In partnership with the Atlantic Council’s Millennium Leadership Program, we invite you to join us for a closed-door discussion on “The Cascade Problem in Geopolitics: Why We Miss What Comes Next,” with Arvid Bell, Co-Founder and CEO of Anadyr Horizon and a 2024-25 Millennium Fellow.

Leaders don’t miss crises because they lack data. They miss them because they misread how decisions interact. Under pressure—across actors, domains, and time—what appears stable can unravel quickly. Misperception, timing errors, and second-order effects compound until outcomes become difficult to control.

Bell’s work identifies three dynamics that define modern conflict environments:

• Cognitive maelstroms — decision-makers operate under extreme pressure, information overload, and time compression, distorting judgment at precisely the moments it matters most.
• Nested negotiation networks — actors are embedded in overlapping, shifting networks of alliances, rivalries, and constituencies, where influence is indirect and often counterintuitive.
• Cascading decision effects — actions do not resolve problems; they trigger chains of consequences—delayed, indirect, and frequently unintended—that reshape the system itself.

Traditional frameworks fail because they isolate actors and issues. Real-world crises do neither. They evolve through continuous interaction. Drawing on field experience in conflict environments, negotiation science, and the design of large-scale immersive simulations, this session examines how these dynamics play out—where escalation pathways form, how they accelerate, and when they can still be shaped.

The discussion moves from first principles to applied cases, concluding with implications for navigating today’s geopolitical landscape—from great-power competition to emerging crisis triggers.

Arvid Bell is Co-Founder and CEO of Anadyr Horizon, a venture-backed predictive intelligence company building simulation technology to model how real-world decisions cascade through geopolitical systems. A former Lecturer on Government at Harvard University, his work integrates research on complex negotiation systems with field experience in active conflict environments, including Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the Middle East. He founded the Negotiation Task Force and serves as Chair of ACONA, an international nuclear arms-control consortium.