Strategic Management Responses to Emerging Global Trade Barriers

Abstract

The form of dull and traditional trade that post-war liberalism had painstakingly waged through successive rounds of GATT and WTO negotiations faces sustained and arguably structural challenges. Between 2018 and 2024, global tariff interventions surged at a pace not recorded since the Great Depression. During the bilateral trade war between the US and China alone, retaliatory tariffs affected over US$700 billion in goods [1]. This dynamism of the US and China, regardless of the interpretation, is only the tip of the iceberg of wider movements: the CEBAM launched by the European Union, India's increasingly assertive import substitution policies, and the US CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act contain restructuring subsidies. All these developments point toward the centrality of trade policy as an instrument for industrial strategy, rather than a tool of comparative advantage. For those with a technical grasp of corporate strategy, this change is simply no longer an academic notion; it invites a sobering rethinking of value chain architecture, sourcing logic, market entry assumptions, and financial hedging frameworks. The relevant managerial question is no longer whether trade barriers will remain, but how firms can create durable strategic postures that consciously and decisively outperform competitors in a world of continuously changing trade policy settings. This article contributes to that practical agenda by synthesizing recent empirical research, strategic management theory, and practitioner case evidence into an integrated framework for trade barrier response.