We are glad you're here because today we have a stack of documents on the table
that frame a concept that feels like it belongs in a dusty museum exhibit.
It really does.
It evokes these images of wooden halls, the smell of salt and gunpowder,
maybe pirates and trade routes carved out by cannon fire.
The term on the docket is gunboat capitalism.
It definitely sounds like the title of a history book about the 18th century,
something you'd read to learn about the high seas and colonial empires.
It does, but the source material we are analyzing today isn't looking backward.
It's looking at the headlines right now, this week.
The core argument here is that this ancient way of doing business is making a massive, sophisticated comeback.
The premise is that the era we all grew up in
where governments largely stayed out of the way of multinational corporations is officially dead.
That is the headline.
The golden age of globalization where the map of the world was defined
by supply chains rather than borders is over and is being replaced
by something much more aggressive.
We are seeing a fundamental restructuring of how the world works.
The mission for this deep dive is to figure out exactly what that replacement looks like.
We want to understand how geopolitics is warping commercial decisions that used to be purely about profit.