. Investors feel great
safety in following, or even front running, SWF investment strategies and
make immense efforts to try to secure investment mandates from these large
institutions. After all, their sheer size means that any investment is likely to
be significant and potentially market moving. As a result, SWFs have also
tried hard to keep the breadth of their interests/operations and their invest-
ment strategies relatively secret. The reappearance of geopolitics on the global
investment landscape will make this strategy more difficult to manage.
Figure 5 depicts a cartogram of world countries resized according to their
estimated GDP and purchasing power parity for 2015.
Ted Truman (2010, p. 2), in his landmark book on the subject, Sovereign
Wealth Funds: Threat or Salvation?, pointed out that SWFs are
symbolic of two major, recent trends in the global political economy: (1) a
redistribution of wealth and economic and financial power from the United
States, Europe, and other mature industrial economies to countries per-
ceived to be less firmly grounded in similar economic, financial, and politi-
cal mores; and (2) an increasing role of governments in managing wealth
and economic power.
This description is no longer exclusive to the new emerging markets. The
advent of government intervention and quantitative easing has blurred or
moved the line between government and market in the industrialised world.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  51

52
Figure 5.  Cartogram of Total Estimated GDP Measured in Purchasing Power Parity, 2015
Geopolitics for Investors

Source: Copyright www.worldmapper.org. Reprinted with permission.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Statecraft and National Interest

Robert Jenkins, a former fund manager who served on the Financial Stability
Board at the Bank of England, has pointed out that QE alone results in such
an enormous accumulation of excess reserves that it becomes nearly impos-
sible for a central bank to actually sell the sovereign debt it holds without
disrupting the sovereign debt market and the economy at large. Thus, central
banks have created the conditions under which they accumulate reserves as
large as those of an SWF, which they cannot sell. In 2013, Jenkins wrote,
“Markets are mesmerised by how and when central bank policies will be
unwound. But they should also consider the possibility that such policies may
not be unwound at all.”10 In other words, central banks may have inadver-
tently become SWFs or taken on some of their characteristics.
The fact that the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and others
have emerged as the largest market buyers of their nations’ debt instruments
means that investors cannot easily short these markets. These governments
have also actively used moral suasion and, sometimes, financial repression
to compel private sector fund managers and investors to hold more sover-
eign debt than they otherwise would have. Financial regulation increasingly
makes other banking and asset management practices—including proprietary
trading, short selling, and the use of complex derivatives—more difficult.

State Intervention
It would be easy to assume that nations with SWFs have a higher degree
of state involvement in the economy. But with governments in indebted
countries playing such a large role in markets, it has become appropriate to
ask, Who has more state intervention and central planning now? This is an
important question in a world where geopolitical motives can be ascribed to
many investment actions. Many emerging-market governments view QE in
the developed world as an effort to default on them and to export inflation.
Developed-country governments find it increasingly difficult to distinguish
between a nation’s political stance and its investment activities. It would be
hard to imagine, for example, that Russia’s SWF could attempt to buy an
asset in the United States or the United Kingdom while simultaneously forc-
ing US and UK fighter jets to scramble in response to air incursions. Or, in a
less dramatic example, it becomes easier to imagine nations being disinclined
to see national food production assets fall under foreign control, especially
when the value of such assets is increasing.

Robert Jenkins, “Swiss Example Questions Need for QE Unwinding; the SNB Has Laid
10

the Foundation for a Sovereign Fund,” Markets Insight, Financial Times (29 May 2013).

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  53

Geopolitics for Investors

Critical Assets
There are, of course, formal methods for determining whether a foreign
nation, or one of its entities, should be permitted to buy “critical” assets.
For example, the United States has the Committee on Foreign Investment
in the United States, which the US Treasury describes as “an inter-agency
committee authorized to review transactions that could result in control
of a U.S. business by a foreign person (‘covered transactions’), in order to
determine the effect of such transactions on the national security of the
United States.” Australia has its Foreign Investment Review Board, which,
according to the Treasury, undertakes to “examine proposed investments
in Australia that are subject to the Policy, the Foreign Acquisitions and
Takeovers Act 1975 (the Act) and supporting legislation, and to make rec-
ommendations to the Treasurer and other Treasury portfolio ministers on
these proposals.” Most nations have some sort of mechanism for vetting
foreign ownership of critical assets or assets deemed to have some aspect of
national interest attached to them.

Modern Warfare and Diplomacy

Investors fear the greatest instability that can occur in markets: war. Investors
are also generally uncomfortable with diplomacy because it can involve nego-
tiating away valuable assets without clear compensation. When investors are
given a choice, however, diplomacy beats war.
Civil strife and war remove all certainty as to who is in charge. Nobody
knows who owns what or whether an asset is safe. War destroys the social
contract. It undermines all investment activity except for the provision of
wartime needs. No one wants war and no one wants to talk about it until it is
under way. Even then, there is an inclination to deem a conflict insignificant
if it is localised.
But the fact is that wars continue to occur, and it is worth considering
how much their conduct has been changed by technology and how much it
remains the same as before. Figure 6 illustrates the military budgets of the
world’s nations; the area of each country in the cartogram is drawn in propor-
tion to that country’s military budget (converted into US dollars at purchas-
ing power parity). After the United States, the dominant military powers are
China, Russia, a number of European countries, India, and Saudi Arabia and
several other Middle Eastern countries.

54 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Figure 6.  Cartogram of World Military Expenditures

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation 

Source: Copyright www.worldmapper.org. Reprinted with permission.

55
Statecraft and National Interest
Geopolitics for Investors

Technology and Warfare

Technology has changed the ways in which war and diplomacy are conducted
just as it has changed everything else. There are many examples of traditional
“boots on the ground” combat, such as the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Syria. But ever more subtle and sophisticated methods are being used.
Cyberwarfare.  Rather than fight an opponent in a direct contest, these
days many states prefer to simply disable their opponents’ weapons or weapon
systems. Preventing action is a less costly strategy than destruction.
The private sector is drawn into the geopolitical realm of cyberwarfare all
the time. Staff members are spied on by competing governments that seek to
glean information about deals, assets, intentions, and national security goals.
Telecommunication companies have been compelled to hand over data on
private conversations—or have been spied on by those seeking the same data.
Banks, investors, fund managers, and policymakers alike are key targets
in the geopolitical game of asset acquisition. Some hackers are after a pay-
out or even ransom. Others simply want access to the chatter. But the idea
that only governments are after data no longer holds true. In the past, gov-
ernments had their offices swept for listening devices as a matter of course.
Today, private firms need to be nearly as vigilant. Commercial espionage is a
central geopolitical issue for investors.
Both governments and investors have concerns about the vulnerability of
critical infrastructure (e.g., the power grid) to cyberattacks. It would be hard
to imagine that an investor in US electricity grids could remain ignorant of
the many efforts by governments and hackers alike to turn off the grid, elec-
tronically or otherwise.
Sophisticated Weapons. Investors tend to assume that the various
nuclear and ICBM treaties that were negotiated during the Cold War are still
in place. Sadly, there is a new arms race. The United States, Russia, Japan,
China, India, and others are all experimenting with or perfecting weapons that
have a greater capacity to inflict damage than ever before. Hypersonic missiles
now cut the delivery time of a nuclear or conventional weapons payload to such
an extent that the so-called red line that connects Washington and Moscow or
Beijing and Tokyo by phone could scarcely be used before it was too late.
Space-based electromagnetic weapons are capable of inflicting severe
damage to infrastructure while leaving any survivors confused as to what
happened. In May 2014, a US U-2 spy plane flying over California inadver-
tently “fried” and shut down the air traffic control system at Los Angeles
International Airport, revealing that such powerful magnetic emissions can
halt operations on the ground.

56 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Statecraft and National Interest

Near Catastrophes
In June 1999, it is now believed, India and Pakistan came within minutes of
setting off a multiple warhead nuclear exchange. The so-called Kargil Crisis
of 1999 was seemingly averted only by the patient diplomacy of President
Clinton. Obviously, such an event would have had a material and negative
effect on financial markets and asset prices, not to mention the environment.
But most investors would consider it a “three- or four-standard-deviation
event.” In other words, the probability would be so low and the impact so
high as to warrant ignoring the risk altogether. But when such catastrophic
events actually occur, such as 9/11, investors respond immediately.

Outsourcing Conflict
A very important trend has re-emerged in recent years. Nations are increas-
ingly outsourcing their defense and military activities to external parties. The
rise of such entities as Blackwater (now called Academi) and other private
military companies reflects a number of trends. First, nations have insuf-
ficient funds to pursue conflict directly. Second, outsourcing the activity is
seen to help with outsourcing the blame. Third, using external private par-
ties permits a degree of plausible deniability. Finally, outsourcing avoids the
unpopular use of young draftees and volunteers with few practical alternatives
to military service. Arguably, almost every major nation has outsourced to
private entities the pursuit of its national interests and national security, to
one degree or another. Although some may argue that the word “mercenary”
does not apply to the modern use of external parties, it is clear that through-
out history, nations have paid not only their own soldiers but also private sol-
diers to advance their cause.

Insourcing Conflict
Some investors, as well as military forces, have noted that there seems to be
more social tolerance of Special Operations conducted by highly trained pro-
fessionals than of ordinary “boots on the ground” soldiers. In the past, geo-
politics may have required armies and a great deal of sophisticated equipment.
Today, a Special Ops officer can do as much damage, or more, by inserting
a virus-laden thumb drive into a computer—which means that it becomes
harder for investors to know when a “war” has begun.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  57

7.  Practical Applications

It is fascinating that investors and fund managers tend to believe that price
movements in the market are mean reverting but do not seem to assume that
geopolitics tends to mean revert as well. Typically, when a market-moving
geopolitical event occurs, it initially appears as a surprise until a glance at
history reveals the event’s long roots. For example, border disputes tend to be
long-standing rather than spontaneous. Ancient rivalries continue to express
themselves over time. Britain has long been a reluctant partner with conti-
nental Europe, so it should be no surprise that questions about the benefits
of participation in the EU linger there. Spain and Greece have had such bad
experiences with dictatorships and war that their citizens may be willing
to endure more pain from their economic weakness in the EU than might
otherwise be probable. All of Eastern Europe has found itself torn, at some
point, between its political aspirations to belong to the West and its strong
economic and cultural ties to Russia. The Middle East has a long-standing
tendency to fall back into ancient tribal disputes. Can it really be a surprise,
for example, that Turkey asserts itself more aggressively in the region given
what we know of the Ottoman Empire?
There are plenty of investors who believe that a random walk, “monkey
with a dart” approach will outperform the active investment management
industry. They become index fund investors. But as an industry and a pro-
fession, fund management tends to assume that there are patterns of behav-
iour in markets rather than just random walks. Many, if not most, investors
place value on active management and on the knowledge needed to engage
in it. Therefore, drilling down into geopolitics, as one of many drivers of
price movements, makes sense. But for those who believe that geopolitics
matters—and who accept the fiduciary responsibility to find and benefit from
profit opportunities while guarding against unnecessary losses—the question
is, what is the right approach?

Is Expertise Required?
The sudden return of geopolitics to the global investment landscape required
many investors to suddenly seek the counsel of “experts” on Ukraine or the
South China Sea or ISIL and its caliphates. It is interesting to note that few
fund managers would consider a couple of phone calls with an “expert” on a
company proper due diligence for making an equity investment in that com-
pany. But they will take that approach when it comes to geopolitics.

58 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Practical Applications

This state of affairs may be due to the heavy reliance on math and algo-
rithms that contributed to the demise of what used to be called “country risk”
officers or experts. The entire function became outmoded when the peace
dividend and the great moderation of inflation, together, pushed up the value
of emerging markets and drove down the risk of political interference. This
explanation makes sense. In a world where markets are growing, there is less
need to argue about how to divide the spoils. Even if the spoils are not evenly
distributed, the belief that many might share in future prosperity encourages
people to carry on with work rather than waste time arguing about political
control. For politicians, prosperity provides a platform for promises, for future
benefits that shore up their support.
Indexation and benchmark investing also played a part in killing off the
need for geopolitics and country-risk experts.
Reliable growth also meant that the risk of default and expropriation
seemed to have receded from the investment landscape in the post–Cold
War years. Many people have made fun of Walter Wriston, the late CEO of
Citigroup, who famously said in 1982, “Countries cannot go bankrupt.” Note
that he did not say that Citigroup invested on the belief that countries could
not go bankrupt. He said it some years after the Latin American debt crisis
had occurred, when the ongoing pain of debt repayment was so great that
it became clear countries might need to “declare bankruptcy,” as a company
can, in order to clear their debts and start their economies anew. In fact, this
was the idea behind the famous Brady Plan in 1989. Brady bonds were col-
lateralised with US Treasuries and effectively permitted defaulted emerging-
market nations to re-enter the capital markets. The Brady Plan was one of the
most important geopolitical events of its era.
Similarly, in 1994, the Mexican peso crisis was resolved when the United
States provided a loan (which Mexico collateralised with future oil revenues).
These kinds of government-sponsored solutions are examples of power pro-
jection. The United States and the industrialised world sought to contain the
economic and political deterioration among the Latin American nations by
providing loans to protect the interests of their own investors and nation-
als. But the intervention also further reduced the risk that geopolitics would
destroy value.
So, what is the right approach for systematically addressing geopolitical risk?

Big Data
Investors love to quantify risk, so they will inevitably be drawn to big data as a
means of detecting geopolitical events and forces. The approaches that inves-
tors take range widely—from keyword searches on Twitter that can detect

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  59

Geopolitics for Investors

social unrest before the media can to the volume of phone calls emanating
from a location. The effort to find reliable signals has been going on for a long
time. It was not that many years ago that hedge funds deployed spotters near
the White House to observe late-night pizza deliveries. The more pizzas and
the later the delivery hour, the bigger the problem. These simple observations
continue today. In June 2014, local plane spotters detected the arrival of two
US B-2 Stealth bombers (apparently with the call signs Death 11 and Death
12) and three B-52 Stratofortress aircraft at the Fairford Royal Air Force
Base in the United Kingdom, just west of London. Such aircraft are normally
based in the United States, so their arrival prompted a flurry of commentary
on the internet. Not all the relevant data are necessarily “big.”
But big data will provide more and more information about geopolitical
events and trends, making it easier for investors to be aware of what is happen-
ing. At the very least, this tendency reduces the chance of unpleasant surprises.

Outsourcing
One approach is to outsource the subject of geopolitics. Some professional
investors will simply reach for the phone whenever a geopolitical event occurs
and get a handful of experts to brief them. This common approach might be
called “occasional outsourcing.”
It is interesting that no serious investor would take this casual approach
to the actual assets they are buying and selling, such as equities, hard assets,
or debt instruments. This approach assumes that the central investment
strategy or themes can only be marginally affected by geopolitical events.
The purpose of acquiring information is to appear knowledgeable quickly.
At best, such an approach assumes that the investment strategy is essen-
tially sound but that it can be marginally tweaked if geopolitical events or
forces are serious enough.
Another approach is to outsource the subject of geopolitics in an ongo-
ing way: “ongoing outsourcing.” Investors can hire outside experts to serve as
“radar” and to be alert to any signs or signals that geopolitics is beginning to
affect market prices. The drawback to outsourcing, even the ongoing kind, is
that the investor also has to disrupt or modify existing investment strategies
in order to accommodate new geopolitical events. The implicit assumption is
that geopolitical events are rare and that geopolitics even more rarely requires
any adjustment to the investment strategy.

60 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Practical Applications

Think Tanks and Lobbyists

Washington, DC, is probably the world’s capital of think tanks and lobbying,
though they exist worldwide. Think tanks are usually nonprofit organisations.
They are groups of policy experts who typically remain very close to policy
making in hopes that they will enter or return to government positions.
The problem with think tanks, from a market perspective, is that most
of them are not very market oriented. They are good at providing the history
of a geopolitical dispute or event. They are good at providing a nuanced view
of the current state of the dialogue on geopolitical issues. They are not typi-
cally very good at translating what such events mean for the markets. Nor are
think tanks “neutral.” They tend to lean to one end of the political spectrum
or the other, although there are some exceptions. They also rely on funding by
both governments and private firms, and so institutional bias is an issue.
Lobbyists are another group that often serves as a resource to investors.
Lobbyists, by definition, have a specific agenda. They represent a client and
are obliged to pursue that client’s objectives. So, a lobbyist will represent a
nation like Pakistan or Argentina and a particular policy objective, such as
promoting a public relations agenda. Although lobbyists can be very well
informed, the presence of this underlying commercial interest must be kept
in mind.
Unlike occasional outsourcing, ongoing outsourcing implies a continuing
dialogue that increases the chances that geopolitics will be incorporated into
the strategy in a more continuous fashion.
Either way, outsourcing is costly. It may be that some geopolitical events
do not move markets, and so there will be criticism of the decision to spend.

Open Sourcing
Banks and asset managers used to employ country-risk officers. But increased
confidence in the speed and efficiency of algorithms and mathematical
model–based investing reduced the need to have live personnel involved in
the asset allocation process, especially those who might focus on obstacles
and risks rather than opportunities. The situation in the asset management
industry somewhat mirrors the decision taken in the intelligence community
in recent decades to focus on high-tech, algorithm-based intelligence at the
expense of (human) intelligence officers on the ground.
Some might argue that the intelligence community is spending the com-
bined GDP of many nations on its intelligence gathering and still not getting
it right all the time. Therefore, it would be pointless for an investor to try
to replicate such a costly effort. But it is interesting to note that intelligence

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  61

Geopolitics for Investors

communities increasingly rely on “open source” information—that is, they

prefer to use information that is already in the public domain and not classi-
fied in any way. In fact, intelligence communities have begun to incorporate
market intelligence into their efforts to gather and process information.
This development is partly a function of the World Wide Web and mod-
ern technology. Think about what George F. Kennan said in 1997, when he
testified before the US Senate at an intelligence hearing. Deputy head of the
US Embassy in Moscow from 1944 to 1946 and author of the famous “X”
article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, which strongly shaped US policy toward the
Soviet Union for a generation, Kennan said:
The need by our government for secret intelligence has been vastly over-
rated. I would say that something upwards of 95% of what we need to
know about foreign countries could very well be obtained by the careful
and competent study of perfectly legitimate sources of information open
and available to us.11
It is fascinating that intelligence and defense agencies increasingly seek to
bring in market experts to help fill out their understanding of geopolitical risk
and market investors increasingly seek to align themselves with defense and
intelligence community experts for the same reason. The varying perspectives
make for a more robust assessment of the risk factors. As a small example,
during the last decade, the financial community held a strong belief that the
middle class in China would not only grow but also form the basis for strong
internal investment in China. The defense and intelligence community, in
contrast, mainly focused on the deteriorating demographic picture in China
and asked, what middle class? Obviously, these two opposing perspectives
resulted in two very different investment strategies.

Insourcing
KKR, the private equity firm, has created a foundation called the Global
Institute, with a prestigious board of directors, that is clearly aimed at securing
geopolitical insights and advantages. Commercial firms have done something
similar, creating or hiring think tanks to provide insights and expertise on
geopolitics. The Hong Kong trading house Li & Fung, for example, created
the Fung Institute. Many companies are backers of the Council on Foreign
Relations in the United States, Chatham House in the United Kingdom, and
their local equivalents internationally in hopes that this support will provide
access to geopolitical intelligence.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale
11

University Press, 1998): 227.

62 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 Practical Applications

This insourcing approach affords investment firms access to the best of

both open sourcing and outsourcing options. It gives them an internal advi-
sory board at their disposal. It gives them a network of experts and active
policymakers who are directly involved in the geopolitical issues of the day.
But they also have the benefit of an external network. For KKR, its founda-
tion serves the following purpose:
Anticipating, understanding, and knowing how to respond to emerging
geopolitical and macro-economic trends as well as the impacts of revolu-
tionary technological changes are critical to smart investing, portfolio man-
agement, and risk mitigation.

Asset Acquisition
The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is a former banker and an active man-
ager of his own wealth. Arguably, one reason he decided to purchase the famed
Washington Post, the main newspaper in Washington, DC, is that it is probably
the least expensive and most effective method for garnering cutting-edge infor-
mation about politics, policy, and geopolitics. After all, the Washington Post
staff have unparalleled access to policymakers, to experts who are jockeying
for the opportunity to write op-ed pieces, to whistleblowers, and to those who
want to leak information. It is, in effect, a far less expensive method for gather-
ing information than paying the lobbyists in Washington for their insights or
paying for any other outsourcing option. Almost everyone who matters will
volunteer information to the editorial board of the Washington Post.
In another example of insourcing and acquisition, Shell, the oil company,
created a division that engages in scenario planning in 1972. Shell Planning’s
reputation as a horizon-scanning group is legendary. It does not pretend to
predict the future, but it has found that thinking about possibilities better
prepares the firm for the expected and unexpected alike. According to Shell
Planning, “Scenarios give us lenses that help us see future prospects more
clearly, make richer judgments, and be more sensitive to uncertainties.”12 The
fact that Shell Planning is an internal division means that it has an ongoing
voice in the company’s strategy. It is not a reactive function. It is designed
to help Shell get “in front of ” geopolitical developments and even anticipate
them with greater accuracy and certainty. Others will argue that the share
price of Exxon, for example, has outperformed Shell’s over the years, so the
scenario planning at Shell, as an overhead cost, has not been worth it.

See “40 Years of Shell Scenarios, 1972–2012” (http://s05.static-shell.com/content/dam/

12

shell-new/local/corporate/corporate/downloads/pdf/shell-scenarios-40yearsbook080213.
pdf).

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  63

Geopolitics for Investors

Special Situations
One final option is to put in place a team whose primary job is not only
to find historic dislocations but also to put capital behind them when they
occur. This option would be the very antithesis of benchmark investing.
Such an approach probably requires providing a pool of actual capital as
an inducement and encouragement to find profitable geopolitical events. A
special situations philosophy assumes that the existing assumptions about
the nature of the state, the social contract, and the geopolitical landscape
are potentially wrong. For example, a benchmark fund manager might
underweight sovereign debt if the assessment was that the sovereign’s ability
to repay the debt was impaired. A special situations approach might con-
sider what would happen if a state’s ability to repay was genuinely impaired.
Which assets would be privatised or nationalised? Which deals or compa-
nies might cease to exist or come into existence? Which nations might cease
to exist or come into existence?
For a special situations approach to succeed, the investor would need not
only capital available (probably on short notice) but also an ability to oper-
ate across asset classes. The Brady Plan, which was deployed in the Latin
American debt crisis, involved debt equity swaps. The US loans to Mexico
during the peso crisis were collateralised by future sales of oil reserves.

64 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

8. Conclusion

Investors inevitably must balance risk and reward. Some risks are four-
standard-deviation events that are too expensive to hedge or insure against
even if they can be anticipated. Geopolitics has the capacity to bring risks
and opportunities, both large and small, onto the investment landscape. The
question is, How much time and effort can be devoted to this particular task?
Prediction is nearly impossible, but preparedness is attainable and desir-
able. Fund managers and investors need to ask whether preparedness is best
achieved through scenario planning, by including geopolitics as one of many
drivers of the actual investment strategy, or by changing the investment team
or the information sources and services that the team uses.
As always, markets represent diverse interests and abilities. Some will
find a way to add geopolitics to their investment scenarios and to profit
from it. Others will take comfort in knowing that they were only one of
many investors to utterly ignore geopolitics. But at least now, with this
book, there are some core ideas about how to think about the subject. These
ideas may prove useful as geopolitics returns to the investment landscape
ever more forcefully.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  65

References

Agnew, J.A., and S. Corbridge. 1989. “The New Geopolitics: The Dynamics
of Geopolitical Disorder.” In A World in Crisis? Geographical Perspectives. 2nd
ed. Edited by R.J. Johnston and P.J. Taylor. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Al-Rodhan, Nayef. 2012. Meta-Geopolitics of Outer Space: An Analysis of Space
Power, Security and Governance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Angell, Norman. 1910. The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military
Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage. London: Heinemann.
Brzezinski, Zbigniew. 1997. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its
Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books.
Carr, E.H. 1939. The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the
Study of International Relations. Reissued with an introduction by Michael
Cox. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Cohen, Saul. 2009. Geopolitics: The Geography of International Relations. 2nd
ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield (originally published in 2002 as
Geopolitics of the World System).
Dodds, Klaus. 2007. Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” National Interest, vol. 16
(Summer): 3–18.
Hawtrey, R.G. 1930. Economic Aspects of Sovereignty. New York: Longmans,
Green & Co.
Hooson, David. 1966. The Soviet Union: A Systematic Regional Geography.
London: University of London Press.
Howard, Michael. 1994. “The World According to Henry: From Metternich
to Me.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 73, no. 3 (May/June): 132–140.
Huntington, Samuel. 1993. “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, vol.
72, no. 3 (Summer): 22–49.
Kaplan, Robert. 2012. The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about
Coming Conflicts and the Battle against Fate. New York: Random House.
Kennedy, Paul. 1987. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change
and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House.

66 ©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation

 References

Kissinger, Henry. 2014. World Order. New York: Penguin Press.

Luttwak, Edward. 1990. “From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics: Logic of
Conflict, Grammar of Commerce.” National Interest, vol. 20 (Summer):
17–23.
Mackinder, H.J. 1902. Britain and the British Seas. New York: Appleton.
———. 1904. “The Geographical Pivot of History.” Geographical Journal, vol.
23, no. 4 (April): 421–437.
Mahan, Alfred Thayer. 1890. The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–
1783. Boston: Little, Brown.
Schelling, Thomas. 1960. The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Truman, Edwin M. 2010. Sovereign Wealth Funds: Threat or Salvation?
Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System. Vol. 1, Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth
Century. New York: Academic Press.
Yankelovich, Daniel. 1972. Corporate Priorities: A Continuing Study of the New
Demands on Business.

©2015 The CFA Institute Research Foundation  67

 RESEARCH FOUNDATION
CONTRIBUTION FORM
 ✓Yes, I want the Research Foundation to continue to fund innovative
research that advances the investment management profession. Please
accept my tax-deductible contribution at the following level:
Thought Leadership Circle................. US$1,000,000 or more
Named Endowment....................... US$100,000 to US$999,999
Research Fellow............................. US$10,000 to US$99,999
Contributing Donor. . ........................ US$1,000 to US$9,999
Friend.................................................. Up to US$999
I would like to donate $_________________________.

  My check is enclosed (payable to the Research Foundation of CFA Institute).

  I would like to donate appreciated securities (send me information).
  Please charge my donation to my credit card.
  VISA   MC   Amex   Diners

Card Number

___/___ _______________________________
Expiration Date Name on card    P L E A S E   P R I N T

  Corporate Card
  Personal Card __________________________________
Signature

  This is a pledge. Please bill me for my donation of $________________

  I would like recognition of my donation to be:
  Individual donation   Corporate donation   Different individual

____________________________________________________
PLEASE PRINT NAME OR COMPANY NAME AS YOU WOULD LIKE IT TO APPEAR

PLEASE PRINT     Mr.   Mrs.   Ms.   MEMBER NUMBER_______________________________

Last Name (Family Name) First Middle Initial

Title

Address

City State/Province Country ZIP/Postal Code

Please mail this completed form with your contribution to:

The Research Foundation of CFA Institute • P.O. Box 2082
Charlottesville, VA 22902-2082 USA

For more on the Research Foundation of CFA Institute, please visit

www.cfainstitute.org/learning/foundation/Pages/index.aspx.
 Named Endowments

The CFA Institute Research Foundation acknowledges with sincere gratitude the gen-
erous contributions of the Named Endowment participants listed below.

Gifts of at least US$100,000 qualify donors for membership in the Named Endow-
ment category, which recognizes in perpetuity the commitment toward unbiased, prac-
titioner-oriented, relevant research that these firms and individuals have expressed
through their generous support of the CFA Institute Research Foundation.

Ameritech Miller Anderson & Sherrerd, LLP

Anonymous John B. Neff, CFA
Robert D. Arnott Nikko Securities Co., Ltd.
Theodore R. Aronson, CFA Nippon Life Insurance Company of Japan
Asahi Mutual Life Nomura Securities Co., Ltd.
Batterymarch Financial Management Payden & Rygel
Boston Company Provident National Bank
Boston Partners Asset Management, L.P. Frank K. Reilly, CFA
Gary P. Brinson, CFA Salomon Brothers
Brinson Partners, Inc. Sassoon Holdings Pte. Ltd.
Capital Group International, Inc. Scudder Stevens & Clark
Concord Capital Management Security Analysts Association of Japan
Dai-Ichi Life Company Shaw Data Securities, Inc.
Daiwa Securities Sit Investment Associates, Inc.
Mr. and Mrs. Jeffrey Diermeier Standish, Ayer & Wood, Inc.
Gifford Fong Associates State Farm Insurance Company
Investment Counsel Association Sumitomo Life America, Inc.
of America, Inc. T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.
Jacobs Levy Equity Management Templeton Investment Counsel Inc.
John A. Gunn, CFA Frank Trainer
Jon L. Hagler Foundation Travelers Insurance Co.
Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan, Ltd. USF&G Companies
Lynch, Jones & Ryan Yamaichi Securities Co., Ltd.
Meiji Mutual Life Insurance Company

Senior Research Fellows

Financial Services Analyst Association

For more on upcoming Research Foundation

publications and webcasts, please visit
www.cfainstitute.org/learning/foundation/.
Research Foundation monographs
are online at www.cfapubs.org.
 The CFA Institute
Research Foundation
Board of Trustees
2014–2015

Chair Diane Garnick Paul Smith, CFA

John T. “JT” Grier, CFA Clear Alternatives LLC CFA Institute
Virginia Retirement System
Pranay Gupta, CFA Brian Singer, CFA
Jeffery V. Bailey, CFA Global Association of William Blair, Dynamic
Target Corporation Alternative Investors Allocation Strategies
Manu Bhaskaran, CFA Beth Hamilton-Keen, CFA Wayne H. Wagner
Centennial Asia Advisors Pte Mawer Investment Marina del Rey, CA
Limited Management Ltd
Arnold S. Wood*
Renee Kathleen-Doyle Blasky, Joachim Klement, CFA Martingale Asset Management
CFA Wellershoff & Partners Ltd.
Charles J. Yang, CFA
Vista Capital Limited
Walter V. “Bud” Haslett, Jr., CFA T&D Asset Management
William Fung* CFA Institute
Aventura, FL
George R. Hoguet, CFA, FRM
State Street Global Advisors

*Emeritus

Officers and Directors

Executive Director Secretary
Walter V. “Bud” Haslett, Jr., CFA Tina Sapsara
CFA Institute CFA Institute
Gary P. Brinson Director of Treasurer
Research Kim Maynard
Laurence B. Siegel CFA Institute
Blue Moon Communications

Research Foundation Review Board

William J. Bernstein Elizabeth R. Hilpman Paul O’Connell
Efficient Frontier Advisors Barlow Partners, Inc. FDO Partners
Stephen J. Brown Paul D. Kaplan, CFA Krishna Ramaswamy
New York University Morningstar, Inc. University of Pennsylvania
Stephen Sexauer Robert E. Kiernan III Andrew Rudd
Allianz Global Investors Advanced Portfolio Advisor Software, Inc.
Solutions Management
Lee R. Thomas
Elroy Dimson Andrew W. Lo Pacific Investment
London Business School Massachusetts Institute of Management Company
Technology
Stephen Figlewski
New York University Alan Marcus
Boston College
William N. Goetzmann
Yale School of Management
 ISBN 978-1-934667-83-5
90000

Available online at www.cfapubs.org 9 781934 667835