Politics of Not Solving Problems
Sulphur, machine tools, Lithium, and AI dependencies known for years before they became crises
There are two kinds of decisions in governance. The first gets you on the front page - a crisis arrives, resources mobilise, a minister holds a press conference. The second never makes the news at all, because if done correctly, the crisis never arrives.
The first is problem-solving. The second is problem-avoidance.
Democratic systems are structurally good at the first and structurally poor at the second. The incentive is simple: problem-solving generates visible credit, good press. Problem-avoidance generates nothing visible - its entire success is the absence of a future event, paid for now, with the benefit accruing years later to a government not yet in office.
No headlines. No ribbon-cutting. No electoral reward.
This is the mechanism behind most sovereignty failures. This has become suddenly important post Fable, lack of machine tools for precision manufacturing and other supply chain exposures that announce themselves only in crisis, despite being knowable for years in advance.
Two Cases, Same Pattern
When the Strait of Hormuz closed to shipping in early 2026, India faced a problem with no obvious connection to oil. Sulphur, a byproduct of Gulf refining, is the feedstock for sulphuric acid, which underpins fertiliser, metal processing, and pharmaceuticals. Roughly 25% of globally traded sulphur moves through Hormuz. Within weeks, India’s import-linked sulphuric acid prices rose from INR 13 /kg to 31 /kg, and the government scrambled to organise emergency procurement.
India’s lithium story similar from the other direction. In February 2023, the Geological Survey of India announced some million tonnes of lithium resources in Jammu and Kashmir and a genuine political moment. Three years on, the auction for that block has been cancelled twice, and environmental clearances, land acquisition, and mining licences flowing through separate bureaucratic channels add 12 to 24 months to project timelines. The announcement was the visible part. The refinery is the invisible part and three years later, it still doesn’t exist.
None of this was unforeseeable. The dependency was documented for years. What was missing was the institutional will to build strategic reserves or domestic recovery capacity before the chokepoint mattered. Why? Because that work produces nothing visible until the day it suddenly does.
(The problem is not even unique to India. US pharmaceutical supply chain and the decades of cost-optimisation left it dependent on key starting/intermediate chemicals. The country still exports most of the drugs and the dependency was flagged in 2008 early warning sign, and 4 presidents later still remains unresolved.)
So Governments can’t do long horizon work?
It would be easy to read this as “governments can’t do long-horizon work. period.” - and that’s both too convenient and not quite true. Singapore’s water security and South Korea’s semiconductor build-out are multi-decade state bets that paid off precisely because the institutions were structured to survive electoral cycles. The honest claim isn’t that this is impossible. It’s that it’s rare, and the rarity is the story. And ordinary citizens do not have any expectations from a rarity.
There’s a second serious counter argument here. Not every dependency is a failure waiting to happen. Global supply chains concentrate for real economic reasons, and a world of zero dependency isn’t obviously a safer one - just one with the fragility distributed.
The right question isn’t about how to “eliminate dependency”. It’s “which dependencies can you tolerate, and which ones, if disrupted, would actually hurt.”
Markets sometimes answer that question faster than governments do. When the commercial case is strong enough on its own, private capital moves without waiting for policy - which is precisely where the opportunity sits for enterprises reading this. Zoho investing into Karuvi Tools is a case in point.
What This Means in Practice
There’s no near-term institutional fix. Election cycles will keep being shorter than supply chain timelines, and that won’t change by argument.
For enterprises in strategically exposed sectors, the move is to treat intermittent state failure as a planning assumption, not a surprise. Map dependencies by exposure, not just cost. Distinguish indigenisation from genuine sovereignty, which means owning the materials, the process knowledge, and the infrastructure.
And build the capability before the crisis, on the correct bet that when it arrives, the company that already has it will be in an entirely different position from the one still waiting for policy support.
Hormuz shock didn’t create India’s fertiliser/energy vulnerability. It simply revealed it.
