the politics shaping market access
Strategy and Intelligence leaders are becoming geopolitical operators
Two 50% tariffs within a week. Two completely different reasons.
The first was copper, justified under national security.
The second was Brazil. Also 50%. This was retaliation for the trial of Jair Bolsonaro, President Trump’s political ally.
This is the new shape of U.S. trade policy, where tariffs may be framed as industrial policy, or loyalty test.
In both cases, the consequences are real: supply chain disruption, cost shocks, corporate uncertainty. But the trigger is no longer predictable. It’s not trade deficits, industry lobbying, or WTO rules. It’s individual whims relative to a shifting cast of friends, enemies, and scapegoats.
The business implication is clear:
If you’re in a decision-support role within a global organization, and you’re not monitoring the U.S. President’s political friendships and animosities, you’re flying blind.
The Collapse of Predictable Trade
For decades, global trade operated on an assumption that decisions about tariffs, quotas, and trade barriers would follow some combination of economic rationale, institutional process, and reciprocal norms. You could debate outcomes, but the inputs were legible: WTO frameworks, cost-benefit analysis, bilateral diplomacy.
That assumption no longer holds.
Today, high-impact trade decisions are based on increasingly subjective criteria.
The 50% copper tariff was justified under national security grounds. But copper is sourced primarily from close U.S. allies like Chile and Canada, and the U.S. imports half its copper and lacks any near-term path to self-sufficiency.
The Brazil tariff threat—also 50%—was tied explicitly to the Bolsonaro trial. Trump’s letter to President Lula accused Brazil of a “witch hunt” and made clear the price for continuing the prosecution.
India, Canada, and Colombia have all faced threats or penalties tied not to trade deficits or industrial policy, but to issues as varied as: drug trafficking, digital taxes, immigration policy, and deportation acceptance.
What once arrived via USTR communiqués and WTO filings now surfaces first on Truth Social. In this environment, executives face a new reality: a single rally speech or political grudge can trigger an overnight collapse in your gross margin.
According to Economist Impact’s 2024–2025 survey, 31% of global companies are redesigning their supply networks specifically to hedge against “presidential tariff shocks.”
The old inputs no longer predict the outputs. And if your models don’t account for that, they’re obsolete.
We’re helping strategy and intelligence teams validate the early signals they’re seeing: are competitors really diversifying out of Vietnam? What are their customers doing differently?—with direct market intelligence.
Politics-First Intelligence
Many firms still treat tariffs as a trade or compliance issue: something for legal to interpret or procurement to mitigate. But in 2025, tariff risk has become a function of political proximity. That requires an entirely new category of intelligence: one that blends geopolitics, open-source monitoring, culture war narrative tracking, and real-time scenario modeling.
What “Politics-First Intelligence” Actually Means
A politics-first approach maps your exposure not just to nations, but to people—leaders, parties, factions, media networks—who are now gatekeepers to your cost structure. It watches how President Trump’s domestic political strategy bleeds into trade enforcement. It tracks which foreign governments, industries, or executives have become symbolic villains in a narrative cycle.
What You Need to Monitor (That You’re Probably Ignoring)
Personal alliances and vendettas: Personal friendships are rewarded. Perceived slights are punished.
Culture war proxies: Immigration, fentanyl, ESG, “woke” capitalism, climate, and many more—if your supply chain touches these hot-button issues, you’re exposed.
Cable news and social media: Many of the tariff moves are first signaled on Truth Social, not in USTR reports. Some are floated on Fox Business segments days before formal letters are sent.
Politics-driven retaliation cycles: Many tariff threats correlate to polling dips, legal distractions, or efforts to shift the narrative.
Why This Intelligence Function Can’t Be Outsourced to Legal
The speed and volatility of 2025’s trade regime renders traditional corporate functions reactive. By the time legal has reviewed a threat, you’ve already lost response time. And few legal functions are set up with the inputs needed to monitor the range of sources we’ve outlined above.
That’s why leading firms are now treating political risk modeling like cybersecurity: real-time, always-on, layered across operational systems, with clear protocols for response.
Think less “country risk briefings” and more early warning radar.
The Playbook: How Firms Are Really Responding
The shift toward politics-first intelligence is already underway—quietly, unevenly, and often led by companies with the most to lose.
Some are responding quietly through strategic reshuffling. Others are building full-spectrum systems to anticipate and absorb shocks. What they share is a new kind of playbook—built not around efficiency, but resilience to political risk.
Strategic Investments (or at least, announcements) for Political Insulation
Apple pledged a $500 billion U.S. investment—including a Houston AI-server plant—not just to expand, but to de-risk. Political pressure, not cost modeling, is now steering capital.
Supplier Mapping and Regional Diversification
Firms are proactively identifying which vendors may be vulnerable to retaliatory tariffs, personal vendettas, or shifting trade alignments. We've been asked to map exposure across Latin America and Southeast Asia, where narrative alignment increasingly drives cost structure.
Scenario-Planning and Political Monitoring Infrastructure
Leading teams are deploying digital twins and FP&A engines to stress-test: “What if we lose Vietnam?” “What if lithium hits 50% overnight?” AI monitors and external advisors feed daily political alerts into internal systems, bridging the gap between headlines and supply chain decisions.
Lobbying and Legal Countermeasures
Firms are organizing coalitions early, submitting data-backed economic impact studies, and crafting narratives that tie their footprint to U.S. jobs, security, or rural economies.
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What This Means for Strategy, Intelligence and Research Leaders
Your job now requires more than tracking trends or delivering insights. Tariffs, retaliation threats, and supply chain shocks aren’t abstract risks anymore; they’re board-level variables. You can’t just report after the fact—you needs systems that detect early signals, simulate downstream impact, and inform decisions before the policy hits. Your internal stakeholders don’t need 80-page reports—they need scenario-ready talking points for next week’s exec meeting.
This shift demands new tools and new expectations. Strategy is no longer about setting ambition. It’s about building optionality.
That means benchmarking what similar firms have actually done, not speculating. General managers don’t want to guess whether reshoring will work—they wants to know what your industry peer’s costs looked like when they added capacity, or how they structured pass-through pricing.
Your role now includes scenario planning, mitigation playbooks, exposure diagnostics, and real-time briefings tied to political cycles. Whether or not the org chart says it, you have an opportunity to step up as a geopolitical nerve center.
You need partners who work at that speed. Emerging Strategy’s clients don’t come to us for 200-page decks. They come for clarity. We help them track which firms are moving, where exposure is growing, and what shifts are already underway across customers, suppliers, and competitors.
Power Has Replaced Policy
We’re in an era where access to the U.S. market is allocated based on political alignment, not economic logic. And that shift is reshaping how multinational firms design their networks, price their products, manage their risk, and allocate their capital.
The old playbooks anchored in comparative advantage, WTO rules, and rational negotiations don’t apply anymore. Today, tariffs are a tool of retaliation, loyalty enforcement, and political theater. The triggers are personal. The implementation is arbitrary. The consequences are real.
And while many companies are still treating this as noise to be worked around, the smart ones know better.
They’re building systems that detect volatility early, test it before it hits, and turn it into an advantage while their competitors stall out.
When political risk starts to feel like noise, we help clients separate signal from spin, grounding boardroom decisions in real-world actions across customers, suppliers, and competitors.
Recent Case Study
Emerging Strategy recently worked with a Fortune 500 U.S. packaging company facing an opaque supplier environment in China and Southeast Asia, and significant day-to-day uncertainty. They were also unsure how tariff chaos was affecting competitors’ import strategies and volume.
Off-the-shelf reports were vague and outdated, and HS code data was riddled with inaccuracies due to inconsistent product classification. The only way to figure out what was really going on was to go directly to the source.
Emerging Strategy approached leading U.S. and Asia-based manufacturers, importers, and exporters, holding in-depth conversations to understand supplier pricing and operational decisions, competitor volumes, and trading strategies. The intelligence and analysis generated within just a few weeks is enabling the client to take fact-based decisions about timing their imports, and negotiating with U.S. enterprise customers.
Adil Husain has over two decades of experience advising Fortune 1000 firms on global expansion and market strategy. Adil is a thought leader in market strategy, market intelligence and competitive intelligence and active within the strategy and intelligence professional communities. Adil is Managing Director at Emerging Strategy, a global strategic intelligence firm that helps multinational enterprises navigate complex international markets, informed by AI-enabled primary research and secondary research.