International trade can no longer be planned or managed once a year

On February 20, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the law underpinning much of the tariffs imposed since 2025 (IEEPA, an economic emergency statute) did not give the president the power to impose across-the-board tariffs: that power belongs to Congress. Within days, the White House activated a different authority, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, to impose a global tariff of 10%, later raised to 15% — an authority that, unlike the previous one, expires after 150 days unless Congress extends it.

Three months later, on the other side of the map, the move was the opposite. On May 22, Mexico and the European Union signed the modernization of their Global Agreement, in force since 2000, which removes tariffs on 99% of the products the two blocs trade — with immediate entry into force for a large share of tariff lines and a schedule of up to ten years for the rest. Both governments presented it, without euphemism, as a shield against U.S. trade policy.

For a company that exports, imports or distributes in several countries, neither piece of news is a distant legal matter. They are two tariff frameworks moving in opposite directions, in the same season of the same year, and neither is the last word. The United States has already opened investigations under two other statutes (Section 232 and Section 301) to sustain tariffs through other routes; in May, a U.S. trade court struck down Section 122 — with the appeal still pending — and the modernization with the EU still has implementation stages outstanding well into the next decade.

This back-and-forth is not an isolated U.S. case. It is the symptom of something broader: trade policy has become a variable that changes faster — and in more directions at once — than most companies' planning cycles.

The numbers behind the nervousness

A KPMG survey of manufacturing executives, published in 2026, found that 26% of companies are already in a formal planning phase or actively executing the relocation of operations (reshoring), up from just 10% six months earlier. Thirty-four percent of businesses are passing more than half of the tariff cost on to the consumer, more than double the 13% of May 2025. And 33% have hired specialized staff to handle tariff complexity, up from 22% in September 2025.

Thomson Reuters' 2026 Global Trade Report confirms the pattern from another angle: 72% of international trade professionals name U.S. tariff volatility as the most disruptive regulatory change they face, almost double the 41% of a year earlier. Sixty-eight percent put supply chain management as their main concern, also nearly double a year ago. And one revealing figure: 40% of those trade professionals say they now have more influence over purchasing decisions and more presence in their company's executive decisions than twelve months ago.

That last figure matters more than it seems. For years, the international trade function in many companies was administrative: someone who filled in customs forms after the business had already decided where to buy and where to sell. That model is no longer enough. When the legal framework can change several times in a year, the tariff and regulatory variable has to come to the decision table before the contract is signed, not after.

Where this lands: the route matters more than the factory

The agreement with the EU illustrates why. Products that until now paid tariffs of up to 45% to enter Mexico — pork, cheese, dairy preparations — move to zero, some immediately; others, such as pasta, chocolate or poultry, come down from tariffs that reached 100%. For a European producer, that is not an automatic advantage: it is a door that opens and must be crossed quickly, before the competition crosses it. And crossing it does not depend on building a plant — it depends on having resolved who distributes the product in Mexico, whether that relationship is contractually protected, whether the sanitary and customs registrations are ready, and whether the local structure can capture the new tariff from the first container.

That is the pattern that repeats with every tariff reshuffle, whether upward (as in the United States) or downward (as with the European Union): the bottleneck is almost never the decision to manufacture or not in a country. It is whether the commercial route — distributor, local legal structure, regulatory compliance — is designed to move at the speed at which the rule moves.

Why a local team stopped being a luxury

The most common reaction to trade uncertainty is not to reduce international activity; it is to reorganize it with people physically where the business happens. The jump from 22% to 33% in specialized tariff hiring reported by KPMG is no coincidence: it is the difference between learning about a regulatory change from a news alert and learning about it because your own team, in the country, is already talking to customs, the distributor or the local regulator before the change hits you.

A local team does not replace strategy from headquarters; it completes it. Its role is not executive but early warning: it validates whether the distributor is honoring the contract, detects when a regulation under discussion in the local congress could change the cost of operating, and can escalate before the problem shows up in the income statement.

Managing ahead, not reacting

What separates the companies that navigate this environment well from those that arrive late is not size or budget: it is whether their international management model is designed to anticipate or only to react. A structured model includes, at a minimum, three pieces: real diversification of suppliers and markets (not on paper, in the contract), local presence with the authority to escalate risk signals, and a recurring scenario exercise reviewed at least every six months — not once a year at the budget meeting, because the environment has already shown in 2026 that it can change more than once within a single fiscal year.

The lesson of these first months of 2026 is not that international trade became riskier. It always was. What changed is the speed — and the number of fronts at once — at which decisions must be made. And that speed is only sustained with people on the ground and a model that reviews the scenario every six months, not once a year.