On Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters stormed the United States Capitol, Mark Zuckerberg convened an emergency call with his closest advisors. On the line were Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s then COO; Joel Kaplan, former White House deputy chief of staff; and Nick Clegg, the former British Deputy Prime Minister who was serving as Facebook’s vice president for global affairs. The question before them was unprecedented: should Facebook ban the sitting President of the United States?[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Clegg emerged as the decisive voice. He had a clear plan: suspend Donald Trump indefinitely, then refer the decision to the company’s new independent Oversight Board, a body Clegg himself had shepherded into existence over the previous two years. Some at Facebook thought referring the ban to the board was too risky. But according to a New York Times account of the deliberations, when Clegg made his case, Zuckerberg responded: “I defer to you, Nick.”That moment crystallized why Zuckerberg had hired Clegg, as a kind of Chief Geopolitics Officer, in the first place. Facebook was then reeling from the Cambridge Analytica scandal and reports that it had enabled election interference. The company needed someone who understood how governments think, how regulators operate, how political crises unfold—and how to navigate all three simultaneously. Clegg, with his experience as a Member of the European Parliament and five years near the top of Britain’s coalition government, was the rare executive who could operate at the intersection of technology and geopolitics.Over the next four years, Clegg proved his value repeatedly. He created the Oversight Board—a panel of former politicians, human rights officials, and journalists that Zuckerberg called Facebook’s “Supreme Court”—convincing former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt to serve as co-chair. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Clegg was central to Meta’s decision to take a hard line against Moscow, precipitating an all-out ban on Facebook and Instagram in Russia. When Frances Haugen’s whistleblower revelations threatened to engulf the company, Clegg served as Meta’s chief defender, a role that earned him criticism but also demonstrated his indispensability.Last month, Clegg announced he is joining Hiro Capital, a London-based venture capital firm focused on AI and spatial computing. His departure from Meta—and his replacement by Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative better attuned to the Trump Administration—marks the end of the first major experiment in corporate geopolitical management.The lessons of that experiment deserve wider attention. For seven years, Clegg demonstrated what it looks like when a company takes political risk seriously enough to put a senior figure in charge of it. The question now is whether other multinationals will learn from Meta’s example, or whether they will wait until crisis strikes.The smart money is already moving. In May, JPMorgan Chase launched its Center for Geopolitics, led by Derek Chollet, a counselor to former Secretary of State Antony Blinken and chief of staff to former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. The unit draws on advisors including former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice; former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair; and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. “Our greatest risk is geopolitical risk,” CEO Jamie Dimon wrote to shareholders. Dimon is not alone in his determination. Citigroup recently brought on Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative. McKinsey and Russell Reynolds report a surge in Fortune 500 companies recruiting executives with geopolitical expertise, often from military, intelligence, and government backgrounds.These moves reflect a dawning recognition that the old assumptions underpinning global business have been shattered. For decades, multinational corporations operated on the premise of a stable, rules-based international order where contracts were honored and investments protected. That world is gone. Under the Trump Administration, tariff policy shifts not by the quarter but by the hour, announced on social media and reversed just as capriciously, with retaliatory spirals that make long-term planning an exercise in futility. As a result, the Geopolitical Risk with Trade index has surged approximately 30% since 2020, compared to the previous two decades. And the Global Supply Chain Pressure Index has nearly tripled. Companies that once worried primarily about exchange rates and regulatory compliance now face a bewildering array of threats: trade wars, sanctions, export controls, nationalist boycotts, and the caprices of populist leaders who prize political theater over economic rationality.The toll of Trump’s geopolitical turbulence is mounting. Foreign companies lost over $170 billion exiting Russia after the Ukraine invasion, including British Petroleum’s staggering $25.5 billion write-off—one of the largest in corporate history. Huawei says it hemorrhages $30 billion annually from U.S. sanctions on its smartphone business alone. TikTok faces forced divestiture in the United States while operating freely in Europe, forcing its parent company to fragment global operations. The UK Cabinet Office recently released its first-ever Chronic Risks Analysis, explicitly warning businesses that international instability and the fracturing of the old international order are risks that all companies, not just large multinationals, must now actively plan for.Take Turkey, where President Erdogan’s arrest of Istanbul’s mayor has thrown the country into political turmoil, creating uncertainty for every foreign company with operations there. And in Hungary, Viktor Orban’s relationship with Moscow generates compliance headaches for Western firms navigating sanctions. Yet most companies remain woefully unprepared. Too often, geopolitical advisory units and risk analysts are hired into ancillary roles which are peripheral to core decision-making—consultants called in to write reports that gather dust, or government affairs departments focused on lobbying rather than strategic anticipation.What’s needed is something more fundamental: a Chief Geopolitics Officer (CGO) at the C-suite level.The historical precedent is instructive. The Chief Technology Officer (CTO) role emerged in the 1990s as technology became central to business operations. Before that, companies treated technology as a support function—important, certainly, but not strategic. The creation of the CTO signaled that technology had become an existential business concern requiring dedicated leadership at the highest level.The same pattern repeated with the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) as cyber threats escalated, and with the Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) as environmental concerns became material business risks. In each case, what had been a peripheral function was elevated to the C-suite because executives recognized that the stakes had grown too high for half-measures.Geopolitical risk has now reached that threshold. It is no longer a concern to be managed by lawyers, outside analysts and lobbyists on an ad hoc basis. It is a core strategic challenge that demands constant attention, sophisticated intelligence capabilities, and—crucially—a seat at the table where decisions are made daily.The CGO would not be a glorified government affairs director. As Nick Clegg demonstrated at Meta, the role requires integrating geopolitical intelligence directly into core business decision-making: monitoring global political developments, developing scenario-planning to anticipate impacts on operations and supply chains, managing relationships with governments and regulatory bodies, and providing rapid crisis response when surprises occur.Most importantly, the CGO must have real authority—the power to say “no” to an investment, to delay a market entry, to redesign a supply chain. When Zuckerberg told Clegg “I defer to you” on one of the most consequential decisions in the company’s history, he was acknowledging that geopolitical judgment sometimes trumps product strategy. That is the kind of authority a CGO requires.What made Clegg effective at Meta was not merely his credentials—it was his authority. When he spoke, people listened, because Zuckerberg had made clear that Clegg spoke for the company on matters of political consequence.For executives without Clegg’s gilded résumé, the C-suite title does that work. A senior vice president for geopolitical risk, no matter how talented, will struggle to get the CEO’s attention when it conflicts with a product launch. A Chief Geopolitics Officer, by definition, already has it.The argument against creating a new C-suite position is always the same: it’s expensive, it adds bureaucracy, and existing functions can handle it. But that argument was made against the CTO, the CISO, and the CSO—and in each case, it proved short-sighted. Companies that recognized the strategic importance of technology, cybersecurity, and sustainability early gained competitive advantages. Those that lagged paid the price.Consider what happened last Sept. 4 in rural Georgia. Hundreds of federal agents descended on a Hyundai-LG battery plant under construction near Savannah—the largest single-site immigration enforcement operation in the Department of Homeland Security’s history. The raid detained 475 workers, more than 300 of them South Korean nationals, many of whom were skilled engineers with valid business visas. Images of shackled workers went viral in Seoul, sparking outrage across South Korea’s political spectrum. The raid came just 11 days after President Trump had met with South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and pledged closer economic cooperation.Perhaps most remarkably, a MAGA congressional candidate named Tori Branum took credit for tipping off immigration authorities. “This is what I voted for,” she told Rolling Stone. Never mind that the plant represents a $12.6 billion investment that was supposed to create 8,500 American jobs. Never mind that South Korea had agreed to invest $350 billion in the United States as part of a broader trade deal with Trump. For a local political aspirant seeking to burnish her nativist credentials, the chance to trigger an international incident was apparently irresistible.Could a Chief Geopolitics Officer have prevented this crisis? We cannot say for certain. But a CGO with real authority and a team of risk analysts beneath them could have anticipated the dangers of operating in a politically charged environment where immigration enforcement had become a tool of populist performance. They could have developed protocols to protect the workforce, or built relationships with local officials who could have defused the situation before it exploded. And they could have recognized that in today’s America, a single activist with an internet connection and a grudge can derail a multibillion-dollar investment.Nick Clegg demonstrated at Meta that when a company empowers someone to think strategically about political risk—and gives them the authority to act on that thinking—the results can be transformative. The era of treating geopolitical risk as someone else’s problem is over. The companies that thrive in this new world will be those that give it the attention it deserves, at the highest level of corporate leadership. The rest will learn the hard way, one crisis at a time.