What did we learn at the recent Geopolitics and Business Briefing?
A small business owner in Canberra buys 50 tonnes of coffee annually. When Trump slaps tariffs on Brazil—not for trade reasons, but because he’s miffed with their current president—the café owner feels it immediately.
Coffee prices spike, the Australian dollar shifts, climate disasters hit Brazilian farms. These are just some of the ways geopolitical forces are reshaping the business landscape.
What we’re witnessing isn’t temporary disruption either, but structural change. As Hayley Channer, Director of Economic Security at the United States Studies Centre, put it during the briefing: “Companies can no longer wait out disruptions and expect things to go back to ‘normal’. Disruption is the new normal.”
Three scenarios reshaping business
Merriden Varrall, KPMG Australia’s Geopolitics Lead Partner, explained that KPMG’s latest risk assessment identifies three geopolitical risk scenarios reshaping business.
First: crisis hits, we’re not prepared. Climate disasters, energy instability, and food insecurity compound each other whilst business horizons rarely extend beyond five years.
Second: the death of truth and trust. AI misgovernance, institutional decline, and information warfare create environments where populism thrives and business increasingly fills trust gaps that governments can’t.
Third: walls, moats, and stranger danger. Supply chains restructure around ideology rather than efficiency as countries pursue friend-shoring.
Australia sits particularly exposed. We export more to China than to our next four trading partners combined. Over a quarter of our GDP flows from exports. When economic statecraft becomes the norm rather than exception, that concentration becomes vulnerability.
The trust paradox
As trust in political institutions collapses globally, citizens increasingly expect businesses to fill the void. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer shows Australians trust business more than government. This creates impossible choices: take a stand and alienate half your customers or stay silent and disappoint everyone.
Hayley noted another challenge: “We’re extremely lucky in Australia that we have a recognised independent election system, and we are not facing some of the challenges that the United States is facing.” Yet even here, declining institutional trust means businesses face growing expectations to demonstrate values whilst navigating fractured communities.
Merriden pointed out that “business leaders need to dig deep and think, what is going on? What do I actually believe in and stand for? How am I not just being performative? What does being trustworthy now mean in this context?”
Why waiting won’t work
Many business leaders hope to simply endure current volatility and wait for normal service to resume. This misunderstands the structural nature of change. We’re witnessing “peak globalisation”—not the end of international trade, but its fundamental restructuring along geopolitical lines.
Smart organisations are already embedding geopolitical thinking into strategic planning. They’re building optionality into supply chains, cultivating relationships across multiple markets, investing in technologies that reduce single-point dependencies. Most importantly, they’re abandoning the fantasy that normal will return. The café owner buying Brazilian coffee understands what many boardrooms are struggling with: geopolitics shapes business reality whether you engage with it or not.