Good Morning!
Welcome to this week’s edition of Grinfi Political Risk Edge, your trusted source for expert political risk analysis and strategic intelligence.
Now, on a lighter note, let’s start the week with a laugh 😄 to brighten the mood. Remember, a little humor never hurts before moving on to the serious stuff.
High Impact Situational Updates
From Grinfi Political Risk Observatory (GPRO), here are the key issues that are expected to shape political risk this week.
The last US troops left Iraq on Wednesday, ending a 23-year military presence that began with the 2003 invasion, as an Iran-aligned militia celebrated what it called the “humiliating withdrawal of the American occupier.”
Trump and the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, Nvidia and SpaceX signed a voluntary “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” at the White House on Tuesday, weeks after Trump dismissed AI safety warnings as a “hoax.” Trump also said he now prefers the term “Super Intelligence” to “AI.”
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu unveiled a belt-tightening French budget on Thursday, seeking €54 billion in savings, as student protests over the plan turned violent for a second week and the 10-year OAT yield climbed toward 5%. Can Lecornu pass a budget that a fragmented, student-protest-weary National Assembly has already rejected twice this year in different forms?
Trump said last week that the US will decide “very soon” whether to strike Iran or negotiate, while claiming “virtually total control” of the Strait of Hormuz, as Tehran received Washington’s response to its seven-day Hormuz proposal through Qatari mediators.
Yemen's internationally-recognized government ordered a full military offensive to retake Houthi-held territory on Saturday, with Saudi-backed forces reporting hundreds of strikes around the contested city of Taiz into Sunday morning.
Situation this morning. The United States completed its withdrawal from Iraq on Wednesday, the Pentagon confirmed, closing a 23-year chapter that began with the 2003 invasion and the 12-year anti-ISIS mission that followed it.
The last few hundred American troops left their final positions in Erbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, under a timeline the US and Iraq agreed in 2024, well before the current Iran war began. Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi presided over a handover ceremony and declared a two-day national holiday, calling the withdrawal the start of “a new phase, one defined by Iraq’s sovereignty.”
Trump called it “the end of a very expensive excursion into Hell.”
The timing feels awkward for Washington, despite the withdrawal having been in the pipeline for years. As’hab Al-Kahf, one of the Iran-aligned militias operating in Iraq, celebrated what it called the “humiliating withdrawal of the American occupier under the strikes of the Resistance’s drones and missiles.”
Those same militias had previously treated the US withdrawal as a precondition for