Policy moves fast. Capacity moves slow.

Announcements are not outcomes.

Independent research on where policy collides with operating reality. Export controls, sanctions, tariffs, and industrial policy, translated into decision-relevant exposure across energy, critical minerals, defense, and supply chains. For investors and operators with real exposure.

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What we do

The risk is in the policy before it is in the price.

Increasingly, the largest dislocations in energy, critical minerals, defense, and supply chains originate in policy rather than markets. Export controls, sanctions, tariffs, and industrial policy reshape incentives immediately, while operating capacity adjusts slowly. MSI focuses on that interval, where policy intent encounters industrial reality and execution diverges from announcement. Policy is the input. Decisions are the output.

Geopolitics & Economic Warfare

Export controls, sanctions, tariffs, and industrial policy, translated into operating and market exposure before the effects reach production, procurement, and pricing.

Critical Minerals & Supply Chains

Rare earths, lithium, and the processing bottlenecks behind electrification, AI compute, and advanced weapons, where control sits in the midstream, not the mine.

Defense Industrial Base

Munitions, magazine depth, and rebuild timelines: whether procurement announcements convert into delivered capacity, and where materials and expertise actually constrain the build.

Energy & Chokepoints

Flows, waterways, and the operating capacity to keep them moving, across the major maritime chokepoints and the statecraft that contests them.

Selected analysis

The work, read through the operating-capacity lens.

Each brief reads a live development for the constraint beneath it. Sourced, rigorous, and decision-ready.

Geopolitics & Critical Minerals

Not who holds the ore, but who controls the processing, and increasingly, who controls it through export policy.

The Rare-Earth Countdown

The U.S.-China truce is a suspension with a date, not a settlement. It expires into a cluster of November 2026 deadlines while China's April 2025 heavy-rare-earth controls stay in force and the U.S. offset does not commission until 2028, and Beijing has now placed that offset, MP Materials and USA Rare Earth, on its export-control list.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 01 · Read the brief →

Resource Is Not Supply

The USGS assessed a vast undiscovered lithium resource under the Appalachians. A resource in the ground is not battery-grade supply, and the binding step is refining, the one the United States does not yet hold.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 04 · Read the brief →

Industrial Memory

China performs roughly 90 percent of the world's rare-earth processing, and the binding constraint beneath it is human: the decade-scale expertise that runs a refinery, not the capital that builds one. MOFCOM Announcement No. 26 builds an enforcement architecture around China's existing technology controls, aimed at the knowledge channels the West is slowest to rebuild.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 05 · Read the brief →

Defense & Allied Supply

Whether stated procurement and allied diversification convert into delivered capacity, and how long the rebuild actually takes.

The Provenance Cliff: The Rule Bans the Magnets, the Waiver Is the Policy

On January 1, 2027 a DFARS clause starts tracing magnets, tantalum, and tungsten back to the mine, across the refining step China dominates. Industry called it inexecutable, and DoD's own answer was the nonavailability waiver. How freely the Pentagon signs those waivers is the actual policy.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 07 · Read the brief →

The Rebuild Clock

Combat consumes interceptors and strike weapons in days; rebuilding the magazine runs on a multiyear industrial clock of appropriations, contracts, suppliers, and production lines. After heavy use across the 2025 and 2026 fighting with Iran, renewed July operations resumed before the earlier drawdown was refilled, and the gap between an announced rebuild and delivered inventory is the exposure.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 03 · Read the brief →

The Deep-Sea Mirage: A Test Is Not a Supply Chain

A first deep-sea rare-earth extraction test proves the resource, not the supply. The processing, vessels, and permitting that turn seabed nodules into delivered metal remain years away. The map is not the mine.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 06 · Read the brief →

Energy & Infrastructure

Whether announced power and infrastructure become delivered capacity, across the interconnection queues, grid equipment, and multi-year clocks that gate every buildout.

The Power Wall

The AI buildout is priced as a race for compute and capital. The binding constraint sits beneath it: a data center runs on delivered power, gated by interconnection queues that now run five to eight years and grid transformers quoted four to five years out. The announced gigawatt is not the delivered gigawatt.

The Macedon Assessment · No. 02 · Read the brief →

How we work

From the primary source to the practical consequence.

Interrogate the primary source. We work from the filing, the dataset, and the statutory text itself, not the secondary coverage that compresses and distorts them.

Isolate the binding constraint. We assess durable operating capacity beneath the announcement: whether the institutions, supply chains, and industrial base can deliver, and precisely where execution diverges from intent.

Translate into consequence. We render the finding into decision-grade analysis: sourced, falsifiable, and explicit about what it changes for the parties exposed to the outcome.

What sets MSI apart

Most analysis stops at what institutions announce. MSI examines what they can durably execute: distinguishing stated intent from operating capacity, surfacing where implementation lags policy, and naming the constraint before it surfaces. The test is not whether the analysis is interesting. It is whether it is useful to an investor or operator making a consequential decision under real constraints.

A principal-direct model. No account layer, no junior-analyst dilution. The person who does the analysis is the person you work with. Every brief is researched, sourced, and stood behind by the principal.

What you receive

Sourced, rigorous, and scaled to the decision.

Executive Decision Briefs Strategic Intelligence Briefs Policy & Regulatory Analyses Whitepapers

Length follows the question, not a fixed format, from a one-page decision brief to a full whitepaper. Across geopolitics, energy, critical minerals, defense, and supply chains.

The principal

Jonathan Macedon

Founder & Principal

Jonathan Macedon founded Macedon Strategic Intelligence to apply an investigative discipline to economic statecraft, markets, and industrial systems. The premise is simple: the greatest source of risk is usually not what has been announced, but the gap between announcement and execution, between what policy intends and what industry can actually deliver.

The method is evidence-led: primary documentation over commentary, observable indicators over assertion. Export controls, sanctions, and industrial policy are assessed against operating capacity, and industrial systems against the constraints and dependencies that shape their range of possible outcomes.