Geopolitics, Trade, and Supply Chain Risk

# Why Take This Course Your supply chain is not isolated from the world. When the US imposes tariffs on Chinese goods, when Taiwan faces political tension, when Russia invades Ukraine, when rare-earth shipments are restricted, when a pandemic hits a port—your supply chain feels it instantly. Yet most supply-chain professionals today manage geopolitical risk as an afterthought, if at all. They source from the cheapest place, optimize for efficiency, and hope nothing goes wrong. This course teaches you to see geopolitical risk as **supply-chain risk**. It teaches you how to map your exposure (where is your supply concentrated? Who are your Tier-2 suppliers?), assess impact (if this region shut down, how long could we produce?), and plan resilience (what would it cost to diversify? What's the real trade-off?). You will learn why TSMC's position in Taiwan is the world's riskiest supply-chain bottleneck. You will understand how US-China decoupling is rewriting sourcing maps in semiconductor, automotive, and defense industries. You will see how energy and rare-earth concentration create cascading shocks. And you will learn the playbook for building a resilient supply chain—one that doesn't just optimize for the lowest cost, but can absorb a geopolitical shock and keep operating. The course is grounded in **real geopolitical events** (Ukraine 2022, US-China tariffs, Taiwan tensions, energy crises, sanctions) and **verified supply-chain impacts**. You will work through cases: semiconductors (concentrated risk), automobiles (nearshoring strategy), energy (resource dependencies), pharmaceuticals (critical sourcing), consumer goods (tariff exposure). By the end, you will be able to: - Assess how a geopolitical event affects your supply networks - Map your exposure across regions, suppliers, and sub-tier dependencies - Evaluate the trade-off between cost efficiency and geopolitical resilience - Plan resilience measures (dual-sourcing, nearshoring, inventory buffers, visibility systems) that fit your business model and risk tolerance This is not about predicting geopolitics. It is about understanding the supply-chain implications of geopolitical risk, quantifying them, and building a strategy that keeps your organization running when the world gets complicated. THE COURSE TEACHES (concepts, for context): Geopolitics and Supply Chains: Why External Events Break Networks, The Master Trade-off: Geopolitical Resilience vs Cost Efficiency, Mapping Geopolitical Exposure: From Tier-1 to Sub-tier Risk, Critical Resource Dependencies: Identifying What You Cannot Live Without, Trade Policy Frameworks: WTO, Tariffs, Regional Agreements, and Their Supply Chain Effects, Sanctions and Export Controls: When Geopolitical Events Shut Off Supply Overnight, Supply Chain Security Regulations: USMCA, Critical Infrastructure Rules, and Compliance Barriers, US-China Tension and Supply Chains: From Trade War to Technology Decoupling, Taiwan and Semiconductors: The World's Riskiest Single Point of Failure, Energy, Rare Earths, and Strategic Minerals: Geopolitical Concentration and Supply Shocks, Nearshoring and Friendshoring: Supply Chains Redrawn by Geopolitics, The EU's Strategic Autonomy: Economic De-Coupling and Supply Chain Localization, Assessing Geopolitical Risk: Frameworks, Scenarios, and Quantification, Sourcing Decisions Under Geopolitical Risk: When to Buy, When to Avoid, How to Hedge, Supplier and Country Concentration: Identifying and Mitigating Single Points of Failure, Resilience Levers: Dual-Sourcing, Nearshoring, and Strategic Inventory, Product and Supply Chain Design for Geopolitical Flexibility, Supply Chain Visibility and Early Warning Systems for Geopolitical Shocks, Business Continuity and Response Playbooks for Geopolitical Supply Chain Shocks, The Cost of Resilience: Quantifying the Resilience-Efficiency Trade-off, Geopolitical Supply Chain Strategy by Industry and Business Model, Designing a Geopolitically Resilient Supply Chain: End-to-End Integration