Geopolitics in a Fracturing World, with Aarathi Krishnan

KEVIN MALONEY: Geopolitics is facing a moment of severe fracture, but what is driving this trend? Today on the Values & Interests podcast, I'm joined by Aarathi Krishnan, CEO of Raksha Intelligence Futures. Together, we pull back the geopolitical curtain to take a hard look at the variables driving this moment of insecurity. I hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did. Let's get right to it.

Aarathi, welcome to Carnegie Council. Thank you so much for joining us today.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Thanks so much for having me, Kevin. It is my pleasure.

KEVIN MALONEY: You have such an interesting professional and personal background. When I look at your bio and CV, it feels like you have lived five professional lives, yet you are sitting in front of me, so this is great. We are going to get through a lot today.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: My white hair probably belies my age.

KEVIN MALONEY: Let’s get into your background. What we like to do on the Values & Interests podcast is get an understanding of what I call the “values CV” of somebody. I don’t want it to be just this professional in front of me. At Carnegie Council we do not disaggregate values from interests or morality from power, and people are at the center of decision-making, at least today; maybe in 50 years we will talk about that.

I would love to hear about your personal background and let my listeners get to know you and your values formation, and then we can get on to the professional side of things.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: I think this is such an interesting question and an interesting thesis on which to have a conversation with somebody because very often we distinguish between our individual moral compass and what we do professionally or how we choose to show up in the world.

I would say my values were shaped at a family and household level and by a particular kind of witnessing. I was born in Malaysia and raised by a single mom. As a South Asian in Malaysia—which in and of itself has various frames of how you interact in that society—the commonality between all of that is the connection between how we understand who we are as a family inside the house and our connection to outside the house. There was never a distinction in how you show up for your neighbors or your community. We did not even call it “community;” it was just “Auntie and Uncle down the street” or whatever. We were parts of different groups and communities in our space.

That idea of always giving and being present was so implicitly wound into our lives, and it taught me that it was not something distant. You refused to treat distance as a reason to disengage because it didn’t exist; we were caught up in our “common humanity,” so to speak.

I think the second part was complexity. As background, I was born in Malaysia, we moved to Australia, and very early on in my career, even though I started in banking and finance I ended up in development and humanitarian work very, very early.

I then started to learn to distrust narratives because when you are always straddling multiple identities and then existing, working, and living in spaces where identities shape politics and relationships, the narratives that were being designed somewhere else never quite fit into the singular story that I was part of or witnessing. Again, very early on, when I was growing up as a Brown kid in Australia, the narrative of what that looked and felt like was not my reality, so you start to distrust that.

Then, when I was working in Rwanda, which was one of my first career entrances into the humanitarian sector, you then started to understand that a person making a decision under duress, the institution caught between wanting to do what its mandate is and what its governance requirements are, the community that existed from one crisis to another, and it just becomes the norm. When poverty and survival are the norm, I think what it taught me was a level of epistemic humility.

Why I think that is important and why I am pleased that in my life, almost 50 now, I have been able to hold onto it, I hope, is that values without epistemic humility become ideology, and I firmly in my lived experience have come to a point where I can say that ideology without that fundamentally serves the person holding onto it rather than the people it is claiming to serve.

It is interesting. Looking back on my life now, as you said, it feels like these multiple career iterations, and none of it made sense at the time. I was a lost 25-year-old with lots of anger issues, but there seems to be this common weave, and I think all of it makes sense now.

KEVIN MALONEY: I talk to a lot of people on the podcast, and there seems to be this confusion when you are young, but as long as you have this North Star of values you are able to feel like you are going in a direction, even if you don’t know what you are doing day-in and day-out.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: I think that’s true.

KEVIN MALONEY: You talked about this connection between values and not having it just manifest as ideology. At Carnegie Council we think about this as testing your values over your lifetime, and this connection between values and principles, principles being the guidelines or actions that are derived from values, and if you are not testing those you are ossified from a moral perspective, so this resonates with us, especially when we are talking with people in the geopolitical space, taking into account what you have experienced, and whether that squares with your values or not. I think we have seen that over the last few years, especially from a U.S. perspective in terms of increased hypocrisy or people not speaking out when their values are tested in a certain way.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Absolutely. I would agree with that.

KEVIN MALONEY: In terms of your work on the international aid side, maybe we can delve into that and talk about how your values connected to that work and what you did in that space. A second part of the question, which you alluded to before, are the tradeoffs that exist within that space and in doing that work, and maybe we could explore that.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Again, the weave of that story starts to become true in that my North Star I suppose, even though I didn’t articulate it and did not have the words for it back then, was that I wanted to do work that was bigger than myself and that held consequence for the people I was working with. That sharpened itself through time, as it does, and you go from the rhetoric of “I want to save the world,” and realize that is a terrible position to start with. It is quite damaging because you then run the risk of playing the white knight on the white shining horse who ends up inevitably causing a lot of damage.

I went into humanitarian crises work a couple of years after graduating, and I am very, very grateful—I mentor a lot of young people graduating out of undergraduate school into postgrads or coming out into the world, and I always tell them to get field work experience first. Even the fact that we call it “the field” is problematic, but I tell them: “Go to where the work you are wanting to do has the most consequence to understand what that actually looks like before you go into the white towers of Geneva, New York, or London to design the policies that then impact that.”

So many people start the other way because it is cool to start in New York, Geneva, or wherever, and I started completely the other way. I started literally in Kigali in Rwanda and made my way through the complexity and mosaic of that world.

The most important lesson I learned very early in my career as a 25-year-old sent from Australia—I am not white and did not look white, but I was working for a white, Australian, Western organization, so again that duality of identity comes up very quickly. I didn’t sound like I came from Asia, but I looked like I did, so you learn to straddle these things.

One of the joys that it opens up for you is that you learn positionality, so you are not straitjacketed by what your outside looks like, where people will most quickly put you into a sandbox of some sort. You actually have to learn a different way of dancing to get through that, but it also allows you to open up your eyes to see things from multiple perspectives that you may not see if it is more homogenized, and what I mean by that is that one of the first things I got as a harsh lesson, and 25 years later I am still reciting this—

KEVIN MALONEY: Those are normally the best lessons.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: I was there with a capacity development program as a 25-year-old; whose capacity am I building, honestly? Mine was barely built. But that was what we blanketed it under.

The secretary-general of this organization in Nairobi literally asked: “Well, who the hell are you? By what authority do you come here and talk about capability and capacity?” That to me has always been the primacy of the value system—by what authority am I standing there?

There were two things that jumped out at me, again because being in aid work was not just a “Here’s my white knight story, and I want to feel good about myself.” It was a deeply personal story because these are the stories of my grandmother in India. I come from a very poor background and I received aid programs and aid packages, so there but for the grace of whatever, my mom working her body off to send my sister and I to college to get a good education, but there go we, so when we are told to count our beneficiaries or who turns up to workshops, that is my grandmother, that is my great-grandmother, so it is a deeply personal story, and when you have that personal story you start to see the discrepancies about how people coming in to help make stereotypical observations and turn those observations into fact and then into policy for the people they are meant to be serving.

The second part of that, which I think became the commonality in my career, was how very often we who were working in crises or humanitarian response would say, “Oh, we were unprepared for this,” and we were always turning up too late, or, “It shocked us,” when in fact it isn’t a shock. We are sensing the conditions shifting, we know it; we just don’t turn it into a decision-making framework that allows us to get ahead of crises.

Those were the two things I think that formed what I understood to be the structural failure in large institutions, the ability to fundamentally get ahead of the crises we were meant to be mitigating. Also, it brought up the dichotomy and tension about whose values mattered.

KEVIN MALONEY: Hearing you talk about that in the context of the discussion we are having today in terms of this pluralism plus humility that set you up early on and thinking about that as manifesting in your career but also in terms of squaring the circle around your identity, is what ethics allows us to do as a framework. Two things can be true at once in good faith. The people going to do this work can be doing it in good faith, and most of them are, but at the same time there are many things to be self-reflective on.

This is one of the difficulties around the narrative of international aid work now or the narrative of the United Nations. You have self-flagellation in one group and on the other side there is the idea that this entire thing needs to be thrown out. What we try to do here at Carnegie Council is create the space in good faith to have these ethics-based conversations.

There is not really a question there. It was an observation in terms of how I appreciated so much how you tied your values formation to how that allowed you to interrogate the nuances within your experience as you went through that.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: As you know, I come from almost two decades in the aid sector and have certainly self-flagellated around this particularly in the last eight years or so, and the practice for decoloniality and all of that has come around, and always I come down to a fundamental truth in that: First, yes, multiple things are true at the same time, but the sector itself is not going to change nor are calls for decolonial practices ever going to shift how the sector works because it is not founded on principles ironically; it is founded on money. That is what makes the sector work.

Many years ago, in another lifetime, I worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross and was the co-designer of their ten-year strategy, and one of the painful points that came up over and over again—this was probably 2017—was around the principles of neutrality and should this be contested. A lot of people in the Red Cross, rightfully so, were saying absolutely not, neutral means neutral. So many other people, also part of the Red Cross family, were saying, no, absolutely not. This depends, and it is very acute and very important. We cannot hide behind a shield of neutrality.

It is this granularity when it comes to principles and values I think that we need to unpack because if we take it as a blanket applied to every context, every role, and every dynamic, then we hide behind it rather than asking which one applies to which context, and is this the right one.

KEVIN MALONEY: I have found that that is where the difficult work is. Anybody can say, “I’m making a decision,” right after you have a “debate” or process internally, but it is the willingness to not just leave the principles on the shelf and let them get dusty.

We are seeing that right now in terms of: “We have principles for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in war.” Well, children are still dying, so what is the point?

AARATHI KRISHNAN: And you just signed an agreement with Palantir, so what are you talking about?

KEVIN MALONEY: Again, this goes to the heart of a lot of what we try to think about here, that you have to be interrogating the value system as your proximity to the issue changes, as the historical context changes, and as the lived experience changes.

I think we are going through a big transition right now in terms of the relationship between morality and power, principles, and international systems, so maybe we can pivot a bit to your current work. I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you are now working for a firm that you founded, Raskha Intelligence Futures. I would guess that this is in response to previous pressure points in your career, so maybe you could tell our listeners what you are offering today, what the value proposition is, and how you are thinking about this intelligence product from a geopolitical perspective.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Thank you. I founded Raskha Intelligence in 2024 after leaving the United Nations after 18 or 19 years. I think I was frustrated fundamentally because the institutions I had worked within and governments I had advised in my almost two-decade career I often realized were significantly lacking in the ability to actually get prepared and ahead of crises and protect the people we were meant to be protecting and serving. The ones that were doing it I felt were not doing it at the level of rigor and structure it needed, so I decided to build it instead. It didn’t exist, so I built it.

That is where Raskha comes in. We occupy a very specific niche in the market. I cannot compare us to a competitor because there isn’t one.

We do “anticipatory intelligence,” and what we mean by that is that we monitor shifting conditions that we start to see patterns across that probabilistically might lead to a particular event, risk, or crisis. Not long term; we don’t do five years or 10 years; not short term, not in a couple of days or weeks, but within the six-month to two-year mark.

The reason we do that is that when you are monitoring conditions and looking for patterns—which is fundamentally what we do; we are patent identifiers—and look for the truth underneath the noise. I tell my team, “We are a bunch of belligerent two-year-olds or journalists,” dogs with a bone because we are always asking: “But why, but why, but why? Let’s go dig deeper.”

The reason why we frame it within that six-month to two-year window is that that is the point when institutions and decision makers can make action. The long-term horizon commitments often feel too far away to make a strategic decision for a different direction for the council. It is too far away, and sometimes it is hard to be committed to actions in a strategic way for something that may or may not happen 10 or 20 years from now. Then there is being responsive; you are just responding to what is happening now in Iran or the Middle East, and that again is too late for many people. That six-month-to-two-year mark gives us a window for different forms of decision making and action, and that is the sweet spot.

We do not tell the story of what is happening. What we do is what I call “using intelligence as a strategic illumination” to lift the veil on what might seem complicated but actually isn’t; you just have to connect the dots, in the simplest terms.

KEVIN MALONEY: As you said, from a UN perspective it is the response mindset, and this is the anticipation mindset.

You mentioned the noise of geopolitics today, and, boy, is there a lot of noise. Before we began recording we were talking about narratives and rhetoric. From Venezuela to Greenland to Iran there is a deluge, like drinking from a firehose.

In the report you recently put out looking at fractures, what I appreciated is that you looked under the hood and identified some areas that are the “streams” of geopolitics right now. Could you give our listeners a framing in terms of the data points or variables in geopolitics that you are looking at beneath the surface?

AARATHI KRISHNAN: A fundamental thesis for how we do our work is that the state-centric model of geopolitics post-war—that it is what states do to each other, it is around military action, and alliance building—is the output and sometimes the dressing for geopolitics or not the truth of geopolitics at all. We maintain that systems are geopolitics, and what we mean by systems is that the systems that states depend on to exercise the functions in which our world exists.

That means insurance; who gets to pay for keeping people safe. It means the financial architecture and how currency is moving around the world. It is around the connective tissue for what enables me to have my laptop on in front of you right now and for us to be able to broadcast this to your audience, and it is also what we call “imperial reordering.”

Let me break that down. In general, Raskha has seven domains we monitor that sit across geopolitics, capital, and governance, and we focus on four here. They are all interrelated, as everything is. One was the insurance market, because it is significantly underreported on. It is not so much just about insurance but about the parameters for what gets insured and what does not get insured.

In the United States we saw this last year when the California FAIR program had to absorb a lot of loss, and we are seeing it play out right now in maritime insurance. When insurers start to move back from specific geographies and specific contexts, it leaves that exposed, and the individual insurance policyholder bears the brunt of it, but what it does is expose communities in America and in many parts of the world that live in geographies completely exposed to climate.

We don’t think about what means for the types of insurance we are going to have to pay for; those premiums increase. It is not a big, bad insurance policy CEO making that happen. Those are very complex things around what makes something uninsurable.

KEVIN MALONEY: The actuaries don’t lie.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: But the conditions into what makes things uninsurable, makes contexts uninsurable, is what we need to pay attention to.

Let’s see how this plays out right now in the Strait of Hormuz. Getting the Strait of Hormuz to open up again is not merely—and we can talk about this until the cows come home—about Iran saying, “Yes, the strait is open; go through.” Even when they made that proclamation last night, as of this morning very few tankers had gone through because of two things: The moment the war got declared, all the major insurance companies withdrew completely, meaning that tankers going through would be completely exposed, so the baselines for what counted as conflict or war insurance changed.

It is not as easy as saying, “Open the strait, the tankers will go through, and our oil prices will return.” It will take ages for that to happen. The notion of what gets insured and what gets exposed impacts on all of us on a very individual level, and that is a geopolitical systemic issue.

The second thing, I would say, and this is interesting, is that this is starting to become an emerging area of conflict. This is one example of what I call “infrastructure substrates.” That can be critical minerals. I am assuming your audience will be well-versed with all the arguments around it. It can be what we are seeing now, which are these straits or chokeholds around how shipments move around the world. Hormuz is one; Malacca is another. There are not a lot of straits, but they can hold up the ability for us to move.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is the problem.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: That is another problem.

A third issue, which is super-interesting, is subsea cable infrastructure. I am just looking at my data here because I always get this wrong, but 95 percent of intercontinental data traffic flows through undersea cables. What is interesting about that is that those cables and infrastructure are controlled by a small number of specialist cable ships, and the companies that own them tend to be state-owned companies or very closely related to state-based operations.

If you look back in the last year alone, the number of incidents in which cables were deliberately destroyed are an increasing point of geopolitical action. This has not been proven, but one incident is around this massive new tanker ship that the Chinese have created that is designed specifically to cut cables.

It is not just that. Cables get destroyed not just because of deliberate acts of power or sabotage but also because of climate change. The cables are next to undersea land that is eroding. The problem with that is that there is only a handful of ships that can repair it, and again they are state-owned.

For us, sitting here thinking about how my internet is connected to whatever, if that gets destroyed, the ability to repair it and get it back on track is dependent on states or state-controlled entities, and this is not in the news, so to speak.

That is what we call a “fracture.” There are many, many examples of the conditions that underpin why states make the decisions they make, and it is never the noise. Iran was never about regime change; it is about oil and energy, and that has always been the case, and you can draw that line to what this administration has been doing with Cuba and Venezuela. That is the emerging fracture we are seeing. It is not about regime change.

KEVIN MALONEY: This brings up a new variable in the equation in terms of the belligerence of leaders and how that impacts your projections in this medium-term focus. An example would be Trump going into Venezuela and then having the oil CEOs saying: “This is un-investible right now. Maybe if you come back to me in two or three years the risk parameters will be there, and I will go back in.”

On the other side too, which we think about here, is that that action by the United States as a military action against a sovereign country from a news-cycle perspective would have been on the shelf for six months at a minimum, and now it goes bad in 30 days before we move on to something else. How are you thinking about this new belligerence from the United States, especially from our leaders, and how does that factor into how you think about geopolitics and projection right now?

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Excellent question, and a very live one because my team and I are working it through this week. We touched on it casually earlier, but what I observe is this idea of rhetoric and military belligerence, not just by the U.S. administration but by many countries, arguably even Israel, that do not abide by international law or the norms and orders that have held our world together although not the same for everybody.

What we are starting to see in my company and in the work we are doing is the rise of rhetoric as a belligerent indicator of structural anxiety and not of structural confidence. We see leaders “going loud” on X, Y, or Z, and then all the actions sit underneath that, but the noise, the headlines, and the use of language we would not normally use that people would say is not democratic or moral language, but it is belligerent language, and belligerent language for me and belligerent actions come from a place of anxiety, of having to flex your muscles to say, “I am the big boss.” We see this with our two-year-olds.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think I had this experience this morning over some cereal.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: When little kids get belligerent and noisy, when teenagers do that, they are hiding a fundamental anxiety. What is the anxiety we are hiding? Are we as effective as we used to be, and by “we” I mean the U.S. administration? Are we considered the safeguard still globally? Is that what has been driving this action? Is this trying to force us back into a time when we were perceived to be so?

Those are the threads I think are more important for us to unpack. What does the administration or countries that are using rhetoric or action in these ways trying to get to or back to? What is the new baseline they are wanting to bring forth?

One of the things we are starting to monitor is that when the rhetoric becomes as belligerent as it is, it amplifies the level of distrust between people and their governments. This has been monitored for a long time, but I am starting to think about it less as a political action and more as a governance failure because if we don’t trust our governments, then our governments are not able to effectively put into place policies that have long-term horizons that can keep not just us but our children and our grandchildren safe. This goes right back into things like climate agreements, military security, and alliances.

Many states around the world right now are breaking long-held alliances, but what is emerging is not a multipolar world. I actually argue against that. What we are seeing are different forms of alliance, not based on ideology but on capital, markets, trading, and what is good for each other. Are we flexing, or are states that are extremely noisy deliberately flaunting international law? What is the actual story? It is not a flex that we can go into a state and literally kidnap their head of state with no repercussions. What is on sale there? What is it?

KEVIN MALONEY: In my research I have found that those two circles overlap in terms of belligerence and the shift to transactionalism. The belligerence is allowed at the top because those within the ecosystem of that belligerence have basically signed a deal saying, “I am going to support this to get something out of it.”

AARATHI KRISHNAN: A hundred percent.

KEVIN MALONEY: And now it is as much as, “I will be able to trade on knowing that we are going to attack Iran.”

I think the shock to the system, especially as an American, has been, of course there have always been levels of corruption and transactionalism, but how blatant and public it is now without any political price or repercussions to pay is when the DNA of a society and an international system begins to shift and erode.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: What is sadder about this—I am not an American; I am an immigrant here, and I have straddled many countries and many identities—is that I feel the grief that is palpable, at least here in New York, that Americans feel about the destruction of its role in the world, and it is a palpable grief that should not be reduced to a sound bite.

What I think is fascinating, and it is something I was grappling with this morning, is: For those of us who grew up in democratically leaning societies this belligerence, the destruction of democratic norms, is such a shock for us because we have not seen it used as a lever of geopolitics before? What I think is interesting since Sunday, when this administration made the declaration that the Strait of Hormuz had to be opened by 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, all Western countries were shocked. A lot of Americans were shocked as well for that kind of warning to be given out.

What was so fascinating was the response from Iranian embassies globally. Every one had a meme, a joke, completely mocking the U.S. administration for that tweet. It got me thinking: Do those who have seen these practices before, seen and lived the realities of the slide away from democracy, see this for what it actually is, so they can poke at it, deal with it, be ahead of it, and not succumb to the anxiety and fear that it is designed to create, whereas we are succumbing to that anxiety and fear? Look at the Iranian embassy memes over the last two days, and it tells you a different story.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think this is an interesting case study. I have a lot of behind-closed-doors conversations on this in terms of: “Well, is this just the United States revealing its true colors, and they have always been like this?”

There is a moral relativism there in the critique. My response to it as a child of the 1990s—I am 37 now—is that I felt I was on a geopolitical vacation. Obviously, you experienced 9/11, but it was never systemic at the threat level.

I try to have these conversations in good faith, and I take your criticism in terms of us in the world not being perfect for many, many years, but my response to it, knowing the systems that have always been in place, the political checks, the branches of government, and the ability to impeach, all fading away right now—

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Is a shock.

KEVIN MALONEY: My response to them is: “Yes, but if you thought it was bad before, buckle up,” and these conversations happened before what just happened this past week. I think this goes back to the need to interrogate the difference of opinion but live in a shared reality, and a lot of times it doesn’t happen.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: I like that. I wrote a piece a couple of months ago. Lots of scholars and writers call it the “interregnum,” the failure of the old order, where Gramsci’s argument is that this order burns down and then we start the cycle again, we go back to the age of gods or whatever.

That was true perhaps of that time, but the world we are experiencing right now is not that world. We are more connected than ever before. Our contexts are completely different, so it is not a going back. Something new is coming, and we don’t know yet what it is. As you said, “buckle up,” because there may be some parts of our history we can draw on, but what is emerging is not something we have seen before.

KEVIN MALONEY: In the report you talk a lot about the caricature of geopolitical analysis: “We are going into a world of the United States, China, and Russia. Geopolitical spheres are—the phrase that I have loathed over the past few years is, “We have entered the polycrisis.” I have a list, and that is on the top of it.

You talk about emergent states from an India perspective and middle powers. We have seen Mark Carney out in the world with his speech and Alexander Stubb from Finland, not just a Global North perspective, but there are these middle powers flexing in new ways right now. Can you talk about that in connection to what you talked about before in the flow points of geopolitics where they can have a real impact and not necessarily pulling up aircraft carriers outside of a country?

AARATHI KRISHNAN: In the report we call it an “imperial reordering,” and I am not using that as a pejorative; it is trying to be descriptive. We talk about the power transition. I would argue this is not the rise of one hegemon and the decline of another but a “reordering of the structural conditions of imperial projection,” and what I mean by that is who can build and maintain the infrastructure, who can set the standards that everybody has to conform to, and who can create the financial architecture through which our resources flow. That is the interesting thing.

Let’s take Iran again. We might think this is a U.S. or Iran ceasefire deal agreement. It is not. Pakistan was in there, China was in there, and Middle Eastern powers were in there. There is so much happening underneath the surface because it comes down to dollars and cents, and that is why this reordering of the landscape is what I argue is occurring. The Munich Security Conference last year called it the “multipolar world,” etc., and I do not necessarily disagree with that per se, but that looks at it through a lens of order just being reorganized, so it is not Global North and Global South or whatever, but if you think of it like lights on a map and that the lights are moving on the map.

What I argue is that we are not on a map but in a networked world. We know we are in a networked world. Suddenly a light is on Russia or Qatar. As opposed to individual actors we need to look at the nodes of connection, not spheres of influence because nodes of connection, coming back to your point earlier, around alliances coming together for transactional reasons potentially. It is no longer ideology. It is about who can invest more in my market, who is going to buy this particular thing. That is the node of connection and alliance making.

What we see now are multiple actors, not just China or Russia, but growing middle powers with considerable strategic sophistication are building alternative infrastructure. They are building alternative financial routes. They are building alternative governance mechanisms if we look just at what has come out of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa).

Again, returning to the Strait of Hormuz, Iran says: “Yes, you can go through, but you have to pay a toll,” but they did not say which currency that toll had to be paid in, and every ship that has been able to pass through in the last week has paid it in yuan. That is a deliberate action.

What I call “imperial reordering” is tracking that fragmentation, that it is nodes of alliance building around common purpose, common mutual aid, and common transactionalism rather than spheres of ideological influence, and if we start to see the world through those nodes, we start to look at where those pressure points for action or inaction come from.

KEVIN MALONEY: I guess we can do a postmortem on the old system now to an extent. For us, the disturbing part is the transactionalism. I think transactionalism can be beneficial, but there is a divide from our perspective here in terms of political arrangements or principles that come out, at least in part, due to ethical reflection. There is this very complicated interconnection between values and interests. You can never look into somebody’s soul, you can never see how that collection of people manifests into state action or institutional action, but that seems to be stripped away, and from a rhetoric perspective basically you are a sucker if you are doing that right now.

It will be “interesting” to see where this takes us in the next few years. In not even two years of Trump alone it goes back to, “What stays on the shelf geopolitically in terms of kinetic action?” If we are looking at this from a predictive perspective, this escalatory ladder from the United States seems to have been paused for two weeks, but in reality what is it going to be like three months from now?

AARATHI KRISHNAN: It doesn’t stop. I know it is very easy for a lot of us to center this on the U.S. administration, but it is not just the U.S. administration. I often say that progress does not seem to be something that easily catches on, but regression is.

All around the world states are regressing in the way they talk in Europe, the United Kingdom, and all parts of the world, and it seems to be contagious. Maybe it started from the U.S. administration, maybe it didn’t, who knows, maybe this administration accelerated something that was already percolating under the surface all around the world, and it is not just an issue—I think we get caught up in it in this part of the world—that has one single actor being the bad person. I think what we are seeing and grappling with is that there is a considerable number of bad actors.

I get your point when you said you grew up in a period of peace and calm, and I think a lot of us did grow up in a period of peace and calm. The fact that we have to claw back from memories of our parents and grandparents to either understand what kinetic action we have to take and to go back into our past to be prepared for the future is not something we thought we would grapple with.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think it is tough as the future is a “nonstate-centric” future as we have talked about from these nonstate actors rising in geopolitical prominence and rising in control of the information ecosystem, levers of power, finances, etc., and then you have this lack of proximity to the costs of getting to where we were. I bring up this example a lot: I knew my grandparents, and they both fought in World War II. There are so many people who do not have that experience. My father did not get drafted, but he got his draft card to go to Vietnam as did many of his friends. They had to pay a price for being in the United States, and, yes, there were many people from my generation who went, but it was not a national moment where you went in together.

I am painting with a broad brush, but this goes back to my claim of being on a geopolitical vacation where I did not ever have to pay a price for what I had. There is a weird ossification that I think has happened in a few generations in the United States where it has not always been like this and there may be some difficult times coming.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: I think that is a powerful reflection and something we should keep front of mind and expand on, coming back to my point earlier about whether those who grew up in much more complex environments see the truth for what it actually is.

I was reflecting on one of my best friends here, who is German. This goes back to the start of 2025 when we began to see some of this, and a lot of us who either work in spaces that come out of this sort of complexity or are dealing with the aftermath of complexity, or, as with my friend, who grew up in that sort of environment, you know the playbook. This was just: “Oh, let’s dust off that playbook. We have seen this happen before.”

It is an interesting observation because, as you know, I work all around the world, and I see it in some of the work I do, in places like Cambodia or Vietnam, where there is a generational gap where the atrocities of not even 50 years ago, the Vietnam War, etc., is so present in the memory of the parents and those who are in power, but it is not present in the generation of young people, so when governments or states try to call back that need for nationalism, for a lot of younger people that is lost because they did not live through that, and now they are being forced into it.

One of the most interesting developments I noticed particularly in the early part of the year, when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was having all those raids in many parts of this country, was the resurrection of certain chapters of the Black Panther movement that evolved to not be around just protecting Black people but protecting immigrants. They had these chapters going out that were protecting immigrants going to work and school. It was poetic to an extent that this acute part of American history is now resurrecting itself but in a different form because the violence is different.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is certainly a moment. We could spend a long time on a domestic-focused conversation.

I want to close by circling back to what I was underlining at the beginning of the interview, the values framework around pluralism from your community growing up. You said there was no difference between being in the house and out in the community. I loved that so much, and that is how I grew up as well, which is amazing, and taking that open-door policy throughout your life and combining that with humility in terms of the professional life.

Maybe we could close on that. Is there anything you want to leave my listeners with? For people who want to be making a difference in the world today or who want to work in these institutions—you have given a playbook in terms of pluralism plus humility—is there anything you want to leave them with in this stressful moment?

AARATHI KRISHNAN: I get influenced a lot by writers and poets. Audre Lourde essentially said that we cannot use the frameworks that our masters put onto us if we want to rebuild, meaning we cannot use the same guidelines that we broke away from to rebuild anew. I hold that to be true. As we are trying to find our ways in the world, I run an intelligence company and I try to have lots of internal conversations around our ethics: When should intelligence become publicly available? What if we know it is going to be used for harm?

There is no guidebook for me to draw back on, to say “How have other companies done this,” because there isn’t. I am informed by a very different worldview, so the ability to be prepared I think is also to let loose our imaginations and if it doesn’t exist to build it, in the simplest terms. If what is working is not working for you, build it, build the thing that you want because what gets built in the ashes of what is burning down now is what will remain when those ashes clear.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is a great thing to end on. I constantly think about that. The United Nations did not exist, and then it existed, and that was because people rolled up their sleeves and decided to do something. It is a complicated story, but right now, from our perspective at the Council, this is a huge moment of transition. If you want to build something, if you want to be a disruptor, if you want to lean into it, do it.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Essentially.

KEVIN MALONEY: We will end with that, but thank you so much for coming by the Council today.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: My pleasure. Oh, the quote is: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I was going to die if I didn’t get that right.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are going to leave that in. Thank you so much.

AARATHI KRISHNAN: Thanks, Kevin. I appreciate it.