WASHINGTON — Governments are leaning harder on tariffs, special envoys and fast-moving regional deals, reshaping alliances and trade flows and testing the rules-based order, Dec. 25, 2025. The shift is less about grand strategy than leverage: punish, bargain, repeat.
In the United States, tariffs have become a blunt opening bid rather than a last resort. This year’s escalations and threats of wider “reciprocal” duties rattled markets and partners alike, according to Reuters reporting on the tariff shock. The White House has framed metals duties as a national security tool, detailing changes to Section 232 rules in a February fact sheet that signaled a tougher posture toward exemptions and enforcement (White House fact sheet).
What the rules-based order looks like under pressure
The practical effect is to turn trade into a negotiating arena where security commitments, industrial policy and border disputes collide. Countries that once relied on predictable arbitration and shared norms now face a more transactional environment — one where the rules-based order is invoked in speeches but sidelined in practice. A recent analysis from Chatham House on “fewer principles, more deals” argues that smaller states feel especially exposed when power politics dominates the agenda.
Diplomacy is shifting with it. Ottawa, facing U.S. tariff pressure, named a new ambassador with an explicit trade mandate — a signal that traditional diplomatic portfolios are being re-centered around market access and retaliation risk, not just security ties (Reuters on Canada’s new U.S. envoy).
BRICS and the alternative deal map
As Washington and its partners argue over tariffs and enforcement, BRICS is widening its orbit and offering parallel venues for trade and finance. Carnegie Endowment’s March assessment notes the bloc’s expansion dynamics and the growing list of partners and aspirants. Even where BRICS does not replace existing institutions, it can route around them — another strain on the rules-based order.
That logic is visible beyond BRICS itself. Indonesia’s new free trade agreement with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union shows how middle powers are pursuing market access wherever it’s available, even when blocs sit on opposite sides of geopolitical fault lines (Reuters on the Indonesia-EAEU deal). Each agreement chips away at the assumption that trade liberalization must flow through a single, Western-led pathway — a foundational idea of the rules-based order.
Continuity: this didn’t start in 2025
Today’s tariff diplomacy builds on earlier shocks. In 2018, the Trump administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs marked a turn toward security-justified protectionism that reverberated through state economies, as documented by Brookings’ 2018 analysis.
At the same time, enforcement mechanisms weakened. A Council on Foreign Relations report argued the WTO Appellate Body crisis undermined confidence in a predictable, rules-based trading system.
And BRICS’ political ambition to widen its coalition was already clear in 2023, when the group invited six countries — including Saudi Arabia and Iran — to join, according to Reuters’ report from the Johannesburg summit.
The throughline is power over process. If 2025 has a defining diplomatic lesson, it is that countries are increasingly willing to bypass shared guardrails when the payoff is immediate. The rules-based order is still the language of legitimacy — but more leaders now treat it as optional.
