Michael Beckley
Most corporate strategy still rests on cheap globalisation and steadily expanding markets. Both assumptions are weakening, and geopolitical rivalry increasingly decides which markets stay open and which close. Leadership teams have to separate temporary disruption from structural change, usually without a reliable way to judge which countries are actually gaining ground.
Michael Beckley is a political scientist at Tufts University who forecasts which great powers are rising and which have peaked, and translates those shifts into the risks facing globally exposed businesses.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Michael Beckley
- He made the Peak China case while the consensus still ran the other way. Foreign Policy credits him and Hal Brands with bringing the term into mainstream use, and by May 2023 The Economist had built a cover package around the question.
- His forecasts come from a published method rather than a point of view. “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters” won the American Political Science Association’s best international security article award in 2019, and sets out how to weigh a country’s assets against its liabilities instead of ranking by GDP.
- He consults regularly for the US intelligence community, and prepared a 2025 assessment of ageing, automation, and the military balance to 2040 for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment.
- He holds a commercial main stage. At Nordic Business Forum 2026 in Helsinki he took the first main-stage slot with “The End of Easy Growth”, then ran a separate CEO session, “Navigating the New World Order”, on day two. The event sold out at more than 7,500 attendees, on a programme with Oprah Winfrey and Angela Duckworth.
- He writes for the people making the decisions, not only for journals. Recent bylines include Foreign Affairs, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic.
Biography highlights
- Associate Professor of Political Science with tenure at Tufts University, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and head of the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
- Author of Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower (Cornell University Press) and, with Hal Brands, Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China (W. W. Norton); The End of Easy Growth and the Struggle for Power is forthcoming from W. W. Norton
- Winner of the American Political Science Association’s Best International Security Article award, the International Studies Association’s Carl Beck Award, the Amos Perlmutter Prize, and Foreign Policy’s Best Long Read of the Year
- Consults regularly for the US intelligence community, and advises the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment
- Previously an International Security Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and worked for the US Department of Defense, the RAND Corporation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- PhD in political science from Columbia University
Biography
The term “Peak China” entered mainstream use after a 2021 Foreign Affairs essay by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley. Two years later The Economist put the same question on its cover. The argument was that China’s slowdown was the dangerous part, because countries tend to act most aggressively when leaders sense that time is running out.
Underneath that claim sits a way of counting. “The Power of Nations: Measuring What Matters”, which won the American Political Science Association’s best international security article prize in 2019, sets out a method for netting a country’s liabilities against its resources. Large populations and large GDP figures carry large costs. Once those are subtracted, the league table of national strength looks different from the one most strategy decks assume.
That method now points at something wider than China. The End of Easy Growth and the Struggle for Power, forthcoming from W. W. Norton, asks what happens to competition between states when ageing populations and slowing productivity make growth harder to find everywhere. For companies the question becomes where labour and demand will actually be, and which governments will intervene to capture whatever growth remains.
Beckley works both sides of that question. He consults regularly for the US intelligence community, and prepared a 2025 assessment of ageing, automation, and the global military balance to 2040 for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. The same analysis went to a sold-out Helsinki audience of more than 7,500 in September 2026. He took the first main-stage slot at Nordic Business Forum with “The End of Easy Growth”, and ran a separate CEO session the next morning.
Key speaking topics
- US-China competition and the balance of power
- Peak China and the consequences of a Chinese slowdown
- The end of easy growth in the world economy
- Measurement of national power beyond GDP
- Demographic change and its effect on markets and security
- Geopolitical risk for globally exposed businesses
- AI and the technology race between the United States and China
- American power and the volatility of US policy
Ideal for
- Chief executives and boards weighing exposure to sanctions, alliance shifts, and state-subsidised competition, and deciding where to invest, insure, and locate talent
- Chief strategy officers and corporate development teams setting five to ten year market bets
- Institutional investors, bank leadership teams, and risk committees pricing political risk into long-horizon decisions
- Shipping, logistics and industrial companies whose routes and input costs move with geopolitical events
Audience outcomes
- A method for judging national strength that holds up against the GDP headlines
- A specific read on where China’s slowdown creates risk and where it creates opening
- Sharper language for the board conversation about geopolitical exposure, beyond the word uncertainty
- A view of what slower global growth does to labour supply and to state intervention in markets
- An answer to the question of whether American political dysfunction has actually weakened American power
Talks
What happens to competition between states, and to business risk, when the economic expansion of recent decades stops being available.
Key takeaways:
- How to challenge the outdated growth assumptions, especially about China, that may be hiding risk in a current strategy
- How to compete when the rival is not another company but the subsidised power of states
- How to design a resilient supply chain and market strategy for a world breaking into geopolitical blocs
The historical case that countries turn aggressive when their rise stalls, applied to China today.
Key takeaways:
- Why economic weakness can produce geopolitical aggression
- What the pattern implies for US-China relations over the next decade
- How to read early warning signals of an emerging crisis
A method for weighing national assets against national liabilities, and what it reveals that GDP rankings hide.
Key takeaways:
- Why headline economic statistics mislead on national power
- Where the United States and China are stronger or weaker than they appear
- How to apply the framework to long-term market and investment questions
How the split between ageing wealthy countries and young fast-growing ones will reset labour markets, migration, and military power.
Key takeaways:
- Which economies face shrinking workforces and rising fiscal pressure
- How demographic divergence changes migration and labour supply
- What ageing populations mean for defence budgets and international stability
How domestic political dysfunction coexists with continued American advantage in wealth, technology, and military capability.
Key takeaways:
- The structural foundations of American power
- The genuine risks that political instability does create
- What allies, rivals, and multinational businesses should expect from US policy
Why technological breakthroughs do not convert automatically into national power, and which countries are positioned to make the conversion.
Key takeaways:
- The economic and institutional foundations of technological leadership
- Where the United States and China each hold the advantage
- How AI could shift productivity and the international balance of power