The world feels increasingly chaotic: trust in all things is dropping, global power is shifting in unfamiliar and unexpected (if not unprecedented) ways, and a bevy of forces are competing to fill the void. The current divergence between Canada and the United States on multilateral engagement is often analyzed as a familiar contest between state power and institutional order. Canada, under Mark Carney, has positioned itself as a coordinator of middle-power coalitions and a defender of rules-based systems. The U.S., by contrast, appears to be relishing a dominance-driven form of isolationism. By withdrawing from hundreds of United Nations bodies and affiliated organizations and presumably cutting off funding, it is signaling a preference for unilateral leverage and exit optionality over institutional constraint. What is still under-examined is how the increasing influence of third and fourth strategic actors is being deployed and altering the payoff matrix: the super-empowered individual, and AI.
Game theory traditionally models geopolitics as interactions among states, sometimes mediated by institutions. That abstraction is breaking down. Technological leverage, capital mobility, platform reach, cryptographic tools, AI systems, and legal-jurisdictional arbitrage have given certain individuals powers that previously required state-scale infrastructure. In strategic terms, this means the game is no longer purely state-versus-state or state-versus-institution. It is now at least tri-polar: states, institutions, and individuals all act as semi-autonomous players capable of altering outcomes.
From a game-theoretic perspective, institutions historically served as adhesives, as commitment devices. They reduced uncertainty, punished defection, and stabilized cooperative equilibria. When a hegemonic actor like the U.S. withdraws from multilateral bodies, it weakens those enforcement mechanisms and shifts the system toward bargaining games with higher variance and more frequent defection. Canada’s response, articulated in Carney’s Davos speech, is an attempt to re-stabilize cooperation by coordinating middle powers and increasing domestic capacity, thereby improving its outside options in bilateral negotiations.
The missing piece is how empowered individuals exploit this institutional thinning. They are not a new influence, but the extent of that influence is. In a world with weaker multilateral enforcement, people with capital, expertise, narrative reach, or technological leverage can arbitrage between jurisdictions, norms, and regulatory regimes with unprecedented speed. In game-theory terms, they introduce new strategies into the game that neither states nor institutions can fully control. The result is a shift from a relatively closed repeated game to an open game with new entrants who can change payoffs mid-play.
This matters a great deal. Individuals sometimes operating as proxies don’t behave like states. States discount future payoffs differently; they care about legitimacy, continuity, and reputational stability across decades. Super-empowered individuals can operate with shorter time horizons, asymmetric risk tolerance, and targeted objectives. They can credibly threaten exit not just from institutions, but from jurisdictions altogether. That threat, when scaled across thousands or millions of actors (founders, investors, engineers, influencers, operators) begins to rival traditional forms of economic and political pressure.
In this context, the U.S. withdrawal strategy can be interpreted as a wager that state-level power still dominates the game. By withdrawing from international coooeration, maximizing “freedom of action” and minimizing institutional constraints, the U.S. is attempting to increase its bargaining leverage against other states. However, this simultaneously lowers the barriers for individuals (along with other states) to defect from collective systems as well. If rules are optional for states, they become negotiable for individuals. This erodes compliance norms and accelerates a shift toward what game theorists would recognize as a high-volatility equilibrium: more innovation, more arbitrage, but less predictability.
Canada’s approach implicitly acknowledges this risk. By emphasizing internal integration, industrial capacity, and coalition-based coordination, Canada is going beyond hedging against U.S. coercion and positioning itself as a leader is a destabilizing power structure. It is attempting to remain attractive to globally mobile individuals and firms who now choose jurisdictions strategically. In effect, Canada is competing in a multi-level game where the loyalty of empowered individuals is as important as formal alliances. If those individuals believe the rules will hold, that contracts will be enforced, and that norms are stable, they will anchor capital, talent, and innovation locally.
For B2B leaders, this shift has immediate implications. Enterprises are no longer operating solely within national regulatory games. They are embedded in overlapping strategic environments where individuals inside and outside the firm can dramatically alter risk exposure. A single engineer, trader, or founder with access to AI systems, global platforms, or financial instruments can create outsized effects that previously required institutional backing. This changes internal governance assumptions as much as external ones.
The rise of the empowered individual also explains why traditional institutional decline feels destabilizing rather than merely political. Institutions once dampened variance by limiting the impact of any single actor. As those constraints weaken, variance returns to the system. Outcomes become less linear, more path-dependent, and harder to insure against. From a game-theory standpoint, we are moving from equilibrium-seeking systems toward metastable ones, where local actions can cascade into global effects.
The strategic question facing both Canada and the U.S. is whether they can re-embed these individuals into cooperative equilibria without relying solely on coercion. Canada’s coalition strategy is an attempt to do this by rebuilding credible commitment at a regional and middle-power level. The U.S. approach appears to assume that individual empowerment will align naturally with national interest once institutional friction is removed. That assumption is untested and risky.
The broader implication is that geopolitical strategy can no longer ignore micro-level agency. Super-empowered individuals are not just economic actors; they are strategic ones. Any serious analysis of state power, institutional decline, or global order that fails to account for them is modeling a game that no longer exists. Gavin Newsom’s recent announcement that California will be joining the World Health Organization is an example of how the rules of the game are changing and individuals with power state conferred or otherwise, or finding new ways to subvert the system. Newsom in this context is operating more as a super empowered individual than he is as a member of a state (as the leader of a subsection of that state, the most populous and powerful state in the Union). He wields enormous power, but he is currently operating outside the normal apparatus. This kind of behaviour will only continue to evolve and will have consequences we cannot possibly foresee today.
Increasingly, these individuals operate not just independently, but as proxies for state power itself. Traditional states, constrained by diplomatic protocol, institutional process, and legal accountability, now channel authority through empowered intermediaries who possess independent power bases while advancing state interests. This is distinct from historical backchannel diplomacy: these proxies control platforms, capital, and infrastructure that rival state capacity in specific domains. The arrangement grants states operational flexibility and plausible deniability, while giving individuals legitimacy and access. The result is a blurring of the distinction between state and non-state actors that makes traditional enforcement and accountability mechanisms more and more obsolete.
From a game-theoretic perspective, the current landscape is best understood as a three-pole strategic game rather than a bilateral or institutional one. The first pole, the United States, is behaving as a dominant player optimizing for exit optionality and bargaining leverage. By withdrawing from multilateral organizations and deprioritizing institutional commitment, the U.S. is increasing its outside options in repeated games with both allies and rivals. This shifts the equilibrium away from rule-enforced cooperation toward threat-based bargaining. The strategy is rational in a short-to-medium horizon game where leverage matters more than predictability, but it raises variance system-wide by weakening enforcement mechanisms that previously stabilized expectations.
The second pole, Canada, is pursuing a fundamentally different equilibrium strategy: coalition stabilization. Canada’s approach assumes that while the hegemon may defect, cooperation can still be sustained among sufficiently aligned middle powers if commitment remains credible within that subgroup. In game-theory terms, this is an attempt to preserve a cooperative equilibrium by shrinking the player set and tightening coordination, rather than abandoning cooperation altogether. Canada is effectively trading scale for reliability, betting that predictable rules, internal integration, and multilateral consistency will outperform raw leverage in attracting capital, talent, and long-term investment under conditions of global uncertainty.
The third pole, the super-empowered individual and proxies, fundamentally alters the game itself; not because this influence is new, but because the speed and scale at which they can now operate is unpredictable. These actors introduce non-state defection paths that bypass both institutional enforcement and national bargaining entirely. In classic models, states could punish defection through trade, sanctions, or exclusion. Empowered individuals can now exit jurisdictions, re-route capital, shift platforms, or operate through proxies faster than states can respond. This creates a meta-game layered on top of geopolitics, where states are not only competing with one another, but also competing to retain and discipline actors who can arbitrage rules in real time. The resulting equilibrium is no longer stable or fully cooperative; it is metastable, characterized by higher innovation and higher risk, where legitimacy, trust, and institutional credibility become competitive assets rather than assumed constants.
An emerging fourth pole, AI itself, is not merely a tool wielded by the other actors but an increasingly autonomous strategic amplifier that reshapes payoffs across the entire game. Unlike empowered individuals, AI enables scaling of influence without proportional increases in cost, coordination, or institutional friction. It compresses decision cycles, lowers barriers to entry for influence and coercion, and enables both states and non-state actors to act with speed and scope previously reserved for large organizations. In game-theoretic terms, AI reduces the cost of defection and experimentation while increasing the asymmetry of outcomes: small actors can generate outsized effects, and errors propagate faster than corrective mechanisms can respond. This transforms the strategic environment from a repeated game with gradual adjustment into a high-frequency interaction space where equilibria are fragile, transient, and increasingly path-dependent. States that fail to integrate AI into governance, enforcement, and legitimacy-building strategies risk losing not just bargaining power, but relevance, as AI-driven actors exploit the widening gap between institutional reaction time and real-world action.
The strategic significance of AI extends beyond speed to accessibility. As AI systems become capable of executing complex technical tasks without specialized expertise (coding, financial modeling, operational coordination) the barrier to entry for strategic action collapses entirely. Anyone with access to frontier AI can now operate at a scale and sophistication previously requiring institutional infrastructure or rare skills. This doesn’t merely amplify existing power; it fundamentally redistributes it, enabling rapid-response capabilities that outpace institutional reaction time by orders of magnitude. The result is a system where action precedes understanding, where iteration happens faster than learning, and where the consequences of deployment often become clear only after they’ve propagated beyond containment.
Historically, periods of heightened uncertainty do not produce institutional flexibility; they produce institutional hardening. States, central banks, and major financial institutions respond to rising volatility by locking down: tightening regulation, narrowing permissible behavior, and aggressively defending existing structures.
From a game-theory perspective, this is a rational shift from cooperative optimization to defensive play, but it also deepens the divide between fast-moving actors and slow-moving stabilizers, accelerating fragmentation rather than restoring equilibrium.
This is not likely to be a momentary change. The US has set the worlds on an irreversible course of loyalty on demand and transactional partnerships. This is usually the kind of environment that produces political chaos, especially with many other powerful actors entering the game. AI accelerates this dynamic in both directions: it enables actors to exploit institutional gaps with unprecedented speed, while simultaneously increasing the urgency with which institutions feel compelled to lock down. The gap between what’s possible and what’s governable widens daily. This is not a temporary adjustment period, it’s a structural mismatch between the tempo of AI-enabled action and the tempo of institutional response.Driven by technology and concentration of money, we are full speed ahead into an environment unlike anything we have ever encountered.
What is Game Theory? (in a geopolitical and economic context)
Game theory is a framework for analyzing strategic interactions where outcomes depend not only on one actor’s choices, but on the anticipated choices of others. In geopolitics and economics, it models how states, institutions, firms, and individuals behave under conditions of uncertainty, incentives, limitations, and repeated interaction. Rather than assuming rational cooperation, game theory focuses on payoffs, credibility, exit options, enforcement mechanisms, and equilibrium states, stable patterns of behavior that persist until incentives change. In today’s environment, game theory is especially useful for understanding why cooperation breaks down, how defection becomes rational, and how new actors or technologies can alter the structure of the game itself.
Who and What are Super-Empowered Individuals?
Super-empowered individuals are non-state actors whose access to technology, capital, platforms, mobility, or network effects gives them influence once reserved for institutions or governments. Unlike traditional individuals, they can operate across jurisdictions, scale their actions rapidly, and arbitrage legal, regulatory, and economic systems in real time. Their power often derives from AI systems, financial instruments, global platforms, or proxy structures rather than formal authority. In strategic terms, super-empowered individuals function as independent players within geopolitical and economic games, capable of defection, exit, or disruption without incurring the costs that constrain states. Their emergence increases volatility, weakens traditional enforcement models, and forces governments and enterprises alike to compete not just with one another, but for legitimacy, trust, and retention of agency.
*Disclosure statement: GPT 5.2 helped with game theory analysis, definitions, editing and image creation; Claude helped with structure feedback on superempowered individuals and talking through how AI is changing game dynamics.
