The End of Special Relationships
From Special Relationships to Strategic Situationships
How We Got Here
This forecast didn’t start with a theory. It started with something many of us in the consortium had already been living — social contracts quietly rewritten, long-standing commitments made conditional, relationships that once carried assumed loyalty increasingly demanding to know what you’d done lately. Aarathi Krishnan had been tracing the mechanism in her work on transactional diplomacy: guardrails replaced by toll gates, every interaction a deal, payment in minerals and ports and political votes. Others in the group were seeing the same logic in their own domains — humanitarian access, civil society funding, corporate partnerships, city-level governance.
In our Singapore mapping workshop, someone called it Strategic Situationships in a group conversation.
The room stopped for a moment.
That kind of pause usually means something has been recognised, not invented. We all understood what it described. The US-UK “special relationship” — the archetype of the whole model — had already been hollowed out. Trump’s first term did that. What had felt like a permanent structural feature of the global order turned out to be contingent on a particular configuration of will and interest. Once that became visible, you couldn’t unsee it anywhere.
The forecast is our attempt to map what comes after. It’s part of the 10F suite — ten open-access forecasts developed by the 10F Consortium mapping structural shifts in global systems through 2035.
Why Now?
We planned this issue before the Iran conflict began. F04 was already on the calendar as the forecast most relevant to the current geopolitical moment. What happened on and since 28 February made the timing exact rather than approximate. We’ve written it to hold regardless of how the immediate situation develops, because the structural logic it describes was operating long before this week and will continue after it.
From Special Relationships to Strategic Situationships
Watch what’s happening around the edges of the Iran conflict right now. Not the strikes themselves — the positioning of everyone else.
One NATO member blocks use of jointly operated US bases, invoking sovereignty over alliance solidarity. Another negotiates down to defensive-only, conditions attached, under review. A third condemns the action publicly while its infrastructure quietly serves both sides. A fourth — with formal partnership ties running in three incompatible directions — says nothing, then says something careful, then says something else. A major power issues measured condemnation and waits to see what the dust settles into. A rising power that spent years cultivating strategic autonomy finds, under pressure, that it has no position at all.
None of these actors is defecting from their alliances. None is aligning cleanly with the other side. Each is managing multiple contradictory relationships simultaneously, preserving optionality while the situation pushes toward declaration.
That is the forecast, playing out in real time.
This is what the 10F Consortium called strategic situationships: deliberately under-defined partnerships that maintain ambiguity about depth, duration and exclusivity. The ambiguity isn’t diplomatic failure. It’s strategy. The party that can be pinned down loses leverage to the party that cannot.
The old vocabulary — ally, adversary, partner, neutral — assumes defined relationships. What’s operating now is something different: positions held lightly, commitments made and qualified in the same breath, everyone keeping room to move.
The Iran conflict is an acid test because it’s happening at speed, under genuine pressure, with high stakes. What it’s showing is that the situationship logic holds especially at the edge of military conflict. When the cost of being pinned down is highest, the incentive to maintain ambiguity is strongest.
Why This Matters Beyond the Headlines
The organisations in our primary readership — civil society, multilateral bodies, humanitarian operations, foundations working across borders — were built for a different environment. One where institutional membership carried operational weight. Where a values-aligned partner stayed aligned. Where framework participation meant something. Silence, in this environment, was the exception. Now it’s a position. When partners stop committing — measured condemnation, careful abstention, strategic ambiguity — they’re preserving optionality. Read it as choice, not absence.
The question the forecast asks: have you priced in the optionality your partners are building?
Poll: One Hard Question
What To Do With This Forecast
The forecast is most useful when you apply it to your own situation rather than the headlines. Here are four ways in depending on where you sit.
If you run or lead an organisation — civil society, company, foundation, multilateral body — the immediate question is which of your key relationships are quietly building exits. Not which partners have declared they’re leaving, but which ones have started hedging: shortening grant cycles, narrowing scope, adding conditionality, avoiding the conversations that would require them to commit. Situationship logic often arrives before anyone names it. Map your partnerships against what they’re actually delivering versus what the framework says they should. The gap is your exposure.
If you work inside institutions — policy teams, diplomatic corps, programme staff — the relevant question is which of your frameworks still carry operational weight and which are zombie structures: technically intact, practically useless, still consuming compliance overhead. The forecast’s blind spot warning is pointed at you specifically: leaders who assume long-standing arrangements gain authority through longevity are the last to see erosion happening in real time. Audit what your institution can actually enforce versus what it rhetorically requires.
If you’re in business — supply chain, market access, regulatory strategy, government relations — the situationship logic is already present in your operating environment whether or not you’ve named it. The partners who maintained redundant relationships look prescient right now. The ones who optimised for single-system efficiency are managing exposure. The question isn’t whether to build corridor optionality — it’s how much verification overhead you can sustain across multiple parallel arrangements, and which relationships you’re willing to make legible versus which ones benefit from remaining undefined.
If you work in advocacy or civil society funding — the forecast’s sharpest observation for you is about the Shaped category: the actors with no corridor options, locked into single-partner dependencies while larger actors maintain alternatives. Your constituents are probably in this category. So, potentially, is your organisation. Conditional grant logic, short-cycle funding, government engagement on instrumental terms — your sector is running situationship dynamics internally while trying to resist them externally. That’s worth naming.
Three Trajectories
The forecast maps three trajectories from the current moment. None is inevitable. All are worth planning for.
Functional Volatility — situationship logic becomes the normal operating principle. New institutions emerge designed for optionality rather than permanence. Treaties look like licensing agreements. Alliances function like subscription services. The actors who thrive are those who can maintain more simultaneous relationships than rivals while delivering verifiable performance across all of them. The question for your organisation: can you build that kind of relationship management capacity, and at what cost?
Zombie Institutions — actors get trapped between old frameworks that no longer function and new arrangements too fragile to scale. Organisations drain resources managing parallel systems. The gap between what alliances rhetorically require and what members actually deliver becomes impossible to ignore — but no actor has sufficient incentive to build replacements. The diagnostic question: how much of your current operating budget is compliance overhead for frameworks that aren’t delivering?
Free-Rider Cascade — erosion of commitment reaches a threshold where a crisis demands collective response but situationship logic has hollowed out the capacity to act. The ambiguity that preserved optionality blocks the flows the crisis demands. The question here isn’t operational — it’s existential: which collective goods does your work depend on, and who is currently maintaining them?
The full forecast works through each of these in detail, with adaptive strategies for organisations, communities, individuals and advocates across all three. It’s worth reading before the situation clarifies, not after.
That’s what forecasting is for.
Forecasts in the Wild
This past week Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, became one of the first crypto-native firms to gain access to Federal Reserve payment infrastructure — the core bank rails that underpin dollar-denominated settlement. Not a partnership with a bank. Direct access to the system itself.
This is F09 — From Dollar Dominance to Money Unbundled — in real time. One of the central arguments in that forecast is that the dollar isn’t simply being challenged by rival currencies but is being disaggregated: the functions it once bundled together — store of value, unit of account, settlement medium, reserve asset — are separating, with different instruments competing to perform each function. When a crypto exchange sits directly on Federal Reserve rails, the boundary between the legacy system and its putative replacements stops being a boundary. The architecture of money itself is being renegotiated, not at the level of policy but at the level of plumbing.
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