US President Donald Trump rattled the global economy when he announced tariffs on around 90 countries on “Liberation Day” one year ago today, but probably not in the way either supporters or critics first imagined. At its peak, the tariffs the US imposed were the highest in nearly a century, yet tariffs haven’t broken the global economy. They haven’t triggered the kind of all-out collapse many feared.
Tariffs didn’t “deglobalize” the world overnight, as some feared. Instead, they rewired how companies think. Businesses now assume politics is a permanent cost of doing business with the US. Supply chains are no longer built just for efficiency; they want redundancy, flexibility, and political safety. That means more rerouting, more stockpiling, more friend-shoring, and, inevitably, adjusting to more friction.
And yet, the global economy proved more resilient than expected. At the beginning of this year, the International Monetary Fund upgraded its 2026 growth outlook to 3.3%, a reminder that tariffs alone were not enough to knock the system off course. As IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a GZERO World interview with Ian Bremmer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, tariffs turned out to have less impact than many initially believed.
The American tariff wall was porous and riddled with deals and exemptions. In fact, since Liberation Day, US tariff policy has changed more than 50 times. The US Supreme Court, too, diluted Trump’s trade policy in its decision to strike down tariffs he imposed under emergency powers.
At the same time, many countries shirked at tariffs and sought multilateral trade deals of their own. In Georgieva’s words, the majority of countries looked at tariffs and said, “thank you, but no thank you.” In the case of the European Union, the unpredictability of US trade policy appeared to speed up long-stalled talks and secure deals with South America’s trade bloc, Mercosur, and India.
But resilience is not the same thing as immunity. The war in Iran may prove to be the stress test that tariffs on their own were not. A prolonged conflict doesn’t just add another geopolitical headache, it compounds existing strains with global energy shocks, shipping disruptions, higher insurance costs, and stickier inflation. That combination could weigh heavily on global growth.
So what, ultimately, did Trump’s tariffs change? They changed the operating system of globalization. They made political risk central to economic decision-making. They accelerated the shift from maximum efficiency to strategic resilience. And they tore down the open global economic order that the US built and led for decades.
The bottom line: Tariffs didn’t sink the global economy. They made it more brittle, more fragmented, and more dependent on everything else going right. With Iran now in the mix, that’s a far shakier bet.
