Well, March 2026, that was fun. Certainly not a slow news month, more like a stress test.
In thirty-one days, the United States launched a war with no exit plan, the Western alliance declined to show up for it, and a California jury told Silicon Valley its design choices are now a legal liability. Humanity aimed four astronauts at the Moon while geopolitics aimed everything else at the boardroom.
In March, three geopolitical business issues crystallized in ways that global executives and private equity leadership need to understand — not as background noise, but as operating conditions.
Issue One: The war that has no off-ramp
A month ago, the United States went to war with Iran. Markets called it a shock. Allies called it a warning. Washington called it a win.
Thirty days later, here's the ledger. The Strait of Hormuz is closed—roughly 20% of the world's oil and 25% of global LNG transit passes through that waterway. Gulf producers have cut output anywhere from 25% to 80%. Amazon has imposed a 3.5% fuel surcharge on North American merchants. Japan's chemical sector is watching its profit outlook darken. South Korea's consumer inflation is accelerating. Oil briefly touched $150 in Oman. And the administration, fresh from President Trump's prime-time address vowing to send Iran "back to the Stone Ages," offered no exit, no timeline, and no diplomatic strategy for ending any of it.
Here's the framing worth adopting: this is not a crisis with a resolution date. It is a structural repricing of energy risk. CFOs who built Q2 guidance on pre-war energy assumptions need to revisit those numbers. The scenario in which the Strait stays closed through the summer is not a tail risk. It is the base case.
The Economist put it bluntly in its framing of what China is thinking: never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. Beijing is watching the US deplete its military toolkit in the Gulf and quietly building another naval base in the South China Sea. Trump's Beijing visit has been postponed until May. The autocratic coordination between China and Russia — shared media, forums, personnel exchanges, drone technology flowing to Tehran — is not abstract analysis. It is the operational infrastructure currently in place, while Washington's attention is occupied elsewhere.
What must executives do?
1. Run Gulf exposure scenarios now, not when this resolves. Map your supplier dependencies, logistics vulnerabilities, and energy cost assumptions against 60 and 90 more days of Hormuz closure. The companies that fare best amid sustained geopolitical disruption are those that understood the risk before the quarterly call.
2. Stress-test your Q2 and Q3 energy models. If your projections assumed normalization following a US military exit, rebuild them from scratch. A theater's withdrawal announcement does not reopen a waterway. That is a physical and operational reality.
3. Get ahead of your board communications. Investors are watching. Directors are asking. The companies that explain the risk before they're forced to explain the damage are in a fundamentally different governance position than those that don't.
Issue Two: The alliance that isn't
Here is what happened in March. The United States went to its allies and asked for help opening the Strait of Hormuz. France said no. Canada said no. Spain, Italy, and Poland all declined. Europe said no — collectively, formally, and on the record.
This ask-and-rejection will be studied in foreign policy programs for a generation. For the executives reading this, it has a more immediate meaning: the Western alliance architecture your company has operated within for 80 years now has a visible crack. Not a hairline fracture. A load-bearing one.
Per the Financial Times, that fracture is now running through day-to-day working relationships at the staff and intelligence level. Poland's prime minister declared that Trump is executing Putin's dream plan. Austria refused US overflight requests. Macron told reporters one shouldn't speak every day, which, as European diplomatic understatements go, is as close to a public rebuke as you're likely to get.
For multinationals, this is not an abstract diplomatic dispute. When alliance relationships deteriorate at the operational level, the downstream effects reach trade negotiations, regulatory coordination, and market access decisions.
Three business implications follow.
First, you cannot manage transatlantic exposure with a single government affairs strategy. Export controls, sanctions compliance, data governance, and AI regulation: these were already moving in different directions between Washington and Brussels. They are now moving apart with political legitimacy on both sides. You need distinct, jurisdiction-aware approaches — and you need them now.
Second, the China window is open, and Beijing knows it. Companies with significant China exposure need to ask a harder question: what decisions is Beijing making this quarter, in the window of reduced US attention? The autocratic coordination documented by the US counterterrorism community this month is not a think-tank concern. It is a commercial risk.
Third, stakeholder expectations in European markets are shifting. Institutional investors, government counterparts, and enterprise clients are watching how American companies navigate their government's posture. Silence is a position. Miscalibrated messaging in either direction carries real costs.
Issue Three: The new battlefield is digital, spatial, and legal
March delivered three signals on technology and sovereignty that belong together even though they arrived from different directions.
The first came from a California courtroom. A jury found Meta and Google liable for the mental health damage their platforms caused a young woman who became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a teenager. The damages were $3 million. The exposure waiting in the queue is potentially multibillion. The legal theory that landed — that intentional design choices that cause demonstrable harm create corporate liability — extends well beyond social media. Any company whose products, platforms, or services touch youth engagement now has heightened legal exposure. The California verdict is not a tech story. It is a corporate governance story.
The second came from low Earth orbit. On Wednesday evening, four astronauts climbed into an Orion capsule and began the first crewed journey to the lunar vicinity since 1972. Artemis II is not a science mission. It is a geopolitical statement. China has a lunar program. Beijing has landed robotic missions on the far side of the Moon. It has announced a crewed landing target of 2030. It has explicitly framed lunar exploration as a strategic priority — not for scientific discovery, but for territorial positioning, access to resources, and the soft power that comes from planting a flag where others haven't reached. The Moon's south pole sits atop water ice that can be converted to rocket fuel. Whoever establishes extractive infrastructure there controls a logistics node for everything that comes after. If you're in aerospace, advanced manufacturing, or materials, the procurement pipeline flowing from Artemis II is worth mapping now.
The third signal came from the information environment. Iran's AI-assisted disinformation campaign is not targeting defense ministries. It is targeting employee news feeds and customer social media timelines. The communications resilience question, once a PR function, has become a board-level governance issue. Meanwhile, OpenAI just closed a funding round valuing the company at $852 billion, with 40% of its $2 billion in monthly revenue now coming from enterprise sales. AI is no longer primarily a consumer product. It is B2B infrastructure at scale, and the corporate adoption curve is steeper than most boardrooms are planning for.
Two strategic imperatives on technology. First, commission a platform and product audit. Identify every engagement mechanism in your technology stack or partner ecosystem that could be characterized as intentionally addictive, particularly with youth-facing exposure. This is legal risk management, not public relations. Second, establish a baseline on your AI information environment. Who is shaping the narratives reaching your employees and customers? How would you know if state-sponsored content were already embedded in those channels?
The theme underneath all three
March did not produce three separate crises. It produced one structural condition, expressed across three domains. Geopolitical volatility is no longer episodic. The Iran war, the Western alliance fracture, the domestic political ruptures within the Trump coalition, the AI governance acceleration, the lunar race — these are not disruptions that resolve into a stable baseline. The baseline has moved.
Your competitors are responding strategically. Are you responding reactively?
Tariff volatility. NATO credibility erosion. Supply chain disruption. Chinese competition. AI and tech sovereignty. Export control tightening. Interest rate uncertainty. These forces are reshaping your capital allocation, supply chain strategy, and competitive positioning right now. Caracal Global monitors these signals daily and translates them into what they mean for your business — helping your board move from reacting to strategizing.
Caracal Global is your fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer. Michigan-born, DC-based, operating at the intersection of globalization and American politics. Intelligence, Strategy, and Communications — for Fortune 1000 companies and PE portfolio firms that need geopolitical capacity without the overhead of a full-time hire. Learn more at caracal.global.
Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.
-Marc.
You can always reach me @ marc@caracal.global.
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Marc A. Ross is a geopolitical strategist and the founder of Caracal Global, a fractional Chief Geopolitical Officer service for Fortune 1,000 companies and private equity firms. He publishes the Caracal Global Daily — what a Chief Geopolitical Officer monitors every morning. Subscribe at caracal.global/contact.
