Business can’t wait for politics to catch up

Over the last week the geopolitical ground has shifted. The United States is not simply stepping back from Europe, it is doing so with language that signals contempt rather than partnership. That alone should make every European business leader intensely uncomfortable.

This is not a political argument. It is a leadership one.

What is most striking is the sheer disbelief across Europe’s senior ranks. You can almost hear the internal monologue.
“Surely America would not abandon us. Surely this is theatre. Surely the alliance is bigger than any one individual?”

Two questions now sit squarely on the desks of European CEOs.

1. If your business depends on the US, do you trust the America you remember or prepare for the one you have?

If you export heavily to the United States or rely on US components, software, data agreements or regulatory predictability, then you are now operating on unstable assumptions.

The temptation is to say, “It will pass. Markets will continue. Politics always swings back.” But geopolitics is not a pendulum, it is a signal. And the signal today is volatility.

Businesses have been here before, even if the context was different.

When Japanese automotive firms began outcompeting Western manufacturers in the 1980s, Detroit insisted the shift was temporary. They argued no one would buy small efficient cars. They clung to the world as they preferred it rather than the market as it was. The consequences were brutal.

When European energy companies received early warnings about the fragility of Russian supply, some dismissed the idea that the taps could ever genuinely be turned off. It was unthinkable, until it happened.

The strategic mistake was always the same. Leaders trusted the world that used to exist.

The question for European companies today is not whether to panic. It is whether to plan.
What is your second market?
What is your alternative supplier?
What is your resilience strategy if the transatlantic path becomes narrower, more expensive or more conditional?

Doing nothing is still a decision, just rarely the best one.

2. What does a leader do when the facts feel impossible to believe?

Every leader eventually reaches a point where the evidence contradicts their instincts. The mature leader does not wait until they “feel ready” to act. They act because waiting is the greater danger.

History gives us all the examples we need.
MySpace genuinely believed users would never leave a platform with such scale.
Blockbuster thought streaming was a temporary sideshow.
Intel spent years assuming the mobile chip market would come back to them when it was clear the ecosystem had moved on.
Major European banks before 2008 could not accept that their liquidity assumptions were fundamentally false.

In each case the leadership teams were intelligent. What they lacked was belief that the unthinkable could be true.

And that is exactly what I am sensing across Europe today.
A quiet but dangerous conviction that America will, in the end, behave as America always has.
That this is performative.
That alliances cannot break down because they have not broken down before.

That is not strategy. It is nostalgia.

The discipline of leadership is the ability to see clearly at the moment when clarity is most unwelcome. Facing into the facts does not make you defeatist. It makes you prepared.

If ever there were a moment for Europe’s leaders to lift their gaze, it is now.

The partnership with the United States has served us extraordinarily well. But it is not a guarantee. It is not a constant of nature. And it is not something on which twenty first century business strategy can be based without contingency.

The world has changed. Our assumptions have not. That gap is where organisational failure begins.

The leaders who act early will not be the ones caught off guard if the geopolitical winds strengthen. They will be the ones who safeguarded their people, their supply chains, their markets and their future.

Clarity is not comfortable, but it is essential. We are out of time for disbelief.

If you want to discuss what this shift means for your business and how to prepare, please contact me.