2026 Outlook

Every January, ministries and boardrooms alike ask us the same question in different words: what should we actually be watching this year. The honest answer is that the instruments most institutions rely on, official statements, published defense budgets, formal alliance structures, tend to describe the world a quarter or two after it has already moved. We spend most of our time on the informal layer beneath those instruments, because that is where 2026's real shifts are already visible.

Coalitions are realigning without saying so

The clearest pattern we are tracking is not a new bloc forming but old ones loosening at the edges. Mid-sized states that spent the last decade hedging between larger powers are now hedging more actively, spreading defense procurement, energy contracts, and infrastructure financing across a wider set of partners than their formal treaty commitments would suggest. None of this shows up as a headline realignment. It shows up as a defense minister taking a delegation to a country outside the usual rotation, or a state-owned enterprise signing a memorandum that never gets a press release. Individually these are noise. Read together across a region, they describe a coalition quietly redrawing itself before any summit makes it official.

Infrastructure is the new pressure point

Gray-zone pressure has moved from rhetoric and cyber probing into physical infrastructure, and we expect that trend to accelerate through the year. Undersea cables, port logistics systems, and regional power interconnects are attractive precisely because interference is deniable, disruption is expensive to attribute, and the response options available to the targeted state are limited and slow. We are advising clients to treat infrastructure resilience not as an engineering question alone but as an intelligence question: who benefits from a specific node going offline, and does that beneficiary have the access and motive to have caused it.

The states that will manage 2026 well are not the ones with the most formal intelligence, but the ones that have built a habit of asking who benefits before they ask what happened.

Information operations are getting harder to see

AI-generated content has changed the economics of information operations more than it has changed the tactics. What used to require a coordinated team producing material over weeks can now be generated by a small group in hours, at a volume and variation that makes pattern-based detection considerably harder. We are seeing this most acutely around elections and contested resource decisions, where synthetic commentary is used less to convince audiences of a specific claim than to exhaust their capacity to tell credible sources from manufactured ones. That erosion of trust is, in our view, the more durable damage, and it persists well after any single campaign is identified and taken down.

What we are telling clients to watch

We do not think 2026 will be defined by a single dramatic event that reorders the landscape. It is more likely to be defined by the accumulation of smaller signals that formal indicators are structurally slow to pick up: procurement patterns that quietly diversify, infrastructure incidents that get resolved without public attribution, and information campaigns that succeed by lowering trust rather than by winning an argument. For decision-makers, the practical implication is to invest less in monitoring official statements and more in mapping the informal relationships, financial flows, and access patterns that tend to move first. Formal indicators will eventually catch up. The organizations that act early are the ones that were not waiting for them.

Our engagements this year will continue to prioritize this informal layer: who is actually talking to whom, what is quietly changing hands, and which relationships are strengthening or fraying beneath the visible diplomatic surface. That is where the outlook for 2026 is being written, and it is where we recommend clients focus their own attention as the year unfolds.