# Guarded Globalization, One Year On: The Reglobalization of Trust

Canonical: https://deriss.com/articles/guarded-globalization-one-year-on
Description: One year on, the data is in — trade didn't retreat but hit records and rewired around politics and compute. Trust is now a property you verify, not a jurisdiction you assume. Europe is building the Verification Layer first.

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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.

- Global goods trade grew roughly 6.5% in 2025, outpacing the world economy — even as U.S. tariff rates reached their highest level since the Second World War.
- U.S. imports and Chinese exports both set all-time records.
- The World Economic Forum, UNCTAD and McKinsey have retired "deglobalisation" in favour of *reglobalisation*: a realignment in which some links fragment through decoupling and export controls while new links form elsewhere.

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.

- **Provenance** — the origin, labour conditions, security posture and IP exposure of an input are traced end-to-end, not inferred from where it was last assembled.
- **Assurance** — that provenance is certified against a recognised standard: AI Act conformity, sovereign-cloud assurance tiers, chip supply-chain rules.
- **Interfaces** — data-safe APIs and shared standards let verified parties exchange and collaborate without leaking crown-jewel IP.

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.

- The **Technological Sovereignty Package** (June 2026) — the Cloud and AI Development Act, Chips Act 2.0 and an EU Open Source Strategy — defines sovereign-cloud assurance tiers (Levels 1–4) and "no kill switch" guarantees over the software supply chain. That is an assurance standard in all but name.
- The **AI Act** reaches its main application milestone in August 2026, converting "human-centric, trustworthy AI" from principle into a dated, enforceable obligation.

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

- **Verified-Provenance Ratio** — share of "trusted" inputs whose origin, labour and security are actually traced.
- **AI-Hardware Exposure** — share of the critical compute supply chain subject to export controls or single-region chokepoints.
- **Friend-Shored Dependency Ratio** *(from Part 1)* — now measured net of upstream China content.
- **Time-to-Assurance** — lead time to certify against safety, ethics and IP requirements; increasingly set by the AI Act clock.
- **IP Retention Rate** — share of high-value inventions kept and commercialised in-region.

## 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.

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### Sources

- McKinsey Global Institute — [Geopolitics and the geometry of global trade: 2026 update](https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/geopolitics-and-the-geometry-of-global-trade-2026-update)
- McKinsey — [AI-related goods lead global trade growth](https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/week-in-charts/ai-related-goods-lead-global-trade-growth)
- World Economic Forum — [Reglobalization: rewiring the world economy for a new growth era](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/reglobalization-world-economy-growth/)
- UNCTAD — [Global Trade Update: top trends redefining global trade in 2026](https://unctad.org/publication/global-trade-update-january-2026-top-trends-redefining-global-trade-2026)
- U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis — [U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, April 2026](https://www.bea.gov/news/2026/us-international-trade-goods-and-services-april-2026)
- CEPR / VoxEU — ['Connector' countries in a geoeconomically fragmented world](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/connector-countries-geoeconomically-fragmented-world)
- Atlantic Council — ['Connector economies' and the fractured state of foreign direct investment](https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/econographics/connector-economies-and-fractured-foreign-direct-investment/)
- Bank of America Institute — [Reshoring vs. friendshoring](https://institute.bankofamerica.com/content/dam/economic-insights/reshoring-vs-friendshoring.pdf)
- European Commission — [Strengthening Europe's tech sovereignty (June 3, 2026)](https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/strengthening-europes-tech-sovereignty-2026-06-03_en)
- European Commission — [AI Act regulatory framework](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai)

*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.*