The numbers come first. The Congressional Budget Office now projects a $2.1 trillion deficit for fiscal 2026, up from its $1.9 trillion forecast in February. Tariff and customs-duty revenue is expected to fall $250 billion below earlier estimates following the Supreme Court's ruling striking down Trump's tariff program — creating a roughly $200 billion net revenue gap even after higher income and payroll tax collections. That is the macro backdrop against which Moore delivered his warning.
Sir Richard Moore, who ran MI6 from 2020 to 2025, now advises leaders through Teneo's Global Political Risk Advisory business and Sixth Street, a global investment firm. His core argument is blunt: the existential threat to most companies is not a surprise. It is the layering of known stressors — COVID-19, Ukraine, Iran, China pressure, tariffs — accumulating faster than organizations can absorb them.
'Resilience eats efficiency for breakfast,' Moore told Fortune's Diane Brady. 'You've got to have that ability to pick yourself up off the floor and go again.' The old management mantra about culture eating strategy has been quietly retired in the boardrooms Moore now walks through.
Going global means going local. Moore's sharpest operational point is geographic granularity. Blocs no longer behave like blocs, he argues. Within the EU and ASEAN, member states are taking sharply divergent positions on China. The Philippines, he notes, are 'in a full-on confrontation with the Chinese because of Chinese bullying over the South China Sea.' For any CEO deploying capital across multiple jurisdictions, the question Moore poses is direct: 'Are you now devoting the resources you need to understand where individual countries are?' Without that investment, he warns, 'you won't achieve the empathy you need to make decent investments.'
On China, Moore counsels precision over ideology. He cautions against assuming China's rise is linear — 'they've clearly got some significant economic headwinds at the moment' — but equally against dismissing Chinese competitiveness, 'not least in open-source AI models.' Because China is deeply integrated into the global economic system, Moore views full 'decoupling' as less realistic than 'derisking.' Capital rewards clear rules, and that distinction matters enormously for supply-chain strategy.
The intelligence discipline that belongs in boardrooms. Moore draws a clean line between his former trade and the CEO's job: 'My job is to steal the secrets; it's not to solve mysteries.' Rather than demanding predictions, he pushes leaders toward scenario thinking — mapping how situations might evolve rather than betting on a single outcome. That discipline, he argues, is as valuable in a boardroom as in a secure briefing room.
He closes on trust, both external and internal. Building sovereign relationships takes years; arriving at a crisis without them is, in his word, 'trouble.' Inside organizations, the same logic applies: if leaders become 'overbearing' and staff fear delivering bad news, 'your decisions are not likely to be the best, are they?'
CEO Times reads this plainly. Free enterprise operates on information quality. Moore's framework — scenario rigor, country-level intelligence, and the institutional courage to speak truth to power — is not soft leadership theory. It is the operating manual for deploying capital in a world where Washington's policy signals are volatile, alliances are fluid, and the CBO is revising deficit projections upward by $200 billion mid-year. The companies that survive the current cycle will be the ones that treated geopolitical risk as a balance-sheet item, not a footnote.
