Weekly Briefing | Conflict and Control

Conflict and Control

Hey all. Apologies for the briefing hiatus — I’ve been traveling a lot in the last month, as you will have seen if you’ve been following my journeys on LinkedIn:

In India, I went deep on foreign policy during a fellowship, meeting with top thinkers and sneaking in a visit to Parliament and the vice president’s residence, thanks to the pull of my hosts at India Foundation. The result? I was super prepared for recent our Consular Conversation with Ramesh Babu Lakshmanan at the Gwinnett Chamber, which landed with a level of optimism on trade talks.

Now I’m just back from the Czech Republic, where I reverted to my normal pattern: Visiting factories and company offices to get insight on Georgia’s partnerships with the place. This is what we call a Dispatch, a service offering we have developed to shine a spotlight on a country here in Georgia by blending a deep-dive digital report with an in-person debriefing event. Our Czech Dispatch, supported by a new Czech Business Incubator Atlanta, flipped the normal pattern. We hosted an event with the ambassador in January, and my trip this week verified some aspects of his sales pitch: Yes, the Czech Republic is an industry-first place, and the focus on Georgia is real and sustained. Learn more here

What has framed both visits is cross-border conflict, which seems to have become a feature of modern-day global business. I’m writing this on a day that the U.S. has decided to celebrate the Army’s history with a parade through Washington D.C. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that it’s also two days after Israel attacked Iran in an effort to decapitate its military command structure and cripple its nuclear program.

My time in India bookended a four-day conflict in which India struck targets in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir and elsewhere in Pakistan in response to a religiously motivated terror attack in Pahalgam that was seemingly designed to halt the flow of Indian tourists to the picturesque area. And of course, the conflict in Ukraine is ongoing, as evidenced in the Czech Republic, where blue and gold Ukrainian flags fly prominently from government buildings, and where locals told us about U.S. military exercises bringing convoys through bucolic wine regions of the south.

All this is to say that if you thought tariffs represented the apex of uncertainty, you haven’t had your illusion of control shattered thoroughly enough. Crossing borders for business is always challenging, but a new dose of adaptability is needed as conflict compounds policy uncertainty. On any day, things can dramatically change, and this seems to be the only constant.

Yes, there is much trade policy to catch up on — how about those 50 percent steel tariffs?! — but I’ll have to do that in a subsequent missive. In the meantime, I hope you’ll catch up on our recent stories, from South African soccer connections to Brazil’s new consul general, Gov. Kemp’s Canada trip and a Mercedes-Benz expansion.

As always, I covet your feedback.