“Portugal is an island surrounded by the sea and Spain”

April 10, 2026 Traveller Times

This is how Paulo Rangel defined Portugal today at Porto Business School, at the closing ceremony of the Geopolitical Risk and Strategy for Executives program, where Isabel Nunes from the National Defense Institute also participated..

Throughout the conversation, it became clear that Portugal’s positioning increasingly depends on the way it projects itself outwards, with special attention to the Indo-Pacific and the new global power dynamics.

Paulo Rangel also warned of the “myth of the eternal present”. The tendency to think that everything we experience is new, when in fact there are patterns that repeat themselves and continue to shape strategic decisions.

Basically, the main issue is to understand the context and act accordingly.