Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Start your day with intelligence. Get The OODA Daily Pulse.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
In 2025, geopolitical risk and technology ceased to be parallel domains. They fused into a single acceleration dynamic where compute, energy, data, autonomy, and perception collectively shaped power, deterrence, and governance – compressing decision timelines and raising the cost of strategic hesitation.
Geopolitical risk in 2025 was defined less by singular shocks than by continuous, compounding pressure, where resilience, foresight, and the ability to operate at machine-speed became the core determinants of national power and strategic relevance. Governments and institutions struggled to adapt governance, deterrence, and industrial policy to exponential change, while adversaries exploited speed, ambiguity, and hybrid tactics to gain advantage below traditional thresholds of conflict.
The 2025 year-end review of Geopolitical Risk and Technology captures a decisive shift from episodic crises to a persistent condition of strategic acceleration, where technological change and geopolitical competition are no longer separable. Throughout the year, AI, quantum technologies, cyber operations, space systems, energy infrastructure, and digital finance increasingly functioned as instruments of state power, economic leverage, and military advantage rather than neutral enablers of growth.
Strategic competition intensified across domains (from undersea cables and semiconductor supply chains to rare earths, compute infrastructure, and cognitive warfare) compressing decision timelines and eroding the margin for error.
This post also frames Geopolitical Risk and Technology relative to:
The analysis is followed by a:
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) released in November 2025 articulates a clear reorientation of American strategic priorities toward narrowly defined core interests, national sovereignty, economic strength, and technological leadership. It critiques past post-Cold War strategies for overextension and vagueness, instead emphasizing economic and industrial revitalization, and a sharper focus on the Western Hemisphere as a foundational theater of security.
Viewed through the prism of Geopolitical Risk and Technology, the November 2025 NSS reflects a widening gap between how national strategy is articulated and how power is actually being contested. This 2025 Year-End Review reveals that risk is no longer episodic or regionally bounded; it is produced continuously by accelerating technologies—AI, cyber operations, space systems, energy infrastructure, digital finance, and supply chains—that now function as strategic terrain.
In this context, the release of the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) reads less as a declaration of dominance than as a corrective response to whiplash: an attempt to regain strategic coherence amid forces that increasingly escape centralized control.
The NSS emphasizes sovereignty, industrial strength, technological leadership, and sharper prioritization of U.S. interests. These priorities align with the year-end analysis in one crucial respect: both recognize that technology and economic infrastructure are now inseparable from national security. However, the OODA-informed geopolitical risk lens highlights how these domains are already deeply contested and globally entangled. Compute infrastructure, rare-earth supply chains, energy grids, and digital platforms operate across borders at machine speed, creating exposure and leverage that cannot be fully managed through national policy alone. Where the NSS seeks to reassert control and clarity, the year-end review underscores how control itself has become partial, provisional, and continuously challenged.
This tension defines the strategic pivot of late 2025. The NSS frames competition largely in state-centric terms—deterrence, industrial capacity, hemispheric stability—while the geopolitical risk and technology analysis reveals a landscape shaped by hybrid actors, dual-use systems, and cascading second-order effects.
Cyber operations blur peace and conflict, AI accelerates both decision advantage and systemic fragility, and financial technologies introduce new vectors of coercion and instability. The result is a strategic environment where trendlines matter more than discrete events, and where misalignment between technological reality and institutional tempo generates persistent risk.
Ultimately, placing geopolitical risk and technology at the center reframes the NSS as an adaptation effort rather than an endpoint. The strategy represents an effort to navigate amid acceleration. Still, the year-end review suggests that advantage will hinge less on declaratory posture and more on the ability to sense, adapt, and reconfigure in real-time. November 2025 thus marked a moment of reorientation under pressure—where national strategy confronts a world in which power is increasingly exercised through networks, infrastructure, and speed, and where managing technological risk is itself the core national security challenge.
Ultimately, this year-end review reinforces the core theme of OODAcon 2025: that advantage in this era depends on architecting resilience and decision speed, not predicting the next crisis. Institutions, policies, and enterprises that remain linear, centralized, or slow are systematically outpaced. Those that embrace modular design, scenario-driven foresight, and rapid OODA-loop execution are better positioned to compete. In this sense, 2025 marked a transition from managing discrete risks to operating continuously at the edge – where strategy, technology, and geopolitics are inseparable.
Viewed through the prism of OODA CEO Matt Devost’s OODAcon 2025 keynote, “Architecting the Edge,” the 2025 year-end analysis reveals a decisive shift in how geopolitical risk and technology interact. Isolated crises did not define the year, but the emergence of acceleration as the permanent operating condition. AI, compute infrastructure, cyber operations, energy systems, space, and digital finance converged into a continuous competitive environment where speed, adaptability, and distributed capability outweighed traditional measures of power. In Matt’s framing, the “edge” is no longer a geographic frontier; It is the intersection of technology, decision-making, and real-time execution across domains.
Across 2025, this manifested as a diffusion of power into infrastructure, cognition, and networks. Compute and AI moved from centralized clouds to sovereign and edge architectures; undersea cables, space systems, and energy grids became contested strategic terrain; and cyber and cognitive warfare blurred the lines between peace and conflict. Geoeconomics (tariffs, rare-earth supply chains, crypto policy, and capital flows) operated as instruments of national strategy rather than market side effects.
The year’s dominant pattern confirmed Matt’s warning: geopolitical risk is now structural, produced by tightly coupled systems that amplify shocks and compress decision timelines.
Ultimately, the year-end review reinforces Devost’s core argument that advantage in this era depends on architecting resilience and decision speed, not predicting the next crisis. Institutions, policies, and enterprises that remain linear, centralized, or slow are systematically outpaced. Those that embrace modular design, scenario-driven foresight, and rapid OODA-loop execution are better positioned to compete. In this sense, 2025 marked a transition from managing discrete risks to operating continuously at the edge, where strategy, technology, and geopolitics are inseparable.
January 2025
The year opened with mounting concern over global risk convergence, as geopolitical flashpoints, AI acceleration, cyber operations, and supply-chain fragility increasingly overlapped. Early discussions emphasized the erosion of traditional crisis separation – economic shocks, cyber operations, and military signaling were now tightly coupled. Strategic foresight themes focused on preparedness gaps, resilience under acceleration, and the early warning signals of systemic stress.
February 2025
February centered on U.S. AI policy direction and cyber posture, highlighted by debates over offensive cyber operations, open-source AI governance, and cryptocurrency policy pivots. Quantum technology emerged as both a security opportunity and a vulnerability, while concerns grew around deepfakes and information warfare as precision tools of state influence. The month highlighted the challenges of governing exponential technologies within traditional regulatory frameworks.
March 2025
March marked a sharp escalation in technology-driven strategic competition, with major developments in quantum communications, semiconductor supply chains, and AI diffusion. China’s advances in quantum satellites and AI-enabled supply-chain targeting intensified concerns about strategic surprise. Meanwhile, U.S. defense innovation mechanisms (OTA, rapid acquisition pathways) gained prominence as tools to keep pace with adversaries.
April 2025
April focused on space, biotech, and deep-tech commercialization as pillars of future national power. Discussions around “Golden Dome” defense concepts, AI-enabled biosecurity, and robotics signaled a broadening definition of strategic arsenal beyond traditional weapons. At the same time, escalating tariff regimes and technology controls highlighted the growing fusion of economic statecraft and security policy.
May 2025
In May, attention shifted to compute, infrastructure, and financial power, as AI drove unprecedented demand for energy, data centers, and capital. Stablecoins, cryptocurrency reserves, and dollar dominance became explicit national-security questions. Global drone proliferation and satellite expansion illustrated how commercial technologies were rapidly militarized, reshaping deterrence and battlefield dynamics.
June 2025
June underscored the AI-energy-security nexus, with thermodynamic computing, semiconductor geopolitics, and nuclear-AI convergence reframing long-term strategic competition. Cyber diplomacy tensions rose around proposed UN cybercrime frameworks, while conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine highlighted the decisive role of small drones, undersea cables, and resilient logistics in modern warfare.
July 2025
July was defined by autonomy and speed in warfare, as drone swarms, counter-drone defenses, hypersonics, and space systems moved from theory to operational reality. AI-enabled wargaming and scenario planning emphasized war termination, escalation control, and strategic clarity. The month reinforced that AI acts simultaneously as a force multiplier and an attack amplifier.
August 2025
August brought quantum readiness, space economy growth, and crypto-cyber convergence into sharper focus. Governments updated preparations for “Q-Day,” while trillion-dollar projections for the global space economy highlighted capital innovation alongside security risks. Taiwan-focused scenario planning and Arctic-space convergence reflected widening theaters of strategic competition.
September 2025
September emphasized geoeconomics, minerals, and climate-security intersections. Ports, Arctic routes, and rare-earth supply chains emerged as strategic pressure points. Advances in digital twins, syndromic surveillance, and manufacturing innovation showed how predictive technologies were reshaping resilience and power projection. Cognitive warfare and AI workforce development underscored the human dimension of competition.
October 2025
October marked a conceptual inflection point around accelerationism and strategic architecture. Discussions ranged from de-dollarization and network states to cognitive warfare and maritime conflict. Hardware-level zero trust (HBOM), rare-earth controls, and AI-driven logistics highlighted how infrastructure itself had become a battlespace. The month stressed imagination as a strategic necessity.
November 2025
November focused on operational tempo and institutional adaptation. Global compute diffusion, space-based AI concepts, and Pentagon acceleration doctrine illustrated how “speed is now strategy.” OODAcon 2025 themes reinforced the need to outpace adversaries by collapsing decision cycles across AI, cyber, and space domains.
December 2025
December closed the year by reframing accumulated risks as structural rather than episodic. Crypto volatility, energy bottlenecks, quantum national strategies, and escalating cyber threats were treated as enduring conditions of the acceleration era. OODAcon’s Annual Global Threat Brief and year-end reflections emphasized that resilience, foresight, and rapid adaptation – not prediction – will define strategic advantage in 2026 and beyond.
Reorganized by theme, the 2025 OODA Loop Research corpus reveals a single dominant pattern: geopolitical competition has fully merged with technological acceleration, collapsing distinctions between economic policy, military power, and digital infrastructure. These themes collectively map the operating environment for 2026 and beyond – where speed, resilience, and strategic imagination determine advantage.
By year’s end, the dominant insight was clear: geopolitical risk in 2025 was defined less by singular shocks than by continuous, compounding pressure, where resilience, foresight, and the ability to operate at machine-speed became the core determinants of national power and strategic relevance
About the Author
Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence
Informing your decisions with actionable intelligence