The May/June 2026 issue of Foreign Affairs arrives at a civilisational inflection point. Iran burns, trade wars calcify into permanent architecture, North Korea emerges as a de facto nuclear power, and Washington faces the most consequential strategic reckoning since 1945. This essay distills the issue’s eight most consequential essays — spanning geopolitics, economic warfare, technology supremacy, and the restructuring of American grand strategy — for UHNW families and family office principals navigating an era defined by rupture, not renewal.

THEMES OF THE ISSUE

Eight Essays. One Fracturing World.

ARTICLE I — GEOPOLITICS

The Shock Waves of Iran

Three essays: Ostovar · Maloney · Bordoff & O’Sullivan

AFSHON OSTOVAR · SUZANNE MALONEY · JASON BORDOFF & MEGHAN L. O’SULLIVAN

Who Will Determine the Fate of the Islamic Republic?

After 35 years of iron-fist rule, Ali Khamenei is dead — and Iran’s future now belongs to whoever seizes the contest.

On March 1, 2026, Iran’s state broadcaster announced that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had “drunk the sweet, pure draft of martyrdom.” Eleven days earlier, coordinated US-Israeli airstrikes had killed him along with senior military and political figures, methodically degrading Iran’s navy, air force, ballistic missile programme, and nuclear infrastructure. “When we are finished,” President Trump told the Iranian people, “take over your government. It will be yours to take.”

But no rapid regime collapse materialised. What emerged instead was something far more dangerous and instructive: a regime that demonstrated it could absorb decapitation, adapt, and weaponise its own apparent weakness. Tehran’s counter-move was swift and devastating to global markets. Within days, it targeted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — through which twenty percent of global oil and liquefied natural gas transits daily — not by mining the waterway but by striking a small number of vessels with cheap drones and missiles, instantly repricing global energy risk.

Afshon Ostovar’s essential essay reveals the succession contest now unfolding. The Assembly of Experts quickly named Mojtaba Khamenei — the supreme leader’s son — as successor, but real power rests with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The IRGC is not merely a military force; under Khamenei’s partnership, it became the central pillar of the Iranian state, its apparatus penetrating the economy, domestic politics, and society. The Guards are now searching for a political partner who will allow them to maintain and expand that dominance.

Yet the IRGC’s position is more precarious than its maximalist posture suggests. The war has killed many of the Guards’ most capable personalities — including senior security official Ali Larijani and adviser Ali Shamkhani — while the most competent reform-minded leaders, including President Pezeshkian, former President Rouhani, and reformist icon Mohammad Khatami, were largely spared. This asymmetry creates a genuine, if narrow, opening for a different Iran.

Suzanne Maloney’s complementary essay situates this crisis within Iran’s revolutionary DNA. The regime has survived before: urban street fighting, purges, the Iraqi invasion of 1980, devastating sanctions. Its doctrine of deterrence through asymmetric capabilities — developed precisely for this scenario — allows it to impose costs on adversaries without possessing superior conventional forces. Tehran’s leadership has already declared that it will not return to any pre-war regional arrangement without compensation, and that Iran is owed reparations for the attacks. The regime that emerges — whether IRGC-dominated or reformist-inflected — will enter any future order from a posture of grievance and leverage, not submission.

For UHNW investors and family offices, the Iran shock carries immediate implications. Jason Bordoff and Meghan O’Sullivan warn against the “dangerous allure of energy autarky” — the impulse, seductive in crisis, to pursue energy independence at any cost. The Hormuz disruption has resurfaced a structural reality: global energy supply chains remain brittle, and even partial disruption of a critical chokepoint can reprice commodities, jeopardise economic growth, and destabilise governments thousands of miles from the conflict. The intelligence conclusion for portfolio positioning is sobering: the Iran crisis is not episodic — it is the new baseline for a permanently elevated energy risk premium.

ARTICLE II — GEOECONOMICS

How to Fight an Economic War

A Field Manual for a Ruptured World

EDWARD FISHMAN · SENIOR FELLOW, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS

The Anatomy of Chokepoints and the Discipline of Economic Warfare

In a world of mutual vulnerability, every nation is now both predator and prey — and Washington lacks a field manual for this terrain.

Edward Fishman — director of the CFR’s Greenberg Center for Geoeconomics and author of Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare — opens with a remarkable scene from Davos: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declaring that “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” What Carney described as a moment of revelation, Fishman diagnoses as a permanent condition — and one for which the United States remains critically underprepared.

Fishman’s central intellectual contribution is a precise taxonomy of what constitutes a true chokepoint, as distinct from merely a competitive advantage. Three conditions must obtain simultaneously. First, a single country or coalition of close allies must possess dominant, concentrated market share — not leadership, but near-monopoly. Second, substitutes must be unavailable in the short term. Third, the controlling party must be able to inflict asymmetric harm: substantial pain on the target, minimal self-harm to itself.

The examples are clarifying. The US dollar is used in nearly 90% of all foreign exchange transactions — a genuine chokepoint. Nvidia accounts for over 85% of the market for AI chips — a genuine chokepoint. China refines roughly 90% of the world’s rare earths — a genuine chokepoint. By contrast, the US accounts for only 13% of global imports, meaning American tariffs, whatever their political theatre, fail the test: a country entirely excluded from the US market can still sell into nearly 90% of the global economy. This explains why Trump’s tariffs repeatedly failed to coerce — Brazil and China actually set annual export records despite US tariff pressure, by redirecting trade flows.

The essay’s most important passage for family office principals concerns the erosion of the dollar’s foundational advantage. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System now counts roughly 1,700 participating institutions in over 120 countries — not yet a rival to SWIFT, but a parallel infrastructure that could scale rapidly in a crisis. More concerning: after the G-7 froze Russia’s central bank reserves in 2022, the euro, pound, and yen fell in international usage — not because the dollar strengthened inherently, but because all G-7 currencies were perceived as equally susceptible to weaponisation. The conclusion: coordinating economic sanctions with European allies is not merely diplomatically desirable, but structurally necessary to prevent a geopolitical risk premium from accumulating against dollar-denominated assets.

Fishman closes with a constitutional proposal: legislative guardrails that create “sanctions-free zones” — sectors requiring congressional approval before the executive can weaponise them — and constraints on sanctioning treaty allies. The political logic is preservation: the United States cannot wage effective economic warfare if the world has concluded it will eventually weaponise everything against everyone.

ARTICLE III — INTERNATIONAL TRADE

The New Trade Order

Restoring Balance to a Broken Global Economy

ROBERT E. LIGHTHIZER · FORMER US TRADE REPRESENTATIVE

From Bretton Woods to the Broken Window: Building a Trading System for the Twenty-First Century

The postwar trading order was always built on myth. The question now is what system should replace it.

Robert Lighthizer — architect of Trump’s first-term trade strategy and author of No Trade Is Free — offers the issue’s most polemically charged essay, and in many respects its most economically urgent. His target is the hyperglobalist consensus that governed trade policy from the WTO’s founding in 1995 through the “China shock” that followed Beijing’s 2001 accession — a consensus he argues was always predicated on false assumptions and became, over time, a vehicle for systematic US impoverishment.

The numbers he marshals are striking and largely uncontested. The US goods trade deficit grew 40% between 2020 and 2024, reaching $1.2 trillion. America’s net international investment position has deteriorated to negative $27 trillion — meaning foreign interests own $27 trillion more of American assets than Americans own of theirs, an increase of over $20 trillion in two decades. GDP growth since 2001 has averaged just 2.1% annually, against 3.2% in the post-war decades. Manufacturing employment fell from 17.3 million in 1999 to 12.6 million today. And the Congressional Budget Office projects average annual growth of just 1.8% between 2027 and 2035.

Lighthizer’s proposed remedy is architecturally ambitious: a new international trade regime built on the principle of balanced trade. This does not mean bilateral balance in every relationship, but rather a commitment by all participating nations to maintain overall balance in international trade, averaged across a rolling three-year period. Countries achieving balance would face low tariffs from member nations; those running persistent surpluses would face escalating duties until they come into alignment. Least-developed countries could run temporary deficits for development purposes. Countries outside the regime — China being the obvious candidate — would face substantially higher duties.

The essay is candid about what drives persistent imbalances beyond tariffs: value-added tax systems that raise import prices and subsidise exports, currency manipulation, state subsidies, and weak labour laws — the nontariff barriers that negotiators have failed to discipline for decades. Germany’s structural surplus, sustained by eurozone currency dynamics and Hartz labour reforms, is cited as a developed-world mirror of China’s mercantilist model. Both externalize the costs of their industrial policies onto deficit countries, primarily the United States.

For family offices with cross-border asset exposure, Lighthizer’s essay signals a durable structural shift in the terms on which international capital will flow. The era in which US markets served as the world’s “consumer of last resort” without demanding reciprocity is ending, and the political coalition that supports that demand spans both parties. The question is not whether a new trading architecture will emerge, but how disruptive the transition will be.

ARTICLE IV — TECHNOLOGY & GEOPOLITICS

The Tech High Ground

What It Will Take to Gain the Advantage Over China

JAKE SULLIVAN · KISSINGER PROFESSOR, HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL · FORMER US NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER

The Real US-China Technology Contest: Production, Scale, and the Control of Critical Inputs

Washington has been running one race. China has been running another. The misalignment may be decisive.

Jake Sullivan — who served as National Security Adviser from 2021 to 2025 and was the principal architect of the Biden administration’s chip export control strategy — offers the issue’s most consequential technology essay, and arguably the most important strategic document on the US-China technology contest to appear in a major journal this year.

Sullivan’s central argument dismantles the assumption that has governed American technology policy for decades: the belief that China was running the same technological race as the United States, simply a few steps behind — a copycat power, dependent on Western IP, incapable of fundamental innovation. That assumption, Sullivan argues, has not been borne out. China has pursued a fundamentally different theory of power — one that places production, scale, and control of critical inputs at the centre of its national strategy.

China’s strategy, Sullivan explains, does not require leading in every frontier domain. It requires controlling nodes of leverage — the inputs and systems that advanced economies and militaries depend on to function. Beijing has already captured several: processed rare earths, precursor ingredients for pharmaceuticals, batteries. China now produces more than 70% of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and controls roughly three-quarters of global battery cell manufacturing capacity. After capturing the supply chain, China raced ahead in battery innovation — a compounding dynamic it is now attempting to replicate in biotechnology and robotics.

The American misframing, Sullivan argues, is conceptual: Washington treats the technology competition as a race to a finish line — a contest to see which country reaches the next exciting innovation first. That framing is misleading and counterproductive. The competition has no end date. It will extend indefinitely, across a wide variety of sectors. It is no longer enough to be first to discover new advancements if others are faster at deploying them, or to lead in design if the inputs and capacity vital to production sit beyond the control of the United States or its allies.

Sullivan’s diagnosis of the Trump administration’s chip export control vacillation is pointed. One camp, led by Secretary Rubio, pushed for tighter restrictions to impede China’s AI progress — a strategy of attrition. Another, represented by Commerce Secretary Lutnick, advocated looser restrictions to make China “addicted” to American chips — a strategy of deterrence through dependency. Both positions have internal logic, Sullivan concedes. But the right choice depends entirely on a clearly articulated objective — and that objective has never been defined with sufficient precision. The result has been strategic incoherence at precisely the moment when consistency is most needed.

For UHNW investors and family offices navigating technology-sector allocations, Sullivan’s essay provides the clearest available framework for assessing which US-China technology dependencies carry genuine strategic risk versus which are merely competitive positions that market forces can resolve. The distinction between chokepoints (where US or allied position is near-monopolistic and substitution is difficult) and merely competitive advantages is the critical analytical filter.

ARTICLES V & VI — KOREAN PENINSULA

The Strange Triumph of North Korea

Victor Cha · Jung H. Pak · Oriana Skylar Mastro

VICTOR CHA · GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY · JUNG H. PAK · FORMER CIA ANALYST

From CVID to Cold Peace: How Kim Jong Un Won the Nuclear Endgame

Seven US administrations. Three decades of sanctions. One failed doctrine. And a North Korea now capable of striking the American homeland.

The North Korea section of this issue constitutes the most forensically devastating intellectual autopsy of a failed foreign policy in modern American statecraft. Victor Cha — who sat at the negotiating table at the six-party talks — and Jung H. Pak — a former CIA analyst who tracked Kim Jong Un’s rise — together document not merely a policy failure but a systemic delusion: the belief, maintained across seven consecutive administrations and four diplomatic frameworks, that denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula was achievable if only the right combination of incentives and sanctions were applied.

The numbers speak with brutal clarity. North Korea today possesses 50 nuclear warheads and has stockpiled enough plutonium and enriched uranium to build 40 to 50 more. It has developed nearly 20 different delivery systems, including ICBMs capable of reaching the continental United States. Kim Jong Un has declared publicly and in parliamentary address that the country “will continue to consolidate our absolutely irreversible status as a nuclear power.” In March 2026, that declaration carried the weight of fait accompli.

Cha’s strategic proposal — a “cold peace” — is at once radical and commonsensical. He argues the United States must abandon the precondition that denuclearisation precede any serious negotiation. In its place, Washington should pursue arms control agreements, limits on nuclear testing and missile production, crisis management mechanisms, direct communication channels, and bans on the transfer of nuclear weapons or technology to third parties. Data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies shows that periods of US-North Korean dialogue correlate consistently with fewer missile launches, nuclear tests, and military provocations.

Jung Pak’s companion essay, “How North Korea Won,” traces Kim Jong Un’s strategic ascent from a little-known third-generation hereditary leader to what she calls a global power player. Kim conducted over 100 missile tests between 2012 and 2019 — more than triple the combined total of his father and grandfather — and in late 2023 formally abandoned his predecessors’ policy of peaceful reunification, declaring South Korea a hostile foreign state. His deployment of combat troops, millions of rounds of ammunition, and hundreds of ballistic missiles to support Russia’s Ukraine campaign has secured him technology transfers — including advanced satellite and drone technology — that substantially improve North Korea’s warfighting capabilities on the Korean Peninsula. The Russia partnership has transformed the strategic calculus: Pyongyang is no longer isolated but networked into a Sino-Russian axis that is aggressively resistant to American pressure.

The strategic implication for US policy is stark. The US military has shifted Patriot missile systems and high-altitude antimissile assets from South Korea to the Middle East to support the Iran campaign. North Korea’s ICBMs already outnumber the US interceptors stationed to defend against them. The gap between threat and defence is widening at precisely the moment when Washington’s attention and resources are most stretched.

ARTICLE VII — AMERICAN GRAND STRATEGY

A Grand Strategy of Consolidation

How Trump Can Revitalize American Power

A. WESS MITCHELL · MARATHON INITIATIVE · FORMER US ASSISTANT SECRETARY OF STATE FOR EUROPE

From Overextension to Concentration: The Hadrian Doctrine for American Power

The United States pays more to service its past borrowing than to fund its defence. The window for strategic consolidation is narrowing.

Wess Mitchell opens with an arresting historical analogy. In 1904, the British Empire faced a strategic predicament strikingly similar to America’s today: supreme power on paper, but with commitments exceeding resources, rising peer competitors, and a military increasingly configured for peripheral policing rather than great-power confrontation. Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher’s response — strategic consolidation, prioritising adjacent waters and delegating distant perimeters to regional allies while mobilising domestic industrial capacity — allowed Britain to achieve what Clausewitz called the “highest and simplest law of strategy”: concentration.

Mitchell argues the United States is at an analogous juncture. American military operations since 2001 added $8 trillion to the national debt. A string of government bailouts added a further $7 trillion — comparable to total US spending during the Second World War. Entitlement spending by 2024 accounted for 51% of federal outlays. Between 2000 and 2015, over 60,000 US factories closed and a third of manufacturing jobs disappeared. China’s GDP, meanwhile, grew from $2 trillion in 1991 (in inflation-adjusted dollars) to $37 trillion in 2024 — a 1,500% increase — and its defence spending grew from $23 billion to over $300 billion. In 2024 alone, a single Chinese shipbuilder produced more ships than the United States has built since 1945.

Consolidation, Mitchell carefully distinguishes, is not retrenchment. Retrenchment occurs when a great power concludes its core is so depleted that decline is inevitable and the goal is to reduce burden. Consolidation proceeds from the premise that a great power’s core of strength remains viable but has been mismanaged. The historical precedents are instructive: Hadrian disgorging Trajan’s overextended conquests and fortifying the Rhine-Danube-Euphrates perimeter produced a Roman golden age. Nixon’s Guam Doctrine — shifting conventional defence burdens to Asian partners while pursuing détente with rivals and investing in domestic energy and infrastructure — allowed the United States to refocus military expenditure on the Soviet contest.

Mitchell’s assessment of the Trump administration’s strategic documents is genuinely approving. The 2025 National Security Strategy explicitly identified the widening gap between US means and ends as the central problem in American statecraft. The 2026 National Defence Strategy — designed principally by Undersecretary Elbridge Colby — calls for a stronger focus on the Western Hemisphere and China, a controlled reduction of US efforts in Europe and the Middle East, and an ambitious programme for mobilising the US military-industrial base. Mitchell compares Colby’s design to Fisher’s 1904 approach in its analytical courage and strategic originality.

The Iran war, Mitchell notes, is a stress test for the consolidation thesis: if it remains narrowly scoped and is resolved expeditiously, it advances the strategy. If it becomes protracted — drawing in more US resources, stretching the military further, and generating new financial obligations — it could undermine the entire project. The fundamental warning is sobering: the United States has a historic opportunity to regain its bearings before China can exploit the gap. But the window is narrow, and the consolidation strategy requires precisely the kind of sustained, multi-administration discipline that Washington has repeatedly failed to sustain.

SYNTHESIS FOR ADVISORS

Six Structural Insights for UHNW Families