You stress about the groceries, but not about the threat stream. You find an element of serenity amidst the worst of times. As a father of young boys I have learned that panic sets in quick when things go wrong; overseas, I aim to be one of the calm ones. The success rate varies. The path isn’t always clear. In fact it rarely is. But two decades in places where the threat picture changes faster than the guidance teaches you something: you stop reaching for certainty the way a drowning man reaches for a rope. Instead you learn to swim.

I think about this now because the wider world has begun to feel the way my operating environment has felt for years. The fog has moved downstream. It has reached the boardrooms, the trading floors, the quarterly planning sessions. And the people sitting in those rooms are discovering what security professionals have known for some time: the fog does not lift on schedule.

BlackRock’s Geopolitical Risk Dashboard is flashing across its top-ten risk categories — from global trade protectionism to major cyber attacks to Russia-NATO conflict. The World Economic Forum ranked geoeconomic confrontation as the risk most likely to trigger a global crisis this year, the top slot in its two-year outlook and up eight positions from the year prior. Sixty-eight percent of WEF respondents expect a multipolar or fragmented order over the next decade, up four points from the last survey. PwC’s 2026 Global CEO Survey found only thirty percent of chief executives confident about twelve-month revenue growth — down from fifty-six percent in 2022.

Then the trade disruption. On February 20th, the Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in a 6-3 ruling, holding that IEEPA does not grant the president the power to impose tariffs. The administration responded within days, invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 — initially at ten percent on nearly all imports, effective February 24th and expiring in 150 days. A fifteen percent increase was announced the next day but never implemented — CBP confirmed the rate held at ten. The weighted average tariff rate dropped from 13.8 percent to 6.7 percent when the IEEPA tariffs fell, then climbed back above ten percent within the week. An estimated $142 billion to $175 billion in IEEPA tariff collections now sits in legal limbo, with the Court silent on whether refunds are owed.

The Global Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, according to the Munich Security Report, reached an all-time high after “Liberation Day” in April 2025 — nearly three times its level during the 2008 financial crisis. UNCTAD Secretary-General Rebeca Grynspan called uncertainty “the highest tariff possible.” The Munich Security Report amplified the point: the uncertainty may be inflicting more economic damage than the tariff rates themselves. The IMF estimates the drag at an additional 0.3 percentage points of global output.

This is not a crisis. A crisis has a beginning and an end. This is a condition.

The natural human response to sustained uncertainty is paralysis. Research compiled by MIT Sloan Management Review found that thirty-two percent of business leaders report freezing when it is time to act. Forty-two percent admit to delaying decisions because thinking about them is uncomfortable. PwC’s Global CEO Survey put a finer point on it: CEOs now spend nearly half their time on issues with horizons under a year — three times more than they devote to thinking beyond five years.

This is the part that does not get discussed enough. We talk endlessly about frameworks, decision trees, scenario planning. We rarely acknowledge that the first obstacle is not analytical but psychological. The fog does not merely obscure the path. It makes you doubt whether there is one.

I have watched this happen in crisis rooms overseas. Smart, experienced people — people who had trained for exactly this — locking up. Not because they lacked information. Because the information they had was contradictory, incomplete, and arriving faster than anyone could process it. The ones who performed were not the ones with better data. They were the ones who had learned, through practice and repetition and failure, to move through ambiguity without requiring it to resolve first.

That is a skill. It is trainable. It is not a personality trait.

What follows is not elegant. Elegant frameworks look beautiful on slides and collapse under load. This one works when you are tired, when the information is bad, and when people are looking at you for answers you do not have.

Separate signal from noise — and accept that you will get it wrong.

The instinct in a high-information, high-adrenaline environment is to consume everything. Every report, every feed, every developing story. This feels productive. It is a coping mechanism disguised as diligence.

The discipline is narrower and less comfortable. Not what is happening but what, if true, changes what I do next. Everything else is atmosphere. Interesting, perhaps. Not actionable.

You will never see the full picture. The question is whether you are watching the variables that matter most and letting the rest blur. Histories make men wise; data make men anxious. The difference is in the selection.

Design decisions to be reversible.

Not every commitment needs to be permanent. One of the most underrated skills in uncertain environments is building exit ramps into your own plans.

In military planning, we built what we called decision support templates — predetermined points where we would reassess whether the plan still fit the situation. In a corporate context, this might mean staging resources rather than deploying them all at once. Piloting technology in one facility before a global rollout. Telling your team: “this is our direction for now. We will revisit in ninety days with fresh data.”

The 150-day expiration on the current Section 122 tariffs is, deliberately or not, an application of this principle. Time-bounded decisions force reassessment. Leaders can build this into their own operating rhythm without waiting for someone else to impose it.

Distinguish the structural from the temporary.

This is where most leaders fail right now, and the cost of misclassification runs high in both directions.

The shift toward a multipolar, fragmented global order is structural. It is not returning to 2019. If your security program, your supply chain, your international operations are built on assumptions about stable alliances and predictable trade relationships, those assumptions need updating. Not next quarter. Now.

A specific tariff rate on a specific product category is probably temporary, or at least variable. It affects your near-term planning. It should not drive your five-year strategy.

The structural and the temporary look alike in the moment. Separating them requires discipline, intellectual honesty, and the willingness to reclassify when the evidence demands it. Some things you thought were storms turn out to be climate change. Some things you feared were permanent turn out to be weather.

And your brand carries a national identity whether you manage it or not. Someone — a competitor, a regulator, a foreign government — is already factoring the flag you fly into their calculus. That, too, is structural.

Build your team’s tolerance for ambiguity, not just your own.

The leader who navigates uncertainty brilliantly but whose organization seizes up the moment things get complicated has not solved the problem. Scale matters.

This means creating an environment where I don’t know is not a career risk. Where changing a plan in light of new information is treated as strength, not indecision. Where tabletop exercises exist not to rehearse a specific scenario but to build the organizational muscle of making decisions under conditions that will never be perfect.

The teams that perform best in crisis, in my experience, are not the ones with the best plans. They are the ones where the leader has built enough trust that people bring problems forward early, challenge assumptions openly, and execute with confidence even when the picture is incomplete. Decentralize decision authority to the lowest feasible level. Your team handles what’s in front of them while you keep your head up — finding the next problem, getting your people ready for what comes after. There will always be more.

If you’re a CEO looking for a security leader, find the one whose team doesn’t need them. A team that is always training, has authority to act, and has the comfort in chaos to function without a single point of failure sitting at the top. When the leader is there, the team runs better. When they aren’t, the team still runs. And when they’re not there, they still shoulder the responsibility for action. That is the standard.

Protect your cognitive capacity like the finite resource it is.

This one I learned the hard way.

Decision fatigue is real. The quality of your judgment degrades over the course of a day, a crisis, a sustained period of uncertainty. If you are spending your sharpest hours on decisions that do not require your judgment, you are burning fuel you will need later.

Delegate not just tasks but decision authority. Build routines that eliminate low-stakes choices. Sleep. The leader who burns out on day two of a seven-day crisis must be replaced. The leader who burns out at month three of a twelve-month crisis has failed the mission as surely as the one who made the wrong call on day one.

The environment is not going to calm down. Not this quarter, probably not this year, possibly not this decade. Your capacity is not superhuman. Protect it — sleep eight hours, show your team that regeneration is part of the job — and you will still be making sound decisions when others have shifted to autopilot.

There is, against all odds, an opportunity here.

In stable times, every leader looks competent. The processes work. The playbook applies. Leadership is mostly operational management wearing a better suit (or khakis in my case).

When the ground shifts — when the rules change between breakfast and lunch, when last quarter’s assumptions become this quarter’s liabilities — that is when the leaders who can think clearly, adapt quickly, and bring their people along actually earn the title.

The world is not falling apart. But it is rearranging. And the question is not whether you can prevent that. The question is whether you and your team have the capacity to navigate it — with discipline, with discernment, and with endurance.

That is not a security question. It is a leadership one. But security professionals, who have lived in this fog longer than most, might have something worth saying about it.

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Devin Carlson leads security operations in South Asia. He has spent over 17 years protecting people and enabling mission success in high-threat environments across three continents.

Sources

BlackRock Investment Institute. Geopolitical Risk Dashboard, March 2026. https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/insights/blackrock-investment-institute/interactive-charts/geopolitical-risk-dashboard

World Economic Forum. Global Risks Report 2026: 21st Edition. Geneva: World Economic Forum, January 2026. https://reports.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risks_Report_2026.pdf

PwC. 29th Annual Global CEO Survey. January 2026. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/c-suite-insights/ceo-survey.html

Supreme Court of the United States. Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump and Trump v. V.O.S. Selections, Inc., decided February 20, 2026.

Tax Foundation. “Tariff Tracker: 2026 Trump Tariffs & Trade War by the Numbers.” Updated March 2026. https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/

Yale Budget Lab. “State of U.S. Tariffs: SCOTUS Ruling Update.” February 20, 2026. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-scotus-ruling-update

Penn Wharton Budget Model. “Supreme Court Tariff Ruling: IEEPA Revenue and Potential Refunds.” February 20, 2026. https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2026/2/20/supreme-court-tariff-ruling-ieepa-revenue-and-potential-refunds

Munich Security Conference. Munich Security Report 2026: Under Destruction. Edited by Tobias Bunde and Sophie Eisentraut. February 2026. https://securityconference.org/en/publications/munich-security-report/2026/

Grynspan, Rebeca. Remarks at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, September 2025. Cited in UNCTAD, “Development in Action: UNCTAD Warns on Tariffs, Debt and Trust Deficit at UN General Assembly.” https://unctad.org/news/development-action-unctad-warns-tariffs-debt-and-trust-deficit-un-general-assembly

International Monetary Fund. World Economic Outlook: Global Economy in Flux, Prospects Remain Dim. October 2025. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2025/10/14/world-economic-outlook-october-2025

MIT Sloan Management Review. “10 Strategies for Leading in Uncertain Times.” https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/10-strategies-for-leading-in-uncertain-times/

Bacon, Francis. “Of Studies.” Essays (1625).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​