The industries that move the world. The firm that knows them.

Defense has returned to the center of hemispheric politics. For three decades after the Cold War, security cooperation in the Americas was a secondary file: counternarcotics, disaster relief, the occasional joint exercise. Great-power competition ended that. Procurement decisions now carry alliance signals. Export controls have become instruments of strategy. A port crane, a 5G network, and a satellite ground station are read in Washington as strategic terrain, and the hemisphere’s governments are learning that the question is no longer which supplier bids lowest but which partner can be trusted with the systems a nation depends on. Technology has followed defense into the same logic: semiconductors, cloud infrastructure, and dual-use systems are now governed less by markets than by security reviews. The result is an industry in which commercial success and geopolitical alignment have become the same problem, and in which the companies that understand both move first.

We advise governments, foreign ministries, and institutions on strategy toward Washington and the multilateral system, informed by service inside both. The work includes bilateral engagement design, negotiation preparation and support, narrative strategy in the U.S. policy environment, and the management of relationships with the World Bank, the IMF, the IDB, and the United Nations system, whose corridors our principals have walked as counterparts rather than visitors.

No industry lives closer to the state than this one. Oil, gas, power, and minerals sit on land the state licenses, move through infrastructure the state permits, and generate revenues the state taxes, which means every asset in the sector carries a political life alongside its geological one. The great miscalculation of the last commodity cycle was treating the two as separable: capital priced the ore body and discounted the country, and the hemisphere is littered with world-class deposits that failed as investments because the concession outlived its political consent. Panama’s Cobre mine, one of the largest copper operations on earth, closed not because the copper ran out but because the social license did. Meanwhile the energy transition has redrawn the sector’s geography. Critical minerals, lithium, copper, and rare earths, have acquired the strategic weight oil carried in the last century, and Washington and Beijing now compete for the hemisphere’s resources the way empires once competed for sea lanes. The industry’s defining question has changed accordingly. It is no longer only what the asset is worth, but how long the arrangement that governs it will hold, and that is a question answered in capitals, not in feasibility studies.

Infrastructure has stopped being neutral. For most of the globalized era, a port was a business, a railway was a utility, and the only questions that mattered were throughput and tariff. That era ended in the hemisphere the moment Washington concluded that whoever operates the terminal shapes what moves through it, and the moment Beijing’s port concessions, built quietly over two decades, became the most contested commercial arrangements in the Americas. The Panama Canal sits at the center of this transformation: five percent of world trade, forty percent of U.S. container traffic between the coasts, and in 2025 the object of the sharpest bilateral pressure the isthmus has faced since the handover, a crisis resolved not by confrontation but by statecraft, sovereignty asserted through institutions while cooperation with Washington deepened. The port transitions that followed rewrote the rules for every operator in the region. The lesson now governs the entire sector: tenders are read as alignment decisions, concessions are audited for their geopolitics as much as their economics, and route authorities, maritime regulators, and U.S. agencies that once ignored logistics now treat it as an instrument of strategy. Whoever holds infrastructure in this hemisphere holds a position in a competition larger than any balance sheet, and the management of that crisis at the Canal, directed from inside Panama’s foreign ministry by RPK’s founding principal, is the standard case of how a chokepoint survives great-power pressure with both its sovereignty and its business intact.

Finance discovered geopolitics late, and it is paying for the delay. For a generation, cross-border capital treated political risk as a footnote: a spread adjustment, an insurance line, a paragraph in the prospectus. Sanctions changed that first, when the dollar’s plumbing became an instrument of statecraft and every correspondent bank inherited a foreign policy. Sovereign debt changed it second, as restructurings from Buenos Aires to Colombo demonstrated that recovery depends less on the bond’s covenants than on the politics of the government honoring them. The rating agencies, built to read fiscal arithmetic, consistently arrive after the fact; the downgrades follow the crisis they were meant to predict, because the decisive variables, a ministry’s internal balance, a president’s coalition, a great power’s interest in the outcome, never appear in the data. In Latin America the pattern is sharpest of all: portfolio exposure to the region is exposure to its politics, from central bank independence fights to mining codes rewritten mid-concession to the quiet question of whose infrastructure loans a government repays first. The institutions that price this correctly hold an advantage measured in whole basis points, and the intersection where that pricing happens, between the sovereign’s chair and the creditor’s, is territory very few advisors have occupied from both sides.

The map of world manufacturing is being redrawn for the first time in forty years, and the force redrawing it is not cost but politics. The offshoring era rested on a single assumption: that geography no longer mattered, that a component could cross the Pacific three times before final assembly and no one would ever ask why. The pandemic broke the assumption operationally; the tariff era broke it financially; and great-power competition has now broken it permanently, because supply chains are read in Washington as questions of national resilience rather than corporate efficiency. What followed is the nearshoring wave: automotive, electronics, and consumer-goods production moving toward the Americas, toward Mexico’s border states, Central America’s free zones, and the reindustrializing United States itself. But the wave has a structure the headlines miss. Every jurisdiction now competes with an offer, incentives, zones, tax holidays, expedited permits, and every offer is a political promise whose durability depends on the government that made it surviving, and on the trade regime that justified it holding. A plant is a twenty-year bet placed inside a tariff schedule that can change in a news cycle. The manufacturers winning this transition are the ones who understood early that site selection has become statecraft: the spreadsheet still matters, but the decisive variables, tariff exposure, rules of origin, the politics of the incentive, and the alignment of the host country with its largest market, are set in capitals, and they decide where the economics actually land.

We serve as the geopolitical bench for law firms, investment banks, and consultancies whose clients face sovereign risk: political context for legal strategy, business development and market entry for the firms themselves, and coordination between legal process and government reality. We have sat on the government side of the table, and we partner with elite firms rather than compete with them; several of the region’s most complex matters have taught us that the strongest legal strategy still needs a political one beside it.

Universities, think tanks, and research labs navigating security, funding, and geopolitics. Export controls now reach into academic research. Federal funding increasingly favors national security priorities. We help institutions navigate this new operating environment. Our principals know this environment from the policy side and the academic side alike, having taught and researched at Johns Hopkins SAIS while engaging Congress and the executive branch on the issues that now reach into the laboratory.