Footnotes
1 "About the Berne
Union," Berne Union, 2026.
2 State of the Industry Report 2025, Berne
Union, 2026.
3 Berne Union Spring Meeting 2026 press materials for 2025
volumes.
In the spring of 1988, a submission landed on my desk in lower Manhattan: A US exporter wanted to ship cigarette rolling papers to Iraq and wanted the world's largest insurance company to guarantee that Saddam Hussein would pay for them.
My colleagues thought it was a joke: rolling papers … in the ninth year of a war that had already killed hundreds of thousands of men.
I saw it differently: You cannot fight a war with an army that has stopped caring, and morale in a trench is not built out of speeches; it is built out of small things that a man can hold. The question was never whether rolling papers mattered; it was whether Saddam would pay—and I decided he would, not out of honor, but out of arithmetic. Stiff this exporter, and word moves through the trading houses within a week that Baghdad is not paying for consumables. In a war, the last thing you want is a reputation that stops the small stuff arriving.
He paid, and that was my introduction to political risk insurance (PRI) and to a career that lasted nearly 4 decades. Here is what it taught me.
The Analysis Is the Easy Part
Anyone can read a country report, but what separates a good underwriter from a bad one is knowing which of the 20 facts in a report actually bears on whether a particular transaction gets paid and being willing to say no when either your gut says no or the answer is that you do not know.
When I started my career, there were perhaps 200 political risk underwriters in the world, and we all knew one another. The industry now employs thousands and produces a great many people who call themselves political risk analysts. But too many outside the PRI world fancy themselves as political risk analysts: Some have a degree in the subject. Rather fewer have stood in the country they are writing about and actually know what they are talking about.
Go and Look
I flew to a gold mine at 14,000 feet in Irian Jaya because no report could tell me what a river looked like below a tailings discharge. I took a canoe to a neighboring island in Papua New Guinea because a signed agreement in Port Moresby could not tell me whether the people who actually lived on the ground wanted the mine. I sat down with Maoist insurgents in western Nepal because the government that nominally controlled the territory did not.
None of that is in a spreadsheet, and none of it can be outsourced. The single most valuable thing I did for 4 decades was get on airplanes and see for myself.
Few People Buy an Umbrella Until They Are Already Wet
On the second of August 1990, Iraqi tanks crossed into Kuwait, and my telephone rang all morning. Investors with factories and contracts in the country wanted protection against having them seized, at any price. There was nothing I could do for any of them. Two days earlier, most of them could have been covered—but 2 days earlier, nothing was wrong.
That is the central problem of my profession, and I never solved it. People do not insure against what might happen; they insure against what has just happened to them or to someone they know—by which point the market has repriced or withdrawn. It is the same reason people buy flood insurance in the rain.
It is also why the market remains so small: Berne Union members supported a record $3.7 trillion of cross-border trade in 2025, but 90 percent of that was short-term credit cover. PRI accounted for roughly $35 billion—a little under 1 percent of the total and a fraction of 1 percent of global trade and investment.
The industry's own numbers make the point. According to Berne Union—whose membership includes the world's export credit agencies, multilateral institutions, and private insurers—PRI volume fell 19 percent in 2025. 1 In the same year, claims under political risk policies passed $11 billion for the first time, driven largely by sanctions-related losses; demand fell while losses rose. 2, 3
Institutions Are Not the Same as the People in Them
Every organization I worked for had a purpose it advertised and a set of internal fiefdoms that determined what actually got done. I built a guarantee program at one multilateral development bank that was barely used and another at a second bank 15 years later that met the same resistance—before producing a billion dollars of lending on its first transaction.
The obstacle was never technical: A new instrument redistributes power inside a building, and everyone in the building understands that long before anyone says it out loud. If you want to change how an institution works, the analysis is not the hard part either.
You Will Not Be Thanked
When PRI succeeds, nothing happens. The mine gets built, the power plant gets financed, the shipment arrives, the wages get paid, and nobody connects any of it to a piece of paper signed by a stranger in an office they will never see.
I stood on an airstrip on Lihir Island in Papua New Guinea in 1995 and saw a shack and a strip of grass; I stood on the same spot 18 months later and saw thousands of people at work. That is the closest thing I have to a monument, and it is not mine. I only helped price the risk that someone else was willing to take.
Daniel Wagner is the CEO of Country Risk Solutions and author of Confessions of a Globetrotter: A Political Risk Insurance Underwriter's Life Among Gold Mines, Insurgents, and Clan Chiefs, published September 1, 2026.
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