# Reglobalization, Not Deglobalization: The Word Was Wrong, the Map Was Right Canonical: https://deriss.com/articles/reglobalization-not-deglobalization Description: Trade didn't retreat in 2025 — it hit record highs and rewired around politics and compute. The guarded-globalization thesis holds, and sharpens: trust must be verified, not assumed. --- Trade didn't retreat in 2025 — it hit record highs and rewired around politics and compute. "Deglobalisation" mislabeled the shift. The guarded-globalization thesis holds, and sharpens: the moat is regional IP, trusted collaboration interfaces, and — now — trust you can verify. **TL;DR:** The data is in, and it refutes the headline. 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 alone driving roughly a third of the increase. The world isn't deglobalising; it's *reglobalising* — fragmenting some links while forging new ones along lines of politics and compute. That vindicates the guarded-globalization thesis and clarifies its core lesson: advantage comes not from scale or self-sufficiency, but from differentiated regional IP, trusted collaboration interfaces, and trust that can be *verified*. Europe's 2026 moves — the Technological Sovereignty Package and a live AI Act — turn trust from a value into infrastructure. ## The headline was wrong Nine months ago, in Part 1, we argued that deglobalisation was pushing technology from scale-at-all-costs toward "guarded globalization." The direction was right. The word dominating the discourse was not. "Deglobalisation" implies retreat — less trade, shorter chains, a smaller map. That is not what happened. - Global goods trade grew ~6.5% in 2025, outpacing the world economy — even as U.S. tariff rates reached their highest level since WWII. - U.S. imports and Chinese exports both hit all-time highs. - The World Economic Forum, UNCTAD and McKinsey have converged on a replacement term: *reglobalisation* — a strategic realignment in which some links fragment (decoupling, export controls, reshoring) while new forms of integration appear elsewhere. The map didn't shrink. It was redrawn. ## What actually rewired it: politics and compute Two forces did the redrawing. **Politics.** Tariffs moved from negotiating tactic to durable policy, rerouting trade through non-aligned "connector" economies rather than shutting it down. Fragmentation changed the *path* of trade far more than its *volume*. **Compute.** AI-related goods — semiconductors, GPUs, servers, networking gear — accounted for about one-third of all 2025 trade growth, expanding ~37% globally (U.S. +66%, EU +22%, China +16%). The U.S. added roughly half of the world's new data-centre capacity in 2025, pulling hardware through supply chains that still run through Taiwan, South Korea and ASEAN. The insight worth sitting with: the single biggest engine of "globalisation" in 2025 was the buildout of the most strategically sensitive, most export-controlled category on earth. Trade grew *because of* the AI race, not despite the tariff war. That is reglobalisation in one sentence — integration and rivalry riding the same wire. ## The friend-shoring mirage The comforting story is that supply chains are quietly moving to trusted partners. The data says: partly — and not the way the slides suggest. "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. But imports *from China into those same connectors* rose even faster: Vietnam's China-import share climbed from roughly 28% to 33%, Mexico's from 18% to 20% over 2017–2022. A large share of "friend-shored" product is Chinese input wearing a new passport. Genuine reshoring and friend-shoring are 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 too often assumed, not established. This is the crux of Part 2: **in a reglobalised economy, trust is not a jurisdiction — it is a measurement.** A friend-shored input is not trustworthy because it cleared a friendly border; it is trustworthy when its provenance, labour, security and IP exposure are known. Which is precisely where Europe's model stops being a slogan and becomes an edge. ## Europe: trust becomes infrastructure, then law Between Part 1 and now, Europe stopped *talking* about "open strategic autonomy" and started building it. - The **Technological Sovereignty Package** (June 2026) — the Cloud and AI Development Act, Chips Act 2.0 and an EU Open Source Strategy — introduces sovereign-cloud assurance tiers (Levels 1–4) and explicit "no kill switch" guarantees over the software supply chain. - The **AI Act** reaches its main application milestone in August 2026, converting "human-centric, trustworthy AI" from a principle into an enforceable, dated requirement (with the highest-risk obligations phased further out). Europe's bet is coherent: if trust is the scarce asset in a reglobalised economy, make it measurable, certifiable and native to the stack. Not the loudest player, nor the largest — the most *verifiable*. ## What changes for leaders - **Stop reporting "reshoring %." Report verified provenance.** A Friend-Shored Dependency Ratio only means something if the inputs *behind* your trusted suppliers are traced. Otherwise you are counting passports, not trust. - **Treat AI-hardware exposure as a first-class supply-chain risk.** When a third of trade growth is the most export-controlled category on the planet, your compute supply chain is now a geopolitical position, not a procurement line. - **Build collaboration interfaces, not walls.** The winners of 2025 traded *through* connectors and standards, not through autarky. Invest in data-safe APIs and provenance rails that let you collaborate without leaking crown-jewel IP. ## 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 unusually well placed to host the emerging "verification layer": the provenance, assurance and standards work that lets trusted cross-border trade actually be trusted. Stockholm is a natural pilot site for turning trust from a claim into a credential. ## Key metrics (updated for reglobalisation) - **Verified-Provenance Ratio** — share of "trusted" inputs whose origin, labour and security are actually traced, not merely sourced from a friendly jurisdiction. - **AI-Hardware Exposure** — share of your 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 meet safety, ethics and IP requirements for launch; 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: a smaller number of trusted, verifiable links carrying a larger, more strategic set of flows. Anchor your IP locally, standardise how you share, and — the 2026 upgrade — make your trust *auditable*. Interested in piloting a human-centric, friend-shored, verifiably-trusted program out of Stockholm? Get in touch. --- ### 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) (trade +6.5%, AI-goods ≈⅓ of growth, all-time highs, AI-goods growth by region, data-centre capacity) - 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) (Q1 2026 bilateral deficits) - CEPR / VoxEU — ['Connector' countries in a geoeconomically fragmented world](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/connector-countries-geoeconomically-fragmented-world) (China-import shares of Vietnam and Mexico) - 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) (US FDI share shifts, incl. India) - 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) (Tech Sovereignty Package, CADA, Chips Act 2.0, assurance tiers) - 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. Part 3 — the sovereignty stack and trust-as-law — follows.*