What competitiveness requires now

Resilience changes the conversation 

Energy makes this shift concrete. A few years ago, renewables were framed almost entirely as climate policy. Now they are just as much about sovereignty. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has driven that home more forcefully than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine did: a stark reminder of how dependent much of the world remains on Middle Eastern fossil fuels, and a trigger for a far more serious push to diversify supply. The economics help: solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuel generation in most markets. 

One figure stands out. Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, shared in my recent Leaders Unplugged podcast interview that roughly three-quarters of all power plants brought online last year were wind and solar. It’s a number that also explains why China absorbed the Strait of Hormuz shock better than expected: it had already moved faster than most to electrify its economy. Reducing dependence on others, and on fossil fuels specifically, while accelerating electrification, is no longer a climate story. It is a resilience story. 

The same shift is visible inside companies. Businesses are bolstering resilience the same way, reducing dependence on single suppliers, single markets, single providers. The same logic now shapes how companies deploy AI. 

The conversation has moved from experimentation to scaling to a much tougher question: where is the ROI? That question pulls in governance and dependency risk alongside it: how much to rely on one cloud provider, one tech stack, one jurisdiction for data? The leaders getting this right are no longer talking about efficiency alone. They are talking about resilience and reliability as well. 

Trust becomes a competitive asset  

Trust, however, is also easier to lose than to build. That applies to companies, but increasingly it applies to countries as well. Policy unpredictability carries an economic cost. When businesses cannot anticipate the rules of the game, investment slows, long-term planning becomes harder, and confidence erodes. 

That is no longer a theoretical concern. It is playing out in real time. The contrast right now is stark, between leaders actively building that kind of trust and the current US administration, which, especially since the war in Iran, has become the single greatest source of uncertainty in the world. The same dynamic runs through the US-Canada trade dispute: a brief reprieve when the Supreme Court ruled the administration’s tariffs unconstitutional, then a fresh wave of tariffs, including a threatened 50% levy on Canada, with the US so far refusing to extend the USMCA it negotiated itself. 

When policy shifts repeatedly and unpredictably, businesses do not simply absorb the uncertainty. They delay investment, rethink supply chains, and hold back long-term commitments. The damage to trust comes long before the economic data catches up. 

For business leaders, trust is no longer an abstract value. It is becoming a practical competitive advantage. Encouragingly, what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called the “coalition of middle powers” — Canada, Europe, the Gulf, Korea, Japan — keeps working to hold trade rules together rather than sliding into competitive protectionism. 

Former Canadian Prime Minster Justin Trudeau, speaking at the Salzburg Summit, argued that Canada had been forced to rethink assumptions it had held for decades.  

“We finally realize that the incredible benefit we’ve had of being as close to the United States as we are… has come with a price,” he shared. Canada would never diversify completely, he acknowledged, “but even just reducing our reliance on the United States gives us alternatives, gives us opportunities.”  

It was less a rejection of globalization than an acceptance that resilience increasingly depends on reducing strategic dependencies.