I Told the WSJ CEO Council the Nation-State Was Coming Back. I Was Right.

On the morning of November 14, 2017, I gave the breakfast keynote at the Wall Street Journal CEO Council in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Tech Mahindra: a talk and conversation called “Disruption by Design,” moderated by Will Lewis, then chief executive of Dow Jones, and C.P. Gurnani, then chief executive of Tech Mahindra. The room was full of people who run very large companies. The title of my talk was “Technology, Globalization, and the Future Wealth of Nations.” The summary I posted beforehand was shorter: “The nation-state is not dead.”

In 2017 that was heresy. Most of the chief executives in that room were still committed to the globalist project: open borders for capital, supply chains built for cost alone, and the assumption that national governments were becoming a regulatory nuisance on the way to irrelevance. I told them the opposite. Nearly nine years later, the results are in, and I am going to enjoy this: I called it.

Why that stage mattered

A year earlier, on November 15, 2016, Adm. Michael Rogers, then director of the National Security Agency, sat on the same CEO Council stage and said of the hacked emails released during the presidential campaign: “This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect” (Nextgov). He did not name the country. He did not have to.

Less than a month later, on December 11, 2016, I posted a Twitter thread making the same case in plainer language: Russia had run an operation against the American election, and the United States was going to respond. It went viral. The full thread is archived on my Substack, so you can read it and judge for yourself how it held up. I laid out the longer record of those calls, and what the evidence has revealed since, in “The Record.”

When I came back to that stage on November 14, 2017, I told the chief executives what it meant, and what was coming next. A foreign intelligence service hacking its way into an American election was not just a political scandal. It was a sign that the borderless, stateless era their companies had been built for was ending, and that governments were about to reassert themselves over data, technology and trade.

What I told the CEOs

The argument ran in three steps.

First, technology drives economics and geopolitics. I started with bronze swords and clay tablets and ran through Egyptian plows, Roman aqueducts and the atomic bomb to the circuit board. Every major technology has redrawn who holds power and how wealth is made. The internet was not going to be the exception.

Second, the last round of technology had made the world feel almost stateless. After the Berlin Wall fell, McDonald’s opened in Moscow, every executive was told to “just get 1% market share” in China, and capital learned to live in Dubai, the Caribbean and the Channel Islands. Global trade seemed to ignore borders. I put a slide in front of the CEOs with a smug young man saying, “Hey man, I’m a Citizen of the World.” The next line on the slide was: “Oh, really?” Then I asked the room to find the money hidden offshore. The Tax Justice Network’s 2012 study, which I put on the next slide, estimated it at $21 trillion to $32 trillion.

Third, that era was ending, and cybersecurity was what would end it. I showed a slide of the Russian annexation of Crimea with a caption I still like: “Suddenly, borders matter.” Then a list of breaches from Sony’s PlayStation Network to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to Yahoo’s three billion accounts to Equifax, and a photo of Vladimir Putin over the words “Breaking Point.” My forecast, in the words on the slide:

“Cybersecurity issues will roll back statelessness and cause a retrenchment in the nation-state system.”

And its consequence for business:

“The global economy will trade market access for national defense while we strengthen information security.”

Call No. 1: Borders would matter again

“Suddenly, borders matter” was a caption about Crimea in 2014. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the largest war in Europe since 1945. Western companies that had spent thirty years treating Russia as just another market found their operations there stranded within weeks; more than 1,000 companies have since publicly curtailed their Russian business, according to a running tally at the Yale School of Management. The quasi-stateless world did not survive contact with an army. Score one.

Call No. 2: Market access would be traded for national security

This was the boldest forecast on my slides. It is now ordinary policy in Washington and in a growing list of allied capitals.

• In May 2019, the Commerce Department added Huawei to its Entity List on national security grounds, cutting the world’s largest telecom equipment maker off from American technology (Akin Gump).
• In January 2025, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent to sell the app or see it banned in the United States, accepting Congress’s “well-supported national security concerns” about data and a foreign adversary (National Constitution Center).
• Also in January 2025, a Treasury rule took effect prohibiting or requiring notice of American investment in Chinese semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence (Perkins Coie).

Each of those is a government deciding that access to its market, its capital or its citizens’ data is a matter of national defense first and commerce second. That is exactly the trade my slide described, word for word, in front of the people whose companies would have to live with it.

Call No. 3: Cyber would become a battlefield between states

My 2017 list ended with Equifax. The list since then is longer and more clearly the work of states. In late 2024, the FBI and CISA confirmed that “PRC-affiliated actors have compromised networks at multiple telecommunications companies” in the United States, in the campaign known as Salt Typhoon (CISA). In 2017 the stolen data was mostly credit card numbers and personnel files. Now it is the phone network itself.

Call No. 4: “Citizen of the World” would lose

The smug young man on my slide has had a bad decade. In October 2021, 136 countries agreed to a global minimum corporate tax of 15 percent, an attempt to make multinationals pay somewhere (EY). In April 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled Malta’s golden-passport program illegal, holding that it amounted to “the commercialisation of the grant of the nationality of a Member State” and that citizenship requires “a genuine link to the country” (OCCRP). Citizenship, it turns out, is not a product. You have to belong somewhere. The smug young man on my slide owes the room an apology.

I said it to the CEOs in 2017, I said it again on Twitter in 2021, and I will say it a third time here: pick a country, and act like you belong to it. Globalization has legal limits, and governments are enforcing them.

Washington came around

I had been making a version of this argument for years. In 2012, I wrote in The Atlantic about how offshore finance was weakening nations. I believed then that we needed strong nation-states. I just did not think many people in power agreed.

Fourteen years later, the idea is not just back in play. It is official doctrine. The 2025 National Security Strategy states that the “world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state,” and that “it is natural and just that all nations put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.” It also faults European allies for failing to build the strength to pursue their own sovereignty (Hudson Institute, quoting the 2025 NSS). Whatever one thinks of the rest of that document, its first principle is the one I put in front of the CEO Council in 2017, when it was still unfashionable to say out loud.

The fine print

I keep honest scorecards, so here is the fine print. I gave cybersecurity too much of the credit. It was one force pushing the nation-state back to the center, but not the only one, and probably not the biggest. A pandemic that closed borders overnight, a rivalry between the United States and China fought with export controls and tariffs, and a war in Europe did more to retrench the nation-state system than any data breach. The conclusion was right; the mechanism had more moving parts than I put on one slide.

And the offshore money has not come home. Reporting under the automatic exchange of bank information has reduced old-fashioned offshore tax evasion, according to the EU Tax Observatory, but the same researchers say the global minimum tax “has been significantly weakened by a growing list of loopholes” (eucrim, summarizing the 2024 Global Tax Evasion Report). Nations have reasserted control over borders, data and technology faster than over money.

The one aside on my slides that aged best had nothing to do with cyber: “Additional disruption: energy transition.” In 2025, solar power passed wind in global electricity generation (Energy Institute Statistical Review, via DieselNet). I had gotten energy badly wrong in 2011, as I admitted in my fifteen-year scorecard; by 2017, at least, I had learned to list it.

The advice still holds

I closed the talk with five things to start doing that day. Here they are, unchanged, with what they mean now.

1. Track economic, technological and social trends outside your industry. In 2017 that meant cybersecurity and populism. Now it means export controls, sanctions designations and investment screening rules, which can close a market faster than any competitor.
2. Hold active discussions with stakeholders about what it all means. Your board, your government affairs team and your largest customers each see a different part of the map.
3. Ask how customer needs will evolve. Customers increasingly ask where their data lives, where your chips come from and which government can reach your servers.
4. Look for new partners in the evolving ecosystem. Supply chains are being rebuilt along national and alliance lines. The partners who matter in 2030 may not be the ones you had in 2017.
5. Tell your customers you have their future in mind. In a world where states are back, reliability is a competitive advantage.

The method I recommended to the CEOs that morning is the same one I would recommend now: strategic trends, plus actor analysis, plus wildcard events. In 2017, a hack of the phone network, a land war in Europe and a court abolishing a passport market all sounded like wildcards. Every one of them happened.

Nine years ago I stood in front of some of the most powerful chief executives in the world and told them the nation-state was coming back. It came back. That is what foresight is for: not to be clever about the future, but to be early, and right, while there is still time to act on it.

The slides from the talk are on SlideShare.

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