Geopolitical change has stopped being a background condition for business. It now decides where companies can operate, what technology they can access, and which dependencies quietly determine their margins. Henri Vanhanen starts today as Senior Advisor at the Economic Security Forum, working with companies and public sector organisations on exactly those questions.
Europe’s security environment is changing faster than most corporate strategies are built to absorb. The EU’s Readiness 2030 package targets some 800 billion euros in defence investment. NIS2 and CER regulation extend preparedness obligations far beyond critical infrastructure operators into ordinary supply chains. Sanctions and export controls now shape commercial positions in industries that never considered themselves geopolitical.None of this is temporary. It is the operating environment.
“Efficiency was the competitive advantage of the last decade. In this decade it will be decided by resilience: the ability to keep operations, deliveries and growth running even when the operating environment changes abruptly. We live in an era of strategic capitalism, where states steer markets and competitiveness is decided in the control of critical flows, meaning supply chains, technology, capital and regulation”, says Mikael Wigell, Founder and CEO of ESF.
Three vantage points on the same problem
Vanhanen brings an unusually complete view of how security policy and economics have converged. He has worked as a researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, in expert roles in the Parliament of Finland and the European Parliament, at the Association of Finnish Defence and Aerospace Industries PIA, and at technology company Nest AI. He is also a Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a frequently cited expert in Finnish and international media.
That combination matters, because the problem itself sits between disciplines. Research explains the shift. Policy experience explains how decisions actually get made. Industry experience explains what a company can realistically do about it on a Tuesday morning.
“I have long followed how the line between security policy and the economy has blurred. At ESF I can bring this expertise closer to corporate decision-making and help Finnish and international organisations in an environment where geopolitical change has become an increasingly concrete part of business”, Vanhanen says.
The blind spot is in the dependencies
At ESF, Vanhanen focuses on identifying the strategic dependencies of companies and organisations, and on building geopolitical and geoeconomic foresight into decision-making rather than bolting it on afterwards.
The pattern he describes is consistent across sectors. Organisations know their supply chain costs to the cent. They rarely know which of those suppliers has no substitute, which component has a single point of origin, or which market access rests on a political arrangement that could change within a quarter. Those dependencies tend to surface during a disruption, which is the most expensive moment to discover them.
“For companies, geopolitical risk no longer means only that a war breaks out somewhere. It can mean a market closing, technology becoming harder to access, a supply chain breaking, or a political decision that changes the terms of business quickly. Companies do not need to be able to predict the next crisis, but they do need to know their own dependencies before those turn into problems. What matters is which comes first: the disruption or the preparation”, Vanhanen says.
Assess your supply-chain exposure. ESF’s Geostrategic Supplier Assessment maps where your critical dependencies actually sit and what would happen if they moved. Contact us for a briefing →
