SYSTEMS & POWER

Why Power No Longer Lives Where We Think It Does

Power is often misunderstood as something centralized: a flag, a capital city, a balance sheet, a headline decision. In reality, power lives in systems, quietly, persistently, and often invisibly. It resides in the rules that determine access, the infrastructure that enables flow, and the thresholds that decide who is included and who is not.

What we are witnessing today is not a collapse of global order, but a redistribution of leverage within it. Trade, payments, energy, data, and logistics are no longer neutral utilities. They are conditional systems, designed with permissions, choke points, and enforcement mechanisms embedded directly into their architecture.

This is why geopolitical risk now shows up not only in diplomacy or defense, but in tariffs, sanctions, payment rails, correspondent banking relationships, and technical standards. Power has migrated from institutions that announce decisions to systems that execute them automatically.

The most consequential shifts are rarely loud. They appear as compliance updates, revised settlement rules, new monitoring requirements, or “temporary” controls that quietly become permanent. Each step feels reasonable in isolation. Collectively, they redraw the map.

This is also why smaller states, firms, and communities experience fragility first. Systems optimized for scale tend to externalize risk downward. When stress arrives, those without control over the infrastructure they depend on discover how little agency they actually have.

Understanding power today requires a different lens. Not who governs, but who designs the system. Not who issues policy, but who controls access. Not who speaks, but what happens when the system is under pressure.

Power, in the modern era, is infrastructural.