It is against this backdrop that I note I have been sent Anthropic’s job posting for a geopolitical intelligence analyst by nearly a dozen people. I’ve been sent it by my wife. I’ve been sent it by other people’s spouses. I’ve been sent it by employees who I hope didn’t apply. I’ve been sent it by friends of friends who think it’s something I should know about. I’ve been sent it by enemies who want me to fold up shop at Unruly and stop trying to take their market, retreating instead to the internal affairs of Anthropic.

The job posting itself has even been reported as news. Never have I seen the geopolitical risk internet (a small corner of the universe to be sure) in such a tizzy over a role.

Here are four reasons why this is important.

First, it underscores that even Anthropic won’t simply use Claude to do geopolitical work! The geopolitical world has begun to dabble in the art of AI, using LLMs to support their work. But when arguably the hottest company in AI and vibe coding still needs humans to “conduct horizon scanning” and “provide geopolitical context for international conferences”, we all must realize that the general purpose models, given where they stand today, do not yet automate geopolitics. (I would argue that purpose built solutions are much better at this).

Second, geopolitical risk work is now a bedrock of corporate activity. Big energy companies have hired geopolitical analysts for a long-time but tech companies typically didn’t. Today, only a small percentage of companies overall have geopolitical teams and those teams are often left to wrestle with strategy, government affairs and the like for influence. Few companies place geopolitical analysis at the core of their of strategic decision-making.

But this job is a bit different. Anthropic itself is a geopolitical football being kicked around by Washington. The job explicitly works on “international expansion and facility siting.” As data centers become flag-bearing national outposts of American companies, choosing where to be and where not to be is much more than risk management. It represents some of the most strategic choices a company will make.

Whether this actually elevates the role of the in-house analyst or not remains to be seen but it underscores that you can no longer do corporate or external affairs without geopolitical affairs.

Third, the opportunity solidifies that the most exciting jobs in the geopolitical risk space may now be inside corporate, if not inside tech and AI specifically. For decades, the dream of many political science students was to land a seat at a major geopolitical advisory firm and work up to being a Managing Director or Partner. I followed this path. Yet, most consulting firms in the space are looking to hire ex-government movers-and-shakers now, not analysts, because they believe that access cannot be replicated by AI. Thus, the pathways to train up to become excellent are closing as AI eats more of the entry level work.

In fact, the number of geopolitical providers I’ve talked to who are running scared about what AI will do to their business model underscores even those sought-after political risk industry roles may only be a temporary safe-haven. At Unruly, we are finding we can serve more and more companies with AI generated geopolitical risk research. That means the role of the human in the model must evolve considerably which offers a different value-proposition to would-be analysts.

Of course, a key selling point of such a role would be building this at Anthropic itself. If you suddenly had access to all the tools and all the compute, you could probably develop some pretty novel ways to model and understand the world. While Anthropic may be an outlier, corporations are going to offer those types of compute packages far more than the consulting industry will in the future (unless, you work for an actual geopolitical tech company, like ours). Thus, if you want to solve big problems, you need big compute, and big compute means big budget which means big corporate.

Finally, the excitement around the job posting implies that even the most risk averse industry - the risk industry - gets excited by a one-in-a-lifetime bet. The job advertises top compensation at $220,000 which is less than what a top analyst would earn in the consulting world, even a lower salary than government Senior Executive Service roles. But presumably the job comes with options over Anthropic shares, which is like buying a lottery ticket where five your six numbers have already been drawn and matched. You’re just waiting for the sixth number so you know how much you’ve won.

You don’t need to be an intelligence analyst to realize that would be an intelligent move. Especially when there are far fewer lottery tickets available to geopolitical analysts than, say, AI engineers.

Based on the all the hubbub, I would guess that roughly half the people in my professional universe applied for this job. To the winner: I hope you have a good few years training Claude before it takes your job too.

-SW

Executive Summary

Viktor Orbán’s 16-year reign ended on 12 April 2026 in a landslide. With 95.9% of list votes counted, Péter Magyar’s Tisza party leads with 53.7% against Fidesz-KDNP’s 37.8% (Europe Elects). Seat projections based on 90.9% of votes counted show Tisza on track for approximately 138 of 199 parliamentary seats — a two-thirds supermajority — while Fidesz-KDNP is projected at roughly 54 seats (Europe Elects; TVP World). Turnout reached 77.8% by 6:30 PM — before polls even closed — surpassing the previous all-time record of 70.5% set in 2002 (Unruly / AFP). Orbán conceded, calling the result “painful but unambiguous” (Unruly / AFP).

The core judgment: This is not a clean democratic restoration. It is the beginning of a protracted institutional reckoning in which a former Fidesz insider — socialised in the very system he promises to dismantle — will attempt to reverse 16 years of state capture using tools that Orbán deliberately booby-trapped before leaving office (Politico). The supermajority, if confirmed in final results, is the single most important variable: it gives Magyar the constitutional authority to rewrite the rules Orbán embedded in cardinal laws. The threshold is 133 seats (Bloomberg). Current projections of 138 seats suggest Tisza will clear it, but final results — including individual constituency races — are not expected until later this week.

Biggest geopolitical winners: The European Union, Ukraine, NATO cohesion, and Hungarian civil society. Biggest losers: Russia’s leverage in the EU Council, China’s privileged access to Central Europe, and the transnational illiberal-populist network that treated Budapest as its ideological capital. The defeat also lands as a symbolic blow to Trump-world at a moment when the White House invested direct political capital — JD Vance rallied with Orbán in Budapest five days before the vote (BBC) — and lost.

What Happened and Why It Matters

Orbán lost because corruption became visible enough to override culture-war politics. The battery-plant environmental scandal — involving Chinese and South Korean factories accused of toxic discharges with government complicity — crystallised public anger over a regime that had become more interested in enriching its network than delivering services (Reuters; Le Monde). Healthcare deterioration, economic stagnation, and the 2024 presidential pardon scandal involving a child abuser’s accomplice created the opening (Unruly / AFP). Magyar, a former government insider who knew where the bodies were buried, filled it.

The result is historically significant for three reasons. First, it is the most decisive defeat of an entrenched illiberal leader through the ballot box in 21st-century Europe — Hungarians turned out in record numbers to end Orbán’s rule (AP News). Second, it occurred despite an electoral system Orbán had gerrymandered over four election cycles, which analysts estimated could have allowed Fidesz to retain a majority even while losing the popular vote by three or four percentage points (Unruly / AFP; New York Times). Third, it happened after the sitting US Vice President flew to Budapest to campaign for the incumbent — and the electorate rejected the intervention (Salon).

Magyar declared the election win had “liberated Hungary,” telling cheering supporters in Budapest: “Together, we brought down the Orbán regime” (Unruly / AFP). Orbán, for his part, stated: “The election results, though not yet final, are clear and understandable; for us, they are painful but unambiguous. We have not been entrusted with the responsibility and opportunity to govern. I congratulated the winning party” (Unruly / AFP).

What remains uncertain: the final seat count (official results expected later this week), whether Tisza secures the full two-thirds needed to amend the constitution (133 seats; current projections suggest 138), and how quickly Magyar can form a government given the institutional traps Orbán has laid.

Is China a Loser?

Yes — but not catastrophically, and not yet irreversibly.

Orbán was Beijing’s most reliable partner inside the EU. Hungary served as China’s gateway for EV battery supply chains — CATL’s €7.3bn plant in Debrecen being the centrepiece (Reuters) — along with BYD’s approximately €4bn factory in Szeged, which has already begun trial production (Reuters), the aborted Fudan University campus in Budapest, and Huawei’s logistics hub. More critically, Orbán reliably blocked or diluted EU consensus positions on China, from Taiwan statements to investment screening (South China Morning Post).

Chinese firms in Hungary now face a “post-election reckoning” regardless of who won, as the South China Morning Post reported (SCMP). Magyar has signalled a rebalancing, not a rupture. He is unlikely to tear up existing investment contracts — the battery factories employ thousands and represent billions in sunk costs. But the political environment will shift materially:

• EU veto cover disappears. Hungary will no longer reflexively shield Beijing in Council votes on trade defence, investment screening, or diplomatic statements. This is the single largest loss for China.

• Regulatory scrutiny increases. The battery-plant scandal was a campaign issue. Revelations about foreign battery makers ignoring safety and environmental regulations — and the government helping cover it up — were a major headache for Fidesz (Balkan Insight; Green European Journal). A Magyar government will face domestic pressure to enforce standards that Orbán waived as sweeteners for Chinese investors.

• Fudan and telecom access face review. The Fudan campus project, already politically toxic, is likely dead. Huawei’s position will face new scrutiny aligned with broader EU security concerns.

• Supply chain positioning survives — for now. Chinese firms already operational in Hungary will adapt. Beijing’s commercial footprint is too large to unwind quickly, and Magyar needs the jobs and tax revenue. CATL’s Debrecen plant alone is expected to create around 9,000 jobs (Bloomberg).

Net assessment: China is a significant loser on diplomatic leverage and EU veto politics, a partial loser on investment access and regulatory environment, but retains its commercial footprint in the medium term. The real question is whether a Magyar government aligns Hungary with the EU’s emerging “de-risking” consensus on China — which would represent a structural, not merely tactical, shift.

What Orbán’s Defeat Means for Trump and the Global Right

The defeat is a genuine blow, and the White House made it worse by going all-in. JD Vance’s Budapest rally on 7 April — where he attacked “disgraceful” European Union interference in Hungary’s election (Reuters) and Trump promised to bring US “economic might” to Hungary if Fidesz won (Unruly / AFP) — turned the election into a referendum on American interference. Hungarian voters answered clearly. As Fox News reported, Hungarians turned out in record numbers despite Orbán being “a strong ally of Donald Trump and JD Vance” (Fox News).

Three implications for Trump-world:

First, the symbolic loss is real. Orbán was not merely an ally; he was the proof of concept — the leader who demonstrated that illiberal democracy could be built inside the EU, sustained through multiple elections, and exported as a model. CPAC Budapest, an overseas version of the most prominent right-wing political event in the US, was the movement’s ideological showcase (euronews). That showcase is now shuttered. As Newsweek asked: “Can MAGA Go Global If It Can’t Hold Hungary?” (Newsweek). Rahm Emanuel argued this marks “three straight losses for Trump-style politics in Europe: Slovenia, French local elections, and now Hungary” (Rahm Emanuel on X) — though this framing overstates the case. In Slovenia, the liberal incumbent beat Trump-allied Janez Janša by barely 1% in the closest election in the country’s history (Bloomberg), and in France’s municipal elections, the far-right National Rally fell short of key targets in Marseille, Toulon, and Nîmes but still made unprecedented gains (Le Monde). Hungary is the only unambiguous rout.

Second, the mechanism of defeat matters. Orbán did not lose on culture-war terrain. He lost because voters prioritised corruption, healthcare, cost of living, and institutional rot over migration fear and anti-woke messaging. As sociologist Andrea Szabo of ELTE University told AFP: “Fidesz decided to run a purely negative campaign... What they talked about was war, war, war” (Unruly / AFP). This is the vulnerability that Trump-aligned movements globally prefer not to discuss: culture wars work until the state visibly fails to deliver basic services.

Third, the exportable parts of the Orbán model survive. The playbook — media capture, judicial packing, electoral gerrymandering, oligarchic patronage networks — has already been studied and partially adopted by actors from Serbia to the US. Orbán’s shrewd tweaking of his country’s political system over 16 years created a model that “illiberal political leaders look up to... as a role model, who has made it, managed to take power,” as Emilia Palonen of the University of Helsinki told AFP (Unruly / AFP). The defeat of the practitioner does not erase the practice.

How Hard Will It Be to Fix the Institutions Orbán Remade?

This is the hardest question, and the answer is: harder than the celebratory mood in Brussels suggests. Orbán spent 16 years embedding loyalists, rewriting laws, and — as Politico documented in detail — laying deliberate “traps” for his successor. He appointed supporters to key state institutions to block budgets and laws (Politico). In December 2025, Hungary’s Fidesz-dominated parliament even passed a bill making it harder to unseat the head of state (DW).

• Constitution & cardinal laws

  • Medium (if supermajority holds) / Extreme (if it doesn’t) difficulty to reverse

  • Orbán’s 2011 Fundamental Law and dozens of cardinal laws (requiring two-thirds to amend) locked in everything from the structure of the judiciary to media regulation. Armed with a two-thirds majority in 2010, Orbán “implemented a root-and-branch reform of Hungarian state institutions and introduced a new constitution steeped in conservative values” (Unruly / AFP). A supermajority (133 of 199 seats) is the skeleton key. Without it, Magyar governs inside Orbán’s constitutional cage.

• Judiciary & Constitutional Court

  • High difficulty to reverse

  • Orbán packed the Constitutional Court with loyalists, including a former Fidesz defence minister (Politico). Judges serve long terms. Even with a supermajority, replacing sitting judges raises rule-of-law concerns that Brussels will scrutinise. Magyar has said courts must decide Orbán’s fate and that his government would focus on restoring judicial independence (TVP World).

• Media ecosystem

  • Extreme difficulty to reverse

  • The Central European Press and Media Foundation (KESMA) consolidated over 470 pro-Fidesz outlets into a single entity in 2018, exempted from antitrust review by government decree (MAPMF; New York Times). Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has classified Orbán as a “press freedom predator,” stating he has “nearly wiped out independent journalism” in Hungary (RSF). Ownership is opaque, legally entrenched, and intertwined with oligarchic networks. You cannot legislate an independent media ecosystem into existence.

• Procurement & oligarchic capture

  • High difficulty to reverse

  • Hungary is ranked the most corrupt country in the EU, together with Bulgaria, according to Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index (Transparency International Hungary). Billions in EU and state contracts flow through Orbán-linked oligarchs, most notably Lőrinc Mészáros, a childhood friend of Orbán who became Hungary’s richest man (Forbes; Bloomberg). Unwinding these networks requires forensic auditing, legal proceedings, and political will.

• President of the Republic

  • High difficulty to reverse

  • Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok, who is close to Fidesz and will be in office until 2029, retains the power to call a snap election if the government can’t form (Politico). Parliament also recently reinforced the president’s position legislatively (DW). This is one of Orbán’s most potent institutional traps.

• Security services

  • High difficulty to reverse

  • Several whistleblowers from police, military and other state authorities came forward during the campaign to publicly accuse Orbán’s government of incompetence and influencing state institutions for political gain (Unruly / AFP). A growing list of Orbán loyalists began defecting before the election as his vulnerability became apparent (New York Times). Reforming these services without destabilising them is a delicate operation.

The European Policy Centre has argued that the EU should agree with a new Hungarian government on a “binding rule-of-law” framework, with institutional reforms phased rather than frontloaded (EPC). This is the right instinct. Magyar has promised to carry out reforms required to unfreeze billions of euros in EU funds earmarked for Hungary (Unruly / AFP), but the Orbán system was designed to survive its creator. As political scientist Attila Gyulai of ELTE University put it: Orbán “acted as a battering ram” so he could be the one who “wears out first” (Unruly / AFP).

6. Global Implications

EU decision-making transforms overnight. Hungary’s veto — wielded by Orbán to block sanctions on Russia, delay Ukraine aid, obstruct rule-of-law mechanisms, and shield China — is gone. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared “Hungary has chosen Europe,” while European Parliament President Roberta Metsola said “Hungary’s place is at the heart of Europe” (Unruly / AFP). One European diplomat had told AFP before the vote, speaking on condition of anonymity: “Most member states would be quite happy to be rid of Orbán. The patience has worn very thin” (Unruly / AFP).

Ukraine gains a neighbour, not an adversary. Magyar has pledged to make Hungary a “reliable NATO ally” and dropped Orbán’s hostile rhetoric toward Kyiv (Unruly / AFP). He still opposes arms transfers and rapid Ukrainian EU accession — continuity that reflects genuine Hungarian public opinion — but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky congratulated Magyar, writing: “We are ready for meetings and constructive joint work in the interest of both nations, as well as for peace, security and stability in Europe” (Unruly / AFP). Ukrainian Prime Minister Ioulia Svyrydenko added that “the Hungarian people have said a clear and categorical ‘no’ to any attempt to bring their country back into Moscow’s orbit” (Unruly / AFP).

Russia loses its inside man. Orbán was Moscow’s most valuable asset in the EU — not as an agent, but as a veto-wielding disruptor who reliably slowed Western consensus. Leaked recorded phone conversations caused EU-wide alarm about Orbán’s and his foreign minister’s close relations with Moscow during the campaign, with Polish and Irish leaders condemning the links as “sinister” and “repulsive” (Unruly / AFP). The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas was even more scathing, saying “European ministers should work for Europe not for Russia” (Unruly / AFP). Reports also claimed an ongoing covert Russian social media campaign to boost Orbán and weaken the opposition (Unruly / AFP). An Orbán loss was described by France 24 as “the turning point Putin fears” (France 24). Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s victory message — “Ruszkik haza!” (Russians go home!) — captured the mood across Central Europe (Unruly / AFP).

The democratic-backsliding narrative shifts. For a decade, Hungary was Exhibit A in the global story of democratic erosion. The European Parliament had denounced Orbán’s Hungary as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy” (BBC). Its reversal — through elections, with record turnout, despite a rigged system — provides a counter-narrative. As Andrea Szabo, a senior research fellow at ELTE University, told AFP before the vote: “This is the last moment in which this process can be halted, and the pendulum can swing back in a democratic direction” (Unruly / AFP).

7. Winners and Losers

Winners

• The European Union — regains Council cohesion, loses its most persistent veto blocker. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote: “Let us join forces for a strong, safe and above all united Europe” (Unruly / AFP). French President Emmanuel Macron hailed “a victory for democratic turnout, the Hungarian people’s attachment to European Union values, and for Hungary in Europe” (Unruly / AFP). Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez declared: “Today, Europe and European values won” (Unruly / AFP).

• Ukraine — loses an obstructionist neighbour, gains a non-hostile one. Zelensky congratulated Magyar and signalled readiness for “constructive joint work” (Unruly / AFP).

• Poland’s Tusk government — gains a regional ally in the democratic-restoration camp. Tusk hailed “a glorious victory” (Unruly / AFP).

• Hungarian civil society and independent media — the groups Orbán vowed to crush (”fake civil society organisations, bought journalists, judges and politicians”) gain political space (Unruly / AFP).

• UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer — called it “an historic moment, not only for Hungary, but for European democracy” (Unruly / AFP).

• Giorgia Meloni — paradoxically, Meloni emerges repositioned. She congratulated Magyar for his “clear election victory” while thanking “my friend Viktor Orbán for the intense collaboration of these last years,” adding she was “certain that we will continue to collaborate constructively” (Unruly / AFP). She is now the undisputed leader of the European right’s illiberal-adjacent wing, without the baggage of Orbán’s defeat.

Losers

• Russia — loses its most effective EU disruptor. Evidence of Russian interference in Hungary’s election had been growing throughout the campaign, including reports of a covert Russian social media campaign to boost Orbán (Unruly / AFP), and it failed.

• China — loses privileged access and EU veto cover (SCMP).

• Trump-world — loses its proof-of-concept and ideological capital. The question of whether the Vance rally helped or hindered Orbán was raised even before the vote (Irish Times).

• Fidesz-linked oligarchs — face potential audits, procurement reform, and loss of political protection. Lőrinc Mészáros, Orbán’s childhood friend who became Hungary’s richest man through state contracts (Forbes), is among those most exposed.

• Orbán personally — moves from the most powerful figure in Central European politics to opposition leader. He had “transformed his small central European country from a burgeoning Western democracy into an illiberal one” (CNN) — and voters reversed it. Born in 1963, he first became prime minister in 1998 at just 35 — the second youngest in Hungarian history (Wikipedia). He returned to power in 2010 and held it for 16 years.

• The “illiberal democracy” brand — the term Orbán used in his infamous 2014 speech at Băile Tușnad, where he declared his government was building an “illiberal state” within the EU (Heinrich Böll Foundation), loses its only successful long-term practitioner inside the EU.

8. The Magyar Question: Can the Insider Deliver System Change?

The biggest risk to the democratic-restoration narrative is Magyar himself. As analyst Andrzej Sadecki of the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies told AFP: “In a way, Magyar is like Orbán 20 years ago without all the baggage, the corruption and the mistakes made in power” (Unruly / AFP). But that cuts both ways.

Magyar was born on 16 March 1981 (Wikipedia), making him 45 at the time of the election. He was born into a family of prominent conservatives, befriended Orbán’s current chief of staff Gergely Gulyás during university, married Judit Varga in 2006 (she later became Orbán’s justice minister), headed the state’s student loan provider, and sat on the board of multiple state companies (Unruly / AFP). He has even stricter anti-immigration views than Orbán, pledging to end the government’s guest worker programme. His stance on LGBTQ rights is vague, though he emphasises equality before the law. He rejects sending arms to Ukraine and opposes the country’s quick EU integration (Unruly / AFP).

“As he was socialised in Fidesz, there are also doubts whether he can provide a genuine rupture with Orbán’s rule,” Sadecki cautioned. “Left-wing voters might not be fully happy with his agenda, but they still support him, because he represents the biggest chance for change” (Unruly / AFP).

9. Scenarios for the Next 12 Months

Scenario 1: Democratic Restoration Accelerates

Probability: 25%

Magyar secures a confirmed supermajority (133+ seats), moves swiftly to amend cardinal laws, begins judicial and media reform, unfreezes EU funds, and aligns Hungary with mainstream EU positions. Orbán’s institutional traps are dismantled within 12 months.

Triggers: Final seat count confirms supermajority (current projections suggest ~138 seats) (TVP World); EU provides structured support and conditionality framework (EPC); Fidesz fragments in opposition, as loyalist defections accelerate (New York Times).

Scenario 2: Partial Reform, Partial Continuity (Base Case)

Probability: 55%

Magyar governs with a supermajority but faces fierce resistance from Orbán-embedded institutions — the Constitutional Court, the Media Council, the State Audit Office, the presidency. Reform proceeds unevenly: EU funds are partially unfrozen, foreign policy realigns, but media and judicial reform stall. Magyar’s own Fidesz socialisation produces policy continuity on migration and some social issues. The oligarchic networks adapt rather than collapse.

Triggers: Institutional resistance from Orbán loyalists in fixed-term positions (Politico); legal challenges to reform legislation; Magyar’s own conservative instincts limit the scope of change.

Scenario 3: Institutional Sabotage and Backlash

Probability: 20%

Orbán-aligned institutions — particularly the president (in office until 2029), the Constitutional Court, and the State Audit Office — actively obstruct Magyar’s government. Budget vetoes, constitutional challenges, and potential snap-election triggers create governance paralysis. Fidesz regroups around a narrative of illegitimate foreign-backed regime change.

Triggers: President Sulyok blocks key legislation or triggers constitutional crisis (Politico); Constitutional Court strikes down reform laws; economic downturn blamed on new government.

10. Key Judgments and Confidence Levels

1. Orbán’s defeat is genuine and irreversible as an electoral outcome. He conceded and congratulated the winning party (Unruly / AFP). He will not return to power in this parliamentary term. — High confidence

2. Tisza will secure a two-thirds supermajority, based on projections of ~138 seats with 90.9% of votes counted (Europe Elects; TVP World). — Moderate-High confidence (final count pending; individual constituency results could shift the total)

3. The supermajority is necessary but not sufficient for institutional reform. Orbán’s traps — loyalist appointments, the presidency, the Constitutional Court — will slow and complicate reform regardless (Politico). — High confidence

4. China’s diplomatic leverage in the EU Council is materially reduced. Beijing loses its most reliable veto partner on trade, investment screening, and foreign policy (SCMP). — High confidence

5. China’s commercial footprint in Hungary will persist in the medium term, even as the regulatory and political environment tightens. CATL’s €7.3bn Debrecen plant (Reuters) and BYD’s ~€4bn Szeged factory (Reuters) represent too much sunk investment to unwind quickly. — Moderate confidence

6. The Vance rally was a net negative for both Orbán and Trump. It allowed Magyar to frame the election as a choice between Hungarian sovereignty and foreign interference — ironically inverting Orbán’s own playbook (Irish Times). — Moderate confidence

7. Magyar will align Hungary with mainstream EU foreign policy positions on Russia and Ukraine within 90 days, but will maintain opposition to arms transfers to Ukraine (Unruly / AFP). — Moderate confidence

8. Media reform will be the hardest institutional domain to address, given the opacity of ownership structures and the legal entrenchment of KESMA, which consolidated over 470 pro-Fidesz outlets (MAPMF; New York Times). RSF has described Orbán as having “nearly wiped out independent journalism” in Hungary (RSF). — High confidence

9. The Orbán system was designed to survive its creator. As political scientist Gyulai noted, Orbán “managed to build up the political system around himself” so that “all policy issues, ideological preferences, socio-cultural perceptions culminate in one referendum-like question: do you want Viktor Orbán? Yes or no?” (Unruly / AFP). The next 12 months will test whether that design holds against a supermajority and EU pressure. — High confidence

10. Orbán’s defeat does not signal the death of right-wing populism in Europe. Meloni remains powerful in Italy; the far right made gains (though fell short of key targets) in French municipal elections (Le Monde); and Janša nearly won in Slovenia (Bloomberg). The lesson other populists will draw is operational — avoid visible corruption, maintain service delivery — not ideological. — High confidence

This analysis reflects information available as of 13 April 2026, the day after the Hungarian parliamentary election. Final official results are expected later this week. All seat projections are based on partial counts (90.9% of list votes) and Europe Elects projections.

Forecast Trump in 10 days

I was given a hard deadline by my publisher of no further edits come November 15, 2024. That meant that I would have 10 days to update the book, including a chapter about America, following the 2024 presidential election. When Trump won on November 5th, I faced the prospect of having to commit my gut instincts into the permanence of a book that I hoped would be read for years.

Many of those gut reactions were correct. I wrote of eliminating federal oversight and regulation on nearly everything. I wrote of tariffs moving from the technical and legal channels into a political football that would result in extra high levels across the board. I wrote about public support for Trump’s deportation plans and how this would permit enforcement tactics like what Trump ultimately did with ICE. I wrote of politicized courts that would do Trump’s bidding.

But one of my other contentions was terribly wrong.

My big miss

After it was clear Trump had won, I went back through the book and started to add Trump as a punctuation to elements which his election validated. And I leaned on what I knew about Trump to predict the future.

I noted that “Trump was elected again in 2024 on similar promises of even bigger, unapologetic tariffs and the implementation of a new isolationism.” I noted that the US was losing its desire to act as the world’s policeman, “a development that is likely to be reinforced by the isolationist instincts of the Trump administration.”

But, I also wrote “The second Trump administration will revert to a more isolationist foreign policy, as it did in his first term. For all of Trump’s tough talk, he engaged in the fewest military actions of any U.S. president in decades.”

Now, there’s no doubt Trump has been isolationist. He has defunded pretty much every international organization. He has eliminated foreign aid. He keeps the sheer existence of NATO an open question that is raised nearly every week.

But, the implication of the point about few military actions in his first term was that this would be the norm in his second term. Clearly, that has not been the case.

Why I got this wrong

Trump had won in 2016 after building an image of being ardently against the 2003 Iraq war. As I noted, his first term saw virtually no international intervention and instead a focus on holding the line against international commitments. In 2024, Trump campaigned on ending the “stupid” war in Ukraine “in 24 hours”. He picked a Vice President who famously didn’t care what happened to Ukraine. And he focused all of his campaign energy on signature domestic issues.

Thus, I made a few mistakes. First, I conflated isolationism with non-intervention. Yes, the US was pulling back from its role as globalization police force. But not intervening militarily is very different.

I probably did this because both had aligned in the politics of Trump’s first term. The population was sick of foreign wars and of foreign aid / support. Foreign countries feared Trump and decided not to antagonize him and instead wait him out. Thus, his lack of military intervention was a function of external conditions too, not necessarily a world view.

Which brings me to the second analytical error: Path dependency. It didn’t seem that foolish to expect Trump to act in his second term as he did in his first term, except that expecting consistency from Trump is probably foolish to some extent. Or, less charitably, I evaluated him within the typical parameters of historical presidents, not someone that would wholesale rethink a foreign policy posture because a brand new approach would suit him politically and maybe financially.

Thus, instead of understanding Trump as a transactionalist who played power politics, I was looking at his actions in the first term as representing a world view. In fact, it was more about the politics of the moment than about his own red lines.

Finally, I saw dots when I should have seen a line related to the Middle East. In his first term, Trump assassinated Iran’s most powerful military commander. He struck Syria more than once. He conducted large scale drone strikes. He did little else militarily, but taken together this showed a willingness to break precedent to counter threats in the Middle East. While the narrative about Trump’s first term was about avoiding foreign entanglements, there was some evidence to the contrary.

Could AI have done better?

AI is not better at predicting the future but it is better at abandoning the past. And if you reframe the game from “being right” to “quickly realizing you are wrong” then I would expect AI to outperform humans.

AI that focuses on news narrative might have bought the “Trump is isolationist” narrative; indeed, Claude comforts me by telling me:

In practice, most LLMs (including me, honestly) would have made the same mistake because we’re trained on text that predominantly labeled Trump as isolationist, which reflects how journalists and analysts talked about him rather than what he actually did...LLMs in late 2024 were actively reinforcing the isolationist frame because that’s how most of their training data described Trump. So on this specific failure mode, AI probably would have been as blind as you were.

ChatGPT tells me it would have made the same mistake because “conflating isolationism with non-intervention was not a human error - it’s a data problem.” GPT notes that its training data labeled Trump as “isolationist”, “anti-war” and “against foreign entanglements”, which becomes compressed to “less likely to use force.”

AI also has trouble with out of the ordinary scenarios. When we were publishing our flagship Iran report a couple weeks ago, we uploaded it to Claude Code which replied:

The data covers a (fictional/scenario) world where a US-Israel war with Iran has broken out, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, and various cascading geopolitical effects are unfolding.

When we asked why Claude thought it was hypothetical, Claude explained:

A few things triggered it:

1. The dates are in the future — March 2026 is still in the future from my training data perspective, and today is March 17, 2026. So I was reading detailed reports about events supposedly happening right now or very recently, which pattern-matched to “scenario” rather than “reporting.”

2. The escalation speed — Khamenei killed on Feb 28, Strait of Hormuz closed, 10+ tankers hit, Gulf states under missile attack, IEA releasing 400M barrels, oil threatening $200 — all within ~12 days. That’s an extremely compressed escalation timeline that felt more like a stress-test scenario than how events typically unfold.

So AI would have started 2025 from the same position as I did. And we can get a sense that it would have trouble developing scenarios about what is underway in such an unruly world because it is simply hard to believe. However, AI wouldn’t have to commit that in the form of a book.

As a result, AI could then be asked to monitor for signals of divergence from the core contention. By March 2025, Trump discussed militarily invading Greenland. By June 2025, Trump had struck underground nuclear facilities in Iran, and saw that Iran’s military response was limited. By mid-2025, Trump was shooting missiles at Venezuelan boats, and moved an aircraft carrier nearby in October. As a result, it would be clear to human analysts and AI that Trump was not a non-interventionist.

And, yet, even with all the evidence, human analysts still suffer confirmation bias. Few warned that a Venezuelan operation was likely or that a war on the scale of what we see in the Gulf was potentially going to occur. AI would likely have done better at helping us understand that probabilities were recalibrating even if it didn’t make an accurate point forecast.

Where AI wins

AI has a few advantages over humans:

• AI holds probabilities, not positions: Humans defend positions while AI tracks probability distributions. If you want to get a sense of what’s possible, probabilistic thinking is much more helpful.

• AI is better at separating labels from behaviors: Both humans and AI might shortcut to the heuristic of Trump as “isolationist” but AI can quickly update for changed behaviors while humans ask if the behavior has moved enough to change the label.

• AI treats every day like Groundhog Day: Humans commit to views and wait to be proven wrong. AI is can be told to think “if I had no prior view, what would I conclude today?”

• AI cares about adaptation, not consistency: Humans want to be coherent and story-tell. AI can hold contradicting evidence in its system and continuously update to make conclusions. It also doesn’t care if it was wrong yesterday, which can often stop a human from forecasting again.

Warning vs Prediction

Thus, if you think about AI less as a predictive tool and more as a warning tool, you can harness it to get leverage over what’s actually happening in the world and what it means.

Any horizon scanning software, like that which we’ve built at Unruly, can pick up when the game is changing and help you prepare.

Human authors are left explaining why they published a wrong sentence a year ago.

-SW

Yet, in the hours following the first bombs, most companies were focused on what it actually meant to their businesses today. Companies have sprawling global supply chains. They have employees sitting in the Emirates airport lounge. They are enmeshed in the middle of churning bilateral relationships. Whether the war ends sooner or later, they needed to figure out their existing exposure. Quickly.

Companies without a dedicated geopolitical risk budget turned to Google News, GPT, or maybe an Economist or FT subscription to get a sense of ramifications. These are affordable, but not able to provide true insights related to their specific business.

Companies with larger budgets turned to a growing number of boutique geopolitical risk research firms. While these firms produce high quality analytical research, it is delivered slowly and rarely iterates at the speed of business decisions or events unfolding. While custom insights can be had with expert phone calls, those insights are out of date with the next headline.

Could AI, instead, give these companies swift, dynamic insights?

Understanding a war - quickly and dynamically

It is into this space that Unruly Corp’s Global Impact of the Iran Conflict Report fits. We have spent a number of months building a system that can size up global events from every perspective and write like an analyst would. So, we unleashed our AI agents to draft a 150 page report that analyzed the impact of the Iran conflict on 17 countries, sectors, and themes across different areas like economics, security, and politics, as well as scenarios and specific implications. The report created specific scenarios for each region, sector or theme as well as detailed signposts and implications.

Suddenly, even the most minor implications of the war were visible. While analysts might focus on a spike in oil prices due to closure of the Strait of Hormuz, more than 40% of the world’s seaborne sulphur and urea would also be at risk. This wouldn’t immediately be obvious to a regional analyst, but AI seamlessly highlighted how this would be a catastrophe for agricultural firms and those upstream from them. There are many other examples.

The first turn of the report took less time than a research house would spend in a planning meeting to scope out how to produce a comparable report and cost less in compute than the coffee and donuts for that meeting.

A sample of the TOC for our global Iran report, which you can access at iran.unrulycorp.com

We got quite positive feedback on the report’s breadth, analytical insights, and ability to spin up unique scenarios from a variety of perspectives. Fortune 500 executives liked having everything in a single PDF that was indexed so they could navigate to what they wanted. Others were happy to put the PDF through their own AI agents to digest implications for themselves.

However, we also got answers like:

“There is zero chance I can read a PDF of 150 pages when the world is at war! 😆”

So the following week we created (and expanded) the report while also deploying it as an app for easy consumption. We added entity linking (i.e. searching for a mentioned company or group) to let people get directly to the insights they need. We made the app free to try to help those making sense of the war; you can access in full here here.

The research was an analysis not of the actual conflict itself–there is plenty of high quality daily reporting on that–but rather on the widespread global impact of the conflict that much analysis doesn’t have the bandwidth or time to cover. Perhaps there is coverage of the impact on energy markets and major countries like India, China, the Gulf states, and Europe, but what about the impact on Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa? Or the defense industry? Or cyber? Perhaps in ad hoc ways, but never holistically.

Full Visibility

Why aren’t there more bespoke reports like this? The answer is largely due to cost and the sheer time it would take human analysts to do it. Whatever the real analytical shortcomings of AI-generated geopolitical analysis, its benefits include not only vastly reduced cost but also unconstrained bandwidth to produce whatever analysis is needed at whatever moment for whatever use case.

If everyone’s money-is-no-object first choice is to commission a team of the world’s greatest geopolitical experts to drop everything and write them a custom report on Iran and its impact on an unlimited array of countries, regions, industries and themes, a really good second choice is to have an AI system produce a report that is nearly as good for a fraction of the cost. And then produce an update to that report the next hour, day or the next week. And then customize it for a particular client’s exposure. And then do it all again for the next global development.

Indeed, the fact that there is very little marginal cost to successive insights allows us to explore angles in the first instance that might not be explored for weeks by human analysts focusing first on where all the money is. For instance, if you are focused on Southeast Asia, you know that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will cause an energy supply crunch, but are there firms putting out research about the Iran conflict from the perspective of Southeast Asia? Or on the metals and mining industry? Or food prices in East Africa? Or more specifically, all the ways that the crisis is affecting shipping giant Maersk or the implications for cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike?

Such analysis is unlikely to be proactively created and constantly updated by humans because the time and cost involved isn’t worth the narrow demand. AI geopolitical analysis fundamentally changes that equation around what is possible and economical.

Share

Cost+Speed

The obvious savings here is cost, but the far more valuable savings here is time. Cost reduction is always appealing, but given the unruliness of today’s world, cost reduction essentially only reduces cost, whereas speed increases upside opportunity.

Across industries, speed can only be increased to a point: freight can’t go faster than airplanes fly, legislation moves at the pace that it does, and analysts and editors produce analysis at the speed they do.

So, can a human-powered firm provide a report about the full global impact of the Iran conflict for me tomorrow? For most firms there is no price that can make that possible. But leveraging AI-generated analysis not only makes that possible, it then also opens up the possibilities of having those insights faster. The marginal cost of another report about another angle on another issue is obviously quite low; but the ability to fast forward in time to get those insights faster is the thing that will transform how businesses use geopolitical analysis to defend against fast moving risks and create opportunities among chaos.

In a quickly changing world, speed is a force multiplier. Analyses, topics, and insights need to evolve as quickly as events morph and as quickly as business opportunities manifest. Each morning a business leader can now have an in-depth report on the global implications of the Iran war on key geographic locations and industries of critical interest. But then the real trick is that there could be another updated report that is focused on a different narrow issue and customized for a particular executive by lunch as circumstances change.

Whether done with our software or constructed in a foundational LLM, this opens up a fundamentally new way to integrate geopolitical analysis, more akin to instant market data to make financial decisions than a weekly research push. It allows rigorous analysis to be disseminated quickly and at a low cost, which in turn opens the possibility of interactive streaming of geopolitical insight tuned to particular exposures and opportunities.

Speed also shifts expectations with regards to prediction. Yes, the holy grail of geopolitical analysis is to know what’s coming next, but explaining what happened yesterday is actually pretty hard too. With AI, we’re able to solve the yesterday problem at scale, which allows us to understand more of what’s happening today - thus, we can respond in real-time much better.

While we will keep innovating new and different ways to cover global crises, the real question is how your business will change when fast, flexible geopolitical insight is available through any lens, on any timeline, tuned to your specific exposures. More on that in future posts.

-SW & DB

After 68 issues of GeoLegal Notes, the writing and launching of my book Unruly: Fighting Back when Politics, AI and Law Upend the Rules of Business, and the spin-out of our geopolitical AI company into The Unruly Corporation, I took a haitus from writing.

Some of it was motivated by intellectual exhaustion: I felt like I had covered the heck out of GeoLegal risk, warning at every twist and turn what could be ahead.

But a bigger part of it was that we woke up in an Unruly nightmare of ever grander proportions than I could have imagined. Yes, my book and Substacks warned about an erosion of rule of law, about the weaponization of technology, and about politics that would manipulated by AI. But suddenly we were living in a world where it was all really happening. And at scale.

As a result, mainstream media had picked up the torch to write about geolegal risk and other forms of unruliness in real-time because it was our everyday life. Piling on might get clicks, likes, and quotes in the press but that’s not what people need today.

What business leaders really need today are tools to actually manage the storm around them. One day that storm is in Venezuela. The next it is the entire Gulf region. Tomorrow it may be in Cuba. And then Taiwan.

Subscribe now

We are lucky because at the precise moment the world has spun out of control, AI technology has armed us with ways to track, act and potentially anticipate. That’s the really interesting story.

So, what I am going to do here is catalog the journey of those building the future of AI to understand and manage geopolitical risk. You will learn a huge amount about the substantive risks the world is facing and about the challenges we face in using technology to wrangle it.

If you are a CEO, head of strategy, head of corporate affairs, head of government affairs, head of threat intelligence, general counsel or many other roles you need to be aware right now of the advances that AI is making to support your business. Or else you will remain exposed and vulnerable while your competitors gain advantage.

Let me be clear: I am building in the space and I am proud of what we are building at The Unruly Corporation. So, yes, I will track our own experimentation and output, giving a platform to my colleagues to talk about how they solve extremely cool geopolitical challenges in real-time.

BUT, I have a very big tent philosophy when it comes to preparing companies for political risk. The more builders in the industry working on solutions, the better that is for client readiness. And, if more clients choose to transform, that means an even more fertile ground for everyone building tools to help them.

So, I am making two commitments here.

First, what you read here will not be bland content marketing. It will continue to be thought provoking approaches to how we manage the world around us, experimenting in plain view.

Second, I want to interview and shine a light on founders in the space who are doing amazing things that you may never have heard of. In the process, I’ll build out the market map for geopolitical AI which can help you with choosing who you want to work with.

Share

If you were a subscriber to GeoLegal Notes, I added you here. If you want off this bus, just pull the cord. If you’re glad to be here, tell a friend.

-SW