What is war good for? Apparently, the markets. 

Despite current conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan in the earlier part of the century, the major stock market indexes have been able to price in potential shocks and still climb to record highs. Their performance has been quite remarkable, says Robert Kaplan, a prominent geopolitical analyst, bestselling author and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “Markets handle geopolitics very well,” he said at the EDGE conference in Boca Raton, Florida, on Tuesday. “You don’t notice that much of a change when you look at your retirement emails once a month.”

While individual sectors, particularly energy, have reacted sharply in…