Subscribe now

When a firm meets a scandal by appointing an independent chair, the most revealing thing is what it has decided not to change.

KPMG Australia has just lost its chair and two senior audit partners, after its chief executive and audit chief before them. The trigger was the misuse of clients’ confidential board papers — Lendlease’s, Optus’s, and Dexus’s — to help the firm win audit work from their rivals. ASIC is now investigating — though its own jurisdiction reaches individual registered auditors, not the partnerships that employ them, a structural gap this piece returns to below. The response, announced alongside the resignations, is a governance overhaul: an independent chair, independent board members, fresh oversight of audit quality and ethics, a new look at how whistleblower complaints are handled. It is the textbook answer. It is also an answer to the wrong question.

The chair the firm settled on makes the point better than I could. KPMG named Michael Ebeid AM as its first Independent Chairman on 2 July — framed as the centrepiece of the overhaul, and an appointment that immediately drew fire in Parliament for being nothing of the kind. Senator Barbara Pocock called it “KPMG’s version of a ‘cleanup’”: Ebeid was already sitting on the board, not an outside appointment, and correspondence released the same day raised further questions about his regard for the whistleblower process the overhaul was meant to fix. A new chief executive, John Sams, followed on 21 July. Both appointments are real governance moves. Neither touches the partner-compensation structure this piece is about.

This is not, at root, a confidentiality breach. A breach is something that happens to a system from the outside. What happened at KPMG happened because of the system. The Big Four are partnerships, and in a partnership the people who profit from winning the next engagement are the same people entrusted with the client’s most sensitive information. The partner who reads Lendlease’s board papers is a partner whose income depends on winning the next big audit. We have built a structure that asks one person to be both the custodian of a client’s secrets and a beneficiary of using them — and then we are surprised, every few years, when the two roles collide.

That is why the scandals rhyme. PwC Australia’s tax-leak affair in 2023 ran on a different mechanism — confidential government tax plans, monetised by the very firm hired to help write them — but it had the same architecture: privileged information on one side of the partner’s desk, a commercial incentive on the other, and nothing structural between them but the partner’s own restraint. The firms answer each episode in the same vocabulary — independence, oversight, culture, an external review — and each time the vocabulary is applied to the symptom and not the structure.

We have been here before, at scale. After Enron and the collapse of Arthur Andersen, the reforms of 2002 — Sarbanes-Oxley, mandatory audit-committee independence, partner rotation, limits on selling consulting to audit clients — were built to wall the auditor off from the incentives that corrupt the audit. Australia ran its own version the year after, following the HIH collapse — CLERP 9, partner rotation under the Corporations Act, an ASX rule mandating audit committees for its largest listed companies. Different statute books, same three levers. They did real work. But they left the deepest incentive untouched: the partnership itself, in which the audit is a product the firm sells and the partners share in the proceeds of selling it. The reforms regulated the conflict. They did not remove it — because removing it would mean asking whether a partnership that profits from the audits it wins can ever be independent of them, and that is a question the profession and its regulators have been content to leave unasked.

Those reforms were built for a narrower firm than the one being asked to hold them now. KPMG in 2002 was close to a pure audit and accounting practice; the Big Four today are sprawling multi-line consultancies — audit, tax, advisory, technology, deals — selling all of it into the same client relationships they are supposed to audit without fear or favour. An independent chair is a good and necessary fix for a governance failure. It is not a fix for a firm that has simply grown too complex, with too many live conflicts, for the partnership structure it still runs on. The question is not only whether the 2002-era guardrails still hold. It is whether the partnership model itself is still fit for purpose for a firm this size and this shape.

I have sat on the committees that receive these assurances, and the tell is always the same: the remedy is aimed at perception. An independent chair changes who sits at the head of the table; it does not change what the people around it are paid to do. New whistleblower guidelines change the process for reporting misconduct; they do not change the incentive that produces it. None of this is worthless — process matters, and a firm that handles a complaint honestly is better than one that buries it, as KPMG’s own inquiries did until Parliament forced the issue. But a board that accepts the overhaul as the answer has confused tidying the room with fixing the house.

Share

The harder options are the structural ones the overhaul avoids. Separate audit from advisory entirely, as reformers have urged for two decades. Cap or rotate the commercial relationships that give the conflict its force. Or concede openly that “independence” inside a profit-sharing partnership is a regulated fiction we have chosen to live with, and supervise it as such. Each is uncomfortable. Each is a real answer. An independent chair is none of them.

KPMG’s people did a serious thing, and the resignations are warranted. But we should be precise about what their departure settles and what it does not. It removes the individuals. It does not touch the incentive that will, in time, produce their successors’ version of the same scandal. The lesson of the Big Four is not that they keep hiring the wrong people. It is that the structure keeps asking the right people to serve two masters — and then dresses the predictable result in the language of reform. Until a regulator is willing to ask whether the partnership model is compatible with the independence the audit function requires, the independent chair will keep being the answer. It will just keep being the answer to the wrong question.

Share

If a regulator forced audit firms to choose — separate audit from advisory entirely, or accept full liability for the conflicts the partnership model creates — which would the profession actually pick?

Leave a comment

For the second time in a year, there have been public protests in Ukraine in response to a decision by the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Subscribe now

In July 2025, protests erupted when Zelensky tried to curb the powers of two independent corruption agencies, forcing him to backtrack within days. The trigger for the latest protests was the dismissal of Ukraine’s popular defence minister, Mykhailo Fedorov.

This is not the first time Zelensky has reshuffled his defence team. Oleksii Reznikov, who had been defence minister since 2021, was dismissed in 2023 following a string of high-profile corruption scandals.

He was replaced by Rustem Umerov who, after two years in office, was moved to the role of secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, as part of a full-scale cabinet reshuffle in the summer of 2025.

Umerov’s replacement, former prime minister Denys Shmyhal, lasted almost exactly six months before another reshuffle linked to the long fallout from the corruption scandals of summer 2025. Shmyhal was moved to the energy ministry and replaced by Fedorov who has now also been ousted after just half a year in office.

What distinguishes Fedorov’s ousting is that this is the first time a reshuffle has been carried out for reasons of internal disagreement within Zelensky’s core team.

In a press conference on July 16, Fedorov accused the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, Oleksandr Syrskyi (who controversially replaced the popular Valeryi Zaluzhny in February 2024), of blocking his reform initiatives and dividing the country. Their rift had become increasingly public. Fedorov and Syrskyi had apparently each demanded that the other be dismissed, rather than finding the compromise Zelensky wanted.

Share

That the president sided with the commander-in-chief rather than his defence minister seemingly defies all logic. Already during his earlier tenure as minister for digital transformation, a role he assumed at the beginning of Zelensky’s tenure as president in 2019, Fedorov had been an advocate of the kind of drone warfare that now has seemingly given Ukraine a slight edge, at least in the air war.

Since Fedorov was appointed minister of defence in January, Ukraine has made significant progress in stalling Russia’s momentum in the war. Key to this has been an intensified campaign of strikes against Russian oil infrastructure – one of the backbones of the country’s war economy.

Fedorov also tried to reform procurement policies in the defence ministry. In June, he stated that his team’s efforts to enforce competitive tendering for defence contracts had saved more than US$100 million (£74 million) by cutting the costs of 155mm artillery shells.

This is one probable source of Fedorov’s conflict with Syrskyi: who decides which weapons systems and military equipment should be procured and how they should be used. More than an issue of corruption, the rift is about control – and a clash of cultures between the moderniser, Fedorov, and the more traditional military leadership around Syrskyi.

After his dismissal, Fedorov apparently refused to continue in an advisory role for Zelensky. Two key advisors in the defence ministry, Serhii “Flash” Beskrestnov and Serhii Sternenko, as well as the deputy commander of the air force, Pavlo Yelizarov, have all now resigned.

These developments further underline the internal strategic disagreements over the direction of Ukraine’s war effort.

Zelensky’s initial choice for his next defence minister was Ihor Klymenko, who apparently declined the role and is set to take up the post of secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council instead.

As a former national police chief who had been Ukraine’s interior minister since 2023, Klymenko was seen as someone who could resolve Ukraine’s continued recruitment crisis. This is arguably the area in which Fedorov failed to make sufficient progress.

In light of sustained rumours about a new mobilisation of Russian troops for the war in the autumn, it is clear that Ukraine’s manpower problem is becoming more acute and needs an urgent resolution.

According to Fedorov’s diagnosis of the scale of the problem, 2 million Ukrainians are currently wanted for draft evasion, and 200,000 soldiers are absent without official leave.

Less clear, however, is why Klymenko was touted for the role. As interior minister, he was at least part of the problem caused by so-called “busification” – the forcible seizure of military-age Ukrainian men by recruitment officials. Klymenko has consistently maintained that these officials have acted within the boundaries of martial law.

Klymenko’s refusal to accept the position may also have been an implicit acknowledgement of how difficult a job any reform of recruitment would be. This is particularly the case given Zelensky’s highly public commitment to eradicating busification, during his press conference with the outgoing British prime minister, Keir Starmer, in Kyiv on July 16.

Yevhenii Khmara, a major general and acting head of the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU, has now been appointed as acting defence minister. Given Khmara’s previous role in supporting Ukraine’s intensifying air campaign against Russia, his appointment somewhat placates critics of Fedorov’s dismissal. These include members of Zelensky’s own party, who saw Klymenko as insufficiently aligned with Fedorov’s strategy in the war.

But a realignment with Fedorov’s vision of how to win the war will do little to address either the recruitment issue or the underlying conflict with Syrskyi. That this will likely fester — as the continuation of public protests clearly indicates —could be particularly destabilising, because the timeline towards Khmara’s parliamentary confirmation is unclear.

Under Ukrainian law, Khmara first has to resign from active military service before he can take on the civilian role of defence minister. He then has to be formally nominated by the president, after which the Ukrainian parliament must approve his appointment.

Like the summer 2025 corruption crisis, Zelensky will probably weather this storm. But the price he is likely to pay is a further erosion of his authority – and a shrinking of his inner circle of trusted advisors.

This is an unnecessary and unwelcome distraction from a defence effort that had finally seemed to put Ukraine on the front foot, for the first time since the end of 2022.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 17 July 2026.

Share

If Zelensky’s decision to back his commander-in-chief over his reform-minded defence minister signals where real power sits inside Ukraine’s wartime government, what does that mean for the other reformers still inside it — and for the allies who have been backing them?

Leave a comment

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

VIENNA, 9 July 2026 — Stefan Wolff, Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex, was one of three independent experts appointed under the OSCE’s Moscow Mechanism — a process allowing OSCE participating States to launch independent human-rights investigations — to investigate the militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children by the Russian Federation. Today, alongside Prof. Hervé Ascensio (France) and Dr. Elīna Šteinerte (Latvia), he presented the mission’s findings to the OSCE Permanent Council: a systematic, accelerating Russian Federation policy to militarize and indoctrinate Ukrainian children in occupied territories and in Russia itself.

The mission was invoked on 14 May 2026 by 41 OSCE participating States. It was the sixth such expert mission on Ukraine since 2022 and was carried out by Prof. Wolff, Prof. Ascensio, and Dr. Šteinerte. Ukraine agreed to host the mission and cooperated fully, including facilitating an in-country visit from 6 to 11 June 2026 during which the experts met Ukrainian state institutions and civil society. The Russian Federation did not respond to the mission’s request for cooperation.

Key Findings at a Glance

• 20,610 children recorded by Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice as deported or forcibly transferred as of June 2026 — only 2,264 had been returned as of the same month.

• Membership of the Russian state-sponsored military-patriotic “Movement of the First” among children in the occupied territories has grown from around 60,000 in 2022 to more than 340,000 today — a nearly six-fold increase.

• Approximately 50,000 children a year are directed toward indoctrination and militarization “recreation camps,” including during school holidays.

• Russia’s militarization and indoctrination programmes now systematically target Ukrainian children from kindergarten age; a naval academy trains children as young as eight in drone operation.

• The mission found violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Hague Regulations, and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; concludes that Russia’s occupation practices may amount to crimes against humanity; and identifies probable war crimes, including torture, inhuman treatment, and unlawful deportation of children.

A System That Has Learned, Sped Up, and Expanded

The experts found that what began as an improvised, friction-laden occupation policy in Crimea after its 2014 annexation has become, within little more than a decade, a fast, well-resourced, and expanding system. Measures that took years to implement in Crimea — replacing the school curriculum, phasing out Ukrainian-language education, rolling out youth paramilitary structures — were imposed within weeks or months in territory occupied after the 2022 full-scale invasion.

The mission also documented the system’s current scale beyond the formal education system. Programmes such as “Eaglets of Russia” now reach children as young as kindergarten and elementary-school age. Government institutions from the Kremlin to the local level, the Russian Orthodox Church, and state-owned companies are directly involved in directing and funding indoctrination and militarization programmes aimed at Ukrainian children. Ukrainian children have also been documented at camps not only in Russia but also in Belarus and in North Korea.

Deportations and Unreturned Children

Ukraine’s Ministry of Justice recorded 20,610 children as deported or forcibly transferred as of June 2026; Ukrainian authorities report that only 2,264 had been returned as of the same month. The mission concluded that the low rate of return reflects a deliberate Russian policy of preventing family reunification, forming part of a broader effort to alter the identity of Ukrainian children in Russian hands.

Legal Findings

The mission concluded that Russia’s conduct violates international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention (on the protection of civilians) and the Hague Regulations (on occupation), and international human rights law, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It further found that the practices of systemic indoctrination and militarization may amount to a crime against humanity in the form of persecution, and endorsed prior findings that the forcible transfer and deportation of Ukrainian children may amount to the crime against humanity of deportation and forcible transfer of population, while also identifying probable war crimes including torture, inhuman treatment, and unlawful deportation of children.

Recommendations

The mission’s principal recommendation is that all stakeholders immediately, effectively, and meaningfully recognize the centrality of Ukrainian children’s safety, identity, and family life in the ongoing war and in any cease-fire or peace negotiations. It calls on the Russian Federation to halt all indoctrination and militarization practices, end coercion against children, parents, and teachers, facilitate the return of all deported children, and establish a mechanism for restoring their identity. It calls on Ukraine to continue strengthening documentation, return, reintegration, and rehabilitation systems, and calls on OSCE participating States and the wider international community to support accountability mechanisms and international cooperation to end impunity for crimes against Ukrainian children.

Ukraine’s Response

In formal comments transmitted together with the report, Ukraine welcomed the mission’s recommendations as a valuable and important basis for further action. Building on them, Ukraine set out further priority actions, including harmonizing the inter-agency methodology for recording deportation cases, expanding secure distance-learning opportunities for children in the occupied territories, introducing a unified long-term reintegration standard covering the child, the family, the school, and psychological and social services, extending sanctions to those directing and financing the transfer and “re-education” of children, continuing to submit evidence to the International Criminal Court and the Register of Damage for Ukraine, and seeking international access to the locations where Ukrainian children are held through the United Nations, UNICEF, the ICRC, and UNESCO.

“Russia isn’t running a static system. It’s an operation that has been learning, speeding up, and expanding for over a decade — and there is no sign that it is done or even slowing down,” said Prof. Stefan Wolff. “If anything, our findings show it is accelerating.”

About the Moscow Mechanism

The Moscow Mechanism, established in 1991 under the Document of the Moscow Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the CSCE (now OSCE), allows participating States to establish independent expert missions to investigate serious human rights concerns on the territory of a participating State. This is the sixth expert mission invoked in relation to Ukraine since 2022. The mission’s full report was submitted on 22 June 2026, formally transmitted to OSCE participating States by the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) together with Ukraine’s comments (ODIHR.GAL/34/26, 6 July 2026), and presented to the OSCE Permanent Council in Vienna on 9 July 2026.

About Professor Stefan Wolff

Stefan Wolff is Professor of International Security in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham, and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre and a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the UK’s Political Studies Association. He specialises in the management of contemporary security challenges, especially in the prevention and settlement of ethnic conflicts, in post-conflict state-building in deeply divided and war-torn societies, and in contemporary geopolitics and great-power rivalry. Wolff has extensive expertise in the post-Soviet space and has also worked on a wide range of other conflicts elsewhere, including in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. With almost three decades of experience in UK higher education, Wolff has a publication record that includes over 100 journal articles and book chapters, as well as 24 books. He is the founding editor of Ethnopolitics and a regular international affairs contributor to The Conversation. He was one of three independent experts appointed to the Moscow Mechanism mission on the militarization and indoctrination of Ukrainian children, alongside Prof. Hervé Ascensio (University of Paris I) and Dr. Elīna Šteinerte (UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture).

Media Contact

Lucy Marcus

Co-founder, Navigating the Vortex

lucy.marcus@navigatingthevortex.com

Notes to Editors

• This release is issued by Navigating the Vortex. It is not an OSCE or ODIHR release; comment on behalf of the OSCE, ODIHR, or the mission’s other two experts should be sought directly from them.

• The mission’s full report runs to 143 pages, including annexes and the Government of Ukraine’s formal response, is available for download via the link at the bottom of this page.

• Prof. Wolff is available for interview. To arrange, please contact Lucy Marcus at lucy.marcus@navigatingthevortex.com.

• For broadcast bookings — TV chyron and Introduction and Radio introduction: “Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham, and co-founder of Navigating the Vortex.”

About Navigating the Vortex

Navigating the Vortex is a strategic analysis publication co-founded by Lucy Marcus and Stefan Wolff, covering Geopolitics & International Affairs, Corporate Governance & Stewardship, Markets & Economics, Leadership, Strategy & Power, Technology & AI, and ESG & Sustainability. Grounded in experience, written with rigour, and delivered with an ethical compass, the analysis draws on direct personal experience — boardroom, diplomatic, and academic — not produced at arm’s length from the world it covers. www.navigatingthevortex.com

OSCE Moscow Mechanism Report: Militarization and Indoctrination of Ukrainian Children by the Russian Federation

1.94MB ∙ PDF file

Download

The full 132-page mission report submitted to the OSCE Permanent Council on 9 July 2026 by Prof. Hervé Ascensio, Dr. Elīna Šteinerte, and Prof. Stefan Wolff, including the Government of Ukraine's formal response.

Download

###

Share

Subscribe now

It is becoming increasingly hard to take the prospects of a long-term deal to end their war seriously now that the United States and Iran are back to exchanging strikes in the Strait of Hormuz.

They concluded a round of meetings through Qatari and Pakistani mediators on Jul 1, just days after agreeing to stop tit-for-tat strikes that had continued despite a ceasefire being in place.

After US President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in-law Jared Kushner and long-time real estate business partner Steve Witkoff to the Qatari capital of Doha in expectation of high-level talks, Iran said it would not meet them.

This does not mean that the already fragile ceasefire is doomed to collapse imminently. But it raises serious questions about whether the 60-day window that the US and Iran agreed to hammer out a permanent settlement is still realistic – if it ever was.

“The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was structurally flawed from the moment of its signing on Jun 17.”

With just over 40 days left, Iran’s refusal to engage directly with the top US negotiators certainly does not bode well. The next round of talks, to come after the late Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s funeral, will also be indirect.

The impasse is hardly surprising. The Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was structurally flawed from the moment of its signing on Jun 17.

The MOU declared “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” and committed the parties not to use or threaten force. But it failed to establish a robust enforcement mechanism.

A High-Level Committee tasked with political oversight was established and involves senior leaders such as US Vice President JD Vance and Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Yet, the mechanism did not function as intended when renewed hostilities broke out because of disagreements over the Strait of Hormuz.

Share

The MOU also fails to resolve any of the foundational disputes between Iran and the US, including over who governs the Strait of Hormuz, which is as much a question of the post-war regional order as it is one of global economic and energy security.

But it is also a question that is tied up with domestic politics. For Iran, control over the strait has long been seen as a question of sovereignty, but it had been content with using it as implied leverage – until the war let it turn the issue into a test of Iran’s claimed right to charge transit fees.

“… a bad deal that prevents escalation might be better than no deal at all. But now, it is not clear whether even a bad deal is possible.”

The MOU explicitly notes that Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels, “with no charge for 60 days only” and that the future administration of the strait will be defined with Oman.

Iran and Oman have reportedly worked out a proposed arrangement to administer the strait, which includes the joint collection of administrative fees. They seem to have some way to go to hammer out the details: Iran is apparently insisting on fee levies while Oman favours voluntary contributions towards regional projects aimed at supporting the safety of waterways and protection of the maritime environment.

Either idea, however, runs counter to the views of Mr Trump, who had repeatedly insisted that there will be no fees to transit the strait.

All the hardest questions – from the conditions and timeline for sanctions relief for Iran and the release of frozen assets to the future of its nuclear programme – are also to be tackled in a final deal. Similar to the issue of transit fees, the gaps between the parties are wide and the process designed to close them far from clear.

Still, a bad deal that prevents escalation might be better than no deal at all. But now, it is not clear whether even a bad deal is possible.

Share

The saving grace is likely to be a provision in the MOU that allows the 60-day timeline for completing negotiations to be extended by mutual agreement.

And this may well be the enduring legacy of the MOU – not that it created a pathway to peace and stability in the region but that it allowed the US and Iran to settle into a holding pattern, preventing a further slide towards the abyss.

The MOU provides minimal guardrails that serve the interests of both Tehran and Washington while negotiations are ongoing, such as asset release and a status quo on sanctions for Iran and a toll-free gradual re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz for the US.

As both sides come to realise the complexity of resolving their substantive issues and the compromises likely required to do so, they might find living within the parameters of the MOU acceptable, even if far from ideal.

Right now, neither the US nor Iran will want to abandon the process. They could thrash out a deal in the remaining weeks or simply agree to give themselves more time to do so.

“If, or rather when, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalates anew, it could turn out to be the real spoiler of any American and Iranian plans.”

This might look like a viable strategy to stabilise the current volatile situation, but that is not the same as stability. There are still significant risks, the most important among them being Lebanon.

The MOU explicitly includes Lebanon as part of the “immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts” and states that the US and Iran also commit themselves to “ensuring the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon”.

Yet neither of the parties to that conflict – Israel and Hezbollah – is a signatory of the MOU. The extent to which Washington and Tehran exercise control over them is debatable.

This is not a sideshow to the main war, but a major arena in which a key part of the conflict over the future regional order of the Middle East will play out.

Israel and Lebanon reached a framework agreement for achieving “lasting peace and security” on Jun 26. But the ceasefire it calls for puts no real, and certainly no enforceable, obligations on Hezbollah but makes the group’s disarmament a condition for Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah immediately rejected the agreement to which it was not a party.

Ceasefire arrangements between Israel and Hezbollah have been running on an entirely separate track. Their most recent truce was agreed on Jun 19, mediated by Iran and Qatar, but leaving Lebanon out of the deal and preserving Iranian leverage.

Four thousand people killed and one million displaced in 2026 alone suggest that attempts to control the fighting in Lebanon are still far from effective. Agreements based on a logic of Hezbollah disarming and the Lebanese army assuming full control of southern Lebanon will continue to fail when there is nothing to suggest that Lebanon’s institutional capacity or Hezbollah’s attitude have changed enough to succeed.

If, or rather when, the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah escalates anew, it could turn out to be the real spoiler of any American and Iranian plans. But Tehran and Washington may not even need that trigger to return to all-out war.

This analysis draws on and updates Stefan Wolff’s commentary published in Channel NewsAsia on 7 July 2026.

Share

For governments and businesses with material exposure to the Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean — is the Islamabad MOU’s extendable 60-day clock a genuine pathway to settlement, or a mechanism that lets Washington and Tehran defer the hardest questions indefinitely? And what happens to that calculus the day the Israel-Hezbollah track breaks again?

Leave a comment

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

The New York Times mistakes a rebrand for a transformation. The relationship between Trump and Infantino is not one of influence but rather a meeting of the minds. I diagnosed FIFA’s corruption as structural in 2014 and warned a new president would not alter it. No one fixed the structure with any permanence — and the people who could have were put on the payroll. For anyone who sits on a board or vets a partner, the mechanism of capture is the same — and the governance diagnostic is the same too.

Subscribe now

The New York Times published a careful, well-reported account of how Gianni Infantino spent years courting Donald Trump — but it has made the wrong call on the chicken and egg of it. The paper calls it the Trumpification of FIFA: a self-invented peace prize pressed into the president’s hands, a flirtation with a FIFA cryptocurrency, hotel-licensing deals stamped with the FIFA name, a gleaming new hub in Miami. Since publication, the relationship has produced its most concrete demonstration yet: a mid-tournament phone call that got a red card against a U.S. player reversed within a day. The reporting is sound, but the framing is wrong.

This is not the story of an upstanding institution being distorted. It is the story of an institution finding its level. FIFA did not contract Trumpism like a virus. FIFA is a body that was already transactional, already self-dealing, already a black box that wrote its own rules. It looked at this White House and recognised an institution resonating on its frequency. This is not a transformation. It is a homecoming.

The diagnosis, a decade early

I can be certain about this, because I wrote FIFA’s diagnosis down more than a decade ago — and not in a place the people who ran football could claim to have never seen it. It ran in translation, too — in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Russian and Spanish, and a piece on the working conditions in Qatar was also translated into Italian.

In 2014, in my column for Project Syndicate, I urged FIFA to fire Sepp Blatter and rebuild its governance from the ground up, calling the organisation a black box that believed itself “immune from scrutiny” and free to “play by their own rules.” In Fortune, I wrote that the charges had not “come out of nowhere” — that FIFA “has been getting progressively worse for years,” in plain sight, while its sponsors wilfully looked away. And in a BBC column that also appeared in the World Economic Forum’s own publication — set, in other words, in front of the very executives, ministers and heads of institutions who could have forced change — I spelt out exactly what fixing it would take: an independent investigation by people the incumbents did not choose; the chair and chief-executive roles split apart; hard term limits; genuinely independent directors in the room.

I also wrote the sentence I want on the record now. Electing a new president, I warned, “won’t be enough.” Nothing short of root-and-branch structural change would do. I said it then. It came to pass — to the letter.

How much there was to fix

It is worth remembering how much there was to fix. In May 2015, Swiss police walked into the five-star Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich and led FIFA officials out through the lobby. The United States Department of Justice unsealed a sweeping racketeering case: more than 150 million dollars in bribes and kickbacks across nearly a quarter-century, dozens of officials and executives charged, the statute written for the Mafia turned on the governing body of the world’s game. Blatter — president since 1998 — was re-elected days later, then pushed toward the exit; within months he and his heir apparent, Michel Platini, were banned from football for eight years. The bidding that sent the World Cup to Russia and to Qatar left a stain that has never washed out. This was not a handful of bad actors. It was the operating system.

Reform on paper, kabuki in practice

Into that wreckage stepped a new president promising to clean house. Infantino arrived in 2016. The promise was reform. What FIFA delivered was a kabuki performance of reform.

Let the record show that FIFA did pass reforms in 2016: a twelve-year limit on the presidency, a formal split between the Council that sets strategy and the General Secretariat that runs the business, independent members on its committees, new disclosure rules. On paper, my checklist was answered. In practice, almost none of it changed the organisation. The Council is composed of elected football insiders; power is pooled, as ever, around the man at the top. And when the one hard rule met that man, the man won: in 2022, FIFA’s own Council ruled that Infantino’s first thirty-nine months “did not count” toward the term limit, clearing him to rule for fifteen years under a twelve-year cap. The structure was repainted, not rebuilt.

Share

Not accidents — a methodology

And the rot did not stop in 2015 — nor did it start there. The decade since reads less like a series of accidents than a methodology, and the method is old: FIFA handed the 1934 World Cup to Mussolini’s Italy and the 1978 tournament to Argentina’s junta, and the 2018 tournament to Putin’s Russia. Sportswashing is bedrock, not a recent habit.

Qatar was sold as the first “carbon-neutral” World Cup, a claim a Swiss regulator ruled false — and the 2034 World Cup was handed to Saudi Arabia without even a contest, on human-rights pledges that Amnesty International warned offered no “credible guarantees of reform.”. The real ledger was human: thousands of migrant-worker deaths in the years of construction, and a FIFA that promised remedy and then delivered a $50 million “Legacy Fund” routed to UN agencies and the World Trade Organization, with nothing for the workers a report it had itself commissioned was understood to recommend it compensate.

Even the doping scandal is, for FIFA, a scandal of looking away. When the McLaren report named Russian football inside a state doping scheme, FIFA investigated its own World Cup hosts and closed the cases against its World Cup players for “insufficient evidence,” then kicked off the tournament in Moscow. FIFA did not dope anyone. It was the body that chose not to look.

And beneath the money sits something worse. Luis Rubiales seized and kissed a player at the 2023 Women’s World Cup final and was later convicted of sexual assault. Federation presidents in both Afghanistan and Haiti were banned for life by FIFA for the sexual abuse of female players. The Afghan ban was upheld on appeal; the Haitian one — where the victims included minors at the national training centre — was quietly overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport for “insufficient evidence,” leaving the man free.

Haiti’s team is at this World Cup; its fans are barred at the United States border; the man who abused its girls is not. If you want to know what an organisation truly values, watch what it lets slide.

Share

The electorate on the payroll

So how does a body with this record keep going, decade after decade, scandal after scandal? The answer is almost banal.

Everyone who could discipline FIFA is paid not to — in money or in joy. Sponsors, broadcasters and host governments look away; even we, the fans, get caught up in the beautiful game and find it hard to look squarely at it. Looking would cost more than not looking.

But the machine has a specific engine, and a whistleblower’s account of how Infantino keeps his grip names it precisely. FIFA hands up to $8 million a cycle to each of its 211 member federations through its development programme — and the president controls the flow. The federations elect him; he funds them; they elect him again. He says it unabashedly from the stage: “seventy per cent of you,” he told the 2024 Congress, “would have no football without the resources coming directly from FIFA.” The electorate that is meant to hold the president to account is on his payroll. Reform that never touches the money was never going to bite.

I had named that failure too, back in 2015. Membership organisations governed only by their members, I argued in my BBC column, risk becoming an echo chamber — “a place where the self-interest of individual members overrides actions that are best for the organisation as a whole.” FIFA did not merely prove the point. It industrialised it.

Don’t mistake the man for the machine

Not everyone takes the bait, which is how you can see the machine working. When FIFA came to Chicago, the Mayor at the time, Rahm Emanuel, read the terms and walked. He would not, he said, “allow taxpayers of the city of Chicago to be dumb money,” and told FIFA to “take a hike.” The point is that walking away is the exception. The model is extraction, and it works because almost no one says no. FIFA even courted the Biden administration, which kept its distance, wary of “a scandal-tainted organisation”.

The pattern keeps confirming itself. During the tournament itself, Trump called Infantino directly to ask for a review of a red card against United States forward Folarin Balogun — and FIFA, within a day, lifted the suspension, drawing a furious response from Belgium's football federation, which called the reversal "unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable." Infantino did not deny the call took place; he said discussing World Cup matters with the U.S. president is something he does "regularly." A financial disclosure the same week showed Trump had accepted fifteen thousand dollars in FIFA tickets from Infantino, days before Infantino confirmed Trump would present the World Cup trophy himself on 19 July. Jürgen Klopp, incoming manager of Germany, put it more bluntly than any official involved: "Let's just say: this is our game, not theirs. These two people, who both have no idea about football, should have nothing to do with that." None of this required a conspiracy. It required only what the captured electorate has always required: a man at the top who understands that proximity to power is worth more than the rules on paper.

The Times is not arguing that FIFA was previously clean; its specific claim is that the Trump relationship represents something new in its particular transactional character. That is true. What the frame gets wrong is the causal direction and the significance.

So when the New York Times reads off Infantino’s flatteries — the peace prize, the FIFA coin, the mooted FIFA hotels — as evidence of a new, Trump-shaped FIFA, it mistakes the surface of a river for the riverbed. Every item is the same organisation doing the same thing it has always done: monetising proximity to power, which is its native art.

This is why the frame is not a quibble. If you believe FIFA is being Trumpified, the cure looks like removing Infantino — a clean new president, a fresh start, the reset. That is the exact error football made in 2015, the error I warned against, and the error that produced the very man the New York Times is now writing about. The disease was never the figure at the top. It is the structure beneath him — and the electorate that structure pays.

For anyone who sits on a board, prices a counterparty, vets a partner, signs off on a sponsorship, the lesson travels far beyond football. Learn to tell reform from rebranding. Reform changes the architecture: independent oversight, separated powers, term limits that bind the people who wrote them, money that cannot be turned into votes. Rebranding changes the letterhead and the friends in the photographs. When an organisation tells you it has turned a corner, do not count the new faces or admire the new mission statement. Ask whether a single line of the governance has changed and proof of genuine follow through — and whether the rules still bind the person at the top. Often enough they do not, and the company an institution keeps will tell you long before its accounts do.

The New York Times is right that FIFA is being remade in a powerful man’s image. It simply has the wrong man. FIFA was ever thus — in Zurich, in Moscow, in Doha, and now at Mar-a-Lago. It promised reform, it even legislated reform, and it counted on the world moving on. The world’s tolerance for naked self-dealing moved instead, and FIFA walked through without lowering its voice. Until someone rebuilds the architecture — and frees the electorate from the purse — the patron will keep changing and the organisation will not.

Share

Leave a comment

In your own governance experience — on a board, as an investor, or inside an institution — have you seen the funding relationship and the oversight function collapse into the same hands? What made it hard to separate them once it had happened?

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

Two massive Russian attacks on Kyiv in less than a week, renewed Iranian threats in the Strait of Hormuz, and a security crackdown in Turkey are just three of the immediate issues shaping the context of the NATO summit in Ankara on July 7–8.

Subscribe now

While Ukraine and Iran will be on the agenda of the NATO summit, the authoritarian drift of its host, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, will be politely overlooked. But as ever, the summit outcome will be determined by the position of the United States.

At last year’s Hague summit, the NATO-sceptical US president, Donald Trump, was placated by the allies’ commitment to spend 5% of their GDP annually on defence by 2035. The challenge this year will be to demonstrate sufficient progress towards that goal, while also addressing Trump’s vision of “NATO 3.0” – involving, according to his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, “a balanced alliance with Europe in the lead for its own defence”.

Progress towards defence spending appears reasonably on track. In 2025 alone, the Atlantic Council notes, “European allies and Canada increased defence spending by 20% from the previous calendar year.” Six NATO allies (the three Baltic states plus Denmark, Poland and Norway) spent more on defence as a share of GDP than the US. Germany, not among that group in 2025, nonetheless has big ambitions. In absolute terms, it is now NATO’s second biggest defence spender. Germany has costed defence procurement plans that run to 2041. These will deliver, according to Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Europe’s largest conventional armed forces. Merz has claimed Germany will be spending 3.5% of GDP on defence as soon as 2029.

Trump seems unable to accept that the NATO allies have made genuine progress in defence.

The allies have also made strenuous efforts to wean themselves off American-sourced defence systems. The UK’s Project Brakestop involves the development of long-range strike missiles without any US components, so creating a completely autonomous British capability. Germany is seeking to buy its own cruise missiles from Israel and Ukraine as a substitute for the deployment US-owned Tomahawks. And in a highly symbolic move (likely to be announced at the summit) the Nato procurement agency will purchase a fleet of Swedish-built SAAB GlobalEye surveillance aircraft to replace its ageing American-made Boeing E-3A AWACS.

But bumps in the road remain. Whereas in 2025, all the NATO allies (bar Iceland, which has no armed forces) met NATO’s 2024 standard of spending 2% of GDP on defence, this will not be repeated in 2026. The Czech government and Hungary are likely to dip below the target. And many spending commitments still need to translate into concrete capabilities.

Europe’s defence industries are working flat out but are at the limits of how fast they can absorb new investment. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte has spoken of an “absorption problem”: the inability of Europe’s defence manufacturers to keep up with the levels of projected spending.

The success of the summit may just be down to luck and the volatile mood of the US president.

Cross-national coordination also remains a problem. Disagreement between Frances’s Dassault Aviation and Airbus (incorporating a German and Spanish stake) led in June to the abandonment of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the €100 billion (£86 billion) joint fighter jet project launched in 2017 as the flagship expression of Franco-German defence ambition.

The success of the summit may just be down to luck and the volatile mood of the US president. Trump seems unable to accept that the NATO allies have made genuine progress in defence. He claimed just days before departing for Ankara it was “ridiculous” that the US continues to support a “one-sided” NATO. That grievance appears to be one reason the meeting may withdraw its endorsement of Albania – a low-spending NATO member – as the 2027 summit venue.

Share

Things could also prove tricky on another of Trump’s pet complaints – the lack of NATO support for the US-Israeli war with Iran. The NATO secretary general, Mark Rutte (who chairs the summit), seems determined to avoid getting too deeply into discussion of the situation.

But if it does intrude, safety will likely be found in the formulation recently agreed by the G7 – welcoming the US-Iran deal, condemning Iran’s nuclear ambitions and supporting a Franco-British led maritime operation in the Strait of Hormuz. Don’t expect a NATO coordinating role in any operation, however. On that, there is no allied consensus.

There will be greater scope at the summit for dealing with Russia’s war against Ukraine and the broader threat to European security that emanates from the Kremlin. The Trump administration has grown increasingly distrusting of Putin and, in parallel, more impressed with the Ukrainian war effort.

This has translated into some positives for Ukraine: the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, will be at the summit, attending the Nato-Ukraine Council and the Ukraine Defence Contact (Ramstein) Group meetings, which coordinate western support for Ukraine.

He will be hoping for more concrete commitments similar to British and German defence packages for Ukraine both announced as part of $60 billion pledge of support for Ukraine at the April meeting of the Ramstein Group in Berlin or the additional air defence provisions to which allies committed at the subsequent meeting in Brussels in June. NATO’s Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative, launched last summer, has also already been a big success in keeping arms and other military aid flowing to Ukraine.

… a pathway to NATO accession for Ukraine will not be spelled out at the summit.

That initiative will be reaffirmed at Ankara, signalling a clear commitment to support for Ukraine from Europe and the deepening of Ukraine-Europe defence links – and at least tolerance by the White House for these efforts, which cannot always be taken for granted, as is evident in Trump’s frequent flip-flopping on sanctions against Russia. What it does not signal is that Ukrainian Nato membership will be on the agenda anytime soon. The US is adamantly against it. So, a pathway to NATO accession for Ukraine will not be spelled out at the summit.

Share

Other items missing from the agenda at Ankara will also reflect the Trump administration’s priorities. It’s no surprise that climate change and Women Peace and Security – a UN-led initiative which recognises and fosters women’s contribution to peacekeeping – have fallen out of favour. Both issues figured in NATO communiques during the Biden period – both disappeared from last year’s Hague summit declaration. Don’t expect a mention at Ankara, despite the fact that some allies continue to press. The British see themselves as champions of WPS initiatives in the alliance, but American diffidence has killed progress. Nato’s agreed WPS Action Plan timed out in 2025; a new one is not in sight. In 2021, Nato adopted a Climate Change and Security Action Plan. One of its few deliverables was an annual Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment. That document has not appeared since 2024.

These omissions are readily explicable. More curious, though, is the lowered priority given to China. NATO’s 2019 London declaration contained NATO’s first ever summit-level statement on China, recognising that the nation’s growing influence brought challenges as well as opportunities – a move engineered by the first Trump administration. Then, Nato’s relevance to the United States was judged by how it was positioned in the emerging era of “strategic competition.” Under Biden a similar logic applied, reinforced by the 2024 Washington summit’s description of China as the “decisive enabler of Russia’s war against Ukraine.2 And yet China disappeared from the 2025 Hague declaration. It was not discussed at Nato’s recent foreign and defence ministerials. Neither is it expected to figure at Ankara.

Why not? The Trump administration’s recent efforts at accommodation with China are part of the answer. Other allies too are happy to see China sidelined from NATO’s business. France, easily perturbed by a globalist NATO, had always been a sceptic when it comes to including China in NATO’s agenda. Many east European allies, meanwhile, see a China focus as distracting NATO from Russia. And big exporters like Germany need to keep Beijing sweet, given the shrinkage of their Russian market.

There will be anxiety and histrionics at Ankara. Trump is not the only big political personality who will be in town. The summit host, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will also want to promote a particular vision of Nato and contemporary security challenges. The summit declaration, like that of 2025, will be short to avoid controversy. But like an iceberg, much lies below the surface. The detailed work of moving to “Nato 3.0” was already agreed at the Nato defence ministerial in mid June. Most of the gaps in the Nato Force Model occasioned by recent US force announcements have already been plugged.

The summit will give rise to much noise, but NATO’s ongoing adaptation to the new reality engendered by shifting US priorities suggests a high degree of underlying resilience.

This analysis draws on Mark Webber’s and Stefan Wolff’s article, published in The Conversation on 6 July 2026.

Share

If record European defence spending still can’t be converted into fielded capability fast enough to matter, is the 5%-by-2035 pledge solving the right problem — or the easiest one to measure?

Leave a comment

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

The G7 summit at Evian from June 15 to 17 is most revealing not for what was agreed, but for what was exposed about the state of play among Europeans, and their relationship with the US. For all the choreography and displays of unity, the summit was, in large part, theatre. It was an attempt to paper over what is becoming increasingly obvious: many of the most critical international issues are now decided without the EU. Brussels is now, at best, an informed bystander.

Subscribe now

This was obvious when the US president, Donald Trump, signed a physical copy of his deal with Iran at a post-G7 dinner at the Palace of Versailles hosted by Emmanuel Macron. It was a diplomatic coup for France, rather than a plan hatched by the EU.

The G7 produced nine joint declarations and seemingly reaffirmed more than just the bare minimum of western unity that has been possible of late. The leaders’ statement on geopolitical issues included strong language on Ukraine. The G7 promised “to increase the delivery of air defence capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities” and “to increase the pressure on the Russian war economy”.

Yet, the statement fell short on concrete provisions and timelines. And it notably lacked the commitment to the “robust and legally binding security guarantees” and “the deployment of the Multinational Force – Ukraine” that France, Germany and the UK (the “E3”) had emphasised in their joint declaration with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky on June 7.

The E3 and Ukraine mini-summit showed European diplomatic coordination at its most effective. Évian, by contrast, showed how little of that coordination carries into the decisions that ultimately matter.

The spectacle of European leaders publicly repudiating their own council president will have given Moscow the satisfaction of knowing that Europe still cannot speak with a single voice.

Europe’s struggle for relevance is particularly obvious in relation to Ukraine. The last meaningful – if hardly constructive – negotiations occurred in the so-called “Geneva track” in February, mediated by Trump’s Witkoff-Kushner team (which was simultaneously involved in talks with Iran). But while Witkoff reported “meaningful progress”, Zelensky commented that “on the political track there was dialogue [but not] the same level of progress … as on the military side.” Zelensky also called for Europeans to be involved in the next round of talks, which had originally been scheduled to take place in Abu Dhabi but were cancelled in the wake of war with Iran.

Meanwhile, Europe’s own efforts also failed. Putin immediately rejected the call from E3 and Ukraine for direct talks. This rejection was further reinforced in a June 19 essay penned by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, accusing Europe of complicity in the 2014 political crisis in Ukraine which ousted the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and, in Lavrov’s view, precipitated the conflict. He added that the Europeans had subsequently sabotaged any attempts at peace.

By the time Lavrov’s essay appeared, the EU was already at loggerheads with itself. Earlier that day, EU leaders gathering for a summit in Brussels discovered that António Costa, the European Council president, had instructed his office to reach out to the Kremlin — without consulting member states — to lay the groundwork for potential peace negotiations with Russia over Ukraine. Their reaction ranged from surprise to outrage. Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and Macron both publicly pushed back against Costa. Macron stated that “he [Costa] cannot represent [EU states] when security guarantees are at stake”.

Share

The episode was damaging for reasons that go well beyond procedural embarrassment. The spectacle of European leaders publicly repudiating their own council president will have given Moscow the satisfaction of knowing that Europe still cannot speak with a single voice.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, tried to bring the messaging under control. At her press conference after the EU leaders’ summit, she noted that “sooner or later Russia will need to come to the negotiating table, and when that comes we need a united European message to President Putin”. That ambition, however, contrasts sharply with the reality of the earlier Costa episode.

Diplomatic embarrassment is not the only issue when it comes to how quickly Europe will be able to close the persistent gap between ambition and reality.

On June 8, the German government formalised its withdrawal from the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), the €100 billion (£86 billion) joint fighter jet project launched in 2017 as the flagship expression of Franco-German defence ambition. FCAS also included engines, sensors and a digital intelligence network known as “combat cloud”.

One point of contention was reportedly the role played by French aerospace giant Dassault. Germany wanted more leadership of a project in which the main partners are had divergent visions of the end product.

This Germany aspiration to “lead or substantially shape” future European air combat systems may seem rational given the country’s financial muscle and engineering prowess. With more than €750 billion committed to rebuilding its armed forces by 2030, Germany’s instinct that this investment should produce proportionate industrial and strategic leadership is understandable. But when applied to European defence cooperation, it is counterproductive.

While European states, including Germany, have repeatedly stressed the need for collective action on defence, there is a repeated fallback on national initiatives. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Europe continues to struggle to effectively coordinate efforts.

Europe’s ambition … for strategic autonomy or “going it alone”… is not matched with an ability to act coherently.

In a development that neatly illustrates this point, on June 20 the UK unveiled three prototype long-range strike missiles built without any US-manufactured components. The product of an 18-month programme known as Project Brakestop, the explicit purpose of developing this capability is to remove Washington’s ability to veto their deployment in Ukraine.

On the positive side, the UK’s ability to pull this off is commendable. It encapsulates the transformation in European thinking about the transatlantic relationship under Trump – and the capability to follow through on this. But as an act of strengthening European strategic sovereignty, it falls short. It is British rather than European.

Share

Europe’s ambition to rise to the simultaneous challenges of Trump’s transactionalism and Putin’s adventurism has been stated loudly and clearly on more than one occasion over the past 18 months or so. This ambition is most commonly expressed in the quest for strategic autonomy or “going it alone”. But it is not matched with an ability to act coherently.

This analysis draws on the article by Richard Whitman and Stefan Wolff published in The Conversation on 25 June 2026.

Share

Germany has committed over €750 billion to national rearmament by 2030, while simultaneously withdrawing from FCAS — the continent’s largest joint defence project. If Europe’s biggest economy is choosing national industrial leadership over cooperative architecture, what does that mean for the strategic autonomy project? Is European strategic sovereignty achievable through national rearmament alone, or does it require a fundamentally different approach to joint procurement and command structures?

Leave a comment

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

The AI Frame War — Part 4 of 4

This is Part 4 of The AI Frame War, a four-part PDQ series. Part 1 mapped where major governments stand after June 2026’s pivotal moves — and identified Colorado’s AI Act as the most rights-protective operative framework in the US. Part 2 examined the two models competing for the world’s uncommitted governments, and described Colorado as holding the rights line inside a country whose federal government was moving in the opposite direction. Part 3 used Canada as the clearest case study in how a democracy makes that choice under pressure — and chose growth over rights. This fourth piece covers the American exception that no longer exists. Each piece stands on its own; read together they map the AI frame war — and how the terrain shifted in one defining month.

Subscribe now

On 14 May 2026, Governor Jared Polis signed SB 26-189, which repeals Colorado’s original AI Act and replaces it with a disclosure-based framework that contains none of the rights-protective mechanisms the original law was built around. The rights-frame exception inside US federal AI policy — the thread this series identified as the most consequential internal contradiction in American AI governance — is gone. What follows is not an account of how Colorado was defeated in court. It is an account of how Colorado made a political choice, what drove that choice, and what it tells every board about the structural resilience of rights-based AI governance when it faces organised pressure.

1. Colorado didn’t wait to be defeated — it chose its exit.

The sequence matters. On 9 April 2026, xAI filed a federal lawsuit challenging SB 205 on constitutional grounds. On 24 April, the Department of Justice intervened to support xAI’s position, arguing SB 205’s disclosure requirements constituted compelled speech and its algorithmic discrimination provisions imposed impermissible race- and sex-conscious obligations. On 27 April, a federal magistrate blocked enforcement of SB 205. Colorado’s legislature introduced a replacement bill on 1 May. Polis signed it thirteen days later. The court never ruled on the substantive constitutional questions. Colorado moved before it had to.

Governor Polis had flagged concerns about SB 205 before the lawsuit existed. When the lawsuit, DOJ backing, and a court order arrived simultaneously, the political cost of defending the law crystallised — and turned out higher than the political cost of replacing it. The federal apparatus did not need to win in court. It needed to make the political calculation clear, and Colorado did the rest.

For boards and governance teams: the lesson is not that rights frameworks cannot survive litigation. It is that a rights framework survives only if the political cost of abandoning it is higher than the political cost of defending it. That threshold is set by how deeply entrenched the framework is — and Colorado’s SB 205, a statute eighteen months old, contested from both industry and civil society, never yet enforced, did not clear it.

2. Formal preemption was never needed — the mechanism is the message.

The Trump administration’s strategy was explicit from its December 2025 executive order: challenge conflicting state AI laws through litigation, develop a preemptive national framework, treat strong state governance as regulatory friction. That strategy did not require Congress to pass preemption legislation. It required one lawsuit from a well-resourced company, DOJ backing, and a court order. Colorado supplied the rest.

The White House’s March 2026 National Policy Framework for AI recommended that Congress broadly preempt state AI laws deemed to impose “undue burdens.” Congress has not acted. It didn’t need to. The informal preemption — executive order, lawsuit, DOJ intervention, court block, replacement legislation — produced the same result without a single vote on Capitol Hill.

What this means for any jurisdiction watching: a rights framework that has not passed into deep institutional structures — enforcement infrastructure, board-level compliance obligations, political constituencies whose interests are now bound to the framework — is vulnerable to exactly this sequence. The EU AI Act has survived because unwinding it is more expensive than complying with it. That pressure from economic competitiveness agendas is real — but the EU AI Act has passed the point where economic argument alone can reverse it: enforcement infrastructure, compliance investment, and political constituencies are already embedded. A state statute facing its first lawsuit, with an unenthusiastic governor and an organised federal opposition, does not enjoy that protection.

Share

3. Canada and Colorado reached the same destination by different routes.

Part 3 of this series documented how Canada abandoned AIDA — a rights-based AI bill cleared for committee passage — under three structural forces: economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience. No democratic vote against rights governance. No constitutional defeat. A political mechanism — prorogation — resolved it without requiring either side to win the argument.

Colorado’s route was different: executive order, lawsuit, DOJ intervention, court block, replacement statute. But the destination is identical. Both jurisdictions had rights-based AI frameworks. Both chose lighter alternatives before those frameworks took full legal effect. Neither required a democratic mandate against the rights approach — both were resolved through political mechanisms that bypassed the contest the rights frame needed in order to win.

Read Canada not as a country that changed its mind, and Colorado not as a state that lost a legal fight. Read both as case studies in the structural conditions under which rights-based AI governance fails to entrench before pressure arrives. Those conditions — economic exposure, US-alignment pressure, frameworks that have not hardened into institutional infrastructure — are present in more than a dozen other democracies. The pattern is not coincidental. It is the operating logic of the industrial frame.

4. The US has defaulted to the industrial frame — what that means for your organisation.

SB 26-189, which Polis signed on 14 May, takes effect 1 January 2027. It contains disclosure requirements and consumer notification rights for automated decision-making technology. It does not contain risk tiers, mandatory impact assessments, algorithmic discrimination duties, or enforcement provisions comparable to the original Act. As of today, there is no operative state AI rights framework in the United States. The Federal Executive Order of 2 June 2026 — “Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security,” EO 14409 — establishes voluntary benchmarking frameworks for frontier AI models and prioritises cybersecurity measures. Voluntary. No mandatory impact assessments. No consumer rights of appeal. No board-level accountability obligations.

For organisations that have been building AI governance to Colorado’s standard for US market coverage: that standard no longer exists in the form you were building to. The floor you were planning around has been replaced by a disclosure obligation that takes effect in six months.

The practical implication is clear: if you are building AI governance to protect your organisation’s position across markets, the relevant rights-framework standards are the EU AI Act, South Korea’s AI Basic Act (in force January 2026), and — for certain sectors like financial services and healthcare — UK and Australian frameworks. If you have built to those standards, you are ahead. The “build to the strictest applicable standard” default that Part 2 of this series identified as the pragmatic corporate position now has an unambiguous answer in the US context: the strictest US standard is the EU AI Act, applicable to any system making consequential decisions about people in EU markets.

5. The contest is not over — but which rights frameworks are robust enough to plan around has become a more specific question.

Neither Canada nor Colorado represent the end of the rights frame’s prospects. South Korea’s AI Basic Act took effect January 2026 and covers a genuinely competitive AI economy — proof that the rights model can take root and hold outside Europe. Brazil’s AI legislation remains in progress. The EU AI Act is generating enforcement activity and compliance infrastructure across markets. The democratic rights coalition is smaller than it was in June — but it has not disappeared.

What has changed is the answer to a precise question: which rights frameworks are structurally robust enough so that you can plan your governance around them for the next five years? The evidence from the last six weeks suggests the answer requires two conditions. First, deep institutional entrenchment: not just statutory text, but enforcement infrastructure, board-level compliance structures, and political constituencies whose interests are now bound to the framework’s survival. Second, insulation from the three structural forces Part 3 named — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience — which together make the political cost of abandonment lower than the political cost of defence.

On those two tests, the EU AI Act and South Korea pass. Canada’s AIDA and Colorado’s SB 205 did not. For boards making AI governance investment decisions now: that is the distinction to apply to every jurisdiction in your operating footprint. Not “is there a rights-based law in progress?” but “has it hardened into the kind of institutional structure that survives a well-funded legal challenge and an unsympathetic federal government?” If the answer is no — plan for the floor to move, and build above it regardless. A governance framework built only to the statutory minimum, without institutional depth, does not hold — as Colorado just demonstrated.

Four articles. Four moves. One month that redrew AI governance.

Part 1 mapped the split: two AI governance frames both operative in June 2026, the world’s governments dividing between them, no global standard yet settled. Part 2 showed what the two models mean for every organisation — the fiduciary bet every board is already making, whether it knows it or not. Part 3 showed how Canada, under economic pressure and US-alignment pull, chose the industrial frame over a rights bill that had cleared committee — and named the three structural forces that made abandonment the rational political choice. This fourth piece shows how Colorado made the same choice by a different mechanism: not prorogation and legislative lapse, but a well-funded corporate lawsuit, a DOJ intervention, a court order, and thirteen days of legislative action.

The pattern across all four is the same: rights frameworks that are not deeply institutionally entrenched do not survive sustained pressure. Canada’s bill died in committee; Colorado’s act lasted months before organised federal and corporate opposition replaced it. What survived — the EU AI Act, South Korea’s AI Basic Act — did so because those frameworks have reached the stage where abandonment is no longer cheap. They have generated compliance infrastructure, enforcement expectations, board-level accountability, and political constituencies whose interests are now bound to the framework’s survival. The cost of unwinding them is higher than the cost of complying with them. That is what entrenchment means in practice.

The rights frame did not lose the AI governance contest in June 2026. It lost two of its most visible champions, in two different countries, in four weeks, through two different mechanisms. That is not the same thing as losing the contest. The contest remains open. But the field is smaller — and the lesson of what just happened is precise: in the AI frame war, the question is never just which framework your jurisdiction has adopted. It is whether that framework is built to survive the pressure that arrives when the stakes get high enough. On current evidence, there are two answers to that question. Build to the EU AI Act and South Korea standards. Everything else is provisional.

Which of the two survival conditions — deep institutional entrenchment, or insulation from the three structural forces this series named (economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience) — is harder to achieve in the jurisdictions your organisation operates in? And does your board’s AI governance strategy account for the possibility that the floor moves before it takes full effect?

Leave a comment

That is The AI Frame War — the map, the models, the pivot, the choice. Four pieces that together trace how the structure of the AI governance contest shifted more in one month than in the two years before it. We hope you will read it, share it with colleagues, and that it helps guide your thinking when addressing these issues.

Subscribe now

This series is free. Subscribe at navigatingthevortex.com — and get the story before the consensus forms.

The AI Frame War — Part 3 of 4

This is Part 3 of The AI Frame War, a four-part Navigating the Vortex PDQ series. Part 1 mapped where governments stand after June 2026’s pivotal moves. Part 2 examined the two models now in direct contest for the world’s uncommitted governments. This piece shows how one democracy made that choice in real time — and what the sequence reveals about how every democracy will have to make that choice. Part 4 (tomorrow) covers the American exception: Colorado’s AI Act vs. the federal Executive Order. Each piece stands on its own; read together they map the AI frame war.

Subscribe now

On 4 June 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney launched ‘AI for All’, Canada’s new national artificial intelligence strategy. The $2.3 billion industrial plan targets a lift in AI adoption from just over 12% of businesses — below the OECD average — to 60% by 2034. What AI for All does not contain is binding AI legislation. The Artificial Intelligence and Data Act — AIDA — which had cleared committee in Parliament, will not be revived. The rights frame was not defeated. It was abandoned. And the three forces that drove that abandonment — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and legislative convenience — are present in more than a dozen other democracies right now.

Parts 1 and 2 of this series mapped the global AI-regulation landscape and the contest between the EU’s rights model and the US industrial model. This piece uses Canada as the clearest available case study in how that choice is made in practice: what collapsed, what replaced it, and what the sequence tells every board operating outside the EU.

1. AIDA’s death was procedural, not principled — and that’s the point.

AIDA was Part III of Bill C-27, the Digital Charter Implementation Act, introduced in June 2022 alongside the Consumer Privacy Protection Act. It passed a second reading and was referred to committee in April 2023, where it remained — contested by civil society and industry alike — as Parliament worked through proposed amendments. When Prime Minister Trudeau prorogued Parliament on 6 January 2025, all pending legislation died on the order paper, including both AIDA and the accompanying privacy reform. The prorogation was triggered by a political crisis. But what it created was an opportunity — and the Carney government, elected in April 2025, chose not to restore it.

The position was confirmed after AI for All’s launch: the strategy “does not introduce comprehensive AI legislation in Canada, and confirms that such legislation is, for now, not contemplated. The previously tabled AIDA is unlikely to be revived.” The rights frame did not lose an argument. It lost a political moment, and then a political choice followed. Those are different things — and regulators in every jurisdiction that has rights-based AI legislation in its pipeline should read the distinction carefully.

2. This is a story about executive power over regulatory design.

A rights agenda that had passed out of committee was overridden by an executive reorientation. This matters beyond Canada because the mechanism is structural, not idiosyncratic: any rights commitment in AI governance is only as durable as its political entrenchment. Passed legislation is more durable than strategy; legislation hardened into institutional structures is more durable still. The EU AI Act, which is now in force and generating compliance obligations across markets, represents deep entrenchment. A bill at committee stage does not.

The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) review sharpens this point. Canada is currently renegotiating its trade relationship with the United States. In March 2026, the US Trade Representative’s annual trade estimate report named Canada’s digital sovereignty measures as trade barriers for the first time — a signal that Washington intends to treat strong AI governance as a friction to be negotiated away. Canada entered those talks without binding AI legislation. The executive that might have defended a rights framework instead launched an industrial strategy. For boards whose operating jurisdictions have AI rights legislation in progress but not yet entrenched, the Canadian sequence is a risk template: the window between ‘cleared committee’ and ‘hardened into law’ is when executive reversal costs the least.

3. Three forces drove the pivot, and none is unique to Canada.

The first is economic lag. Statistics Canada recorded that 12.2% of businesses were using AI in the second quarter of 2025 — below the OECD average, and behind the UK (20.5%) and Germany (19.75%) among its fastest-accelerating G7 peers. Canada’s own SME AI Adoption Blueprint, prepared for the G7, documented that gap and made closing it the central case for urgency. A government looking at those numbers and at a rights-based legislative framework that had attracted sustained criticism from both industry and civil society made a rational political calculation.

The second is US-alignment pressure. Canada’s trade exposure to the United States is structural — roughly 75% of Canadian exports go south. The CUSMA 2026 review was live when AI for All launched. The US Trade Representative had named Canada’s digital sovereignty measures as trade barriers three months earlier. An AI rights framework that Washington would treat as a trade friction was a harder political sell in that environment than an industrial strategy aligned with the direction the US had already set at federal level.

The third is legislative convenience. AIDA was not a standalone bill. It was packaged inside C-27 alongside the Consumer Privacy Protection Act, which had its own critics and its own contested history. Letting the whole bill die cleared a thorny legislative agenda without requiring the government to defeat either part on its merits. The political cost of abandonment was low. The political cost of revival, during a CUSMA negotiation, was considerably higher.

The combination of these three forces — economic urgency, trade-relationship alignment, and legislative convenience — is not specific to Canada’s geography, government, or political history. They are structural features of any other democracy with deep US trade exposure, a growth gap to close, and AI rights legislation that has not yet passed into law.

Share

4. Every democracy is watching — but not from the same position.

The governments most exposed to the same three forces are not a uniform bloc, and their varying responses matter for understanding which way the contest goes next. South Korea chose the opposite direction. Its AI Basic Act — the Asia-Pacific’s first comprehensive AI law — was promulgated in January 2025 and took effect on 22 January 2026. It establishes national governance structures, trustworthiness requirements, and binding obligations for high-impact AI systems in healthcare, energy, and public services. South Korea has large, globally competitive domestic AI-capable firms that might have argued for the industrial model. It chose rights-focused governance anyway. That shows the EU rights model is genuinely competitive in Asia, not only in Europe — it is not losing by default.

Australia is heading Canada’s way. In September 2024, the Australian government proposed ten mandatory guardrails for high-risk AI uses — a clear trajectory toward binding legislation. By December 2025, it had abandoned them, confirming that existing laws and sector regulators would carry the load, supported by voluntary guidance and an AI Safety Institute with advisory functions and no enforcement powers. In early 2026, Australia signed an AI safety cooperation agreement with Canada. Even if the pivot was quieter, the direction of travel is the same.

Singapore has taken a third path: voluntary, pragmatic, and deliberately non-binding. Its Model AI Governance Framework has been progressively extended; in January 2026 it published the world’s first governance framework specifically for agentic AI. There is no binding legislation. The posture is “show don’t mandate” — a framework that establishes Singapore as a reference jurisdiction without the compliance costs that would follow a binding AI Act, keeping its options open as the contest develops.

Brazil holds a rights-leaning position — it appeared as part of the rights coalition in Part 2 of this series — but its exposure to US trade pressure and a domestic growth gap that mirrors Canada’s create the same structural pressures. Its AI legislation is in progress, not yet entrenched. The three forces that drove Canada’s pivot are present. The timing is the only difference.

What the variation across these four governments shows is that the contest is genuinely open. The EU rights model can take root outside Europe — South Korea’s binding legislation proves it. But the Canadian template is already replicating in Australia. The question is which template spreads faster.

5. ‘Trust’ inside an industrial strategy is not a rights framework.

Canada’s AI for All positions trust as the strategy’s “north star.” Its first pillar — Protecting Canadians and Safeguarding Democracy — commits the government to legislation on deepfakes, AI-generated content labelling, and children’s safety online. A $50 million commitment funds the Canadian AI Safety Institute. The language of protection, responsibility, and accountability runs through the document.

None of it is equivalent to AIDA. AIDA would have imposed binding obligations on developers and deployers of high-impact AI systems: mandatory impact assessments, risk-management frameworks, documented human oversight requirements, and serious adverse incident reporting. Contravention carried penalties of up to 3% of global revenue. AI for All contains none of those mechanisms.

The distinction matters. Trust that enables adoption means trust that AI systems are reliable, accurate, and available — a design principle, enforced through reputational pressure and market incentives. Trust that constrains harm means a legal right to challenge a consequential AI decision — a compliance obligation with enforcement teeth. Only one gives a citizen a legal claim. Only one gives an organisation a defined liability exposure that its board must govern.

Industrial strategies consistently adopt the vocabulary of rights frameworks, because doing so reduces the political cost of departing from them. The word ‘trust’ in AI for All is not incidental. It is precisely the term that makes an industrial strategy sound like a continuation of a rights agenda when it is not. Every democracy that pivots will call its first pillar something like ‘trust’ or ‘responsible AI’ or ‘safe and beneficial deployment.’ Reading those phrases as equivalent to a rights framework is the category error the frame war is engineered to produce.

Subscribe now

Read Canada not as a country changing its mind, but as the conditions under which any democracy could or would.

The three forces — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and the political cost of defending rights legislation through a trade negotiation — are structural. They apply wherever growth lags, US trade exposure is real, and AI rights legislation has not yet hardened into institutional structures that survive executive reorientation. Canada did not invent a new political logic. It followed an old one.

The question for boards operating outside the EU is not whether your jurisdiction will face this choice. It will. The question is whether your organisation’s governance framework is built to the standard that survives the pivot — or only to the standard your jurisdiction currently requires. Those two standards are not the same when the political weather changes. In Canada, the weather just changed.

The three forces that drove Canada’s choice — economic lag, US-alignment pressure, and the political cost of defending rights legislation through elections — are present in some degree in every OECD jurisdiction. Which of these is most visible in your sector or region right now, and does that change how your board thinks about AI governance?

Tomorrow — Part 4: America is the only democracy fighting its own government over AI. Colorado just made it official.

Leave a comment

This series is free. Subscribe at navigatingthevortex.com — and get the story before the consensus forms.

The AI Frame War — Part 2 of 4

This is Part 2 of The AI Frame War, a four-part PDQ series. Yesterday’s Part 1 mapped where major governments stand after June 2026’s three pivotal moves. This piece examines the two models competing for the rest of the world’s allegiance. Part 3 (Thursday) uses Canada as a case study in the choice every democracy faces. Part 4 (Friday) covers the American exception — Colorado’s AI Act vs. the federal Executive Order. Each piece stands on its own; together they map the AI frame war.

Subscribe now

Two incompatible models are competing to become the world's AI standard. The contest is not between the US and the EU — it is between two models of how AI should be governed. Most governments have not yet chosen between them. The two models competing for their allegiance are already determining what every organisation can build, sell, and deploy — and in which markets.

The EU AI Act is in force and exporting its rules through market access — the Brussels Effect that Anu Bradford named. On 2 June the US federal government, under the Trump administration, signed an Executive Order recasting foreign AI regulation as a threat to American competitiveness. Between those two poles sit the rest of the world’s governments — from Seoul to Brasília to Singapore — most of which have not yet chosen.

Yesterday’s Part 1 mapped where major governments now stand after June 2026’s three pivotal moves. This piece examines what is driving the map: two models — one built around rights, one around industrial power — in active contest for the world’s uncommitted majority, and what that contest means for every organisation that must place a bet on which one prevails.

1. Regulatory models spread through trade, not through persuasion. The Brussels Effect is real: the EU exports its rules by making market access conditional on compliance. It worked with GDPR because data standards are cheap to adopt — a privacy policy, a consent mechanism, a data-processing agreement. The AI Act is categorically harder. Compliance means product redesign, board-level accountability structures, mandatory impact assessments, and documented human oversight for high-risk systems — changes that take years and cost real money. Enforcement has barely begun. Diffusion of the rights model to the rest of the world is not assured by inertia; it requires active adoption pressure. That is precisely why the US Executive Order matters: Washington has recognised that the contest is about the global standard, not only the domestic one, and has entered it explicitly.

2. The race for the uncommitted majority is active and not yet won. The rights-model coalition — the EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, and now Colorado — is real. So is the pressure pulling against it. India, the Gulf states, and much of Southeast Asia are watching Canada’s calculation and running the same numbers: rights compliance is expensive; industrial deployment is fast; US-alignment carries its own strategic value. The G7 met at Évian and produced no common framework. The prize is the majority of the world’s governments that have not yet committed to either model. Neither side has won it.

Share

3. The multilateral gap is the contest’s decisive vulnerability. There is no WTO for AI — no binding international regime, no enforcement mechanism, no dispute-resolution process. Évian produced communiqué language, not a framework. The advantage goes to whichever model is first written into a trade condition — and the EU’s single market gives it the most powerful first-mover tool. For boards with cross-border trade exposure — procurement contracts, vendor agreements, digital services — the signal to watch is not another summit communiqué: it is the first bilateral or multilateral trade agreement that makes AI-framework alignment a market-access condition. That is when the contest moves from a regulatory preference into a compliance obligation your board will have to act on.

4. For an organisation anywhere, this is a fiduciary bet, not a regulatory one. If the rights model prevails, high-risk-AI accountability becomes a board duty with defined liability; if the industrial model prevails, obligations are lighter and faster but thinner on redress. Every product roadmap is already being built inside one assumption — and the wrong one means costly retrofits, regulatory exposure, and competitive disadvantage arriving at the same time. For boards outside the US sourcing AI systems from US vendors: those products were built to the federal industrial standard — no mandatory impact assessments, no consumer disclosure requirements, no right to appeal. Deploying them in EU, UK, Australian or Brazilian regulatory environments may leave a compliance gap between what the vendor built to and what your jurisdiction requires. Procurement due diligence now includes asking which framework your AI vendors were built to.

5. Every organisation now occupies a geopolitical position. Even “the US” is not one bloc: its federal government races on the industrial model while states like Colorado hold the rights line (Part 4). The pragmatic corporate default — comply with the strictest standard in any market you serve — quietly favours the rights model and puts organisations that adopt it ahead of those that build only to the federal standard. That default holds as long as the contest remains open.

Subscribe now

The question for any organisation, in any market, is no longer which standard is cheaper to meet — it is which one you can afford to be caught on the wrong side of.

For multinational organisations already operating in rights-frame jurisdictions — the EU, UK, Australia, Japan, Brazil, or now Colorado — that question has an answer worth using: your governance approach is more internationally aligned than your US-federal-framework competitors. If you have built to the EU AI Act, you are ahead. That alignment is a procurement and stakeholder argument you can make explicitly — in a board paper, in a tender, in a client conversation. There is no neutral position from which to wait the contest out.

Tomorrow — Part 3: Canada had a rights-based AI law ready. It chose growth instead — and every democracy will face the same choice.

Leave a comment

This series is free. Subscribe at navigatingthevortex.com — and get the story before the consensus forms.

The world’s AI-regulation map shifted more in June 2026 than in the prior two years combined — and the divide it now shows will shape every government, organisation and board’s decision-making.

The AI Frame War — Part 1 of 4

This is Part 1 of The AI Frame War, a four-part series publishing Tuesday through Friday this week. Part 2 (tomorrow) examines two models now in direct competition for the world’s AI rules. Part 3 (Thursday) uses Canada as a case study for the choice every democracy will face. Part 4 (Friday) covers the American exception — Colorado’s AI Act vs. federal policy. Each piece stands on its own; together they map the AI frame war.

Subscribe now

In one momentous month, governments around the world are dividing between two futures for AI — one where it is a right to be protected, one where it is a strategic asset to be deployed. June 2026 made three of those choices visible.

Since 2 June 2026, three governments have set their positions. The US federal government signed a Federal Executive Order framing AI as a national-security and competitiveness asset; Colorado’s AI Act — the first US state law requiring companies to protect consumers from high-stakes AI decisions — takes effect on 30 June, six days from now; and Canada shelved its rights-based bill on 4 June in favour of a $2.3 billion industrial strategy.

The G7 met in Évian (15–17 June) and produced no common AI governance framework. The summit communiqué’s AI section covers protection for children from chatbots and a pledge to accelerate ‘safe and beneficial deployment’ — language broad enough to contain both the rights frame and the industrial frame simultaneously, and therefore settles nothing. Seven governments. One communiqué. No answer to the question this series asks.

How the map is drawn: each jurisdiction’s position on the horizontal axis reflects three factors — the stated primary purpose of the law or strategy (rights protection vs economic development vs state authority); the degree of binding legal obligation; and alignment with international frameworks such as the EU AI Act and the OECD AI Principles. Left of centre on the axis = rights or risk protection is the primary purpose; right of centre = industrial promotion or strategic advantage.

1. The map changed, not the territory. In June 2026, intent became law. Three governments committed their AI frames to statute or official national strategy this month — and the frame a government chooses shapes every regulation, procurement decision, and board agenda that follows. The territory did not change: AI’s capabilities, risks, and economic potential are what they were in May. What changed is the map — the legal and political framework governments use to define what AI governance is for. A government that has classified AI as a national-security and competitiveness asset will not later write a rights-based statute. Read the frame and the downstream laws become predictable.

Share

2. Canada is the canary. A G7 democracy with deep EU ties had a rights-based law ready, let it die, and chose growth. This is not simply a Canadian story — it is the template every democracy under adoption pressure now faces.

3. The US is not one country on AI. The Federal Executive Order and the Colorado Act rest on incompatible theories of what AI is: the Executive Order treats it as a national asset to be deployed without constraint; Colorado’s law treats it as a potential threat to citizens that must be regulated to protect rights, and both are now operative. This is now a contradiction embedded in law, not a policy disagreement on its way to committee resolution. For any organisation operating in the US market, this is not abstract. Colorado’s law takes effect in six days. There is no reconciliation mechanism — boards must satisfy both frameworks simultaneously, make a legal bet on which will survive, or build to both at additional cost. For boards outside the US: if you serve US consumers, Colorado’s obligations apply to you regardless of where you are incorporated. If you source from US vendors, check which framework they were built to — federal permissiveness does not travel.

4. The democratic convergence is real but fragile. The EU, South Korea, Japan, the UK, Brazil, Australia and now Colorado share a rights frame — the closest thing to a global standard the AI governance field has produced. A coalition, not a consensus: the member governments agree on the same rights-based outcome but for different underlying reasons and with different levels of commitment. A true consensus would mean internalising a shared principle — much harder to defect from. Canada just showed how fast a coalition member leaves when growth pressure and US-alignment pull the same way.

5. For a board, this map is a planning document, not a curiosity. Where your jurisdictions sit determines which compliance regime your AI roadmap is being built inside this year. The next move to watch: which democracy outside the EU-US axis recalculates after Canada — and whether the US split deepens — more states passing their own rights-based AI laws, or the ideological divide between federal and state frameworks hardening — or is blocked by federal law asserting constitutional supremacy over state AI regulation.

The question isn’t whether democracies converge on a rights frame. It’s how many defect before the rights-frame coalition hardens into a standard — and Canada just showed the price of leaving is lower than it looked. Watch who recalculates next.

Subscribe now

Tomorrow — Part 2: Two Incompatible Models for AI Are Competing for Global Dominance. The EU and the US are running fundamentally different AI-regulation models; every country, organisation and board is already inside one of them — whether they know it or not.

Leave a comment

This series is free. Subscribe at navigatingthevortex.com — and get the story before the consensus forms.

Subscribe now

Over the past month, there has been a notable increase in the intensity of the air war in Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Strikes in mid- and late-May and early June have been characterised by significantly larger numbers of drones and missiles deployed by Russia in single attacks, leading to more destruction and more casualties.

At the same time, Russian territorial gains on the ground have slowed significantly, and in some cases have been reversed by successful Ukrainian counter-attacks.

The change in intensity in the air war, however, is what generates headlines, and for good reason. Two consecutive Russian attacks on May 13 and 14 were the largest in the war to date.

Ten days later, a similar strike hit Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. And a week after that, Russia launched yet another large-scale strike.

Just focusing on the Russian strikes, however, masks an important pattern of increasingly effective Ukrainian retaliation.

This series of Russian and Ukrainian airstrikes represents a high-intensity retaliation cycle. Ukraine responds to a Russian strike, which Moscow then uses to justify its next massive strike, and so on.

The first Russian attack in May was followed by Ukrainian strikes on the Moscow region. The second one saw Ukrainian strikes on St Petersburg on June 3, just before Vladimir Putin’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum was due to begin there.

At the same time, Ukraine has also intensified its strikes on Crimea and critical Russian supply lines to the peninsula, which Moscow has illegally occupied since 2014.

This series of Russian and Ukrainian airstrikes represents a high-intensity retaliation cycle. Ukraine responds to a Russian strike, which Moscow then uses to justify its next massive strike, and so on.

What is new is both the scale of the Russian strikes, with larger numbers of drones and missiles compared even with the peak of attacks in late 2025, and the quickening cycle of these tit-for-tat attacks.

Ukrainian attacks deep into Russia are no longer just symbolic but highly effective – prompting Russia to accuse Ukraine of a terror campaign, in an attempt to deflect from its own systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure.

In their levels of destruction and civilian casualties, the Russian strikes also seem more effective than in the past – and Ukraine’s air defences less so. But this is only partially true. Ukraine’s intercept rate of drones remains high. However, the larger number of drones being deployed by Russia means that, in absolute numbers, more drones hit their targets.

Russia has also deployed more missiles in recent strikes, which Ukraine finds harder to intercept – not least because its stockpiles of anti-missile defences have been depleted over time, with the decrease in US support since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. The recent diversion of US interceptors to the American war effort in the Middle East has also run down the stocks of these defence systems that are available to Kyiv.

Russia has thus been presented with an opportunity it is ruthlessly exploiting. But how sustainable is the current pattern?

The scale and frequency of the past four weeks is probably beyond Russia’s capacity to sustain indefinitely. While still large in scale, the strikes in late May and early June did not involve the same number of munitions as the first wave.

Russia is clearly able to mass-produce cheap attack drones, but less able to do the same for missiles. So, sustaining larger-scale attacks over time is likely to decrease their frequency, while more frequent attacks will mean a more limited scale.

A mixture of the two is most likely – a sustained campaign of frequent massed drone strikes, with intermittent spikes of large missile barrages.

Sustaining larger-scale attacks over time is likely to decrease their frequency, while more frequent attacks will mean a more limited scale.

Share

While this may be a sustainable attack pattern for Russia, it does not mean the current level of effectiveness is equally sustainable. Ukrainian air defences will adapt and become more effective, including against Russian missiles.

Kyiv’s defence cooperation with the EU is simultaneously also improving. The lifting of Hungary’s veto on €40 billion (£34.6bn) of EU reimbursements for military support is likely to free additional funds to supply critical air defence systems to Ukraine.

Even with a sustained Russian air campaign, a manageable equilibrium is likely to set in over time. But critically, this will not merely be characterised by better Ukrainian defences against Russian attacks – but also by more effective Ukrainian strikes at Moscow’s critical war infrastructure.

The Russian air campaign, and the war against Ukraine more generally, will thus become more costly for the Kremlin, and not just on the battlefield inside Ukraine.

Whether this simply creates a different stalemate at a more costly level for both sides in their ongoing war of attrition, or prompts them to reassess their exit strategies, remains to be seen.

For Moscow, there is a hard choice to be made: towards escalation, including potential nuclear mobilisation, or towards a peace deal. The middle ground of simply continuing with his campaign as is is quickly eroding, because none of Putin’s strategic goals in the war can be achieved this way, and the ongoing waste of resources cannot be sustained indefinitely.

The middle ground of simply continuing with his campaign as is is quickly eroding, because none of Putin’s strategic goals in the war can be achieved this way.

On the Ukrainian side, the statement by Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that Ukraine’s recent strikes on Russia put the country on an equal footing with Moscow in negotiations, hints at Kyiv’s willingness to negotiate an end to the war directly with Moscow. However, it may take several more rounds in the air campaign retaliation cycle before the Kremlin reaches a similar conclusion.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s and Tetyana Malyarenko’s article published in The Conversation on 4 June 2026.

Share

Leave a comment

Stefan and Tetyana argue that Moscow’s middle ground — continuing the ongoing war of attrition — is “quickly eroding.” Zelensky has already signalled negotiating readiness. What would it take for the Kremlin to reach a similar conclusion — and does the currently escalating retaliation cycle make that moment more or less likely?

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

Subscribe now

Armenia's parliamentary elections on 7 June are often framed as a binary choice between Russia and the West. In reality, the outcome will shape the country's evolving relationship with Russia, the West, and its neighbours in the strategically important South Caucasus — a region at a crucial north-south and east-west crossroads, and one whose geopolitical significance extends far beyond its borders.

At stake first is the future of incumbent Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party government, which came to power in 2018 after the Velvet Revolution. That movement ousted the government of long-term leader Serzh Sarkisian, who had tried to prolong his stay in power by moving from the office of president to that of prime minister — triggering nation-wide protests that propelled Pashinyan to the premiership in May 2018 and to electoral victory that December.

Under Pashinyan, who was re-elected in 2021, Armenia has generally gravitated towards the European Union and away from Russia. That drift is mostly the consequence of Russia's failure to support Armenia during the Azerbaijani offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh in September 2023. The offensive resulted in Azerbaijan retaking control of the territory — which Armenia had illegally occupied since the first Karabakh war in the early 1990s — and causing the displacement of around 100,000 Armenians from the region. These events unfolded in the presence of Russian "peacekeepers" deployed under the ceasefire agreement that ended the second Karabakh war in 2020.

Pashinyan is now campaigning on a platform to reopen the country's borders, lower dependence on Russia, and diversify its foreign and economic profile by normalising relations with traditional adversaries Azerbaijan and Turkey. If he secures another term, it would give him the mandate to carry out a major shift in Armenia's foreign policy orientation. In that sense, these elections amount to a strategic referendum on Armenia's geopolitical orientation.

Armenia's elections are often framed as a choice between Russia and the West. In reality, the outcome will shape a far more complex set of relationships — including with its neighbours.

Reordering the South Caucasus

A popular endorsement of Pashinyan's agenda would enable the continuation of three important trends in the region: first, the gradual emergence of regional ties between Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan; second, further declining Russian influence in a region where Moscow was once the undisputed hegemonic power; and third, a strengthening foothold for the EU and the US in a strategically important land bridge towards Central Asia and China.

The relationship between Moscow and Yerevan has steadily deteriorated over the past decade. Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the weight and significance of Russia in the region has clearly diminished — though this has been a gradual process rather than an abrupt rupture.

While Russia retains significant influence in Georgia, the Georgian Dream government in Tbilisi is also trying to balance its relationship more carefully between Russia and the West — forging closer ties with Azerbaijan and Türkiye in the process. A victory for Pashinyan and his pro-Western agenda is likely to reinforce the trend towards geopolitical re-orientation across the region. But this will remain a careful multi-vector balancing act — a mixture of political, economic, and cultural relationships with different external actors — rather than a one-directional pivot towards the West.

Where Russia once accounted for over 90% of Armenia's weapons purchases, its share has now dropped to somewhere between 5% and 10%, while France and India have become Armenia's primary defence partners.

Share

Russia's Residual Grip

Although Russian influence may be declining, Moscow's strategic interests in the South Caucasus remain strong. Russia will use whatever tools and leverage it still commands to prevent a further erosion of its role as erstwhile regional hegemon, including through cultural and religious channels of influence. Economically, Russia remains Armenia's most important trade partner and energy supplier. Many opposition forces also remain closely aligned with Moscow, including the Strong Armenia bloc led by billionaire Samvel Karapetyan.

Most Armenians favour diversification of relations rather than an outright rejection of Russia. According to recent polling, 43% see Moscow as the country's most important partner, compared to 42% who think of Washington in that way, and 29% who think of Brussels.

The geopolitical dynamics in and around Armenia are therefore more complex and nuanced than the political rhetoric surrounding them. Yet Russia's capacity to exercise real influence effectively — at the level of its previous dominance — is more constrained than ever. Where Russia once accounted for over 90% of Armenia's weapons purchases, its share has now dropped to somewhere between 5% and 10%, while France and India have become Armenia's primary defence partners.

Multi-Vector, Not a Pivot

Armenia has not, and most likely will not, replace its close alignment with Russia with one that solely relies on the West. However, the change in foreign policy direction under Pashinyan has clearly shifted away from Moscow and towards Brussels and Washington. On the European side, this has been reciprocated with the back-to-back European Political Community summit and first bilateral Armenia-EU summit held in Yerevan in May 2026.

Whoever forms the next government in Yerevan will still have a range of pre-existing problems to resolve in an environment where external support is neither certain nor dependably benign.

The United States under President Donald Trump has also demonstrated a continuing interest in the region. This has been most evident in Trump's engagement with a permanent peace agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan. While that has yet to be achieved, several pieces of the puzzle have been put in place, including, most recently, a bilateral framework agreement on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP). Given the transactional and erratic nature of much of Trump's foreign policy, this is unlikely to be a pivotal game changer for long-term US commitment to the region, but it is part of the broader picture of Armenia's geopolitical importance — and the opportunities it may create for Pashinyan's agenda.

A careful balance therefore needs to be struck between dismissing Armenia's parliamentary elections as mere continuation of historic Russian dependence and reading them as a clean pivot to the West in a much bigger geopolitical game. The outcome will matter for the country's direction and for the speed of travel.

Whoever forms the next government in Yerevan will still have a range of pre-existing problems to resolve — in an environment where external support is neither certain nor dependably benign.

Share

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff's article co-authored with James Stanley, published in The Foreign Policy Centre on 4 June 2026.

Leave a comment

Armenia's shift in defence procurement — from over 90% Russian-sourced to under 10% — represents a structural reorientation that is harder to reverse than a rhetorical pivot. At what point, if any, does a change of this depth become irreversible, and what would it take to pull it back?

We hope you'll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

Subscribe now

After first announcing late on May 23 that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated”, US president Donald Trump then backtracked less than 24 hours later, stating that he had instructed his negotiators “not to rush into a deal”. So far, so usual for Trump’s approach to diplomacy.

Over the past week, the pathway to a deal between the US and Iran had become both more credible and more narrow at the same time. Brinkmanship has escalated on both sides, with Trump threatening renewed escalation, then pulling back — after an intervention by Gulf allies — but leaving it on the table as a credible option. This was matched by Iran threatening a wider regional response to any renewed US strikes. Over the past year, both sides have demonstrated enough capacity and willingness to underscore that these are not empty threats.

This basic logic has not changed over the weekend. The risk of escalation, therefore, is real, which, in turn, narrows the time available for a deal but also makes it more likely because both sides stand to lose from a return to all-out war. For the regime in Tehran, the potential consequences are existential; for the White House, they may be more reputational — any decisive military victory will entail enormous humanitarian suffering in the region and cause long-term economic pain globally and domestically — but these are still significant costs for an administration heading into crucial mid-term elections.

The risk of escalation, therefore, is real, which, in turn, narrows the time available for a deal but also makes it more likely because both sides stand to lose from a return to all-out war.

The credibility of escalation and its likely cost have created a window of opportunity for a renewed push for a deal, reflected in intensifying Pakistani mediation efforts. The arrival of high-profile officials from Islamabad in Tehran — the army chief and the interior minister — carrying the latest US proposal signals a potentially viable route to a deal.

Even more so, the re-entry of Qatar into the mediation process is an indication that the Arab Gulf states sense that a deal might be possible, which they want to be able to shape as much as possible. Qatar has traditionally had a role as a mediator and retains multiple backchannels to key actors in the conflict, including Iran and the US. This makes its re-entry acceptable to both Tehran and Washington. That Doha is willing to take the diplomatic risk that this move involves is also a sign of both the urgency that countries in the region feel to prevent a renewed escalation of the war and the narrow window of opportunity that they currently see to achieve it.

Further away from the region, on May 22, the Council of the European Union decided to extend its sanctions framework against Iran, specifically targeting individuals and entities deemed to undermine freedom of navigation in the Middle East. No-one was specifically named, which adds pressure on Iranian negotiators but also creates incentives to reach a deal — on re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. This is significant because it positions the EU for a potential role in a post-deal operation in implementing new arrangements to uphold freedom of navigation in the Strait, similar to the role it already plays in the Red Sea with its Operation Aspides. The expanded sanctions framework, which comes on top of the wide range of existing sanctions, further adds to the independent diplomatic leverage of the EU: it can impose and renew sanctions on Iran but crucially also remove them in exchange for a deal, and can do so independently of the US.

All of these developments, however, also expose two long-term structural vulnerabilities. Current efforts are primarily focused on short-term gains: preventing an all-out resumption of the war between the US and Iran and across the region and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. This may be possible but is likely to include some commitment to a process to resolve the more fundamental underlying dispute over Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched Uranium and its future enrichment capabilities, and possibly its ballistic missiles programme and support for regional proxies.

These are issues over which sustainable agreement has eluded negotiators for a long time and the sides’ stated positions will make any compromise extremely difficult and time-consuming to achieve. Whatever deal might be achieved now on the Strait of Hormuz, therefore, will not remove the risk of escalation later. The lack of trust between Tehran and Washington, public posturing by both Trump and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and the potential for even minor incidents in a yet-to-be-agreed new regime for the Strait of Hormuz will create a combustible mix of risk factors that will at best prolong a volatile ceasefire and at worst simply postpone the resumption of hostilities until one side perceives a road to victory.

Whatever deal might be achieved now on the Strait of Hormuz, therefore, will not remove the risk of escalation later.

Share

There is an important wild card in all of this: Israel. The strategic preferences of Tel Aviv are fundamentally mis-aligned with those of the US, Arab Gulf states, and Europe. Israel requires a comprehensive neutering of Iranian nuclear, ballistic missile, and regional proxy capabilities. The US under Trump seems to have settled for a transactional framework deal that trades re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz for a longer-term commitment to negotiating a new regime curbing Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons (not unlike the JCPOA original nuclear deal of 2015 which Trump abandoned in 2018). The Arab Gulf states and Europe are similarly keen on rapid de-escalation and more strongly committed to long-term stabilisation, especially with an eye to secure energy flows from the region.

The mis-alignment of preferences, and the perception of an existential threat from Iran, creates the incentives for Israel to torpedo any short-term deal that seems currently possible. Israel’s ability to do so hinges on whether Netanyahu can drag Trump back into an all-out war, including by launching unilateral strikes on targets in Iran or whether he is willing to escalate his war against Lebanon in order to trigger Iran to walk away from negotiations now. Both of these options have significant disruptive potential and Israel has a track record of using them – despite the risks they involve. Importantly, they are also not simply options for the short term but threats that Israel can wield in the longer term, heightening the risk to subsequent talks under a US-Iran framework deal.

The mis-alignment of preferences, and the perception of an existential threat from Iran, creates the incentives for Israel to torpedo any short-term deal that seems currently possible.

In a phone call with Trump on May 24, Netanyahu apparently kept insisting that “Israel will maintain freedom of action against threats in all arenas, including Lebanon”.

Constraining Tel Aviv, therefore, is both a short-term priority and a long-term necessity. In the short-term, pressure on Netanyahu might be effective. In the long-term, only a deal with Iran that assuages existential Israeli security concerns will do.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in CNA on 25 May 2026.

Share

Stefan argues that a deal reopening the Strait of Hormuz would postpone the confrontation rather than resolve it — and that constraining Israel is the precondition for a settlement that lasts. For a government or a business with material exposure to the region, is a near-term deal a genuine de-risking event, or a window that merely resets the clock?

Leave a comment

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

Hot on the heels of his summit with US president Donald Trump, China’s Xi Jinping hosted his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, in Beijing on May 19 and 20.

Headlines spoke of multiple trade agreements, warnings against a return to the law of the jungle in international relations, and a joint declaration on building a multipolar world. But underneath that, it was also obvious that this is not a partnership of equals anymore – and hasn’t been for some time.

Subscribe now

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has become increasingly dependent on China. But the 2022 proclamation of a “no-limits friendship” between Russia and China has not turned into a strategic alliance between two poles of a new world order.

Beijing is now Moscow’s most important export market for its oil and gas and its most important source of imports, especially of so-called dual-use goods that are critical to sustaining Russia’s war effort against Ukraine. Yet, bilateral trade between Russia and China, while consistently above US$200 billion (£149 billion) annually for the past three years, is not growing that fast.

Notably, Russia is one of the few countries with which China has a trade deficit, albeit a small one, driven by Chinese energy imports. In this context, the continuing lack of a final deal between Moscow and Beijing over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline is remarkable but not surprising. The key disagreements appear to be on price (how much China pays) and volume (how much China buys), and potentially over the length of any such commitments.

China is reluctant to commit fully to a long-term and expensive partnership with Russia. China wants Russian gas, but not at any price.

This sheds an interesting light on Beijing’s strategic commitments to Moscow, indicating that China is reluctant to commit fully to a long-term and expensive partnership with Russia. China wants Russian gas, but not at any price.

Beyond their economic relations, China also provides critical political and diplomatic cover for Russia in various multilateral formats and helps Russia retain its reputation as a champion of concerns of the global south and as a critic of a US-dominated global order. This is unlikely to change, with Xi explicitly committing himself and Putin to “continue to offer each other firm and mutual support on matters relating to our respective core interests and key concerns”.

All roads lead to Beijing

Putin is the 12th leader to visit Xi this year. He has followed in the footsteps of, among others, Canada’s Mark Carney, the UK’s Keir Starmer, and Germany’s Friedrich Merz. And, of course, his visit followed just a week after Xi’s summit with Trump. This makes Beijing clearly an important pole in a multipolar order — and a more important one than Moscow.

For Russia, a multipolar order in which Moscow is one of the poles, is probably the best that the Kremlin can hope for.

There is clearly significant ideological alignment between Russia and China, including in their sometimes more veiled and sometimes more explicit criticism of the US. But their shared criticism of US hegemony and unilateralism disguises a crucial difference over what they envision as the end state of the current transition to a new order.

For Russia, a multipolar order in which Moscow is one of the poles, is probably the best that the Kremlin can hope for. For Beijing, the real issue is whether a multipolar order is simply a transitional phase — and the desired endpoint is instead Chinese hegemony. This would place China at the apex with all the other poles of the multipolar order, including Russia and the US, relegated to second-tier status.

The challenge for China in this context is how to avoid all-out confrontation with the US — the so-called Thucydides Trap, which refers to the near inevitability of war between a rising power (in this case, China) and the existing dominant power (in this case, the US) it seeks to replace.

For now, war between the US and China is not imminently in the cards. Instead, China and Russia can exploit an opportunity grounded in their shared dislike of a US-dominated world and facilitated by Trump’s active destruction of it. But not much of this has so far translated into a coordinated and effective foreign policy agenda, despite Putin’s and Xi’s rhetorical commitments.

Where Russia sees an opening for disruption and chaos, China senses an opportunity to accelerate the transition to Chinese dominance.

Two of the multilateral flagship projects of China and Russia, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the BRICS are not coherent formats. India and Pakistan are members of the SCO and yet fought a war in 2025. Iran and the UAE are both part of the newly enlarged BRICS but now find themselves at opposite sides of the US-Iran war.

Share

Regardless of how effective the challenges to the existing international are — from Trump and from the disparate bloc led by China (and to some extent still Russia) — they are real and create space for China and Russia to pursue their own agendas. And this is another crucial difference: where Russia sees an opening for disruption and chaos, China senses an opportunity to accelerate the transition to Chinese dominance.

The clear signal from the Xi-Trump and Xi-Putin summits is that China is not choosing between Russia and the US. This underscores Xi’s rhetorical commitment to a multipolar order. It also indicates that China keeps instrumentalising Russia and the US. Russia is a useful partner — not an ally, and not a vassal yet. The US, meanwhile, is an essential political and economic partner — an equal for now, but not forever.

This gives reassurance to Russia that, for now, China sees a multilateral order as beneficial, while signalling to the US that China, again just for now, is not seeking to replace the US as the sole superpower.

But neither Moscow nor Washington should be under any illusion that a tripolar order is China’s ultimate goal. This is a transitional strategy to a China-dominated international order through which Beijing hopes to avoid the Thucydides Trap.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 21 May 2026.

Share

If China’s multipolar rhetoric is a transitional strategy toward primacy rather than a settled end state — as this analysis argues — at what point does Moscow recognise it has become a tool of Beijing’s grand strategy rather than a partner, and what leverage, if any, does Russia retain to resist that trajectory?

Leave a comment

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

With the AfD now the second-largest party in the Bundestag after its February 2025 result, a PiS-backed candidate having won Poland’s presidency in June 2025, and French presidential elections due in April 2027 and Polish parliamentary elections later that year, Britain is at risk of losing dependable security partners on the continent. A minilateral hedge — the Joint Expeditionary Force, the Coalition of the Willing, the E3, and the Ukraine Defence Contact Group — and the recently published Strategic Defence Review hold some promise for mitigating this risk, but the populist landscape that is reshaping Britain’s continental partners is also reshaping the ground that this hedge sits on.

1. The populist right is not one threat — it is three. AfD-style sovereigntist-nationalism would fracture EU cohesion on Ukraine. PiS-style illiberal conservatism keeps the Atlanticist line but qualifies the Ukraine commitment. RN-style nativist statism is uncertain on NATO at the operational level. Britain cannot plan for a single populist Europe — it has to plan for three distinct disruption modes simultaneously, and the planning starts now, not after the elections.

Read more

The Xi–Trump summit produced the photo-op everyone expected and the substance nobody can quite name. Headlines have oscillated between “thaw” and “theatre” — both wrong, in different ways. In an interview with ItalyPost’s Simone Matteis, Stefan Wolff answers the questions that matter most: what the summit actually changes, what it reveals about Russia’s slow demotion, the quiet US–China alignment on Iran, and the moment Europe finally runs out of excuses for not being a power of its own. Below, we provide an English-language version of the interview, lightly edited for style and readability.

Subscribe now

1. Does the Xi–Trump summit mark a real turning point in US–China relations, or is it just a temporary tactical pause? Who is the real winner?

It is definitely not a turning point, and this was hardly to be expected: neither side has an interest in worsening relations at the moment — i.e., a negative turning point, implying a breakdown of the relationship — or the capacity to fundamentally reset relations towards full-on cooperation — i.e., a positive turning point, marking a greater alignment of strategic interests. I don’t think it’s merely a tactical pause either. It’s the continuation of a pattern in the relationship between Washington and Beijing that acknowledges certain boundaries and redlines (e.g., on Taiwan) and manages their deep economic interdependency by small mutual concessions and by creating new frameworks and processes (e.g., a Board of Trade and a Board of Investment) to kick the can of harder decisions further down the road. In that sense, they are both winners: Xi and Trump can each take some deals back home and look strong to domestic audiences without having given too much away.

2. If Washington and Beijing stabilise their relationship, is Vladimir Putin the real geopolitical loser of this shift?

Read more

The accelerating proliferation of minilateral security formats is reshaping European defence — from Nordic-Baltic cooperation to the Joint Expeditionary Force. At the heart of it, the Weimar Triangle has the potential to provide the strategic coordination Europe urgently needs. The architecture that is emerging is more dynamic than it appears but has never been tested in a real crisis.

Subscribe now

Something significant is happening in European security — and it is not happening inside NATO or the EU. Across the continent, a proliferation of flexible, issue-focused minilateral formats has emerged alongside the traditional institutional architecture. Some formats are old and have been energised; others are brand new. Together, they are reshaping how Europe actually organises its defence.

The pattern has three defining features. First, a multiplying set of more or less permanent minilateral groupings, each serving distinct but overlapping purposes, cutting across the formal structures of NATO and the EU rather than nesting neatly inside them. Second, a thematic focus firmly on security and increasingly and more narrowly on defence, with varying emphasis on military, political, and economic dimensions. Third, a geographic logic centred on the Nordic and Baltic region, and along a north-south axis running from the Baltic to the Black Sea and the Adriatic.

The Weimar Triangle has the potential to provide strategic coordination across these different formats — but it has never been tested in a real crisis.

Two simultaneous pressures explain why this is happening now. The first is Russia: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the sustained hybrid war being waged across Europe’s political and physical infrastructure. The second is the United States: a trajectory that runs from soft retrenchment through hard disengagement toward what some European governments now model as potential strategic exit — compounded by active interference in European political affairs and a broader assault on the international order Washington itself built in the decades after the end of the Second World War. Europe needs to manage both pressures at once, at a moment when domestic polarisation is rising, democratic institutions are under strain, and economies are underperforming.

Minilateral formats, and their proliferation, is the response — and potentially part of the solution.

Read more

The opening headlines from the summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in Beijing signalled an openness on the Chinese side towards stabilising relations with the US. In his opening remarks, the Chinese president noted that China and the US “should be partners not rivals”. But he warned Trump that a crisis over Taiwan could lead to “clashes and even conflicts”.

Subscribe now

With Xi also indicating that there will be more opportunities for US companies to do business in China, the stage was set for a relatively successful summit. Both sides can now claim it as a success because it offers some concrete benefits in the form of a trade war avoided and at least the prospect of cooperation on global issues such as the Iran war. It also sets a generally more positive tone for relations between the two countries.

Putin’s aspirations to position Russia as a great power depend on Moscow either being strategically useful to Washington and Beijing, or gaining leverage with them by demonstrating a capacity to be disruptive.

Such an outcome is particularly troubling for Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who will see his relevance and leverage diminished by more stable and predictable US-China relations. Putin’s aspirations to position Russia as a great power depend on Moscow either being strategically useful to Washington and Beijing, or gaining leverage with them by demonstrating a capacity to be disruptive.

However, on both counts, Putin’s hand was weak before the summit even started — and it has been further weakened as a result. His war against Ukraine is no longer a priority issue for the US, with the two main American interlocutors in peace talks, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, focused on negotiations with Iran.

Putin’s latest phone call with Trump on April 29 will have been disappointing for the Russian leader. His offer to take Iran’s highly enriched uranium to Russia was reportedly rebuffed by Trump, who told him to focus on “ending the war with Ukraine”. And days later the Kremlin was forced to scale back its annual military parade in Moscow, due to concerns that it could be targeted by Ukrainian forces.

On the Chinese side, things are possibly even more troubling. The last face-to-face meeting between Xi and Putin took place in September 2025. They have only held one video conference since then. A Kremlin statement during the Trump-Xi summit that Putin will visit China soon smacks more of desperation than confirmation.

Putin’s leverage

While Putin appears sidelined in the US-China relationship, he is not without cards of his own. Major global issues — including wars in Ukraine and Iran, energy security and the future of the international order — are still connected to Russia. This provides Putin with a degree of leverage in his relations with both Xi and Trump. But exercising this leverage comes with significant risks, especially in areas where Chinese and US interests are more aligned with each other than with Russia.

Take the case of the Iran war as an example. Russia benefits most from this conflict continuing. The disruption it is causing to global energy flows has pushed up oil and gas prices, keeping Moscow’s war economy afloat. It has also reduced the flow of US arms to Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Russia has expanded its support for Iran — from intelligence and cyber support to providing “unjammable” drones.

For China, its relationship with the US is far more important than the one with Iran. This tilts the balance of preferences in Beijing towards an end of the conflict rather than towards its continuation.

While Russian support is unlikely to enable Iran to win the war, it will give the regime in Tehran more time to avoid defeat and thus increase the costs for the US, its regional allies and the global economy. This is not going to play well with Trump, who is under mounting domestic pressure to wind down the war in Iran.

Beijing has offered Iran some support throughout the war, for example by helping it bypass western sanctions on the export of its oil. But there are clear limits to how far China will go. For China, its relationship with the US is far more important than the one with Iran. This tilts the balance of preferences in Beijing towards an end of the conflict rather than towards its continuation.

Share

The limits of realignment

This does not mean that China and the US will now align against Russia. Relations between Russia and China are longstanding and deep across a range of issues. Their “no-limits partnership” may be increasingly asymmetric, but there is still a great deal of anti-American and anti-western alignment between them.

The US under Trump is also more ambivalent about its stance on Russia than under previous administrations. Trump’s transactional foreign policy — and his urge to make deals rather than pursue a consistent strategy — is something Russia will continue to try to leverage to its own advantage.

The Xi-Trump summit is a party to which Putin was not invited.

Ahead of the Trump-Xi summit, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov released a statement in which he said “the path to the implementation of a whole range of economic projects will be open” if the White House agrees to decouple trade from the war in Ukraine. This indicates that Moscow is fully aware of this opportunity — as well as the challenge to offer the US something China cannot.

The Xi-Trump summit is a party to which Putin was not invited. The fact that the US and China seem to be heading towards a period of better-managed relations indicates that his efforts to make his presence felt have largely failed. This does not bode well for his aspirations to restore Russia to its Soviet-era status as a great power – but it does not imply that he will give up.

This analysis draws on Stefan Wolff’s article published in The Conversation on 14 May 2026.

Share

Leave a comment

If Putin’s leverage strategy requires being either useful or disruptive to Washington and Beijing, and a stabilising US-China relationship narrows both options, where would you expect Russian disruption to surface next — and what does that imply for institutions and boards with operational exposure in those theatres?

We hope you’ll share Navigating the Vortex with anyone you think might find it of interest. Also, you can listen to our podcast editions via the website and on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon/Audible.

Russia’s campaign of hybrid warfare against Europe has Soviet roots and will likely outlast Putin. This analysis maps the campaign in precise, systematic terms: what it is, where it is targeted, why Russia is doing it, and — most importantly — how effective it has actually been. The assessment is unsettling not because the campaign is succeeding, but because the European response, while significantly improved, remains strategically deficient where it matters most: credible deterrence not just by denial but also by punishment.

Subscribe now

The title of last year’s annual report of the Valdai Discussion Club offered an inadvertent self-portrait of Russian strategic intent: “Dr. Chaos or: How to Stop Worrying and Love the Disorder.” This is, of course, a telling play on Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove — and a worrying one. Russia is not merely observing European disorder. It is manufacturing it.

What Russia Is Doing

Russia is conducting a sustained campaign of hybrid warfare: what the UK Ministry of Defence described in 2019 as “the synchronized use of multiple instruments of power tailored to specific vulnerabilities across the full spectrum of societal functions to achieve synergistic effects.” The European Commission offered a complementary definition in its 2016 Joint Framework on countering hybrid threats: “a mixture of coercive and subversive activity, conventional and unconventional methods — diplomatic, military, economic, technological — which can be used in a coordinated manner by state or non-state actors to achieve specific objectives while remaining below the threshold of formally declared warfare.”

Russia recognises the same concept under different labels — the “Gerasimov doctrine”, non-linear war or new-generation warfare, and the Soviet-era tradition of “active measures”. In practice, it involves a range of tactics: information warfare and disinformation; cyber operations; covert physical sabotage of critical infrastructure; the weaponisation of energy; the weaponisation of migration; and espionage and intelligence-led operations, including assassinations and assassination attempts.

Russia is not merely observing European disorder. It is manufacturing it.

These tactics are no longer just abstract labels. They have real-life manifestations: undersea cable disruptions in the Baltic Sea; incendiary parcel bombs in DHL distribution centres in Birmingham, Leipzig, and Warsaw; sabotage of Poland’s railway network; drone flights disrupting civilian aviation in Denmark, Germany, and Norway; hack-and-leak attacks against the German SPD in 2024 and against a range of UK officials in a campaign starting in 2015; election interference in Romania and Moldova; and actual and attempted assassinations of former Russian spies in the UK, including Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018.

What follows maps what and where Russia’s targets are and examines how Europe's response — while strategically deficient right now — can rise to the permanent challenge that Russia poses.

Read more