Callback
Contact
+356 2138 7400
Rob Larity is a Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Bespoke Group.
“Panics do not destroy capital,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1848, “They merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed.” Similarly, the breakout of war in the Middle East — which has caused the country rankings of Henley & Partners’ Global Investment Risk and Resilience Index (GIRRI) to diverge sharply in the latest edition — did not introduce new risks to the system; it merely revealed the risks that were already there and catalyzed them.
Geopolitical multipolarity is accelerating. The USA, while still the strongest individual power in the world, is no longer the unipolar tentpole of global trade and liberal economic order. This trend has been in motion for over a decade, became un-ignorable when the Houthis started lobbing missiles into the Red Sea — without obvious consequences — in 2023, and now, with the USA electing to start a conflict in the Middle East, it has become obvious to everyone.
While foreign interventionism has long been part of the US playbook, it has always been decently cloaked in the narrative of protecting against threats to global law and order, whether in the form of international communism or just crackpot dictators with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In 2003, we got ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ and Colin Powell. In 2026, we get ‘Epic Fury’ and SpongeBob SquarePants. Times have changed.
Against the backdrop of a global volatility spiral, this much is clear: the USA is not so special anymore. It is increasingly just another self-interested player, one ‘pole’ in a multipolar order. We can see this multipolarity in the latest GIRRI rankings. Emerging nations with the space and sovereignty to exercise power independently of the key poles — India, Turkey, Brazil — are among the largest gainers. So too are emerging markets that are responding to multipolarity by integrating ever more deeply into one of the major poles via trade and capital flows — witness the improved rankings of Mexico (USA), Morocco (EU), and Thailand (China). Meanwhile, the rankings of global ‘safe havens’ like Singapore and Switzerland have only been reaffirmed. These remain ports in an increasingly violent storm.
These changes are visible in financial markets. US dollar markets remain the deepest and most liquid in the world, but global investors are shifting away at the margin. Central banks have steadily accumulated physical gold over the past decade, and thanks to a spike in the gold price, in late 2025, physical gold reserves (as a % of total reserves) overtook US Treasuries for the first time since 1995. The Iran war is accelerating this trend. Despite the spike in oil prices causing a reflexive, short-term scramble for USD liquidity, as I write this, the Swiss franc and Singapore dollar stand just a whisker off multi-decade highs, and the euro is testing five-year highs against the US dollar. There is no obvious heir to the US dollar’s throne as a global reserve currency, so allocators are splitting their exposure across a variety of options. This is multipolarity showing its FX face.
At Bespoke Group, our clients’ investment portfolios reflect our house view that multipolarity is here to stay. Geographically, this means starting with a ‘global first’ approach to allocation, rather than the ‘USA first’ approach that historically was the default — not only for American families, but also for families in EMEA who looked overseas to US Treasuries and large-cap US equities as the starting point. Based on our recent conversations with UHNW families in EMEA, that assumption is clearly breaking down.
Meanwhile, we have seen a surge of interest and demand from US-based prospects for our global-first approach to both custody and investment. This aligns with the latest Henley & Partners data on client inquiries: even as American individuals represent the largest share of client applications worldwide, the volume of inquiries from Americans figured among the fastest growing nationalities between 4Q25 and 1Q26. A veritable wave of American families, over-indexed to the USA, are now seeking to diversify their global footprint.
The USA, indeed, is no longer a safe haven, as the GIRRI rankings demonstrate. It remains a juggernaut of innovation and entrepreneurialism, but for us as global investors, it is increasingly a place to venture into for selective risk-taking, picking and choosing our spots, not a default base from which everything starts.
Today, our clients’ portfolios are built around a ‘resilient core’ of safe haven Singaporean and Swiss assets. Resiliency, to us, is about incentives and the rule of law (not the rule of man). Both Switzerland and Singapore, like Venice in prior centuries, are small entrepôt nations surrounded by greater powers, that have a compulsion to act as havens for global wealth — indeed, their very survival depends on it. This is the key difference between Singapore and, say, the GCC city-states like Dubai, which do and say all the right things about protecting global wealth but where power is wielded in a discretionary manner and where vast oil and mineral riches represent a ‘plan B’ in case the ruling families’ priorities should ever change. Truly resilient nations, in our analysis, are paranoid.
This Swiss/Singapore core resembles a castle with multiple layers of fortifications — at the base, custody and legal jurisdiction, then durable currency, then resilient businesses, all making up our resilient ‘stack’ for clients and all denominated in durable Swiss francs and Singapore dollars.
From this resilient fortress, our clients can then venture out with confidence to capture the best risk-taking opportunities across the world. We go to Japan for capital goods and materials science. We go to China for PV and energy storage, EVs, e-commerce, and AI. We go to Europe for niche industrials, renewable energy, grid, and defense tech. And we go to the USA for multiomics, biotech, and semiconductors.
For wealthy families, multipolarity requires diversification — of residency or legal jurisdiction and of investment holdings. When volatility spirals and power fragments, the value of safe havens is reaffirmed. The war in Iran has drawn attention to a decade-long fact in the making — that the USA is just one nation among many. Global families and their investment assets are starting to respond.
Henley & Partners assists international clients in obtaining residence and citizenship under the respective programs. Contact us to arrange an initial private consultation.
