One year after we argued that deglobalisation was pushing technology toward "guarded globalization," the data has arrived — and it sharpens the thesis rather than softening it. Trade didn't retreat; it hit records and rewired around politics and compute. The lesson that survives: trust has become the scarce, decisive asset, and it is no longer a jurisdiction you assume but a property you measure.

TL;DR: Despite the highest U.S. tariffs since the Second World War, global goods trade grew about 6.5% in 2025 to record volumes, with AI-related goods driving roughly a third of the increase. This is reglobalisation — not retreat, but a politically- and compute-conditioned rewiring of who trades with whom. The strategic upshot is that trust is now something to be verified, not presumed. We name the emerging stack that produces it the Verification Layer — and Europe, through its 2026 Sovereignty Package and a live AI Act, is building it first.

One year on

In October 2025 we made a claim: deglobalisation was moving technology away from scale-at-all-costs toward guarded globalization, where regions protect core IP, re-anchor critical capacity, and collaborate selectively. Twelve months of data have arrived, and they cut against the popular label while confirming the underlying direction.

The map did not shrink. It was redrawn — and the pen was held by two forces.

| | The deglobalisation narrative (2023) | The reglobalisation reality (2025–26) | |---|---|---| | Trade volume | Shrinks; chains shorten | Record highs; ~+6.5% in 2025 | | What moved | Production comes home | The path of trade rerouted; volume rose | | The driver | Retreat from risk | The AI-hardware buildout (~⅓ of all trade growth) | | "Friend-shoring" | Trusted partners replace rivals | Connector economies rose — often on Chinese inputs | | The moat | Self-sufficiency and scale | Regional IP plus verifiable trust |

What rewired it: politics and compute

Politics turned tariffs from a negotiating tactic into standing policy, rerouting trade through non-aligned "connector" economies rather than ending it. Compute did the rest. AI-related goods — semiconductors, GPUs, servers, networking — accounted for about one-third of all 2025 trade growth, expanding some 37% globally (United States +66%, EU +22%, China +16%), as the U.S. alone added roughly half of the world's new data-centre capacity. The most strategically sensitive, most export-controlled category on earth became the primary engine of global trade. Integration and rivalry now travel the same supply chain.

The friend-shoring mirage

The reassuring version of this story is that production is migrating to trusted partners. The evidence supports a more careful reading.

Connector economies — Bloomberg Economics names Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico, Poland and Morocco — have absorbed most of the rerouting. In Q1 2026 the U.S. ran its largest goods deficits with Taiwan (~$59B), Vietnam (~$54B) and Mexico (~$43B), with China (~$30B) now sitting behind them. Yet imports from China into those same connectors have risen faster still: Vietnam's China-import share moved from roughly 28% to 33%, Mexico's from 18% to 20% across 2017–2022. A meaningful share of "friend-shored" output is Chinese input that has simply changed its country of final assembly. Genuine relocation is real at the margin — India's share of U.S. outbound FDI rose from 7.6% to 11.6% between 2019 and 2023 — but "trusted" is frequently assumed rather than established.

This exposes the real problem of a reglobalised economy: trust has become the scarce asset, and most organisations still treat it as a jurisdiction rather than a measurement. A friendly border is not provenance. That gap is where the next decade of advantage will be built.

The Verification Layer

If Part 1's moat was "regional IP plus collaboration interfaces," Part 2 names the missing layer that makes those interfaces trustworthy. We call it the Verification Layer: the stack that turns trust from a claim into a credential. It has three tiers.

In a world where a third of trade growth is the most controlled category on earth, and where "friend-shored" can quietly mean "Chinese content, relabelled," the Verification Layer is what separates trusted trade from trade that merely looks trusted.

Europe is building the Verification Layer

Between Part 1 and now, Europe stopped describing "open strategic autonomy" and began building its instruments.

Europe's wager is coherent: if trust is the scarce, decisive asset, the winning move is to make it certifiable and native to the stack — to supply the Verification Layer the rest of the world will eventually need. Not the loudest player, nor the largest. The most verifiable.

What changes for leaders

Founders and product leaders. Treat AI-hardware exposure as a first-class supply-chain risk, and design provenance in from the start — data-safe APIs and traceable inputs are product features now, not compliance overhead.

Enterprises and boards. Retire "reshoring %" as a headline. Measure a Friend-Shored Dependency Ratio net of upstream China content, and treat verification — not relocation — as the KPI.

Policymakers and ecosystem builders. Fund the Verification Layer as shared infrastructure: provenance registries, assurance standards, and testbeds that let trusted regions trade without re-auditing one another from scratch.

A Stockholm note

Reglobalisation rewards neutral, high-trust nodes that can verify. The Nordics — high institutional trust, strong public-private coordination, EU-aligned governance — are well positioned to host the Verification Layer in practice: the provenance, assurance and standards work that lets trusted cross-border trade actually be trusted. Stockholm is a natural site to pilot trust as a credential rather than a claim.

Key metrics

Call to action

Deglobalisation was never the story. Reglobalisation is: fewer, more strategic links, carrying record flows, held together by trust that increasingly has to be proven. Anchor your IP locally, standardise how you share, and build your Verification Layer before it is demanded of you.

Interested in piloting a human-centric, verifiably-trusted program out of Stockholm? Get in touch.

Sources

Part 2 of the Guarded Globalization series. Part 1 established the thesis (October 2025); this instalment updates it against 2026 trade data and names the Verification Layer. Part 3 — the sovereignty stack and trust-as-law — follows.

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