The Industrial Engineer's Guide to Navigating Global Supply Chain Shifts
Geopolitical risk isn't abstract — Graham Allison's Thucydides Trap analysis of rising-vs-incumbent power transitions plus Kevin Rudd's Avoidable War give supply chain leaders a two-book framework for stress-testing US-China exposure. Read them as a conversation, not a prediction: one maps the historical failure modes, the other maps the modern stabilizers your continuity plan should be modeling.
“We see operations leaders treating geopolitics as news, not input — but a single tariff shift or export control can add 15-40% to landed cost overnight, so this belongs in your gap map alongside cycle time and first-pass yield.”
Geopolitical risk isn't abstract — Graham Allison's Thucydides Trap analysis of rising-vs-incumbent power transitions plus Kevin Rudd's Avoidable War give supply chain leaders a two-book framework for stress-testing US-China exposure. Read them as a conversation, not a prediction: one maps the historical failure modes, the other maps the modern stabilizers your continuity plan should be modeling.
From the Source
"How rising powers have challenged incumbent powers over the past several thousand years and the risk that that competition can end in major conflict."
— What to read next: Mark Sedwill's recommendation
Key Takeaways
- 01Allison's Thucydides Trap documents power-transition conflict risk across Athens-Sparta, Britain-Germany, and now US-China
- 02Rudd's Avoidable War provides the modern playbook for managing — not just predicting — US-China competition
- 03The two books function as a conversation on the century's biggest geopolitical question
- 04Supply chain leaders should translate this into scenario models, not headlines
- 05Read together, they shift the frame from inevitability to management
Watch the Source
What to read next: Mark Sedwill's recommendation
Source
What to read next: Mark Sedwill's recommendation
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