The most consequential form of strategy may be the ability to identify the dependency that allows a problem to continue.
By Joe Cozart
I have become increasingly interested in the distance between where a problem appears and where the power to change it actually resides.
We have a natural tendency to look directly at the thing troubling us. If a military conflict is the problem, we look at the battlefield. If healthcare costs are the problem, we look at hospitals. If energy is the problem, we look at generation. If transportation is the problem, we look at vehicles. If a technology cannot reach commercial deployment, we look at the technology.
I am beginning to think this instinct is responsible for an extraordinary amount of wasted effort.
The visible problem is frequently only the last expression of a system operating somewhere upstream.
That is what caught my attention in the Senate’s latest attempt to increase economic pressure on Russia. The legislation is obviously about Russia and Ukraine, but the architecture of the proposed pressure is considerably more interesting to me than the politics surrounding it. Rather than concentrating exclusively on Russia itself, the United States is contemplating the ability to impose enormous economic costs upon countries purchasing Russian energy.
That changes the geometry of the problem.
Russia sells energy because someone buys it. Those buyers purchase Russian energy because the economics make sense. But those same countries participate in other economic systems, including trade with the United States. Suddenly, the question is no longer simply whether Russia can sell its oil. The question becomes whether its customers are willing to accept potentially much larger costs elsewhere in their economies for the privilege of continuing to buy it.
The pressure has moved upstream.
That distinction fascinates me because I increasingly see versions of it everywhere.
A sophisticated system does not merely ask how to stop an undesirable outcome. It asks what conditions must continue to exist for that outcome to remain possible.
Those are very different questions.
The first sends us toward the symptom.
The second sends us searching for the dependency.
And dependencies are where leverage tends to hide.
This has changed the way I think about systems altogether. When something repeatedly fails, my first instinct is no longer necessarily to examine the point of failure. I want to move backward through the architecture. What supplied it? What enabled it? What assumption does it depend upon? What decision had to occur before this decision became possible? What infrastructure makes the behavior economically rational? What happens if one of those conditions changes?
Eventually, one often encounters something considerably smaller than the original problem.
That smaller thing may control everything downstream from it.
This is why I have become increasingly skeptical when organizations tell me how much activity surrounds a problem. Activity can be impressive while accomplishing remarkably little. Meetings occur. Technologies are tested. committees are created. Funding is announced. Partnerships are formed. Demonstrations are conducted. Reports are published.
Everyone is moving.
The system may not be.
An organization that confuses activity with progress can move quickly for years while repeatedly discovering that one more unresolved variable stands between demonstration and deployment.
I find myself returning to that distinction because deployment is merciless. A demonstration can prove that something works. Deployment requires proving that the surrounding system works.
That surrounding system is usually where the interesting problems are hiding.
A technology may function beautifully and still depend upon infrastructure that does not exist. A healthcare intervention may work and still arrive twenty years downstream from the conditions creating the disease burden. An autonomous vehicle may navigate perfectly and still lack the regulatory, communications, insurance, infrastructure, and operating environment necessary for widespread adoption. An energy technology may produce electricity successfully and still fail because feedstock, permitting, heat management, financing, interconnection, maintenance, or economics have not been solved.
None of those are necessarily failures of the technology.
They are failures to identify the complete system required for deployment.
This is also why I increasingly think sovereignty is misunderstood.
Sovereignty is usually discussed as independence. I see it more as the management of dependency.
No sophisticated society, company, military installation, healthcare system, or individual is truly independent. Everything depends upon something else. The strategic question is whether those dependencies are understood, diversified, controlled, replaceable, or dangerously concentrated.
Energy provides perhaps the clearest example.
A country dependent upon another country for critical energy has not merely entered a commercial relationship. It has created a strategic dependency. The price per barrel does not capture the entire cost of that relationship. Neither does the price per kilowatt-hour.
There is another price hidden underneath it.
The price of losing optionality.
That is where resilience begins to acquire economic value that conventional accounting frequently struggles to recognize. Distributed generation, microgrids, domestic fuel production, storage, redundant communications, local computing capacity and resilient supply chains may sometimes appear more expensive when evaluated as isolated assets.
But isolated assets are not the system.
The real calculation is what those capabilities make unnecessary.
A backup energy source is not merely another source of electricity. It reduces dependence upon the primary one. Edge computing is not merely another place to process data. It reduces dependence upon distant infrastructure. Domestic manufacturing is not merely another factory. It reduces dependence upon foreign production. Preventive healthcare is not merely another intervention. Properly constructed, it reduces dependence upon increasingly expensive downstream care.
The value exists partly in what no longer has the power to stop you.
That may be one of the most useful definitions of sovereignty I have encountered.
And it brings me back to the geopolitical example that started me thinking about this.
The remarkable thing about a credible economic weapon is that it may begin working before anyone uses it.
If a government possesses the credible ability to impose a sufficiently painful consequence, companies begin calculating exposure. Banks begin examining financing. insurers reconsider risk. Governments begin negotiating. Supply chains begin looking for alternatives. Buyers reconsider contracts.
Nothing has necessarily happened yet.
But behavior has changed.
The possibility has entered the system.
That is leverage.
And leverage, properly understood, is not primarily force. It is the ability to change someone else’s calculation.
Once I began seeing systems this way, I started finding the same pattern almost everywhere. The most powerful intervention is frequently not located at the place where the problem becomes visible. It exists earlier, somewhere inside the sequence of dependencies that permits the visible outcome to occur.
Which means that when I enter a room and someone tells me what the problem is, I am increasingly reluctant to accept the location they have assigned to it.
They may be completely correct about what they are seeing.
They may simply be looking too far downstream.
The question I want to ask is different.
What has to remain true for this problem to continue?
Follow that question far enough upstream and something interesting usually happens.
The problem changes.
Sometimes it becomes larger.
Sometimes it becomes smaller.
But almost invariably, it becomes clearer.
And clarity changes where we apply pressure.
The strongest systems do not merely become better at responding to problems.
They become better at finding the dependency that allows the problem to exist in the first place.
That is where I increasingly believe strategy begins.
——— GMJoe™ ———
Clarity. Strategy. Sovereignty.
Books by Joe Cozart are available at: amazon.com/author/joecozart
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Joe Cozart is a writer and consultant based in North Dakota. His work explores the intersection of political performance, cultural clarity, and the architecture of power. He is the creator of the GMJoe™ consulting voice and author of several longform essay series exploring sovereignty, institutional systems, industrial civilization, and the recursive tensions shaping the modern age.